Articles:

All Things Considered: Systematic Cognitive Processing and Electoral Decision-Making
David C. Barker, Susan B. Hansen [Abstract]

Alliances, Arms Buildups and Recurrent Conflict: Testing a Steps-to-War Model
Michael P. Colaresi, William R. Thompson [Abstract]

Residual Votes Attributable to Technology
Stephen Ansolabehere, Charles Stewart III [Abstract]

Term Limits as a Response to Incumbency Advantage
Kong-Pin Chen, Emerson M. S. Niou [Abstract]

An Integrated Model of Women's Representation
Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer, William Mishler [Abstract]

Voter Uncertainty Can Produce Preferences with More Than One Peak, But Not Preference Cycles: A Clue to the Fate of Ross Perot?
Richard F. Potthoff, Michael C. Munger [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

The Politics of Humanitarian Aid: U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, 1964-1995
A. Cooper Drury, Richard Stuart Olson, Douglas A. Van Belle [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Strategic Politicians and U.S. House Elections, 1874-1914
Jamie L. Carson, Jason M. Roberts [Abstract]

Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic
Margaret Kohn [Abstract]

Where Turnout Matters: The Consequences of Uneven Turnout in City Politics
Zoltan Hajnal, Jessica Trounstine [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996-2001
William B. Heller, Carol Mershon [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Location, Location, Location: Precinct Placement and the Costs of Voting
Moshe Haspel and H. Gibbs Knotts [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Explaining the Variation in Organized Civil Society Across States and Time
Robert C. Lowry [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Abstracts:

All Things Considered: Systematic Cognitive Processing and Electoral Decision-making
David C. Barker, University of Pittsburgh
Susan B. Hansen, University of Pittsburgh
This paper seeks to understand what difference it makes if voters systematically consider a representative range of salient criteria before choosing a candidate, and whether the effects of such systematic processing are conditioned by political knowledge. To this end, we executed experiments during the 2000 electoral season that randomly exposed some subjects to an Analytic Hierarchy Processing (AHP) tool, which encourages systematic processing of various orthogonal decision criteria in complex choice environments. We predicted, and found, that the choices of knowledgeable voters exposed to AHP were weaker and less consistent than control group responses, suggesting that systematic processing induces integrative complexity and perhaps "analysis paralysis" among knowledgeable voters. However, we found that among less knowledgeable voters, the opposite pattern generally emerged-- AHP exposure was associated with even greater reliance on party ID and ideology cues, perhaps even bolstering predispositions via projection and rationalization.

Alliances, Arms Buildups and Recurrent Conflict: Testing A Steps-to-War Model
Michael P. Colaresi, Michigan State University
William R. Thompson, Indiana University
Alliances and arms races have received considerable attention in the causes of war literature. While a large amount of empirical research has pursued these topics separately, multivariate conditional combinations of these processes have been relatively scarce to date. An argument for doing so is provided by Vasquez's steps-to-war theory which organizes international relations into an interactive complex of factors, including territorial disputes, interstate rivalry, recurrent crises, alliances, military build-ups, and war onset. A model linking indicators of these processes is developed and tested for the 1919-1995 era. Substantial empirical support for their interactions emerges. Territorial disputes in the context of rivalry and recurrent crises, aggravated by military build-ups and asymmetrical external alliance situations, combine to make escalations to war more probable. Hopefully, an improved understanding of interstate escalatory dynamics can serve as a foundation and stimulus for more interactive attempts to unravel the puzzle of war causation.

Residual Votes Attributable to Technology
Stephen Ansolabehere, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Charles Stewart III, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e. "residual votes"), followed by optically scanned ballots, mechanical lever machines, direct register electronic machines (DREs), and punch cards. In gubernatorial and senatorial races, paper, optical scan ballots, and DREs are significantly better in minimizing the residual vote rate than mechanical lever machines and punch cards. If all jurisdictions in the U.S. that used punch cards in 2000 had used optically scanned ballots instead, we estimate that approximately 500,000 more votes would have been attributed to presidential candidates nationwide.

Term Limits as a Response to Incumbency Advantage
Kong-Pin Chen, Academica Sinica
Emerson M.S. Niou, University of Hong Kong and Duke University
In this paper we develop a spatial model to provide an explantion for the seeming paradox that voters in some states reelect incumbents while unilaterally self-imposing legislative term limits. The model shows that voters are more likely to support term limits if the incumbent's position is farther from the median voter position or if the incumbent's party is more moderate. Furthermore, it suggests that term limits or the threat of it increases the responsiveness of politicians' policy platforms.

An Integrated Model of Women's Representation
Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer, University of Mississippi
William Mishler, University of Arizona
The concept of representation, as developed in Hanna Pitkin's seminal work, is a complex structure, whose multiple dimensions are hypothesized to be closely interconnected. Most empirical work, however, ignores the integrated character of representation and examines its several dimensions in isolation. The picture of representation that results is not so much incorrect as incomplete. This research tests an integrated model of representation linking formal, descriptive, substantive and symbolic representation. Data on the representation of women in 31 democracies confirms the interconnections among the several dimensions of representation. The structure of electoral systems exerts powerful influences on both women's descriptive representation and symbolic representation. Descriptive representation, in turn, increases legislatures' responsiveness to women's policy concerns and enhances perceptions of legitimacy. The effects of substantive representation, however, are much less than theory anticipates.

Voter Uncertainty Can Produce Preferences with More Than One Peak, but Not Preference Cycles: A Clue to the Fate of Ross Perot?
Richard F. Potthoff, Duke University
Michael C. Munger, Duke University
The one-dimensional Downsian spatial model entails single-peaked preferences for each voter. Consequently, the preference ranking of the electorate as a whole is also single-peaked, and Condorcet cycles in the preferences of the electorate are not possible. Our main theoretical results herein are that, if the model is generalized to allow for voter uncertainty about candidates' positions, then single-peakedness no longer exists invariably, either for individual voters or for the electorate as a whole. However, cyclical preference majorities remain impossible. We examine how well the generalized model may fit preference and variability data from the 1992 United States Presidential election.

The Politics of Humanitarian Aid: U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, 1964-1995
A. Cooper Drury, University of Missouri, Columbia
Richard Stuart Olson, Florida International University
Douglas A. Van Belle, Victoria University of Wellington
Previous studies of U.S. foreign aid have firmly established that foreign policy and domestic considerations strongly influence allocations of military and economic development assistance. Uncharted, however, is the question of similar influences on U.S. humanitarian aid. Analyzing U.S. foreign disaster assistance data from 1964 through 1995, this paper concludes that foreign policy and domestic factors not only influence disaster assistance allocations but that they are the overriding determinant. This impact is, however, somewhat differential: The initial "yes/no" decision to grant disaster assistance is markedly political, but the subsequent "how much" decision is also not devoid of political considerations.

Strategic Politicians and U.S. House Elections, 1874-1914
Jamie L. Cason, The University of Georgia
Jason M. Roberts, University of Minnesota
One of the most fundamental changes in post-World War II congressional elections has been the rise of candidate-centered campaigns. This phenomenon has given rise to considerable theoretical and empirical literature demonstrating the strategic behavior of congressional candidates. Yet, very few scholars have assessed the effect or existence of strategic candidate behavior for the pre-World War II era. We seek to fill part of this void by exploring the extent to which experienced or quality candidates played a role in influencing the electoral fortunes of incumbent House members in elections spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our findings suggest that in terms of strategic emergence and electoral performance, congressional candidates exhibited patterns of behavior which are strikingly similar to those seen in modern day campaigns, suggesting that individual ambition is the best explanation for candidate behavior in both eras.

Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic
Margaret Kohn, University of Florida
This article explores the issues of violence, recognition, and freedom in the work of Frederick Douglass. It analyzes the contradiction between Douglass's defense of pacifism in his speeches and articles (before 1847) and his celebration of the redemptive effects of violence in his autobiographies, most notably in his account of his fight with the slave breaker Edward Covey. One thing that distinguishes this article from other interpretations of Douglass is that it draws upon another famous account of the struggle between master and slave - Hegel's dialectic of lordship and bondage - in order to offer a novel resolution to this interpretive puzzle. By reading these two nineteenth century accounts together we see how the texts illuminate, complicate, and challenge one another.

Where Turnout Matters: The Consequences of Uneven Turnout in City Politics
Zoltan L. Hajnal, University of California, San Diego
Jessica Trounstine, Princeton University
There is a widespread concern that imbalances in voter turnout across race and class have led to biased outcomes in American democracy. Yet empirical tests have generally found that the unrepresentative nature of the electorate has little effect on who wins and loses elections. We challenge this finding by arguing that existing research minimizes the chances of finding bias because it focuses largely on national elections where turnout is relatively high and where minority groups are generally too small a percentage of the population to sway elections. By focusing on city elections we find that lower turnout leads to substantial reductions in the representation of Latinos and Asian Americans on city councils and in the mayor's office. For African Americans district elections and off- cycle local elections are more important barriers to representation.

Party Switching in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996-2001
William B. Heller, Binghamton University
Carol Mershon, University of Virginia
Almost one-fourth of the members of the lower house in Italy, the Chamber of Deputies, switched parties at least once between 1996 and 2001. Why would a legislator abandon one party and enter another during a legislative term? Starting from the basic assumption that politicians are ambitious, we examine electoral and partisan motivations for members of parliament (MPs) who switch parties. We conclude that party switching most likely is motivated by party labels that provide little information about policy goals and that pit co- partisans against each other in the effort to serve constituent needs. Switching is especially frequent when ambitious politicians operate under heightened uncertainty.

Location, Location, Location: Precinct Placement and the Costs of Voting
Moshe Haspel, Spelman College
H. Gibbs Knotts, Western Carolina University
This article provides a new measure of voting costs by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to calculate the distance between the residence and polling place for registered voters in the city of Atlanta. Using this measure to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small differences in distance from the polls can have a significant impact on voter turnout. We also find that moving a polling place can affect the decision to vote. In addition to providing a better understanding of the costs of voting, our findings have important implications regarding the location of polling places and the effects of altering precinct boundaries.

Explaining the Variation in Organized Civil Society Across States and Time
Robert C. Lowry, Iowa State University
I analyze the determinants of the numbers of tax-exempt cultural and historical, sports and recreation, civil rights, and environment and conservation organizations in American states circa 1990 and 1998. Controlling for state population, aggregate measures of educational attainment and religious affiliation have substantial and statistically significant effects across all four types of organizations, and for both philanthropic and non-philanthropic sports and recreation organizations. In contrast, the effects of public spending, fundraising regulations and direct democracy provisions are relatively small. Thus, the size and composition of these parts of organized civil society are largely independent of the public sector.


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 "The Politics of Humanitarian Aid: U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, 1964-1995"
A. Cooper Drury, Richard Stuart Olson, Douglas A. Van Belle
Supplemental Information
Replication data, STATA format
STATA DO file

Supplements for "Explaining the Variation in Organized Civil Society Across States and Time"
Robert C. Lowry
Replication data, STATA format
Documentation for replication data
Supplemental statistics