Articles:

Defenders of Democracy? Legitimacy, Popular Acceptance, and The South African Constitutional Court
James L. Gibson, Gregory A. Caldeira [Abstract]

The Foundation of Latino Voter Partisanship: Evidence from the 2000 Election.
R. Michael Alvarez, Lisa García Bedolla [Abstract]

Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People
Sean M. Theriault [Abstract]

A Unified Model of War Onset and Outcome
David H. Clark, William Reed [Abstract]

The Marginal and Time Varying Effect of Public Approval on Presidential Success in Congress
Jon R. Bond, Richard Fleisher, B. Dan Wood [Abstract]

The Dynamics of Presidential Popularity in Post-Communist Russia: Cultural Imperative versus Neo-Institutional Choice?
William Mishler, John P. Willerton [Abstract]

Why is Research on the Effects of Negative Campaigning So Inconclusive? Understanding Citizens' Perceptions of Negativity
Lee Sigelman, Mark Kugler [Abstract]

Voter Turnout and Candidate Strategies in American Elections
James Adams and Samuel Merrill, III [Abstract]

Institutional Context and the Assignment of Political Responsibility
Thomas J. Rudolph [Abstract]

Research Notes:

Does Racial Redistricting Cause Conservative Policy Outcomes? Policy Preferences of Southern Representatives in the 1980s and 1990s
Kenneth W. Shotts [Abstract]

The Missing Middle: Why Median-Voter Theory Can't Save the Democrats from Singing the Boll Weevil Blues
David Lublin, D. Stephen Voss [Abstract]

Racial Redistricting's Alleged Perverse Effects: Theory, Data and "Reality"
Kenneth W. Shotts [Abstract]

Women Running "as Women": Candidate Gender, Campaign Issues, and Voter Targeting Strategies
Paul S. Herrnson, J. Celeste Lay, Atiya Kai Stokes [Abstract]

Abstracts:

Defenders of Democracy? Legitimacy, Popular Acceptance, and The South African Constitutional Court
James L. Gibson, Washington University in St. Louis
Gregory A. Caldeira, The Ohio State University
The question of how courts in newly emerging democracies are able to act in a "counter-majoritarian" fashion is of burning theoretical and practical importance. Consequently, our purpose is to investigate the relationship between the legitimacy of the South African Constitutional Court and its success at generating acquiescence to its decisions even when they are unpopular. Based on a national survey, we begin by describing the institutional loyalty the Court enjoys among its constituents. We next consider the consequences of legitimacy by determining whether people are willing to acquiesce to an adverse Court decision on a civil liberties dispute. Our central hypothesis - that legitimate institutions are capable of generating acceptance of decisions, even when citizens find the policy highly disagreeable - receives only conditional support. What little legitimacy the Constitutional Court has acquired does not readily translate into acquiescence to its decisions. The apparent inability of the Court to perform the role of a "veto player" in South African politics has important consequences for that country's efforts to consolidate its democratic transition.

The Foundation of Latino Voter Partisanship: Evidence from the 2000 Election.
R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology
Lisa García Bedolla, University of California, Irvine
Studies of partisan identification in the U.S. have concentrated on Anglo Americans. We argue that by focusing only on the descendents of naturalized, mostly white, immigrants, that previous research may have been biased towards largely sociological accounts for the development of partisan attitudes. Here, we study the partisan affiliations of Latino voters, and argue that by examining their partisan attitudes we should find that their partisanship is more explicitly political that Anglos. We utilize a telephone survey of Latino likely voters in the 2000 presidential election, and find that Latino voter partisanship is shaped by both political and social factors.

Patronage, the Pendleton Act, and the Power of the People
Sean M. Theriault, University of Texas at Austin
The conventional wisdom and congressional scholarship find that members of Congress use their public authority to facilitate their reelections (Aldrich 1995, Moe 1990, Parker 1992, and Weingast and Marshall 1988). The adoption of the Pendleton Act of 1883 has been cited as another in a long line of examples where members have "stacked the deck" in their own self-interests (Johnson and Libecap 1994a). I challenge these pervasive views by presenting evidence that public pressure was an important and frequently overlooked factor in explaining the adoption of civil service reform in the late nineteenth century. More generally, I argue that members of Congress will enact reforms that diminish their power or restrict their authority only when the public is attentive and united; otherwise, they will establish governing structures and rules that facilitate their own reelections. This insight sheds light, more broadly, on the relationship between the represented and their representatives.

A Unified Model of War Onset and Outcome
David H. Clark, Binghamton University
William Reed, Rice University
Recent work regarding what influences the chances states either win or lose wars focuses on two primary explanations. The first suggests that states win or lose largely on the merits of their war fighting strategies and capabilities. The second explanation asserts that successful states simply chose their fights more carefully, thus selecting opponents that they are more likely to defeat. Though these approaches are often perceived as contending theories, they actually are complementary in the sense that both contribute to a unified explanation of why states win wars. This paper provides a theoretical explanation of success in war by joining these two approaches and arguing that, because the explanations are complementary, analyses ignoring one or the other are incomplete. We report a series of censored probit models that unify these explanations. The results of the unified model support the argument that the theories should be considered complementary. Our conclusions point to the importance of conceiving of international phenomena including conflict as processes rather than as discrete events.

The Marginal and Time Varying Effect of Public Approval on Presidential Success in Congress
Jon R. Bond, Texas A & M University
Richard Fleisher, Fordham University
B. Dan Wood, Texas A & M University
We analyze the relationship between public approval and presidential success in Congress using time varying parameter regression methods. Our initial theoretical expectation is that cues from constituency, ideology, and party dominate congressional vote choice, so the effect of public approval of the president is typically marginal. But because the strength of these primary cues varies through time, the effect of public approval on presidential success should also be time varying. Analysis of conflictual roll call votes from 1953-2000 using the time varying Kalman filter reveals the effect of public approval on presidential success is marginal and changing through time. These models assume that the time variation is a stochastic process, and finding time varying relationships may indicate model misspecification. Our theory, however, suggests that this time variation depends on a systematic factor, partisanship. A better specified model that allows systematic parameter variation confirms that the level of partisanship conditions the relationship between public approval and presidential success in Congress: as congressional partisanship increases, the effect of public approval declines. Because partisanship in Congress increased during the 1980s, presidents since Ronald Reagan have received less benefit from strong approval ratings.

The Dynamics of Presidential Popularity in Post-Communist Russia: Cultural Imperative versus Neo-Institutional Choice?
William Mishler, University of Arizona, Tucson
John P. Willerton, University of Arizona, Tucson
Public support for Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin has fluctuated significantly over Russia's first post-Soviet decade. Cultural explanations for these dynamics emphasize the country's authoritarian culture and Russian preferences for strong and decisive leaders. Neo-institutional theories attribute the dynamics to citizens' everyday evaluations of presidential performance as the government succeeds or fails in meeting citizens' needs and demands. This paper tests competing cultural and neo-institutional theories of presidential popularity in Russia during the Yeltsin and early Putin years (1991-2000). We develop and estimate a series of political support models of Russian presidential approval including indicators hypothesized to reflect variously the impact of Russia's authoritarian culture and of citizens' assessments of political and economic performance. We find substantial support for elements of both cultural and neo-institutional theories of presidential popularity, but institutional theories with their emphasis on citizen's rational evaluations of political performance perform substantially better in accounting for fluctuations in the popularity of Russia's first two post-Soviet presidents.

Why is Research on the Effects of Negative Campaigning So Inconclusive? Understanding Citizens' Perceptions of Negativity
Lee Sigelman, George Washington University
Mark Kugler, George Washington University
Prior research has produced inconclusive results concerning the effects of negative campaigning. Researchers' reliance on encyclopedic, even-handed measures of the tone of campaigns may help account for this inconsistency, for such measures are unlikely to reflect the way that most citizens process information about campaigns. Testing this argument by analyzing data from three 1998 gubernatorial campaigns, we observe a lack of consensus in citizens' perceptions of these campaigns, a lack of convergence between citizens' perceptions and social science-style classifications of these campaigns, and an array of biasing factors in citizens' perceptions.

Voter Turnout and Candidate Strategies in American Elections
James Adams, University of California, Santa Barbara
Samuel Merrill, III, Wilkes University
Most spatial models of two-candidate competition imply that candidates have electoral incentives to present similar, centrist policies. We modify the standard Downsian model to include three observations supported by empirical research on American elections: that voters are prepared to abstain if neither competitor is sufficiently attractive (abstention due to alienation) or if the candidates are insufficiently differentiated (abstention due to indifference); that voters are influenced by factors such as education, race, and partisanship, that are not directly tied to the candidates' positions in the current campaign; and that voters' nonpolicy characteristics correlate with their policy preferences. Our results suggest that voters' turnout decisions and their nonpolicy characteristics, even if the candidates in the course of a campaign cannot manipulate the latter, are nonetheless necessary for understanding candidates' policy strategies.

Institutional Context and the Assignment of Political Responsibility
Thomas J. Rudolph, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Comparative analyses of economic voting in Europe and in the American states suggest that institutional context structures the assignment of political responsibility for policy outcomes. Since most of it has proceeded at the aggregate level, however, the extant literature is ill equipped to comment critically on the ability of individuals to incorporate information about institutional context into their responsibility judgments and on whether the effects of such contextual factors outweigh those of individual-level characteristics. This article analyzes attributions of executive versus legislative responsibility for fiscal policy outcomes in the American states and represents the first attempt to integrate both institutional context and responsibility attributions into a single analysis. Exploiting recent advances in multilevel modeling techniques, this article analyzes the extent to which individuals' responsibility judgments are shaped by institutional and individual-level factors and how, in turn, these responsibility judgments influence political evaluations.

Does Racial Redistricting Cause Conservative Policy Outcomes? Policy Preferences of Southern Representatives in the 1980s and 1990s
Kenneth W. Shotts, Northwestern University and Princeton University
This paper uses a median legislator model to assess the claim that racial redistricting leads to conservative policy outcomes. I examine policy preferences of southern representatives to the U.S. House in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Surprisingly, the fraction of southern representatives who were liberal, i.e., to the left of the House median, increased after racial redistricting. To explain this empirical pattern, I develop a simple model of redistricting's electoral effects. In the model, racial redistricting in a conservative state increases the number of members of that state's delegation to the left of the U.S. House median, thereby moving national policy outcomes to the left.

The Missing Middle: Why Median-Voter Theory Can't Save the Democrats from Singing the Boll Weevil Blues
David Lublin, American University
D. Stephen Voss, University of Kentucky
Racial redistricting decimated the southern congressional districts once represented by centrist Democrats. Electoral maps drawn in the 1990s instead helped polarize the South's congressional delegation into a mixture of minority Democrats and hard-right Republicans, creating a more-favorable environment for conservative legislation. The median-voter approach offered by Ken Shotts misses this phenomenon, primarily because neither his statistical nor his formal model incorporates the sharp rightward shift in the House median that followed the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. As a result, his models completely discount gains made by hard-right Republicans at the expense of moderate Democrats.

Racial Redistricting's Alleged Perverse Effects: Theory, Data and "Reality"
Kenneth W. Shotts, Northwestern University and Princeton University
In this rejoinder I address Lublin and Voss's (2003) theoretical and empirical critique of my analysis of racial redistricting. I first show that their theoretical critique simply consists of unsubstantiated assertions. Moreover, Lublin and Voss fail to recognize that their unproven assertions are directly contradicted by previously published theoretical analysis. I then turn to Lublin and Voss's empirical critique and demonstrate that the research design underlying their claims is fundamentally flawed. Thus, Lublin and Voss provide no compelling reason to question my article's conclusion that racial redistricting for the US House of Representatives promotes liberal policy outcomes.

Women Running "as Women": Candidate Gender, Campaign Issues, and Voter Targeting Strategies
Paul S. Herrnson, University of Maryland at College Park
J. Celeste Lay, University of Maryland at College Park
Atiya Kai Stokes, University of Maryland at College Park
Previous research has demonstrated that voter stereotypes about gender place certain strategic imperatives on female candidates. This study examines the effects of the interplay of candidate gender and campaign strategy using a new data set consisting of survey responses from U.S. House and state legislative candidates who ran for office in 1996 or 1998. We demonstrate that women gain a strategic advantage when they run "as women," stressing issues that voters associate favorably with female candidates and targeting female voters. These findings suggest that one of the keys to success for female candidates is to wage campaigns that use voters' dispositions toward gender as an asset rather than a liability.