Economics, Party, and the Vote: Causality Issues and Panel Data

Conventional wisdom argues that national economic perceptions generally have an important impact on the vote choice in democracies. Recently, a revisionist view has arisen, contending that this link, regularly observed in election surveys, is mostly spurious. According to the argument, partisanship distorts economic perception, thereby substantially exaggerating the real vote connection. These causality issues have not been much investigated empirically, despite their critical importance. Utilizing primarily American, and secondarily British and Canadian, election panel surveys, we confront directly questions of the time dynamic and independent variable exogeneity. We find, after all, economics clearly matters for the vote. Indeed, once these causality concerns are properly taken into account, the impact of economic perceptions emerges as larger than previously thought. As well, the actual impact of partisanship is clearly reduced.     

The Interstate Sprawl System

The Interstate Sprawl System is an article about the role of automobile transportation in the culture and civilization of the USA. After demonstrating that all previous civilizations in history have gathered around trading ports, where land values rise as the proximity to the port increases, it analyses the changes wrought by the grid system of transportation brought on by the automobile in the USA, where land values remain fairly constant and no core trading centers can be found. These changes include the decimation of the old port cities as well as the urbanization of rural lands. The article concludes with an appeal to encourage inter-city rapid rail as the obvious antidote to the problem.

How Americans Think About Trade: Reconciling Conflicts Among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mentaal models—mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic—sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.     

Rereading the Public: Isolationism and Internationalism Revisited

This is the first installment in what we hope will be a recurring series of Forums in ISP. In each segment we intend to provide an outlet for peer-reviewed dialogue and debate on important topics in the field and to allow our readers to discuss material previously printed in the pages of ISP. Below are two comments on "Challenging U.S. Policymakers' Image of an Isolationist Public" by Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay published in ISP 1:1. Both comments raise a number of important issues pertaining to the relationship of public opinion and foreign policy, and also address more general questions of domestic impact on foreign policy outputs and several significant methodological questions about approaches to polling. The Forum begins first with comments by Richard Clark and Kenneth Dautrich, is followed by comments from Shoon Murray, and concludes with a response from Kull and Ramsay.     

Five years after the Arab Spring: a critical evaluation

A new political geography has emerged in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) after the Arab Spring. The transformative impact of the popular upheavals appeared to put an end to long-term authoritarian regimes. Today, the region is far from stable since authoritarian resilience violently pushed back popular demands for good governance and is pushing to restore former state structures. However, the collective consciousness of the popular revolts endures, and a transformative prospect may emerge on the horizon. The chaotic situation is the result of an ongoing struggle between those who seek change and transformation and others in favour of the status quo ante. A critical evaluation of the Arab Spring after five years indicates a continuous process of recalculation and recalibration of policies and strategies. There are alternative routes for an eventual settlement in the MENA region, which are in competition against both regional and transregional quests for a favourable order.     

Public Sector Participation and Compliance across National and Global Transparency Regimes

Transparency has recently become a widely supported norm of information regulation within and among states. Transparency may be a widely accepted element of good governance, but it has a number of dimensions and manifestations. This article is among the first to examine the relationship between public sector transparency at the domestic and global levels. While the extant literature suggests that we should expect a strong relationship between the degree of a jurisdiction’s domestic and global commitments to public sector transparency, our sample of the 33 jurisdictions for which data are available finds no such correlation. The article develops an explanation of this unexpected finding, which highlights the varied incentives to implement transparency-promoting reforms that different jurisdictions experience. This analysis suggests that many developing countries engage in marginal participation across regimes. More concerning are possible cases of mock compliance where states participate in transparency regimes without the intention of fully implementing their commitments. Mock compliance is of particular concern in the sphere of global governance in which sovereignty is contested and compliance mechanisms face unique challenges.