By ground or by air? Voter mobilization during the United States’ 2008 presidential campaign

Aggregate studies find no effect of campaign advertising on voter turnout in the United States, thereby calling into question experimental and survey-based studies that produce strong turnout effects. In revisiting the debate over the impact of campaign ads, this paper examines the effects of both TV campaign advertising and campaign field offices on aggregate voter turnout during the 2008 US presidential election campaign. In contrast to previous studies, our analysis finds that both campaign field offices and campaign advertising help to stimulate turnout, although the effect of campaign field offices is more robust to alternative model specifications. We also find that only Obama's field offices had any discernible impact on aggregate voter turnout, thereby reinforcing the narrative that the Obama campaign had a superior ground game in 2008.     

The 22 July Terrorist Attacks in Norway: Impact on Public Attitudes towards Counterterrorist Authorities

Did the terrorist attacks in Norway affect citizens’ attitudes to security‐related institutions and policies? To answer this question this study pools two cross‐sectional surveys, collected shortly before and after the 2011 terrorist attacks, to determine the attacks’ effects on people's attitudes. One important finding is that general support for the institutions responsible for security increased slightly, whereas specific support for government agencies capability to prevent and cope with crises decreased markedly. A second important finding concerns the potential for politicisation of crises: On issues of security, the distance between right‐wing voters and other party voters increased after the attack. Irrespective of party attachment, Norwegians have become less satisfied with governmental policies on security‐related issues, but dissatisfaction has increased significantly more among right‐wing than among left‐wing voters. Thus, even in a country where politicians responded to the crisis with an appeal to togetherness and common values, citizens’ attitudes on security policies were politicised.     

What Happens at the Polling Place: Using Administrative Data to Look Inside Elections

Tremendous attention has been paid to local election administration since the 2000 presidential election meltdown, yet policy makers still lack basic information about what happens at the polling place. One strategy to understand the interactions between citizens and street‐level election bureaucrats is to turn to administrative data. Using logs collected by polling place workers, the authors analyze more than 66,000 individual incidents recorded from four different statewide elections. Such data provide novel insights and guidance for the administration of elections. Findings indicate that task scale (in terms of the number of ballots) and complexity (in terms of absentee ballots) increase the incident rate. Managerial choices about how polling places are run also matter: the use of electronic voting machines and central count processing of ballots reduce the incident rate, while splitting poll worker shifts increases it. Operator capacity, measured in terms of experience, also reduces the number of incidents.     

The Stress Response and Adolescents’ Adjustment: The Impact of Child Maltreatment

Experience with and management of stress has implications for adolescents' behavioral and socioemotional development. This study examined the relationship between adolescents' physiological response to an acute laboratory stressor (i.e., Trier Social Stress Test; TSST) and anger regulation and interpersonal competence in a sample of 175 low-income urban adolescents (51.8% girls). Findings suggested that heightened reactivity as indicated by cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure was associated with increased interpersonal competence and anger regulation. However, these findings were context dependent such that, for youth high in self-reported child maltreatment, heightened reactivity was associated with decreased interpersonal competence and anger regulation. Results highlight the importance of considering how context may condition the effect of stress reactivity on functioning during adolescence.     

The democratizing impact of governance networks: From pluralization,via democratic anchorage,to interactive political leadership

Initially, governance networks were intended as tools for making public governance more effective. Yet, scholars have argued that governance networks also have the potential to democratize public governance. This article provides an overview of theoretical arguments pertaining to the democratizing impact of governance networks. It claims that the initial celebration of the pluralization of public governance and the subsequent call for a democratic anchorage of governance networks should give way to a new concern for how governance networks can strengthen and democratize political leadership. Tying political leadership to networked processes of collaborative governance fosters ‘interactive political leadership’. The article presents theoretical arguments in support of interactive political leadership, and provides an illustrative case study of a recent attempt to strengthen political leadership through the systematic involvement of elected politicians in local governance networks. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactive political leadership could transform our thinking about democracy.     

Revisiting Lasswell

This article continues the line of argument and historical interpretation we offered in “The Policy Scientist of Democracy: The Discipline of Harold D. Lasswell” by way of a response to Ronald Brunner’s “The Policy Scientist of Democracy Revisited.” Problems regarding Lasswell’s capacious vision of the policy scientist and vagaries surrounding “democracy,” do not diminish the importance of the questions Lasswell asked and left as his legacy to the discipline of political science. We here supply further evidence for our historical interpretation of Lasswell and sketch what sort of “policy scientist of democracy” fits our times and the current state of the discipline of political science.     

Resisting Broken Windows

Political Behavior - Concurrent housing and opioid crises have increased exposure to street-crime, homelessness and addiction in American cities. What are the political consequences of this...