Analyzing the representativeness of internet political participation

Political participation researchers have developed several evaluative techniques to assess the representativeness of political participation patterns. Yet, while the Internet has become a mainstream avenue for political participation in the United States, current assessments of online participation insufficiently apply these methods. To incorporate these methods we begin by drawing upon resource theory to inform two-stage ordered-logit models of online and offline political participation. Our results suggest that the factors predicting online participation often differ from the factors that predict offline participation. Even so, we find that those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds tend to disproportionately possess these distinct online determinants. Next, we use a wide spectrum of political opinion questions to determine whether online participators opinions reflect or distort those of the general population. Overall, we find that online participation tends to relate moderately with liberal preferences. However, because offline participation relates to political attitudes similarly, the Internet only marginally advantages the political voice of liberals. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results.     

Public Opinion and Collective Obligations

This article attempts to identify the general principles that underlie public reasoning about collective obligations and that help explain when political parties can create new obligations or defend existing ones. I use these principles to President Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to create government health-care plan and attempts by President Bush to privatize Social Security. The success of a party in selling – or defeating – an obligation depends upon what people believe about the competence and capacity of government and the value of autonomy – choices made by each citizen; whether people perceive the obligation as providing floors or establishing ceilings by limiting choice or otherwise restricting opportunities for the better-off; and whether the program is more like insurance or more like welfare. A party’s ability to maintain credibility with voters also depends upon whether party leaders can suppress issues that threaten intra-party elite pacts. When attempts to suppress “taboo” issues like “stem cells” or “black crime” fail, the party loses credibility with its voters and attempts to defend or sell obligations fail.

Magnitude and durability of electoral change: Identifying critical elections in the U.S. Congress 1854–2010

The two hallmarks of a critical election and, hence, of a critical realignment are the magnitude of the observed change and the durability of that change. In addition to offering a new approach to measuring durable change in national party dominance, and providing a non-parametric criterion to identify unusual changes in seat/vote shares, we provide fresh insights via a unifying statistical approach that reflects both of these factors simultaneously. Furthermore, we assess the robustness of critical election determinations in two ways. First, we compare the magnitude of inter-election shifts with both average volatility over the entire time period and volatility relative to a particular time period. Second, as an alternative to the usual perspective, we consider critical elections not as a one-time cataclysm, but rather as a pair (or perhaps even triple) of consecutive substantial shifts, generated by the same underlying factors. Overall, we distinguish six elections that marginally or provisionally meet our criteria to be critical elections. But focusing on pairs of elections, 1858–60 and 1930–32 stand out as critical among all elections since the 1850s.     

The religious conversion and race of a prisoner: Mock parole board members' decisions,perceptions, and emotions

Parole board members (PBMs) decide whether to release inmates on parole. Decisions may be affected by in‐group bias or stereotypes regarding religion and race. Two experiments investigated whether religious conversions/secular lifestyle changes and race affect mock PBMs' release decisions, emotions, and perceptions. Mock PBMs read a case file of an inmate who was eligible for parole and decided whether to grant parole. Study 1 manipulated whether the inmate had converted to Christianity or Islam, had a secular lifestyle change, or had no lifestyle change. Study 2 also varied race (African American or Caucasian). Race was not a significant factor, possibly because the manipulation was not strong enough to influence participants or because participants did not want to appear racist. Conversions to Islam and Christianity impacted the parole decision, and effects were mediated by believability of the conversion. Secular lifestyle changes affected release decisions and were mediated by perceptions of the inmate and beliefs about his likelihood of recidivism. Such inmates were the most likely to be released and were perceived most positively; their conversions were the most believable. Inmates who made no changes were perceived least positively, indicating that any lifestyle change is better than none. Importantly, no bias towards either religion (Islam, Christianity) was found. Furthermore, conversion type affected how scared PBMs were of the inmate, but this fear did not impact release decisions.     

Examining the prevalence and correlates of a ‘senior citizen discount’ in US federal courts

Few studies focus on age as a factor influencing judicial decision-making, in spite of the widespread use of age as a control variable. Although the limited research to have done so is inconsistent, most scholars agree that age may be race- and/or gender-graded in a manner that produces more severe sentences for certain race–gender–age combinations, especially for young males who are Black or Latino. Less consensus exists with regard to whether older defendants are granted more leniency in the sentencing process and, if so, if the effects of older age are also race- and/or gender-graded. The present study examines this question by examining data from the United States Sentencing Commission. The data presented reveal three noteworthy findings. First, a ‘senior citizen discount’ exists insofar as judges afford more leniency in sentencing to older offenders than their younger counterparts. Second, compared to older males, older females were treated with greater leniency by judges. Finally, whereas Latinos 60 and over were treated with greater severity at the stage of incarceration compared to similarly situated Whites, Blacks received shorter sentence lengths on average. These results are analyzed within the framework of the focal concerns perspective.     

Using Open-Source Data to Identify Participation in the Illicit Antiquities Trade: A Case Study on the Cypriot Civil War

The illicit trade in antiquities from conflict zones is clandestine and politicised and it very likely involves violent, organised criminals, including paramilitaries and terrorists; so reliable, detailed information is extraordinarily difficult to access. Nonetheless, open-source data may provide clues to the structure of the market. This article reviews the development of the Cypriot antiquities trade until the outbreak of the civil war in 1963, through the cultural heritage crisis that accompanied that conflict until the coup and invasion of 1974. Then, adapting an established method for studying the scale of a small, undisturbed illicit market, it gauges communities’ participation in looting during the civil war in Cyprus. It does so by analysing the find-spot and acquisition date information in collections of antiquities recovered before and during conflict, and cross-referencing them with demographic and historical information in order to identify the communities from which the looters probably came. It uses this crude categorical method in order to assess ethnically-based narratives of looting and trading in illicit antiquities. The evidence suggests that: before the conflict, there was no correlation between community and looting; during the civil war, due to economic and geopolitical factors, members of Turkish Cypriot communities were disproportionately involved in looting; at the same time, members of Greek Cypriot communities were far more involved in looting than has previously been recognised; Greek Cypriot archaeologists have misinterpreted the structure of the trade and consequently contributed to communalist policies and nationalist histories; and the antiquities policy of the Republic of Cyprus was one of the significant causes of the developments in the trade.     

Running to stand still: aggressive immobility and the limits of power in Russia

The common conception of Russian politics as an elite game of rent-seeking and autocratic management masks a great deal of ‘mundane’ policymaking, and few areas of social and economic activity have escaped at least some degree of reform in recent years. This article takes a closer look at four such reform attempts – involving higher education, welfare, housing and regional policy – in an effort to discern broad patterns governing how and when the state succeeds or fails. The evidence suggests that both masses and mid-level elites actively defend informality – usually interpreted in the literature as an agent-led response to deinstitutionalization and the breakdown of structure – creating a strong brake on state power. More than a quarter century into the post-Soviet period, this pattern of “aggressive immobility” – the purposeful and concerted defense by citizens of a weakly institutionalized state – has in fact become an entrenched, structural element in Russian politics.