The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

Despite generations of research, political scientists have trouble pinpointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment—they are “pretreated.” This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of “pretreatment” from outside the experiment—exposure-based and reputation-based—dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants—who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment—are the most sensitive to this interference from real-world context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.     

Ballot position and election results: Evidence from a natural experiment

Candidates listed first on the ballot paper regularly receive more votes than other candidates, but what role does ballot layout play in this connection? Experimental studies from first-past-the-post systems show that the ballot position effect is causal as the order of names functions as a cue to voters. Does this also hold for PR systems where voters may vote for a party instead of a specific candidate? We identify a natural experiment in Danish local and regional elections involving more than 10,000 candidates on 103 different ballot papers using ballot layout to study ballot position effects. We find indeed, the ballot position/layout has a causal effect on election results in PR systems. Our findings indicate that the empirical domain of ballot position and layout effects is much wider than suggested by previous research.     

When trust matters—a multilevel analysis of the effect of generalized trust on political participation in 25 European democracies

Generalized social trust has been argued to have positive effects for both individuals and society, but despite solid theoretical arguments in favour of different contextual effects, the empirical evidence remains scant. We here examine whether and how the effect of generalized trust on the propensity to become politically active is moderated by the level of generalized trust in society. We inspect two different causal mechanisms: The rainmaker effect, which entails that the effect of generalized trust is weaker at the individual level when there is a high level of generalized trust in society; and the sunmaker effect, which entails that the effect of generalized trust is strengthened by a high level of generalized trust in society. We examine the links for three forms of political participation: voting, institutionalized participation, and non-institutionalized participation. The data come from the fourth round of the European Social Survey from 2008 [European Social Survey. (2008 European Social Survey. (2008). Data file edition 4.0. Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway – Data Archive and distributor of ESS data. [Google Scholar]). Data file edition 4.0. Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway—Data Archive and distributor of ESS data], and we include 47,489 respondents in 25 democratic countries. The results from a series of multilevel logistic regressions suggest that the effect of generalized trust varies depending on the level of generalized trust in the surrounding community but the causal mechanisms differ for different kinds of political participation.     

Housing Voucher Take‐Up and Labor Market Impacts

Low participation rates in government assistance programs are a major policy concern in the United States. This paper studies take‐up of Section 8 housing vouchers, a program in which take‐up rates are quite low among interested and eligible households. We link 18,109 households in Chicago that were offered vouchers through a lottery to administrative data and study how baseline employment, earnings, public assistance, arrests, residential location, and children's academic performance predict take‐up. Our analysis finds mixed evidence of whether the most disadvantaged or distressed households face the largest barriers to program participation. We also study the causal impact of peer behavior on take‐up by exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the timing of voucher offers. We find that the probability of lease‐up increases with the number of neighbors who recently received voucher offers. Finally, we explore the policy implications of increasing housing voucher take‐up by applying reweighting methods to existing causal impact estimates of voucher receipt. This analysis suggests that greater utilization of vouchers may lead to larger reductions in labor market activity. Differences in take‐up rates across settings may be important to consider when assessing the external validity of studies identifying the effects of public assistance programs.     

论我国“公务员热”的成因与现实影响

公务员制度的实施是我国人事行政规范化、法制化、科学化的标志。自该制度实施以来,公共职位的竞争日趋激烈。过度的竞争源自于民族文化和经济利益多种因素,这种状况对政府自身和社会既有积极有利的一面:有利于危机意识、竞争意识和成本意识的形成;又会产生消极有害影响:就业的反示范效应与行政成本的激增。     

Social pressure, surveillance and community size: Evidence from field experiments on voter turnout

Citizens participate in elections, at least partly, because they perceive voting as a social norm. Norms induce compliance because individuals prefer to avoid enforcement mechanisms—including social sanctions—that can be activated by uncooperative behavior. Public visibility, or surveillance, increases the likelihood of norm-compliant behavior and applies social pressure that impels individuals to act. Some scholars have linked social pressure to community size, advancing the notion that pressure to conform to social norms is heightened in smaller, less populous communities in which citizens interact frequently and where monitoring behavior is less onerous. Others argue that even highly-populated communities can exhibit “small world” properties that cause residents to be sensitive to social pressure. In this paper, I analyze data from a recent field experiment designed to test the impact of social pressure on voting taking interactions with community size into account. The findings I report suggest community size does not moderate the impact of social pressure.     

基于行业岗位的物流管理专业培养模式研究

现代物流业集仓储、运输、装卸于一体,是一种先进的组织形式和管理方式,是信息化、专业化、系统化、综合化的全过程。我国物流行业的短板在于物流专业人才的匮乏,物流人才培养供给量滞后于人才市场的需求量;物流专业人才培养目标滞后于物流业管理现状;物流专业人才培养体系滞后于社会岗位要求;物流师资力量滞后于物流专业教学发展水平。如何将短板转变为长板,正是我们基于行业岗位的物流管理专业培养模式研究的意义所在。因此,为了提高物流行业的整体水平,满足持续增长的市场需要,构建面向市场的、可操作性强,基于行业岗位的物流管理专业培养模式意义重大。     

新泉整训与红军早期的党和军队建设

新泉整训正值毛泽东上井冈山开辟党领导的第一个革命根据地两年之际.这两年既可视为红军初创时期,也是党的幼年时期.以毛泽东为代表的中国共产党人在探索中国革命道路的同时,也开始了对红军的党的建设和军队建设的探索.从井冈山斗争到新泉整训,再到古田会议,探索在总体上是顺利的,最后在不同意见争论基础上和党中央的引导下形成共识,红四军党的建设和军队建设走上了马克思主义轨道.新泉整训为伟大的古田会议的成功召开,使之成为党和人民军队建设历史上的重要里程碑起了奠基作用,功不可没.     

功利主义文化和关系文化对温州经济发展的作用

功利主义文化和关系文化是温州商业文化的两大特点。这两种文化特质在温州经济发展的过程中具有重要的作用,它们为温州经济的早期发展积累了大量的物质资本和关系资本,也为温州日后的经济发展奠定了坚实的基础。但是,这两种温州文化却面临着许多的困境和挑战,由功利主义文化引起的市场经济无序和道德混乱,以及由关系文化带来的对外来流动人口的排斥,在很大程度上阻碍了温州经济的发展。温州经济需要转型,而温州文化也同样需要一次新的转型。