Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation .     

Character Strengths Among Youth

Four hundred and fiftynine students from 20 different high school classrooms in Michigan participated in focus group discussions about the character strengths included in the Values in Action Classification. Students were interested in the subject of good character and able to discuss with candor and sophistication instances of each strength. They were especially drawn to the positive traits of leadership, practical intelligence, wisdom, social intelligence, love of learning, spirituality, and the capacity to love and be loved. Students believed that strengths were largely acquired rather than innate and that these strengths developed through ongoing life experience as opposed to formal instruction. They cited an almost complete lack of contemporary role models exemplifying different strengths of character. Implications of these findings for the quantitative assessment of positive traits were discussed, as were implications for designing character education programs for adolescents. We suggest that peers can be an especially important force in encouraging the development and display of good character among youth.     

When Do Low Roll Rates Indicate Party Influence? Evidence from Counterfactual Roll Rates

A simulation-based counterfactual is one way to solve the observational equivalence challenge that seemingly “partisan” majority-party roll rates can be observed in the absence of any actual party influence. We simulate no-partisan-agenda-control counterfactual roll rates and apply them across sessions of the US House of Representatives and 86 state legislative chambers to evaluate the extent to which observed roll rates provide evidence for party influence on the legislative agenda. After assessing and controlling for the baseline risk of majority-party rolls, there is significant evidence of party influence on roll rates in some state legislatures, particularly those with rules that grant parties more agenda power, and in the post-Reed’s-rules House of Representatives. Institutional rules interact with the (simulated) risk of a majority roll to shape observed roll rates across chambers and across time.     

Cause and response: vulnerability and climate in the Anthropocene

Causal analysis of vulnerability aims to identify root causes of crises so that transformative solutions might be found. Yet root-cause analysis is absent from most climate response assessments. Framings for climate-change risk analysis often locate causality in hazards while attributing some causal weight to proximate social variables such as poverty or lack of capacity. They rarely ask why capacity is lacking, assets are inadequate or social protections are absent or fail. This contribution frames vulnerability and security as matters of access to assets and social protections. Assets and social protections each have their own context-contingent causal chains. A key recursive element in those causal chains is the ability – means and powers – of vulnerable people to influence the political economy that shapes their assets and social protections. Vulnerability is, as Sen rightly observed, linked to the lack of freedom – the freedom to influence the political economy that shapes these entitlements. In the Anthropocene, human causes of climate hazard must also now be accounted for in etiologies of disaster. However, attention to anthropogenic climate change should not occlude social causes of (and responsibility for) vulnerability – vulnerability is still produced in and by society.     

Beyond Participation: The Association Between School Extracurricular Activities and Involvement in Violence Across Generations of Immigration

Participation in extracurricular activities is purported to protect the broad spectrum of youth from a host of behavioral risks. Yet, empirical research on the extent to which this assumption holds for involvement in violence by immigrant youth is limited. Thus, using data for 13,236 (51.8% female) adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study explores how the relationship between extracurricular activities and youth violence varies by type of extracurricular activity profile (sports alone, non-sports alone, and a combination of sports and non-sports) and by generations of immigration (first, second, and third-plus). The sample is composed of 9.3% (n = 1,233) first-generation youth, 15.7% (n = 2,080) second generation, and 74.9% (n = 9,923) third-plus generation. The results reveal that adolescents from the third-plus generation (i.e., non-immigrant youth) who participate in non-sports alone or sports plus non-sports have lower odds of involvement in violence than adolescents from the same generation who do not participate in extracurricular activities. However, for first- and second-generation adolescents, participation in extracurricular activities is associated with higher rather than lower odds of violence compared to their non-participating counterparts. These findings challenge the viewpoint that participation in mainstream extracurricular activities as afforded by US schools is equally beneficial for all youth. They also call for additional research that explores why immigrant youth are less likely than non-immigrant youth to gain violence-reducing benefits when they participate in extracurricular activities.     

Competitive Advantage in Nonprofit Grant Markets: Implications of Network Embeddedness and Status

This article empirically addresses the effects of network embeddedness on nonprofit organizations’ ability to access financial resources within competitive markets, with a focus in this analysis on the acquisition of foundation grants. We test theory on the role of organizational status in competitive markets using data from a network of nonprofits linked by foundation grants in metropolitan Atlanta during 2000 and 2005. We find that observable characteristics of nonprofits, including size, fundraising expenses, and financial health, explain success in grant markets. However, market status in previous time periods, operationalized as prior relationships with influential foundations in grant markets, additionally explains future grant awards. Our findings suggest that the status conferred through connections to important actors in a network can raise the profile of a nonprofit and increase the probability of grant success.     

Discriminatory decision making at the legislative level

This paper is an analysis of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. Consistent with value-conflict perspectives, previous research on the social origins of drug legislation suggests that coercive laws occur when the behavior of minority and other subordinate groups become threatening. Liberalizing drug legislation is enacted when the interests of dominant groups seem juxtaposed to existing punitive legislation. The present analysis explores the process of legislative decision making when both subordinateand superordinate groups engage in drug-related behaviors which run counter to dominant norms and values. To do so, a detailed analysis of the congressional committee hearings and floor debates which preceded enactment of the 1970 Act was conducted. This analysis revealed that Congress did not pass a strictly coercive drug control policy at the risk of stigmatizing superordinate groups. Nor did it choose to liberalize drug penalties across the board. Congress perceived that strictly liberal policies might undermine both the instrumental goal of reducing illicit drug activity, and the symbolic goal of expressing general societal disapproval of illicit drug use. Instead, the legislation that emerged from congressional debates contained both liberal and coercive provisions reflecting the requirements of dealing with two targeted populations: young middle and upper class white drug users who became identified as victims of drug traffickers; and large-scale and professional drug dealers who became identified as enemy deviants—the true source and symbol of the drug problem. Liberal, and essentially discriminatory, provisions permitted the protection of the former from stigmatization as criminal felons. Coercive, but apparently nondiscriminatory, provisions provided the threat and potential for severe punishment of the latter. The discriminatory features of the 1970 Act are identified and explicated. And, the implications of the Act's provisions for race- or class-based decisions in the application of sanctions are discussed.     

Local television news and voter support for law enforcement

Television has become “the” medium of the masses in contemporary America. However, there has been very little systematic investigation about television’s impact upon agents of political authority, such as municipal police agencies. This research analyzes potential linkages between voter support for local police and voter viewing habits of local television news. The impact of television news upon voter support for police is assessed in the context of a multivariate model, which includes media and non-media predictor variables. Voter “support” for a municipal police agency is deemed a multidimensional concept and is measured in absolute and relative terms. The findings of this exploratory study suggest that local television news has minimal or no impact (positively or negatively) upon voter attitudes toward local police agencies. The inability of mediaand non-media variables to explain voter support for municipal law enforcement indicates the need for a completely new paradigm to guide research in this niche of criminal justice.