Candidate Valence and Ideological Positions in U.S. House Elections

We examine the relationship between the valence qualities of candidates and the ideological positions they take in U.S. House elections based on a study of the 2006 midterm elections. Our design enables us to distinguish between campaign and character dimensions of candidate valence and to place candidates and districts on the same ideological scale. Incumbents with a personal‐character advantage are closer ideologically to their district preferences, while disadvantaged challengers take more extreme policy positions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, challengers can reap electoral rewards by taking more extreme positions relative to their districts. We explore a possible mechanism for this extremism effect by demonstrating that challengers closer to the extreme received greater financial contributions, which enhanced their chances of victory. Our results bear on theories of representation that include policy and valence, although the interactions between these two dimensions may be complex and counterintuitive.     

Parental Involvement and Adolescent Academic Outcomes: Exploring Differences in Beneficial Strategies across Racial/Ethnic Groups

Gaps in educational outcomes between racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups persist in the United States, and parental involvement is often cited as an important avenue for improving outcomes among racially/ethnically diverse adolescents. This study utilized data from the Education Longitudinal Study 2002–2013 (56% female, N?=?4429), which followed 10th-graders through high school and ten years post-high school, to examine the links between parental involvement strategies and academic outcomes (grade point average and educational attainment). Participants included white, African American, and Hispanic/Latino adolescents from low-SES families. This study used recursive partitioning, a novel analytic strategy used for exploring higher-order interactions and non-linear associations among factors (e.g., parental educational involvement strategies) to predict an outcome (e.g., grade point average or educational attainment) through step-wise partitioning. The results showed that the combination of greater academic socialization and school-based involvement was beneficial for all adolescents’ grade point average, whereas the combination of home-based involvement with academic socialization and school-based involvement yielded mixed results. Greater academic socialization and home-based involvement appeared beneficial for educational attainment among African American and Hispanic/Latino adolescents, but not white adolescents. More home-based involvement and less academic socialization were associated with less educational attainment for white adolescents. Overall, the findings showed different combinations of parental educational involvement strategies were beneficial for adolescents across racial/ethnic groups, which may have implications for practice and policy.     

A Two Decade Examination of Historical Race/Ethnicity Disparities in Academic Achievement by Poverty Status

Research on achievement gaps by race/ethnicity and poverty status typically focuses on each gap separately, and recent syntheses suggest the poverty gap is growing while racial/ethnic gaps are narrowing. In this study, we used time-varying effect modeling to examine the interaction of race/ethnicity and poverty gaps in math and reading achievement from 1986–2005 for poor and non-poor White, Black, and Hispanic students in three age groups (5–6, 9–10, and 13–14). We found that across this twenty-year period, the gaps between poor White students and their poor Black and Hispanic peers grew, while the gap between non-poor Whites and Hispanics narrowed. We conclude that understanding the nature of achievement gaps requires simultaneous examination of race/ethnicity and income.     

Building capacity in indigenous governance: Comparing the Australian and American experiences

This paper compares key aspects of governance structures for Indigenous populations in the United States and Australia. The paper focuses on policy coordination and administration, in particular the nodes of decision-making in the two countries in relation to government contracting and accountability. The U.S. approach to funding Indigenous organizations stems from the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act and its subsequent expansions. Through the development of contracting into permanent compacting via block grants, this approach builds established nodes of Indigenous government and facilitates whole-of-government coherence at the level of the American Indian tribe. The U.S. approach seems correlated with better performance and may lighten bureaucratic loads over the long term. The Australian model, on the other hand, seeks to create whole-of-government coherence through top-down financial accountability in a way that hampers the development of Indigenous political capacity. The paper traces the development of these practices through time and illustrates how they contribute to the fragmentation rather than growth of Indigenous political capacities. It suggests ways the Australian model could be improved even in the absence of fundamental reform by drawing on the contracting-to-compacting framework of longstanding U.S. practices.     

Bridging the Ideological Divide: Trust and Support for Social Security Privatization

Using a pair of national surveys, this article analyzes the individual-level sources of public support for Social Security privatization. Given the inherent risks associated with privatization, we argue that the political trust heuristic affords untapped theoretical leverage in explaining public attitudes toward privatization. We find that, among certain individuals, political trust plays an instrumental role in structuring privatization preferences. Political trust increases support for privatization, but only among liberals. This heterogeneity in trust’s impact is best explained, we argue, by the unbalanced ideological costs imposed by the potential privatization of Social Security. Among liberals, embracing privatization requires the sacrifice of core values, thereby making political trust a potent consideration. Political trust is inconsequential among conservatives because supporting privatization requires no comparable sacrifice for them.

Policy learning and change during crisis: COVID-19 policy responses across six states

Whereas policy change is often characterized as a gradual and incremental process, effective crisis response necessitates that organizations adapt to evolving problems in near real time. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the case of COVID-19, which forced subnational governments to constantly adjust and recalibrate public health and disease mitigation measures in the face of changing patterns of viral transmission and the emergence of new information. This study assesses (a) the extent to which subnational policies changed over the course of the pandemic; (b) whether these changes are emblematic of policy learning; and (c) the drivers of these changes, namely changing political and public health conditions. Using a novel dataset analyzing each policy's content, including its timing of enactment, substantive focus, stringency, and similar variables, results indicate the pandemic response varied significantly across states. The states examined were responsive to both changing public health and political conditions. This study identifies patterns of preemptive policy learning, which denotes learning in anticipation of an emerging hazard. In doing so, the study provides important insights into the dynamics of policy learning and change during disaster.     

Where Movements Matter: Examining Unintended Consequences of the Pain Management Movement in Medical,Criminal Justice,and Public Health Fields

Social movement scholars have rarely considered professional fields as sites of social movement consequences and have overlooked how social movement consequences traverse field boundaries. This research examines where movements matter by examining unintended consequences across professional fields. Drawing on a case study of the pain management movement, this study asks (1) under what conditions do movements targeting a focal professional field create consequences in adjacent fields; (2) what factors affect how adeptly the adjacent field responds; and (3) how do social movement impacts on adjacent fields affect the focal field? Findings demonstrate how the success of the pain management movement in medicine helped to fuel the opioid epidemic, which detrimentally affected the adjacent fields of criminal justice and public health. These adjacent fields' strategies for curbing spillover, in turn, created a new set of consequences for medicine. Their responses depended on material and moral resources and authority structures that differed significantly across the two adjacent fields. This article concludes with a discussion of factors that may facilitate or deter cross‐field contagion effects and offers suggestions for future research.