Can Partisan Cues Diminish Democratic Accountability?

When evaluating political candidates, citizens can draw on partisan stereotypes and use partisan cues to make inferences about the candidates’ issue positions without undertaking a costly information search. As long as candidates adopt policy positions that are congruent with partisan stereotypes, partisan cues can help citizens make an accurate voting decision with limited information. However, if candidates take counter-stereotypical positions, it is incumbent upon citizens to recognize it and adjust their evaluations accordingly. Using the dual-processing framework, I hypothesize about the conditions under which individuals reduce their reliance on partisan cues and scrutinize counter-stereotypical messages, and test these hypotheses with experimental data collected from a nationally representative sample of adults. The findings show that whether individuals punish a candidate from their party for taking a counter-stereotypical position is contingent on the salience of the issue and the political awareness of the message recipient. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and normative implications of these findings.

ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND YOUTH GANG MEMBERSHIP: SELECTION AND SOCIALIZATION

We examine whether gang membership is associated with higher levels of delinquency because boys predisposed to delinquent activity are more likely than others to join. We use 10 years of longitudinal data from 858 participants of the Pittsburgh Youth Study to identify periods before, during and after gang membership. We build on prior research by controlling for ages and calendar time, by better accounting for gang memberships that occurred before the study began, and by using fixed effects statistical models. We find more evidence than has been found in prior studies that boys who join gangs are more delinquent before entering the gang than those who do not join. Even with such selective differences, however, we replicate research showing that drug selling, drug use, violent behaviors and vandalism of property increase significantly when a youth joins a gang. The delinquency of peers appears to be one mechanism of socialization. These findings are clearest in youth self-reports, but are also evident in reports from parents and teachers on boys' behavior and delinquency. Once we adjust for time trends, we find that the increase in delinquency is temporary, that delinquency falls to pre-gang levels when boys leave gangs.     

Race and the probability of pleading guilty

The legal ramifications of pleading guilty and findings of an interdependence between pleading guilty and sentence severity suggest that the guilty plea decision is a significent turning point in case processing. The present research examines the variables affecting the probability of pleading guilty. The first analysis involves estimating a single probit equation of main effects of variables previously found to be related to pleading guilty. A second analysis is conducted estimating the same equation separately for black defendants and white defendants. Findings from the first part of the analysis indicate that physical evidence, number of charges, and confessing to the crime during police/prosecutor interrogation increase the probability of pleading guilty, whereas the number of witnesses, use of a weapon, and offenses carrying a minimum penalty of 5 years in custody with no maximum prison term decrease the probability of pleading guilty. Findings from the second analysis indicate that the effect of marital status, prior record of felony convictions, type of counsel, number of charges, and use of a weapon on the probability of pleading guilty varies by defendant's race. The research concludes by offering several competing explanations of these findings in hope of stimulating further research on the variables affecting the route of case disposition in felony processing.     

实践意识·制度结构·权力资源--从结构化理论看思想政治工作有效性问题

结构化理论是社会学中揭示个人行为与社会系统互动关系的重要理论之一.其中实践意识、结构性制约和权力资源配置的论述,对于我们进一步探寻教育者、受教育者、制度等思想政治工作变量间的内在联系,深入探讨如何增强思想政治工作有效性有着重要的启示作用.这表现在整合官兵的实践意识,为增强军队思想政治工作有效性提供坚实的思想基础;优化制度结构,为增强有效性提供科学的制度保障;合理运用权力资源,为增强有效性提供有力的权威支持.     

略论产业集群的集聚效应对民营经济发展的推动——以福建部分产业集群为例

企业在集群区域所产生的集聚效应,有利于提升以产业集群为支撑的民营经济的整体竞争力,其表现出来的是一种比所有单个企业竞争力简单叠加起来更具优势的全新的集群竞争力。集聚效应对民营经济的发展起到了至关重要的推动作用。     

Trade and the environment in North America

Environmental assessments of trade agreements remain in its infancy, and demonstrate that trade in itself will not green our economies. By examining various aspects of the environmental effects of trade in North America, this special issue not only contributes to deepening our understanding of the key issues in the trade and environment debate, but also helps to formulate mutually supportive trade and environmental policies.     

Measuring community social organization: Sense of community as a mediator in social disorganization theory

The current study utilized an updated systemic model of social disorganization to investigate neighborhood effects on both positive and negative youth outcomes. Although empirical support for updated social disorganization models has increased in recent years, the field continues to rely too heavily on behavioral indicators of community social organization. Unfortunately, these measures do not assess the truly important social processes and dynamics that result in cohesive and supportive neighborhoods. It was proposed that sense of community (SOC) was a more valid, comprehensive, and applicable measure for the mediating variables in social disorganization theory. Results supported the hypothesis that SOC mediates the effect of neighborhood disadvantage on youth outcomes and implications for the field are discussed.     

Negative personalization and voting behavior in 14 parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters’ polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the relationship between negativity towards party leaders and vote choice in multi-party systems. We develop our negative personalization hypothesis and test it empirically on an original pooled dataset featuring 109 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected over the last six decades. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust relationship between negative party-leader evaluations and vote choice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a sizable growth in the incidence of negative personalization across time, now of a magnitude that compares to that exerted by in-party-leader evaluations. This finding constitutes a central innovation adding to the personalization of politics literature.     

How the coronavirus crisis affects citizen trust in institutions and in unknown others: Evidence from ‘the Swedish experiment’

We study how Swedish citizens updated their institutional and interpersonal trust as the corona crisis evolved from an initial phase to an acute phase in the spring of 2020. The study is based on a large web-survey panel with adult Swedes (n = 11,406) in which the same individuals were asked the same set of questions at two different time points during the coronavirus pandemic (t₀ and t₁). The sample was self-selected but diverse (a smaller subsample, n = 1,464, was pre-stratified to be representative of the Swedish population on key demographics). We find support for the view that the corona crisis led to higher levels of institutional and interpersonal trust. Moreover, reactions were largely homogeneous across those groups that could potentially relate distantly to government authorities.