Campaign Advertising and Democratic Citizenship

Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre-existing levels of political information.     

When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics

Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996, 1998 ) and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999 ; Coleman 1999 ), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions—incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence—and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices.     

Welfare policy: The administrative frontier

The process of national welfare reform has been overtaken by local reform as states implement experimental programs under federal waivers. Most of these initiatives attempt to enforce work or otherwise control the lives of the dependent in return for support. Research, which traditionally stressed the social and economic aspects of welfare or poverty, must be reoriented to address the administrative issues raised by the emerging paternalism. A combination of field interviewing and analyses of reporting data can track implementation and connect program operations to outcomes. Such research assesses program performance less definitively than experimental trials do but is more useful to operators and more relevant to current program goals. The frontiers of welfare research, like welfare policy, are institutional.     

The Time to Give: PAC Motivations and Electoral Timing

There has been much discussion about how members of Congressdesire money early in the campaign season. However, theoreticalmodels of how contributions are allocated during the electoralcycle have been lacking. Our analysis attempts to remedy thisgap by providing and testing a model which specifies how theprocess of bargaining between members of Congress and organizedinterests produces the pattern of donations observed over thecourse of the electoral cycle. Most notably, our results suggestthat strategic incumbents can receive money early in the campaignif they desire but that they are generally unwilling to paythe price of lower aggregate fundraising and greater provisionof access. These findings buttress earlier empirical findingsthat question the instrumental value of early money. In addition,our results highlight that contribution choices are fundamentallyinfluenced by short-term factors, especially electoral conditions,that do not lend themselves to the routinized behavior necessaryfor contributors to invest in incumbents for long-run payoffs.     

Testing hot-spots police patrols against no-treatment controls: Temporal and spatial deterrence effects in the London Underground experiment

Our understanding of causality and effect size in randomized field experiments is challenged by variations in levels of baseline treatment dosage in control groups across experiments testing similar treatments. The clearest design is to compare treated cases with no-treatment controls in a sample that lacks any prior treatment at baseline. We applied that strategy in a randomized test of hot-spots police patrols on the previously never-patrolled, track-level platforms of the London Underground (LU). In a pretest–posttest, control-group design, we randomly assigned 57 of the LU's 115 highest crime platforms to receive foot patrol by officers in 15-minute doses, 4 times per day, during 8-hour shifts on 4 days a week for 6 months. The effect of 23,272 police arrivals at the treatment hot spots over 26 weeks was to reduce public calls for service by 21 percent on treated platforms relative to controls, primarily when police were absent (97 percent of the measured effect). This effect was six times larger than the mean standardized effect size found in the leading systematic review. This finding provides a benchmark against the baseline counterfactual of no patrol in hot spots, with strong evidence of residual deterrence and no evidence of local displacement.     

Cultural Difference

President Trump’s criticisms of minorities, immigrants, and poor countries, while controversial, point to the need to discuss cultural differences more candidly. Much of the upset over diversity in America and the world results from the fact that everyone is not the same. The United States is the world’s most individualist country, where most people approach life as a quest to achieve their personal goals. But most minority Americans and recent immigrants tend to adjust to the world as it is rather than seeking change. That is a major reason why integration of these groups has proven difficult. Poor countries abroad are often ill-governed because local culture accepts misrule more passively than in the West. The entire American tradition, including political theory and theology, takes an individualist culture as normal and thus fails to address our current challenges. We need a new tradition in which cultural difference is the subject rather than denied.