Notes from the Editor:

A Question, An Innovation, and An Explanation
William G. Jacoby [Text, PDF format]

Articles:

A Wider Race? Interstate Competition across Health and Welfare Programs
Michael A. Bailey, Mark Carl Rom [Abstract]

Representation in Congressional Campaigns: Evidence for Discounting/Directional Voting in U.S. Senate Elections
James Adams, Benjamin G. Bishin, Jay K. Dow [Abstract]

Plato' Laws: Postlude or Prelude to Socratic Political Philosophy?
Catherine H. Zuckert [Abstract]

Institutional Change and Persistence: The Evolution of Poland's Electoral System, 1989-2001
Kenneth Benoit, Jacqueline Hayden [Abstract]

Jumping on the Bandwagon: An Interest Based Explanation for Great Power Alliances
Kevin Sweeney, Paul Fritz [Abstract]

Congressional Representation of Black Interests: Recognizing the Importance of Stability
Vincent L. Hutchings, Harwood K. McClerking, Guy-Uriel Charles [Abstract]

Strategic Diversion in Political Communication
Roger Larocca [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials, PDF format]

The Knowledge Gap: A Reexamination of Gender-Based Differences in Political Knowledge
Jeffery J. Mondak, Mary R. Anderson [Abstract]

Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants
Robert C. Lowry, Matthew Potoski [Abstract]

Minority Representation, Empowerment, and Participation
Susan A. Banducci, Todd Donovan, Jeffrey A. Karp [Abstract]

Beliefs, Values and Strategic Choice: U.S. Leaders' Decisions to Engage, Contain and Use Force in an Era of Globalization
Richard K. Herrmann, Jonathan W. Keller [Abstract]

Policy Goals, Public Rhetoric, and Political Attitudes
Thomas E. Nelson [Abstract]

An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition
Frederick M. Dolan [Abstract]

Erratum:

Erratum for "The Methods behind the Madness: Presidential Electoral College Strategies, 1988-1996"
Daron R. Shaw [Text, PDF format]

A Reassessment of "The Methods behind the Madness: Presidential Electoral College Strategies, 1988-1996"
Andrew Reeves, Lanhee Chen, Tiffany Nagano [Text, PDF format]

Abstracts:

A Wider Race? Interstate Competition across Health and Welfare Programs
Michael A. Bailey, Georgetown University
Mark Carl Rom, Georgetown University
Does interstate competition reduce welfare generosity? Most analyses of this question focus on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefit levels. The welfare- reducing logic of interstate competition should apply to all redistributive programs, however. We test for competitive effects more generally, examining several measures of welfare generosity for AFDC, Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income-State (SSI-S) policy. We find evidence of interstate competition across multiple programs and measures over which states have authority. We also find variation in the effects that is consistent with variation in political debates across the programs.

Representation in Congressional Campaigns: Evidence for Discounting/Directional Voting in U.S. Senate Elections
James Adams, University of California, Santa Barbara
Benjamin G. Bishin, University of Miami
Jay K. Dow, Univerity of Missouri, Columbia
Several recent studies suggest that voters may prefer candidates who propose policies that are similar to, but more extreme than, the voters' sincere policy preferences. This may arise either because voters vote directionally based on the direction and intensity of candidates' proposals or, alternatively, because voters recognize that elected officials face obstacles to implementing their policy agenda and therefore discount the candidates' policy promises. Using data from the Pooled Senate Election Study, we evaluate the discounting/directional hypothesis versus the alternative proximity hypothesis, by conducting individual-level and aggregate-level analyses of voting in 95 Senate races held in 1988-90-92. Our results support the discounting/directional hypothesis, that voters reward candidates when they present distinctly non-centrist positions on the side of the issue (liberal or conservative) favored by their constituency. These findings have important implications for understanding voting behavior, policy representation, and candidate strategies in Senate elections.

Plato's Laws: Postlude or Prelude to Socratic Political Philosophy?
Catherine H. Zuckert, University of Notre Dame
In the Laws, some commentators maintain, Plato put forth his own practical political proposals. According to others, the Athenian Stranger says what Socrates would have said. Having examined the dramatic setting, central philosophical doctrines, and political project outlined in the Laws, I conclude that the Athenian Stranger is neither Plato nor Socrates ahistorically transposed to Crete. When the Athenian ends his description of the best possible regime by arguing that its leaders need to investigate the ideas of virtue, the noble and the good, he shows why the emergence of Socratic political philosophy was necessary to achieve true political reform.

Institutional Change and Persistence: The Evolution of Poland's Electoral System, 1989- 2001
Kenneth Benoit, University of Dublin
Jacqueline Hayden, University of Dublin
Electoral systems are uniquely distributive political institutions that shape political outcomes, yet are themselves endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. In Poland, party system development has involved not only parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also parties modifying these institutions prior to every election. We model electoral system change as driven by partisan self-interest in maximizing seat share, and test it in five episodes of electoral system change in Poland from 1989 to 2001, comparing parties' support for electoral law alternatives to their expectations of seat shares from those alternatives. Data consists of opinion polls, roll call votes, Sejm records, constitutional committee transcripts, and interviews with political actors who designed and chose the Polish electoral institutions. The findings clearly show that party support for each electoral law was closely linked to the perceived effect on that party's seat share, with this linkage growing more consistent over time.

Jumping on the Bandwagon: An Interest Based Explanation for Great Power Alliances
Kevin Sweeney, The Ohio State University
Paul Fritz, The Ohio State University
Despite an impressive collection of classical works on the subject, little is known about the frequency or characteristics of Great Power alliance decisions to balance with the weak or bandwagon with the strong. Most works hold that balancing is the predominant Great Power alliance formation behavior, but many examples to the contrary come to mind. We clearly operationalize the concepts of balancing and bandwagoning and find that Great Powers ally with the stronger of two choices (i.e. bandwagon) more often than balance of power theory expects. We argue this surprising finding occurs because Great Powers ally based on interests, not power. We test the generalizability of our argument with a censored probit model of Great Power alliance formation on all Great Powers from 1816 to 1992.

Congressional Representation of Black Interests: Recognizing the Importance of Stability
Vincent L. Hutchings, University of Michigan
Harwood K. McClerking, The Ohio State University
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota Law School
The relationship between black constituency size and congressional support for black interests has two important attributes: magnitude and stability. Although previous research has examined the first characteristic, scant attention has been directed at the second. This article examines the relationship between district racial composition and congressional voting patterns with a particular emphasis on the stability of support across different types of votes and different types of districts. We hypothesize that, among white Democrats, the influence of black constituency size will be less stable in the South, owing in part to this region's more racially divided constituencies. Examining LCCR scores from the 101st through 103rd Congress, we find that this expectation is largely confirmed. We also find that, among Republicans, the impact of black constituency size is most stable--albeit negligible in size--in the South. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the relative merits of "influence districts" and "majority minority" districts.

Strategic Diversion in Political Communication
Roger Larocca, Purdue University
This study shows how an informed advisor can use selective information revelation to divert the agenda of a decision maker. An advisor is likely to employ diversion when the decision maker is restricted in the scope of her actions by time, resource, or institutional constraints. The incentive for diversion and the suspicion it engenders in the decision maker reduce the amount of information that can be conveyed by an advisor in two important ways: 1) by expanding the strategic conditions under which no information can be conveyed, and 2) by reducing the strategic conditions under which complete information can be conveyed.

The Knowledge Gap: A Reexamination of Gender-Based Differences in Political Knowledge
Jeffery J. Mondak, Florida State University
Mary R. Anderson, Florida State University
A considerable body of data suggests that men know more about politics than do women. Although gender gaps exist in other aspects of political behavior, the unusual magnitude of the gender gap makes it particularly perplexing. In this paper, we advance and test the hypothesis that the knowledge gap is partly an artifact of how knowledge is measured. If men are disproportionately more likely to guess than are women, then observed gender disparities in knowledge will be artificially inflated. To test this hypothesis, we reexamine data used in two recent inquiries concerning the gender gap in knowledge, along with experimental data from the 1998 NES Pilot Study. All analyses point to a common conclusion: approximately 50 percent of the gender gap is illusory, reflecting response patterns that work to the collective advantage of male respondents.

Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants
Robert C. Lowry, Iowa State University
Matthew Potoski, Iowa State University
Despite their importance in theories of distributive spending, interest groups and other private and public organizations are largely absent from empirical research on the allocation of federal spending to subnational jurisdictions. We find that organized interests are significant determinants of the allocation of federal discretionary grants to states for 1991 through 1998 across seven policy areas. In contrast, we find only meager effects for supply-side variables suggested by the literature. We conjecture that supply- side effects are highly contingent on political circumstances and the type of spending being analyzed.

Minority Representation, Empowerment, and Participation
Susan A. Banducci, Texas Tech University and The University of Twente
Todd Donovan, Western Washington University
Jeffrey A. Karp, Texas Tech University and The University of Twente
According to the minority empowerment thesis, minority representation strengthens representational links, fosters more positive attitudes toward government and encourages political participation. We examine this theory from a cross-national perspective, making use of surveys that sampled minorities in the United States and New Zealand. Both countries incorporate structures into their electoral systems that make it possible for minority groups to elect representatives of their choice. We find that in both countries descriptive representation matters: it increases knowledge about and contact with representatives in the U.S. and leads to more positive evaluations of governmental responsiveness and increased electoral participation in New Zealand. These findings have broad implications for debates about minority representation.

Beliefs, Values and Strategic Choice: U.S. Leaders' Decisions to Engage, Contain and Use Force in an Era of Globalization
Richard K. Herrmann, Ohio State University
Jonathan W. Keller, Southern Methodist University
Do ideational factors shape the strategic choices of American leaders in the realm of national security policy? If they do, what perceptions and value dispositions guide choices toward critical countries like Russia, China, Japan and Iran? Macro-theories of international relations make assumptions about the micro-processes at the decision- making level that are rarely examined empirically. For instance, do leaders decide based on their perceptions of an adversary's intentions as neo-realists claim or do they give greater weight to their perceptions of similar and different political cultures as advocates of the democratic peace assume? If ideational factors matter at all, are they independent forces or simply determined by demographics and/or parochial interests? This project reports the results of a survey of 514 U.S. leaders designed to answer these questions. We find that military assertiveness remains related to decisions to use force as it was during the Cold War but that a new disposition—attitudes toward free trade—has emerged as an even more robust predictor of these decisions as well as decisions to engage and contain. We find support for the micro-foundations of neo-realist and image theory as well as for the idea that perceived culture matters. Our study also provides individual-level evidence for a micro-mechanism connecting trade to pacific choices.

Policy Goals, Public Rhetoric, and Political Attitudes
Thomas E. Nelson, The Ohio State University
Political communicators can frame the debate over controversial public issues by emphasizing which policy goals deserve highest priority. This research examines how such rhetoric affects political attitudes by influencing the importance attributed to competing values. I examine three specific rhetorical strategies: goal ranking, issue categorization, and institutional role assignment. Support for this approach comes from experimental studies in laboratory and survey settings. Frames affected not only opinions on the issues, but also the participants' judgments of the relative importance of competing policy goals. These findings should deepen our understanding of how political persuaders can shape public opinion through the framing of policy choices.

An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition
Frederick M. Dolan, University of California at Berkeley
Hannah Arendt's concept of natality is by common consent one of her most numinous contributions to political philosophy. Arendt introduces the idea in the course of her attempt to draw out the significance of the ever-present possibility that someone, somewhere, some time might say or do something that makes possible a fresh start in the realm of human affairs (Arendt 1958, 247). She characterizes this ineradicable possibility as nothing less than "the miracle that saves the world" from the ruin to which it is otherwise subject. The greatest symbol of this possibility – "its most glorious and succinct expression," Arendt says – is the Christian Gospels' announcement of "glad tidings": "A child has been born unto us." It is this Christian figuration of the miraculous through the image of the newborn that gives Arendt the term "natality."