Racial or Spatial Voting? The Effects of Candidate Ethnicity and Ethnic Group Endorsements in Local Elections

With the growth of Latino and Asian American populations, candidates frequently must appeal to diverse electorates. Strategies for doing so include emphasizing candidates’ racial/ethnic identity and securing endorsements from racial/ethnic groups. While many scholars focus on candidates’ racial/ethnic attributes, ethnic group endorsements are understudied. Whether such endorsements induce voters to choose ideologically similar candidates (spatial voting), or choose based on race/ethnicity (racial voting) is unclear. We address this question by examining elections in multiethnic local settings. Using original surveys and exit polls, we create comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology, and examine how race/ethnicity and ideology affect voters’ choices. We also embed experiments that manipulate ethnic group endorsements. We find that ideology influences voters’ choices, but that ethnic group endorsements weaken spatial voting. The latter effect among whites is driven by racial/ethnic stereotypes. These reactions explain why some candidates seek such endorsements and why others might prefer to avoid them.     

Territorial Representation and the Opinion–Policy Linkage: Evidence from the European Union

A key feature of federal systems is the representation of subnational units by “territorial representatives” in policymaking at the federal level. How do such arrangements influence the linkage between public opinion and policy outputs? I argue that policymaking under territorial representation should be systematically skewed toward opinion in those states where citizens care about a policy issue and have a uniform view on it. This claim is tested using a novel data set of policy change in the European Union (EU), covering 211 policy issues and 6,506 observations of opinion–policy dyads. Results show that measures weighting opinion across member states by how much national citizens care about an issue are better predictors of policy change than EU‐wide mean opinion. Moreover, congruence between state‐level opinion and EU‐level policy becomes more likely, the more salient and clear‐cut opinion in a member state is. These findings refine our understanding of the opinion–policy linkage under territorial representation.     

Pursuing the common goods: An economic theory of collective action among NGOs in transnational advocacy

This article integrates previous research on NGO behaviour with economic theory on collective action to create a generalizable and predictive model of advocacy campaign growth. It identifies three types of goods which NGOs may pursue in advocacy: unlimited, non-rival (public) goods; rival and excludable (private) goods; and rival but non-excludable goods. It then models an individual NGO’s decision to (not) join an existing advocacy campaign using a cost-benefit analysis conditioned by the presence or absence of competition for the good(s) sought by the NGO. This model of individual behaviour forms the basis for predicting collective action among NGOs with varying cost structures and pursuing a variety of rival and non-rival goods. The theory is illustrated using two cases of NGOs campaigning on World Bank policy.     

Cardinals or Clerics? Congressional Committees and the Distribution of Pork

Journalistic and academic accounts of Congress suggest that important committee positions allow members to procure more federal funds for their constituents, but existing evidence on this topic is limited in scope and has failed to distinguish the effects of committee membership from selection onto committees. We bring together decades of data on federal outlays and congressional committee and subcommittee assignments to provide a comprehensive analysis of committee positions and distributive politics across all policy domains. Using a within‐member research design, we find that seats on key committees produce little additional spending. The chairs of the Appropriations subcommittees—the so called “cardinals” of Congress—are an exception to the rule. These leadership positions do generate more funding for constituents, but only from programs under the jurisdiction of their subcommittee. Our results paint a new picture of distributive politics and call for a reexamination of its canonical theories.     

The Company You Keep: How Voters Infer Party Positions on European Integration from Governing Coalition Arrangements

Recent studies document that voters infer parties’ left‐right positions from governing coalition arrangements. We show that citizens extend this coalition‐based heuristic to the European integration dimension and, furthermore, that citizens’ coalition‐based inferences on this issue conflict with alternative measures of party positions derived from election manifestos and expert placements. We also show that citizens’ perceptions of party positions on Europe matter, in that they drive substantial partisan sorting in the electorate. Our findings have implications for parties’ election strategies and for mass‐elite policy linkages.     

Note on Teaching Intelligence

Over the last decade, intelligence has become one of the most widely taught subjects in higher education. In response to this, a sub-discipline has emerged within Intelligence Studies devoted to thinking about how the subject is actually taught. One of the most common arguments to come out of this literature is that there should be more practitioner involvement in the university teaching of intelligence. However, it is rarely specified what exactly intelligence professionals bring to the classroom, save the largely self-evident point that because they have ‘walked the walk’, they are uniquely qualified to teach the subject. Drawing on student questionnaires, as well as interviews with serving and retired intelligence officers, this article attempts to probe a little deeper and identify the specific benefits of incorporating practitioners into the university teaching of intelligence. It is argued that practitioners ‘put a face on the profession’ and help to remove some of the mystique and misperceptions that surround intelligence work. It is claimed that practitioners, especially with their ‘inside stories’, give added meaning to academic theories and make the subject more exciting. Finally, it is argued that practitioners enrich the broader ‘student experience’. In UK higher education, now under a new fees regime, students are looking for departments to go the extra mile not only in terms of their teaching, but also in areas like careers advice and support. In this context, intelligence professionals are enormously valuable.     

Estimating the Impact of Education on Political Participation: Evidence from Monozygotic Twins in the United States,Denmark and Sweden

In this study we provide new evidence on the much-discussed effect of education on political participation by utilizing the quasi-experiment of twinning. By looking at the relationship between education and participation within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs we are able to circumvent traditional sources of confounding of the relationship rooted in genes and early life family environment because MZ twins share both. The results of within-twin pair analyses based on surveys from the United States, Denmark and Sweden show that while the relationship between education and political participation is highly confounded by genes and/or familial environment in all three countries, a positive impact remains of years of education in the US and of high school completion in Denmark. No effect is found in Sweden. Robustness checks suggest that the observed effect is not confounded by within-twin pair differences in prenatal environment nor differential treatment during childhood, and, if anything, that it most likely constitutes a lower bound estimate.     

The Affect and Effect of Images of War on Individual Opinion and Emotions

We explore the conditions under which individuals are attentive to positive and negative battlefield information when forming beliefs about a conflict’s success or failure. We use three experiments to explore the impact of visual and textual battlefield cues on individuals’ emotional states and attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan. We find that both visual and textual information convey information about failure that influences public attitudes and emotions toward war. In keeping with rational expectations theory, but contrary to widespread beliefs within the journalistic and policymaking communities, textual cues and images of battlefield failure have similar effects on emotions and attitudes. The consistency of multiple war cues, however, greatly affects peoples’ reactions. Simply put, in war the content of information matters, not its delivery style.     

The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning, 2004–2012

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics.     

Blended Sentencing Laws and the Punitive Turn in Juvenile Justice

In many states, young people today can receive a “blended” combination of both a juvenile sanction and an adult criminal sentence. We ask what accounts for the rise of blended sentencing in juvenile justice and whether this trend parallels crime control developments in the adult criminal justice system. We use event history analysis to model state adoption of blended sentencing laws from 1985 to 2008, examining the relative influence of social, political, administrative, and economic factors. We find that states with high unemployment, greater prosecutorial discretion, and disproportionate rates of African American incarceration are most likely to pass blended sentencing provisions. This suggests that the turn toward blended sentencing largely parallels the punitive turn in adult sentencing and corrections—and that theory and research on adult punishment productively extends to developments in juvenile justice.