Voter participation and the redistributive state

The redistributive theory of the state implies that voter participation rates should be highest among those who have the most to gain or lose or a V-shaped relationship between income and voting participation should exist. We use a data set that contains nearly 21,000 observations on individual survey responses about voting behavior in the U.S. between 1972 and 1993 to show that the participation rate generally rises monotonically with income, perhaps except at very high income levels. It does report other findings consistent with an economic theory of voting based on returns to association and with the hypothesis that public employees vote more.     

New Battles and Battlegrounds for Mandatory Arbitration After Epic Systems,New Prime,and Lamps Plus

The Supreme Court's recent decisions interpreting the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in the employment context generally prioritize arbitration over workers’ labor law rights. The majority in Epic Systems Corporation v. Lewis upheld mandatory individual employment arbitration agreements despite their conflict with the labor law right to act in concert. The same majority in Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela rejected a state law interpretation of a contract provision to find that parties to an employment contract intend individual arbitration absent reference to group arbitration. A unanimous Court in New Prime v. Oliveira interpreted the FAA to include independent contractors under the transportation worker exemption, reinvigorating the battle over what it means to be engaged in interstate commerce to qualify for the exemption. These decisions resolved some disputes about the breadth of the FAA, but other questions remain. In the wake of Epic Systems and Lamps Plus, state courts and legislatures are testing the boundaries of the FAA's saving clause, with limited success. Confidentiality provisions, frequently associated with arbitration agreements, may unlawfully interfere with employees’ federal labor law rights. This article recommends that Congress amend the FAA to address these issues by excluding all workers engaged in interstate commerce, not just transportation workers, because the Court has strayed far from the original intent of the Act—to enforce commercial agreements in which the parties had equal bargaining power. State legislation also should provide guidance on what makes arbitration voluntary and fair, and provide a choice to employees on collective action, forum, and confidentiality.     

Pathological counterinsurgency: the failure of imposing legitimacy in El Salvador,Afghanistan, and Iraq

Many voices in the US policy community have suggested that El Salvador provided a model for US counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the unsound contention that elections increased government legitimacy and effectiveness. The same flawed assessments were present in counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan – unfounded assumptions that elections would increase legitimacy and improve institutional performance and human rights records lead to inaccurate analysis and bad strategy. Indeed, the US experience calls into question the ability of even a great power to impose legitimacy on a partner in order to wage counterinsurgency. Assuming that elections will advance such legitimacy is a dangerous pathology.     

gendered Islam and modernity in the nation-space: women's modernism in the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity.     

Talk is not cheap: Policy agendas,information processing,and the unusually proportional nature of European Central Bank communications policy responses

This article unveils the policy agenda of the European Central Bank (ECB) Governing Council as found in the speeches that Governing Council Members gave between 1999 and 2018. Using a dynamic topic‐modeling approached based on non‐negative matrix factorization, we demonstrate how the issues discussed by ECB Governing Council members have evolved over time, and how the general punctuation hypothesis (Jones, B. D. & Baumgartner, F. R. (2005). The politics of attention: How government prioritizes problems. University of Chicago Press) sheds light on what drives this process. We find that unlike policy outputs from many other policymaking systems, ECB communications evolve in a proportional manner. We attribute this finding to the information‐processing capacities of the bank. Our findings speak to the literatures on central bank communications, the evolution of policy agendas, and the application of topic models to speech texts.     

‘Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems’ the independence echo: the rise of the constitutional question in Scottish election manifestos and voter behaviour

ABSTRACT

Since the formation of the Scottish Parliament, the idea of Scottish independence increased in salience and popularity among Scottish voters to such an extent that it now constitutes the country’s defining political cleavage. Given that Scottish politics is increasingly organized around this constitutional question, support for either side of the debate among voters and elites drives political engagement, election turnout and public attitudes to other major issues. Although much popular and academic work has sought to explain the rise of support for independence, few scholars have explored changes in elite behaviour or its consequences for public opinion. From an elite-driven perspective, the increased salience of independence may be but an echo of elite and partisan attention. Developing hypotheses from this approach, we predict that voters identifying with parties developed stronger views on independence following increased attention in parties’ campaigns. We examine these hypotheses by performing computer assisted, unsupervised content analysis of Scottish Parties’ election manifestos. We then use estimates from a structural topic model to predict change in voter support for independence from the British Election Study. The theory and results suggest that increasing salience on alternative dimensions of politics likely closely relates to elite-driven choices in their election campaigns.     

Great expectations: Constructions of the life course during adolescence

Despite numerous demographic analyses of the sequencing of life events during the transition to adulthood (Kett, 1977; Modell et al., 1976), little is known of the psychological expectancies that adolescents bring to this and other aspects of the life course experience. This research was conducted to determine whether the futures anticipated by high school and college students correspond to the demographic trends previously observed for comparable age groups (i.e., projected vs. actual age at marriage). The findings indicate that, with increasing age, adolescents acquire a shared life course perspective that is at once richer and more differentiated than that implied by previous demographic investigations. This shared life course perspective was manifest in two ways: (1) increased agreement or concordance in the types of future events anticipated, and (2) increased variability in the ages at which future events were expected to occur. These findings underscore the need to complement demographic analyses of the life course with psychological investigations of the expectancies that adolescents bring to the adulthood transition.Received Ph.D. from Boston University in Developmental Psychology. Research interests: contextual approaches to self-concept, cognition, adolescence.This work was completed while the author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Stanford, CA. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support provided by the National Council for Research and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.