Partisan Media and Engagement: A Field Experiment in a Newly Liberalized System

How does media exposure affect political engagement in newly liberalized systems? Some celebrate newly vibrant and diverse media, believing that they mobilize citizens. Others worry that these outlets, which are often partisan, dampen engagement. We theorize that exposure to political programming engenders interest in politics irrespective of program bias, but that interest does not necessarily beget action. Partisan media affect participation only when altering attitude strength, and thus motivations. To evaluate media effects on interest and participation, we conducted a field experiment in Ghana, in which subjects in tro-tros (commuter vans) were randomly exposed to different types of live talk radio. We find that partisan and nonpartisan media increased political interest, but not participation. Instead, exposure to alternate perspectives on cross-cutting media (i.e., those biased against subjects’ partisan preferences) heightened ambivalence and dampened participation, measured as signing a petition to parties. Partisan media simultaneously increased interest and decreased participation.     

Relating Seasonal Hunger and Prevention and Coping Strategies: A Panel Analysis of Malawian Farm Households

Relative to chronic hunger, seasonal hunger in rural and urban areas of Africa is poorly understood. This paper examines the extent and potential correlates of seasonal hunger in Malawi using panel data from 2011–2013. We find that both urban and rural households report seasonal hunger in the pre-harvest months. Certain strategies to smooth consumption, including crop storage and livestock ownership, are associated with fewer months of hunger. In addition, we find that Malawian households that experience seasonal hunger harvest their crops earlier than average – a short-term coping mechanism that can reduce the crop’s yield and nutritional value, possibly perpetuating hunger.     

Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism

Research has shown that legal cynicism is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, controlling for crime rates, these residents call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle‐class neighborhoods, and ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these findings, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African‐American mothers in Washington, DC, this article develops an alternative conception of cultural orientations about law: situational trust. This concept emphasizes micro‐level dynamism in cultural conceptions of the police, expanding the literature on police trust by emphasizing situational contingency. Mothers deploy at least four alternative strategies that produce moments of trust: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimacy.     

What's the Next Step after Mt. Laurel?

Since its beginnings, zoning has been at its core a tool for achieving exclusionary objectives. Judge Westenhaver, who wrote the lower court decision in Ambler Realty Co. u. Village of Euclid, 297 Fed. 307, 316 (N.D. Ohio 1924) invalidating the village's zoning ordinance, observed that its purpose “is really to regulate the mode of Living of persons who may here-after inhabit [the village]. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or station in life.” In reversing his decision, Justice Sutherland classified apartments as “mere parasites … which would deprive children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities,” In effect, he held that the state's police power could be used to create different levels of health, safety and genera1 welfare for different classes of people. One level was adequate for the poor and another level could be enforced at the behest of the rich who could afford to buy homes in single-family, low-density districts. Even Justice Douglas, a most unlikely bedmate for Justice Sutherland, reflected the same attitude when he wrote recently.     

Judicial Politics on the Ground

This symposium focuses on judicial politics at the micro level. Its aim is to shed light on justice in action, drawing on an ethnographic approach to explore the routine decision‐making practices of judges and other legal actors, and to study their interactions with citizens and politicians. Each article is based on close observation of the interactions between legal professionals and administrative actors who are at the frontline in local and lower courts. By examining a variety of jurisdictions around the globe, the articles in this symposium offer fresh insight into “judicial politics on the ground.”