Articles:

The Timeline of Presidential Election Campaigns
Christopher Wlezien, Robert S. Erikson [Abstract]

Civic Education and the Mobilization of Political Participation in Developing Democracies
Steven E. Finkel [Abstract]

Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making
David P. Redlawsk [Abstract]

Conflict Emergence and Escalation in Interactive International Dyads
David Kinsella, Bruce Russett [Abstract]

Duration Models for Repeated Events
Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Christopher J. W. Zorn [Abstract]

Agencies by Presidential Design
William G. Howell, David E. Lewis [Abstract]

The Many Faces of Elite Power in the "System of 1896"
Kim Quaile Hill, Carl Klarner [Abstract]

Alexis de Tocqueville on the Natural State of Religion in the Age of Democracy
Aristide Tessitore [Abstract]

Beyond Bodies: Institutional Sources of Representation for Women in Democratic Policymaking
S. Laurel Weldon [Abstract]

Hot Spots or Hot Hands? Serial Crisis Behavior, Escalating Risks, and Rivalry
Michael Colaresi, William R. Thompson [Abstract]

Research Notes:

Partisan Conversion in the 1990s: Ideological Realignment meets Measurement Theory
David W. Putz [Abstract]

System Structure, Campaign Stimuli, and Voter Falloff in Runoff Primaries
Charles S. Bullock, III, Ronald Keith Gaddie, Anders Ferrington [Abstract]

Abstracts:

The Timeline of Presidential Election Campaigns
Christopher Wlezien, University of Oxford
Robert S. Erikson, Columbia University
Little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over the campaign cycle. How does the outcome come into focus as the election cycle evolves? Do voters' preferences evolve in a patterned and understandable way? What role does the election campaign play? In this manuscript, we address these issues. We translate general arguments about the role of campaigns into a set of formal, statistical expectations. Then, we outline an empirical analysis and examine poll results for the 15 U.S. presidential elections between 1944 and 2000. Our analysis focuses specifically on two questions. First, to what extent does the observable variation in aggregate poll results represent real movement in electoral preferences (if the election were held the day of the poll) as opposed to mere survey error? Second, to the extent polls register true movement of preferences owing to the shocks of campaign events, do the effects last or do they decay? Answers to these questions tell us whether and the extent to which campaign events have effects on preferences and, if so, whether these effects persist until Election Day. The answers thus inform us about what we ultimately want to know: Do campaigns have any real impact on the election outcome? The results of our analysis suggest that they do. Civic Education and the Mobilization of Political Participation in Developing Democracies
Steven E. Finkel, University of Virginia
This paper examines the effect of adult civic education programs on political participation in two developing democracies, the Dominican Republic and South Africa. I first develop hypotheses about the effects of civic education on participation from theories of political culture and recent work on recruitment and group mobilization. Using survey data collected on participants in numerous civic education programs as well as control groups in both countries, I then show that civic education has significant and substantively meaningful effects on local-level political participation in four of the seven programs studied in South Africa and the Dominican Republic, and that the results hold after controlling for potential biases related to the individual's self-selection into the programs. The effects of civic education on participation are largely conditional in nature, dependent on the frequency and nature of the civic education "treatment," and the individual's store of prior political and participatory resources. The results suggest that civic education and other group mobilization processes are highly complementary in both countries; civic education training stimulates individual political behavior in much the same way as does participation in other kinds of secondary group activities. Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making
David P. Redlawsk, University of Iowa
Researchers attempting to understand how citizens process political information have advanced motivated reasoning to explain the joint role of affect and cognition. The prominence of affect suggests that all social information processing is affectively charged and prone to biases. This paper makes use of a unique dataset collected using a dynamic information board experiment to test important effects of motivated reasoning. In particular, affective biases should cause citizens to spend longer processing information incongruent with their existing affect, and such biases should also direct search for new information about candidates. Somewhat perversely, motivated reasoners may actually increase their support of a positively evaluated candidate upon learning new negatively evaluated information. Findings are reported which support all of these expectations. Additional analysis shows that these affective biases may easily lead to lower quality decision-making, leading to a direct challenge to the notion of voters as rational Bayesian updaters. Conflict Emergence and Escalation in Interactive International Dyads
David Kinsella, American University
Bruce Russett, Yale University
We examine whether the conditions affecting initial expressions of hostility are similar to those affecting militarized disputes. Analyzing dyadic interactions 1951-1992, we estimate a model to take into account selection effects, and check it against another allowing conjunctive causation. Both provide close approximations to theoretical models of the conflict process, and yield similar results. Overall, we confirm Kant's belief that all states are subject to the realist conditions of interstate competition that makes disputes likely, but that liberal influences, if present, can constrain the escalation of such disputes to war. Several influences on the conflict process have nonmonotonic effects over the range of state behavior. Geopolitical factors affect the opportunity for conflict more at lower levels of the conflict process, when less information is available regarding acceptable settlements and actors' resolve, than at higher levels. Factors affecting willingness--democracy and economic interdependence--gain importance as the conflict process unfolds because they facilitate the flow of information relevant to the ongoing dispute. The proposition that democracy and interdependence encourage diplomatic conflicts as signals of resolve is not supported. Not only do they reduce the risk that diplomatic conflicts will escalate to militarized disputes, they also discourage diplomatic conflict from emerging in the first place. Duration Models for Repeated Events
Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Ohio State University
Christopher J. W. Zorn, Emory University
An important feature of most political events is their repeatability: nearly all political events reoccur, and theories of learning, path dependence and institutional change all suggest that later events will differ from earlier ones. Yet, most models for event history analysis fail to account for repeated events, a fact which can yield misleading results in practice. We present a class of duration models for analyzing repeated events, discuss their properties and implementation, and offer recommendations for their use by applied researchers. We illustrate these methods through an application to widely-used data on international conflict. Agencies by Presidential Design
William G. Howell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
David E. Lewis, College of William and Mary
Scholars have largely ignored one of the most important ways in which presidents influence the administrative state in the modern era, that is, by creating administrative agencies through executive action. Because they can act unilaterally, presidents alter the kinds of administrative agencies that are created and the control they wield over the federal bureaucracy. We analyze the 425 agencies established between 1946-1995 and find that agencies created by administrative action are significantly less insulated from presidential control than are agencies created through legislation. We also find that the ease of congressional legislative action is a significant predictor of the number of agencies created by executive action. We conclude that the very institutional factors that make it harder for Congress to legislate provide presidents new opportunities to create administrative agencies on their own, and to design them in ways that maximizes executive control. The Many Faces of Elite Power in the "System of 1896"
Kim Quaile Hill, Texas A & M University
Carl Klarner, Texas A & M University
We formalize and test arguments originating with Schattschneider and Burnham about elite control of the governing process in the "system of 1896." To do so, we draw upon classic elite theory and contemporary public policy theory to specify the particular ways elite power might have operated and to deduce a series of hypotheses about such power at various stages of the policy process. Our empirical tests of the resultant propositions - for the controversy over direct democracy reform adoptions in individual American states - offer notable evidence for elite influence over the active agenda status of direct democracy proposals as well as over the adoption, scope of adoption, and speediness of adoption of such reforms. Alexis de Tocqueville on the Natural State of Religion in the Age of Democracy
Aristide Tessitore, Furman University
Contemporary scholars, journalists, and politicians are deeply divided with respect to the religious or secular character of America's founding principles. In sharp contrast to the narrowing tendencies of contemporary intellectual and political life, Tocqueville's classic study of democracy in America is the first of any scope to give weight to America's dual founding-biblical and philosophic. For Tocqueville it is the combination of two different traditions, neither of which can be reduced to the other, that is the hallmark of the new political science he bequeaths to the dawning democratic age. In the essay that follows I draw out the natural state of religion in a democratic society, particularly as it comes to sight in America, as well as Tocqueville's attempts to address the particular problems and possibilities to which it gives rise. Beyond Bodies: Institutional Sources of Representation for Women in Democratic Policymaking
S. Laurel Weldon, Purdue University
The idea that individual members of marginalized groups provide substantive representation for the wider group rests on a problematic understanding of the relationship between individual experience and group perspective. I propose understanding group perspectives as collective products. On this view, institutional structures and social movements, not just bodies, can be more or less representative of groups. Comparing the impact of various modes of women's representation on policies to address violence against women in 36 democratic countries in 1994, I find that women's movements and women's policy agencies may provide more effective avenues of expression for women's perspective than the presence of women in the legislatures. Thus, studies of representation for marginalized groups should consider institutional changes and increased political mobilization as potential sources of improved political representation. Hot Spots or Hot Hands? Serial Crisis Behavior, Escalating Risks, and Rivalry
Michael Colaresi, Indiana University
William R. Thompson, Indiana University
Recently, a debate has begun concerning the relationship between conflict events over time between the same disputants. While research on rivalries and recurrent conflict suggest that crises are related over time, others (Gartzke and Simon, 1999) doubt the empirical and theoretical foundations of this research. We agree with the critics that the proposition that conflicts between adversaries are related over time remains only weakly substantiated. To fill this lacunae, we test 4 hypotheses relating past crisis behavior and sequences to subsequent conflict, using ICB data. Our results support the serial crisis hypothesis, and suggest that the probability of subsequent crises and wars increase with each past crisis. Our findings also reinforce the inclination to give more emphasis to the analysis of rivalries. Partisan Conversion in the 1990s: Ideological Realignment meets Measurement Theory
David W. Putz, University of Houston
A well-known debate in electoral behavior has centered on the potential for individual-level partisan change, and as the recent work on ideological realignment published in this journal suggests, this debate is far from settled. Using 1992-1994-1996 NES panel data, I test the conversion assumption of ideological realignment theories using a structural equation model combined with two measurement models to control for measurement error in my indicators of ideology and party identification. Results suggest that while partisan conversion did occur during the 1994 mid term election, ideological realignment theories must be qualified. System Structure, Campaign Stimuli, and Voter Falloff in Runoff Primaries
Charles S. Bullock, III, University of Georgia
Ronald Keith Gaddie, University of Oklahoma
Anders Ferrington, University of Oklahoma
In a model that relies entirely on legal and structural factors, Wright (1989) seeks to account for changes in voter participation from the initial primary to the runoff. This paper tests an alternative, campaign-centered model of voter turnout in 109 congressional runoffs from 1982-1996. The analysis indicates that candidate-centered factors, including the amount of money expended by the candidates in the runoff and the political experience of the primary leader, influence turnout in runoff primaries. Generally when more money is spent during the runoff, voter participation declines less relative to the initial primary suggesting that a more stimulated political environment encourages greater participation. Spending before the initial primary is less influential than spending between the primary and runoff in maintaining voter turnout, indicating that any potential effects from stimulation of the environment in the prior campaign have largely dissipated by the time of the second election.