Articles:

The Not-So-Simple Calculus of Winning: Potential U.S. House Candidates' Nomination and General Election Prospects
Walter J. Stone, L. Sandy Maisel [Abstract]

When Parties Matter: The Conditional Influence of Party Positions on Voter Opinions about European Integration
Leonard Ray [Abstract]

Policy Signals and Executive Governance: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Drugs
Andrew B. Whitford, Jeff Yates [Abstract]

Can Strategic Interaction Divert Diversionary Behavior? A Model of U.S. Conflict Propensity
David H. Clark [Abstract]

Not All Cues Are Created Equal: The Conditional Impact of Female Candidates on Political Engagement
Lonna Rae Atkeson [Abstract]

Plato's Paragon of Human Excellence: Socratic Philosopher and Civic Guardian
Darrell Dobbs [Abstract]

Getting Out the Vote in Local Elections: Results from Six Door-to-Door Canvassing Experiments
Donald P. Green, Alan S. Gerber, David W. Nickerson [Abstract]

Policymaking through Advice and Consent: Treaty Consideration by the United States Senate
David Auerswald, Forrest Maltzman [Abstract]

Art for Democracy's Sake? Group Membership and Political Engagement in Europe
Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, Robert Hanneman [Abstract]

Implementing Popular Initiatives: What Matters for Compliance?
Valentina A. Bali [Abstract]

The Choosers or the Choices? Voter Characteristics and the Structure of Electoral Competition as Explanations for Ticket Splitting
Douglas D. Roscoe [Abstract]

Measuring Constituency Ideology In U.S. House Districts: A Top-Down Simulation Approach
Philip J. Ardoin, James C. Garand [Abstract]

Fragmentation, Fiscal Mobility, and Efficiency
Keith Dowding, Thanos Mergoupis [Abstract]

The Shifting Foundations of Public Opinion about Gay Rights
Paul R. Brewer [Abstract]

The Redistricting Cycle and Strategic Candidate Decisions in U.S. House Races
Marc J. Hetherington, Bruce A. Larson, Suzanne Globetti [Abstract]

Averting Armed International Conflicts Through State-to-State Territorial Transfers
Jaroslav Tir [Abstract]

Abstracts:

The Not-So-Simple Calculus of Winning: Potential U.S. House Candidates' Nomination and General Election Prospects
Walter J. Stone, University of California, Davis
L. Sandy Maisel, Colby College
As the individual qualities of potential House candidates improve, their prospects in both the nomination and general election chances go up. However the same is not true for two key characteristics of the district context in which potential candidates might run: the party of the potential candidate in relation to the incumbent, and the partisan makeup of the district. The direction of the effects of both incumbency and district partisanship on prospects, in contrast to the effects of quality, depend upon the stage of the election process. Using a survey of district informants in a random sample of House districts, we find that incumbent and potential candidate quality both affect potential candidates' prospects of winning, with "strategic qualities" generally having a stronger direct effect than "personal qualities." District partisanship has offsetting and strong effects on potential candidates' chances in both stages: Nomination prospects decline as the partisan makeup of the district favors the potential candidate, while general election chances increase as district partisanship becomes more favorable. An expected parabolic relationship between chances of winning the seat and district partisanship clearly emerges in the analysis. These effects are fundamental to our understanding of the sources of competition in U.S. House elections. When Parties Matter: The Conditional Influence of Party Positions on Voter Opinions about European Integration
Leonard Ray, Louisiana State University
While the literature on public support for European integration often suggests that political elites play an important role in shaping public attitudes toward the European Union, the empirical findings to date reveal an inconsistent pattern of political effects. The causal direction of this relationship has also been questioned. Using data from the Eurobarometer surveys, this paper tests hypotheses to explain national, partisan, and individual level variations in the strength of the party/voter connection. The results of a nonrecursive model demonstrate that party positions do influence electorate opinion, but that this effect varies with levels of disagreement among parties, party unity, issue salience, and party attachment. These results help to explain when and where political parties will exercise the greatest influence over public opinion. Policy Signals and Executive Governance: Presidential Rhetoric in the War on Drugs
Andrew B. Whitford, University of Kansas
Jeff Yates, The University of Georgia
One consequence of the president's use of rhetoric to shape the public agenda, the media, and congressional attention is less recognized: presidential rhetoric shapes the priorities of the administrative agents over whom he seeks managerial control. We present statistical tests of the managerial power of presidential policy signals in the case of the United States Attorneys' implementation of the federal "War on Drugs." We find that presidential policy signals shifted the composition of the Attorneys' caseload, although not to the exclusion of other pertinent local, national, and internal factors. Yet, the consequences of presidential rhetoric for executive governance remain real and substantial. Can Strategic Interaction Divert Diversionary Behavior? A Model of U.S. Conflict Propensity
David H. Clark, Binghamton University
Current conflict research increasingly suggests the relevance of unobserved strategic processes in determining how and why states engage in conflict. Alastair Smith's (1996, 1998) work, in particular, highlights the likelihood that diversionary foreign policy behavior is inhibited by the very fact that Democratic leaders' political needs are abundantly apparent to their potential targets. So, the very factors that give Democratic leaders the incentive to divert also give their targets incentives to maintain low profiles. Yet, few empirical tests of this proposition exist in diversionary work or elsewhere. This paper seeks to provide such a test in the context of Fordham's (1998a) innovative explanation for American diversionary behavior. I test the strategic interaction hypothesis in a Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) model and evaluate the utility of the ZIP model for modeling an unobserved process. The results suggest both the importance of strategic interaction and the power of the ZIP model in accounting for strategic interaction in world politics. Not All Cues Are Created Equal: The Conditional Impact of Female Candidates on Political Engagement
Lonna Rae Atkeson, University of New Mexico
Over the past several decades women's lives in the public sphere have increased dramatically, providing women with more political resources than they have ever had before. Yet, the gap between men and women's level of political engagement in a number of key areas of political life has maintained. This suggests that political or contextual factors, rather than resources or socialization, may be key in understanding these differences. One contextual factor that may be important to female political engagement is competitive female candidates. The hypothesis that visible and competitive women matter to female citizens is tested by examining the relationship between various political attitudes and behaviors and the presence (or absence) of a viable statewide female candidate. The models indicate that there is overwhelming support for the hypothesis that women citizens in states with competitive and visible female candidates increase their political engagement. These results suggest that descriptive representation matters in important ways. Plato's Paragon of Human Excellence: Socratic Philosopher and Civic Guardian
Darrell Dobbs, Marquette University
Literary and analytical approaches to the study of Plato have seldom converged in anything resembling a consensus. But recent proponents of these divergent models of interpretation do concur in finding a number of anomalies in the Republic's portrait of the philosopher king. These anomalies, if authentic, would suffice to discredit the dialogue's paragon of human excellence, leaving readers to wonder whether Plato himself could have believed in the existence of any nonarbitrary standard of righteousness. Reexamining the textual evidence, I resolve these supposed anomalies and show that Socrates' account of the model ruler is both logically coherent and perfectly compatible with his own practice of philosophy. The philosopher king is a civic guardian in the most elevated or precise sense and also a genuine Socratic. But even this exalted harmonization of political and philosophical virtue does not constitute the Republic's "greatest lesson." That designation is reserved for a still loftier and more desireable good, in relation to which the philosopher king himself stands as a mere stepping-stone. Getting Out the Vote in Local Elections: Results from Six Door-to-Door Canvassing Experiments
Donald P. Green, Yale University
Alan S. Gerber, Yale University
David W. Nickerson, Yale University
Prior to the November 6, 2001 elections, randomized voter mobilization experiments were conducted in Bridgeport, Columbus, Detroit, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and St. Paul. Names appearing on official lists of registered voters were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. A few days before Election Day, the treatment group received a face-to-face contact from a coalition of nonpartisan student and community organizations, encouraging them to vote. After the election, voter turnout records were used to compare turnout rates among people assigned to treatment and control groups. Consistent with the recent experimental results reported by Gerber and Green (2000b), the findings here indicate that face-to-face voter mobilization was effective in stimulating voter turnout across a wide spectrum of local elections. Policymaking through Advice and Consent: Treaty Consideration by the United States Senate
David Auerswald, National War College
Forrest Maltzman, George Washington University
Conventional wisdom holds that the President of the United States has a high degree of autonomy over U.S. foreign policy. Such autonomy is said to stem in part from his ability to confront the Senate with the either-or choice of accepting or rejecting treaties. In this article, we take issue with this characterization and explore how the Senate uses treaty "reservations" to alter ratification documents and advance Senate policy views. We find conservative Senates and pivotal senators systematically exploit the right to add reservations, and thus limit the President's autonomy in his conduct of foreign affairs. Art for Democracy's Sake? Group Membership and Political Engagement in Europe
Shaun Bowler, University of California, Riverside
Todd Donovan, Western Washington University
Robert Hanneman, University of California, Riverside
Theorists contend that private social groups - particularly those that have no overt political missions such as bowling leagues, sports clubs, and choral societies - make major contributions to democracy by generating engagement with democracy in the form of political interest and participation. Although this discussion is generally at an aggregate-level, it is based on seldom-tested assumptions about individual-level phenomena. This study expands our understanding of how (and where) memberships in various groups are associated with political engagement of individual citizens. We test if the effects of group membership vary across eleven European democracies, and test which types of groups have the strongest association with political engagement. We find that major social groups differ in their relationship with engagement, and also find that formal political arrangements for group accommodation may condition the effects of some memberships on engagement. Implementing Popular Initiatives: What Matters for Compliance?
Valentina A. Bali, Michigan State University
The purpose of this research is to understand what matters for compliance with a popular initiative. While scholars of policy implementation have identified many factors that play a role in explaining compliance with a new law, these explanatory variables have not been collectively tested, in particular, in the context of the initiative process. Focusing on an initiative in education, I examine compliance with California's Proposition 227 that aimed to dismantle bilingual programs for English learners in the state's public schools. The analysis confirms earlier research that the preferences of the agents of implementation are key to explain compliance, but other factors emerge as equally important. In particular, voter preferences, local demographics, and institutional capacity can also shape the level of implementation of an initiative. Since many local factors are jointly needed to understand implementation, full compliance with an initiative may be difficult to achieve. The Choosers or the Choices: Voter Characteristics and the Structure of Electoral Competition as Explanations for Ticket Splitting
Douglas D. Roscoe, Central Michigan University
This research combines National Election Study (NES) data with data on congressional candidate quality and spending to assess explanations for ticket splitting. The results indicate characteristics of both voters and candidates are important, but candidate-level variables as a whole provide a better account of ticket splitting than individual-level variables. NES data are also used to evaluate the reasons why candidate quality and spending are so important. Candidates encourage ticket splitting through various campaign activities, especially those that are unmediated. Additionally, incumbents benefit from constituency service and pork barrel legislation, which foster ticket splitting among voters in their districts. Measuring Constituency Ideology In U.S. House Districts: A Top-Down Simulation Approach
Phillip J. Ardoin, Appalachian State University
James C. Garand, Louisiana State University
One of the most intractable problems associated with studying representation in the U.S. House of Representatives involves the measurement of district-level constituency opinion. In measuring constituency opinion in House districts, scholars have relied on a number of alternative approaches, including the use of demographic variables, small-sample estimates of public opinion, presidential election results, referenda data, and "bottom-up" simulated opinion. In this paper we develop an innovative "top-down" simulation of House district opinion that provides more reliable and valid measures of House district ideology. We model state-level ideology (as measured by Erikson, Wright, and McIver, 1993) as a function of various demographic and political variables found at both the state and House district levels, and then use the estimates from the state-level model to generate predicted ideology scores for each House district during the 1980s and 1990s. Our findings suggest that the top-down simulated measure is a valid indicator of House district ideology that can be used in a number of research venues. Fragmentation, Fiscal Mobility, and Efficiency
Keith Dowding, London School of Economics and Political Science
Thanos Mergoupis, Queen's University
This paper examines whether greater fragmentation in local government improves efficiency. Tiebout 'exiting' is the general theoretical underpinning for the belief that fragmentation should improve efficiency. The paper argues that evidence of fiscal mobility previous evidence for the greater efficiency of fragmented government is weak because the complex nature of many local government systems are not consistent with the institutional structures supposed in the models, and do not allow for simple testing. Using evidence from England where institutional structures more closely resemble those in the Tiebout model, efficiency is analyzed both at the jurisdictional and metropolitan level in a straightforward manner. No evidence for the supposed positive effects of fragmentation is found. Voice mechanisms may explain why fiscal mobility does not lead to efficiency in the fragmented system of metropolitan England. The Shifting Foundations of Public Opinion about Gay Rights
Paul R. Brewer, The George Washington University
This study tests two explanations for the recent increase in support among the American public for gay rights policies. One possibility is that shifts in the aggregate levels of predispositions such as egalitarianism, moral traditionalism, feelings toward gays and lesbians, partisanship, and ideology produced changes in policy opinions. Another possibility is that shifts in the underlying structure of opinion--that is, shifts in the how citizens used these predispositions to think about the issue--produced changes in support for gay rights. An analysis of data from the 1992, 1996, and 2000 National Election Studies showed that both types of shifts explained why Americans became increasingly favorable toward gay rights policies over this span. The Redistricting Cycle and Strategic Candidate Decisions in U.S. House Races
Marc J. Hetherington, Bowdoin College
Bruce A. Larson, Fairleigh Dickinson University
Suzanne Globetti, Bowdoin College
We examine the impact of the ten-year redistricting cycle on strategic candidate behavior. First, we provide evidence that strategic candidate behavior is a function of an election's temporal proximity to a redistricting year, finding that quality challengers are less likely to emerge as the redistricting cycle progresses. Next, we show that strategic candidates interpret national and local political conditions through the lens of time. Specifically, national political conditions greatly encourage quality challengers early in the redistricting cycle but play a much reduced role later. In addition, incumbents who demonstrate moderate electoral vulnerability in the prior election are more likely to face quality challengers toward the beginning of the redistricting cycle than the end. Averting Armed International Conflicts Through State-to-State Territorial Transfers
Jaroslav Tir, The University of Georgia
This study examines how changes in land's ownership (i.e. territorial transfers) influence the prospects of future armed conflict between countries gaining and losing land. The losing country is motivated by the value of the lost land, while the winner is motivated by the value of additional land it desires but which the loser still controls. Relative power and transfer process condition whether these motivations are turned into the post-transfer use of force. Three basic processes of how the land changed hands are considered: peaceful, overwhelming victory, and violent (but short of an overwhelming victory). The findings show that both peaceful and overwhelming victory transfers are significantly better in terms of minimizing the chances of post-transfer conflict than are their violent counterparts and that intangible factors such as disputed land's ethnic value play less of a role in conflict onset for both parties than do tangible factors such as disputed land's strategic and economic value.