Articles:

Strategy, Selection, and Candidate Competition in House and Senate Elections
Jamie L. Carson [Abstract]

The Pursuit of Political Control by Multiple Principals
Andrew B. Whitford [Abstract]

Campaign Effects and the Dynamics of Turnout Intention in Election 2000
D. Sunshine Hillygus [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Constitutional Amendment Procedures and the Informal Political Construction of Constitutions
Michael Besso [Abstract]

Civil War Destruction and the Prospects for Economic Growth
Seonjou Kang, James Meernik [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

The Dual Roots of Opinion Leadership
Christine H. Roch [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Strategic Conflict Avoidance and the Diversionary Use of Force
Benjamin O. Fordham [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Black Candidates and Black Voters: Assessing the Impact of Candidate Race on Uncounted Vote Rates
Michael C. Herron, Jasjeet S. Sekhon [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Under What Conditions Do Presidents Resort to Decree Power? Theory and Evidence From the Brazilian Case
Carlos Pereira, Timothy J. Power, Lucio Rennó [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Candidate Occupations and Voter Information Shortcuts
Monika L. McDermott [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Rawls, Kant's Doctrine of Right, and Global Distributive Justice
Brian J. Shaw [Abstract]

Democratic Variants and Democratic Variance: How Domestic Constraints Shape Interstate Conflict
David H. Clark, Timothy Nordstrom [Abstract]

An Alternative Measure of Relative Education To Explain Voter Turnout
Steven Tenn [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Abstracts:

Strategy, Selection, and Candidate Competition in House and Senate Elections
Jamie L. Carson, The University of Georgia
In the context of congressional elections research on candidate competition, two lines of inquiry have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. The first deals with the issue of strategic candidate emergence in seeking to identify the conditions under which experienced candidates will challenge incumbents. The second focuses on the question of incumbents' career choices, particularly in terms of their decisions to seek reelection or retire. While past research has treated these questions as mutually exclusive, I argue in this paper that such explanations are incomplete due to the complementary nature of the approaches. To unify these related research agendas, I develop a theoretical model of strategic interaction between congressional challengers and incumbents and test the model with House and Senate elections data from 1976 to 2000 using a strategic probit technique. The results both confirm and challenge a number of findings in the literature on candidate competition.

The Pursuit of Political Control by Multiple Principals
Andrew B. Whitford, The University of Georgia
I examine how the legislature and the president sequentially enable and constrain agencies in a tug-of-war over the exercise of bureaucratic discretion, partly in response to past political interventions. I provide evidence from a duration analysis of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement of hazard waste law for the acceleration and deceleration of policy implementation in response to sequential interventions by multiple, competing principals. I document the use of agenda-setting and solution-forcing statutes by Congress, and case clearance mechanisms by the president. Sequenced political control means that agencies face shifting political expectations, caused in part by how the agency responds to past control attempts. While previous empirical research has portrayed a largely static world in which Congress and the president have influence, this study reveals a dynamic portrayal in which there is move and counter-move from these principals.

Campaign Effects and the Dynamics of Turnout Intention in Election 2000
D. Sunshine Hillygus, Harvard University
Previous survey analyses examining campaign effects on turnout are somewhat unconvincing because they do not control for the fact that individuals may have decided they will vote independent of campaign activities (even before the campaign begins). Using a unique repeated measures data set of the 2000 presidential campaign, I estimate a Markov chain transition model to test the effects of campaign efforts on turnout intention conditional on precampaign turnout intention. I demonstrate that campaign efforts have a substantial influence on turnout intention, even taking initial turnout intention into account. More notably, I find that different campaign efforts are effective for intended nonvoters than for intended voters.

Constitutional Amendment Procedures and the Informal Political Construction of Constitutions
Michael Besso, Rutgers University
Recent public law studies demonstrate that the informal political construction of constitutional meaning--particularly by executive and legislative officials--manifests as an essential feature of American constitutionalism. A leading explanation of the phenomenon depends on the effect of formal amendment procedures. Given the inevitability of constitutional change over time, difficult and burdensome amendment procedures seem to require that political actors resort to informal means to pursue change and enshrine new constitutional meaning. While this explanation has been central to a number of studies of the federal constitution, it has also led to the exclusion of state constitutional experiences from the study of this phenomenon. This is likely because state amendment procedures are notably less difficult and (apparently) do not require the resort to informal means of change. In this article, I present evidence that informal political construction does occur in the states; it is as important there as it is at the federal level. I also argue, accordingly, that our studies and theories regarding informal construction must account for both federal and state experiences to provide a more complete appreciation of American constitutionalism.

Civil War Destruction and the Prospects for Economic Growth
Seonjou Kang, University of North Texas
James Meernik, University of North Texas
This paper examines the effects of civil wars on economies. The "war renewal" school of thought maintains that wars can produce beneficial effects as they improve efficiency in the economy, especially by reducing the power of special interests, bring technological innovation, and advance human capital. The "war ruin" school of thought sees mostly detrimental effects resulting from war. We seek to address two critical questions. First, which perspective on wars and economic growth is more accurate? Second to what extent do policy choices at both the domestic and international levels exert influence on economic growth? We develop several hypotheses to assess these arguments, and utilizing a 2SLS model, test them on data for all nations for the period 1960-2002. We find that generally wars exercise negative economic effects, and that economic fundamentals, as well as the response by the international community to civil wars, exert powerful effects on economic growth.

The Dual Roots of Opinion Leadership
Christine H. Roch, Georgia State University
Political scientists often focus on the link between personal attributes and the flow of political information. In this paper, I argue that opinion-leadership may not be as singularly rooted in the presence of a certain predisposition or set of personal characteristics as suggested in previous political opinion leadership studies. I develop two sets of hypotheses: the first derived from the perspective that opinion leadership is a function of a recipe of attributes, and the second derived from the perspective that opinion leadership is tied to the characteristics of the social milieu in which the citizen is embedded. I test these hypotheses empirically using a data set constructed from two surveys of individuals in the New York metropolitan area. The results suggest that while opinion leaders possess attributes that distinguish them from non-leaders, they appear to gain influence through their informational advantages relative to others in the same environment.

Strategic Conflict Avoidance and the Diversionary Use of Force
Benjamin O. Fordham, Binghamton University (SUNY)
The argument that state leaders sometimes use military force as a way to divert attention from their domestic political problems has long been controversial. One of the most important recent objections to it is that potential target states may strategically avoid conflict with a state whose leaders are experiencing domestic political difficulties. This paper tests this argument using COPDAB and WEIS events data on rivals of the United States. The results offer qualified support for the argument that likely targets of a diversionary use of force by the United States behave more cooperatively when the American economy is performing poorly.

Black Candidates and Black Voters: Assessing the Impact of Candidate Race on Uncounted Vote Rates
Michael C. Herron, Dartmouth College
Jasjeet S. Sekhon, Harvard University
Numerous studies show that the rate at which African-Americans cast ballots with missing or invalid votes, i.e., the African-American residual vote rate, is higher than the corresponding white rate. While existing literature argues that the plethora of African-American residual votes is caused by administrative problems or socioeconomic factors, we show using precinct-level data from two recent elections in Cook County, Illinois, that the African-American residual vote rate in electoral contests with black candidates is less than half the rate in contests without black candidates. African-Americans, therefore, are able to reduce their residual vote rate when they wish to do so. We present complementary findings for white voters, whose residual vote rate often substantially increases in contests which feature dominant black candidates.

Under What Conditions Do Presidents Resort to Decree Power? Theory and Evidence From the Brazilian Case
Carlos Pereira, University of São Paulo
Timothy J. Power, Florida International University
Lucio Rennó, University of Arizona and SUNY Stony Brook
The emerging literature on executive decree authority has generated important insights, but it has tended to select on the dependent variable (decrees), rather than view decrees as one of several possible ways that presidents can initiate policies. This article examines the conditions under which presidents resort to extraordinary rather than ordinary means of legislative initiative. Unilateral action theory claims that presidents will resort to decrees in unfavorable political environments, while delegation theory claims that decrees will flourish when the president is more politically secure. A study of four Brazilian presidents between 1988 and 1998 yields inconsistent support for both theories. Presidential popularity is only weakly related to the use of decree authority, but executive-legislative relations—especially coalition management via multiparty cabinets—is a more reliable predictor. Neither unilateral action theory nor delegation theory can fully account for the wide variation in the legislative strategies of presidents.

Candidate Occupations and Voter Information Shortcuts
Monika L. McDermott, University of Connecticut
Voters in low-information elections frequently rely on heuristics or information shortcuts when making their decisions of whom to support. While existing research on these shortcuts has examined many candidate characteristics, it has largely overlooked the potential of candidate occupational cues. This paper uses experimental survey data conducted by the Los Angeles Times Poll in the 1994 statewide elections in California to analyze whether candidates' occupational ballot designations influence voters' choices. Specifically, it hypothesizes that voters use candidate occupational labels to infer candidates' competence or qualifications for the office in question. As the analysis demonstrates, candidate occupational cues have two simultaneous effects on voting behavior: they help voters make a decision in races where they otherwise might not have, decreasing abstention; and in races in which voters infer one candidate to have a qualification advantage, the addition of occupational designations makes voters more likely to support that candidate.

Rawls, Kant's Doctrine of Right, and Global Distributive Justice
Brian J. Shaw, Davidson College
Cosmopolitans have criticized Rawls' Law of Peoples for abandoning the egalitarianism of A Theory of Justice, a retreat they trace to his concern to articulate justice as fairness as a freestanding political conception. Yet the comprehensive liberalisms they propose to underwrite global distributive principles fall short to the extent that they neglect Kant's defense in the Doctrine of Right (1797) of property rights as a "permissive law (lex permissiva) of practical reason." Were Rawls' critics to utilize this resource, the law of peoples might be refashioned in a manner both affirming Rawls' earlier universalism and immune to claims that any comprehensive liberalism must betray its commitments to toleration and reciprocity.

Democratic Variants and Democratic Variance: How Domestic Constraints Shape Interstate Conflict
David H. Clark, Binghamton University (SUNY)
Timothy Nordstrom, University of Mississippi
Recent work on democratic processes (elections, parties, etc.) and foreign policy behavior makes a variety of claims about how those processes influence the decision to resort to arms. Some work also claims the diversity in the family of democracies produces different types of behaviors across democratic systems. While much theoretical and empirical rigor has been brought to bear on these issues, little attention is paid to how democratic processes shape the variance in foreign policy behavior both across different democratic systems and within systems across time. This paper explores variants of democratic systems and variance in democratic systems with respect to interstate conflict.

An Alternative Measure of Relative Education To Explain Voter Turnout
Steven Tenn, Federal Trade Commission
Nie et al. (1996) develop a theory in which relative, rather than absolute education determines political participation. Empirical tests of this theory have been unable to isolate the effect of education from other factors that impact participation. We propose an alternative definition in which education is measured relative to those born in the same year. This is used to estimate a model of voter turnout that controls for both absolute and relative education. The results show that this new measure of relative education has far more explanatory power than does absolute education. This finding has significant implications regarding how education affects both aggregate voter turnout levels and inequality in voter participation.

Supplemental Materials:

The links shown below contain supplemental material for articles that appear in The Journal of Politics. The materials are presented exactly as they were provided by the authors. Neither The JOP Editor nor the Southern Political Science Association takes any responsibility for problems that may arise from the use of these materials (e.g., computer code, datasets, etc.). All inquiries and comments regarding these files and their contents should be directed to the appropriate authors.

Supplements for "Campaign Effects and the Dynamics of Turnout Intention in Election 2000"
D. Sunshine Hillygus.
Data file, STATA format
STATA code
STATA do file

  Supplements for "Civil War Destruction and the Prospects for Economic Growth"
Seonjou Kang, James Meernik
Appendix
Post-CW Growth Data, STATA format

Supplements for "The Dual Roots of Opinion Leadership"
Christine H. Roch.
Appendix
Replication data, STATA format

Supplements for "Strategic Conflict Avoidance and the Diversionary Use of Force"
Benjamin O. Fordham.
Appendix
COPDAB replication data, STATA format
WEIS replication data, STATA format

Supplements for "Under What Conditions Do Presidents Resort to Decree Power? Theory and Evidence From the Brazilian Case"
Carlos Pereira, Timothy J. Power, Lucio Rennó.
Appendix
Data, MS Excel format