Articles:

Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy
B. Dan Wood, Chris T. Owens, Brandy M. Durham [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

The Structure and Effects of Moral Predispositions in Contemporary American Politics
Herbert F. Weisberg [Abstract]

Courts and Compliance in International Regulatory Regimes
Clifford James Carrubba [Abstract]

Micro and Macro Level Models of the Presidential Expectations Gap
Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Carol L. Silva, Richard W. Waterman [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

Electoral Incentives for Political Corruption under Open-List Proportional Representation
Eric C.C. Chang [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

The Conceptualization and Measurement of Symbolic Racism
Christopher Tarman, David O. Sears [Abstract]

Explaining The Great Racial Divide: Perceptions of Fairness in the U.S. Criminal Justice System
Jonathan Hurwitz, Mark Peffley [Abstract]

The Skeptical American: Revisiting the Meanings of Trust in Government and Confidence in Institutions
Timothy E. Cook, Paul Gronke [Abstract]

The Impact of Employment Status on Voting Behavior
Robert Grafstein [Abstract]

Social Desirability and Response Validity: A Comparative Analysis of Over-reporting Voter Turnout in Five Countries
Jeffrey A. Karp, David Brockington [Abstract]

Elicited Priors for Bayesian Model Specifications in Political Science Research
Jeff Gill, Lee D. Walker [Abstract]

The Authorities Really Do Matter: Party Control and Trust in Government
Luke Keele [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials]

State Campaign Finance Laws and Interest Group Electioneering Activities
Robert E. Hogan [Abstract]

Bloc Voting, Polarization and the Panethnic Hypothesis: The Case of Little Saigon
Christian Collet [Abstract]

Abstracts:

Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy
B. Dan Wood, Texas A&M University
Chris T. Owens, Texas A&M University
Brandy M. Durham, Texas A&M University
Does the relative optimism of presidential remarks on the economy affect U.S. economic performance? We theorize that the relative optimism of presidential remarks should affect economic performance by altering consumer perceptions of the economic news and consumer sentiment, which in turn affect the risks consumers are willing to take in spending decisions. We measure the relative optimism of presidential remarks on the economy through content analysis of all public statements on the general economy and unemployment from January 1978 through April 2002. Controlling for current and past economic performance, we use vector autoregression analysis to show that presidential remarks significantly affect people's perceptions of the economic news, as well as their confidence about current and future economic conditions. Using simulation analyses, we also demonstrate that presidential rhetoric operating through these indirect channels can have substantial impacts on U.S. economic growth and unemployment. The larger implication is that the president has a heretofore little appreciated role as rhetorical leader of the economy.

The Structure and Effects of Moral Predispositions in Contemporary American Politics
Herbert F. Weisberg, The Ohio State University
Moral values are frequently invoked in election campaigns. Some past studies have taken into account the effect of moral traditionalism on voting. However, a related moral predisposition -- moral judgment -- may have greater effects, and not taking moral judgment into account may lead to underestimation of the importance of moral values in affecting people's attitudes. Two statewide surveys are analyzed to determine the added effect of moral judgment. Moral judgment is found to have a greater impact that moral traditionalism on abortion views, some other cultural issues, and attitudes toward the Clinton impeachment.

Courts and Compliance in International Regulatory Regimes
Clifford J. Carrubba, Emory University
International regulatory regimes are increasingly important parts of interstate politics. As these regimes multiply, the question of what exactly governments are agreeing to is becoming increasingly important. Some scholars see the high levels of observed compliance with these regimes as a sign that they are transforming interstate relationships. Others argue that compliance rates are uninformative since governments will only choose a depth of agreement that is self-enforcing. This study demonstrates that even seemingly deep agreements with well developed, and seemingly effective, adjudicating mechanisms can suffer from severe enforcement problems. The relevance of this model for a real world deep agreement, the European Union, is demonstrated, and predictions that can determine if a regulatory regime suffers from enforcement problems are derived.

Micro and Macro Level Models of the Presidential Expectations Gap
Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Texas A&M University
Carol L. Silva, Texas A&M University
Richard W. Waterman, University of Kentucky
The idea that the public expects more from its presidents than they are able to deliver long has been a mainstay of the presidential literature. When presidential scholars ask whether the expectations gap exists, they generally provide micro level explanations that focus on the relationships among various presidential characteristics and how these characteristics are perceived by the public. This approach makes sense if expectations are chiefly responsive to perceptions of the Presidency itself. Yet, recent research empirically identifies an expectations gap in public perceptions of Congress and the president. These studies provide a theoretical reason to believe that macro level political phenomena, or public perceptions of the broader governmental system, also may be determinants of the gap. These macro determinants might include general beliefs about the responsiveness, efficacy and trustworthiness of government. Using two national surveys conducted in 1998 and 1999, we test three related micro level explanations and two macro level explanations for the gap's existence. While we find support for micro level explanations, importantly, we demonstrate that macro level phenomena such as trust in government, perceptions of political efficacy, and individual political attitudes are important determinants of presidential, incumbent and weighted models of the expectations gap.

Electoral Incentives for Political Corruption under Open-List Proportional Representation
Eric C.C. Chang, Michigan State University
Despite the considerable attention paid to the aggregate-level determinants of political corruption, until recently little empirical work has attempted to understand what systematic factors drive individual politicians to corruption. To reduce this gap, this paper hypothesizes that under open-list proportional representation in which personal votes are expensive yet critical for politicans to win election, politicians' electoral uncertainty regarding their chances of winning election drives them to corruption in order to finance campaigns. The hypothesis, running against the conventional view that suggests and anti-corruption effect of electoral uncertainty, receives substantial empirical support by individual-level data from pre-1994 Italy.

The Conceptualization and Measurement of Symbolic Racism
Christopher Tarman, University of California, Los Angeles
David O. Sears, University of California, Los Angeles
The conceptualization and measurement of symbolic racism have been the subjects of a number of critiques, of which we address four: (1) we briefly review the history of its past conceptualization, which has been somewhat loose, and of its past measurement, which has been more consistent than often suggested. We then address three other critiques empirically. In each case the results support the original theory: (2) symbolic racism is an internally consistent belief system; it does have individual and structural variants, but they are highly correlated and have virtually identical effects on whites' racial policy preferences; (3) the effects of symbolic racism on whites' racial policy preferences are not artifacts of shared item content with policy attitude items (both conclusions are replicated in quite similar form in two surveys); and (4) symbolic racism is a distinctive belief system in its own right, encompassing a set of attitudes different from those in ideological conservatism, anti-egalitarianism, individualism, and old-fashioned racism (a conclusion replicated in similar form in six surveys). Perhaps most important, the effects of symbolic racism on racial policy preferences are the same regardless of which conventional measure of symbolic racism is used.

Explaining The Great Racial Divide: Perceptions of Fairness in the U.S. Criminal Justice System
Jonathan Hurwitz, University of Pittsburgh
Mark Peffley, University of Kentucky
We examine the huge racial divide in citizens' general beliefs about the fairness of the criminal justice system, focusing on the political consequences of these beliefs for shaping diverging interpretations of police behavior. Predictably, most blacks believe the system to be unfair and most whites believe the opposite. More importantly, these beliefs influence the interpretation of events quite differently. African-Americans who view the system as unfair are much more suspicious of the police in confrontations with black civilians. Fairness for whites, however, has fewer racial connotations; they naively interpret the confrontations disregarding civilian race. Still, whites holding anti-black stereotypes are much more sympathetic to the police in their confrontations with black civilians.

The Skeptical American: Revisiting the Meanings of Trust in Government and Confidence in Institutions
Timothy E. Cook, Louisiana State University
Paul Gronke, Reed College
This paper critically analyzes the survey literature on trust in government and confidence in institutions. It highlights the gap between theoretical understandings of trust which encompass trust, lack of trust, and distrust, next to empirical realizations which fail to consider active distrust of government. Using a specially tailored survey designed for this project, the paper is the first which directly compares competing operationalizations of trust and distrust. The most frequently used measures, both from the National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, tend to exaggerate the level of disaffection compared to a new measure especially designed to run from active trust, which anticipates that the government will do the right thing, to active distrust, the expectation that it will do the wrong thing. Multivariate analyses reveal statistically significant differences in the underlying determinants of these measures. The conventional NES measure in particular is more influenced by short-term evaluations of political events and leaders; our new measure of active trust/distrust taps a more deeply-seated orientation toward government.

The Impact of Employment Status on Voting Behavior
Robert Grafstein, The University of Georgia
This paper examines the impact of employment status on voting by formally modeling the effect of partisan government on workers' economic interests. These interests are determined by model workers' labor supply decisions, which are conditioned on their expected wage, unemployment benefits, and the probability of receiving a job offer or being laid off. Both probabilities are influenced by the party in power. The solution to the model implies that, relative to the employed, the higher the education level, the income, and the unemployment benefits of the unemployed the less likely they are to vote for the party associated with higher growth. The unemployment rate has the same impact. These hypotheses are successfully tested on NES 1972-2000 U.S. presidential elections data. Social Desirability and Response Validity: A Comparative Analysis of Over-reporting Voter Turnout in Five Countries

Jeffrey A. Karp, Texas Tech University and University of Twente
David Brockington, University of Plymouth
Theory and evidence suggests that respondents are likely to over-report voter turnout in election surveys because they have a strong incentive to offer a socially desirable response. We suggest that contextual influences may affect the socially desirable bias, leading to variance in the rate of over-reporting across countries. This leads us to hypothesize that nonvoters will be more likely to over-report voting in elections that have high turnout. We rely on validated turnout data to measure over-reporting in five countries which vary a great deal in turnout: Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. We find that in national settings with higher levels of participation, the tendency to over-report turnout may be greater than in settings where low participation is the norm.

Elicited Priors for Bayesian Model Specifications in Political Science Research
Jeff Gill, University of California – Davis
Lee D. Walker, University of Kentucky
We explain how to use elicited priors in Bayesian political science research. These are a form of prior information produced by previous knowledge from structured interviews with subjective area experts who have little or no concern for the statistical aspects of the project. The purpose is to introduce qualitative and area-specific information into an empirical model in a systematic and organized manner in order to produce parsimonious yet realistic implications. Currently, there is no work in political science that articulates elicited priors in a Bayesian specification. We demonstrate the value of the approach by applying elicited priors to a problem in judicial comparative politics using data and elicitations we collected in Nicaragua.

The Authorities Really Do Matter: Party Control and Trust in Government
Luke Keele, Nuffield College, Oxford University
For some time, one line of research on trust in government has stressed that trust results from evaluations of the institutions of government. Here, trust reflects public sentiments toward the responsiveness of the political process. Another line of research, has alternatively countered that trust tends to be a reflection of political leaders. But this research has been largely unable to demonstrate that the performance of authorities matters relative to evaluations of the political process. Changes in partisan control of Congress and the presidency however, provides us with a natural experiment where authorities change while the political process is constant. Here, partisans should trust government more when their party controls Congress, the presidency or both. I find that trust does respond to changes in partisan control of the Congress and presidency, which demonstrates that the effect of authorities matters relative to evaluations of the political process.

State Campaign Finance Laws and Interest Group Electioneering Activities
Robert E. Hogan, Louisiana State University
This paper examines the effects of campaign finance laws on interest group activities in state election campaigns. Specifically, the analysis considers how laws aimed at limiting contributions by interest groups influence the strategies used by these groups. In states where limits are low, it is expected that groups will find alternative ways to affect elections, either by emphasizing direct contact with voters (e.g., independent spending and issue advertising) or by providing more indirect forms of candidate assistance (e.g., endorsements and donations to political parties). Multivariate analyses demonstrate that laws limiting interest group contributions are associated with greater group efforts in these other areas of electioneering.

Bloc Voting, Polarization and the Panethnic Hypothesis: The Case of Little Saigon
Christian Collet, University of California, Irvine
The extensive literature on racial bloc voting (RBV) and minority representation has given little attention to Asian Americans. This paper contributes by examining the behavior of Vietnamese Americans living in the Little Saigon enclave in Orange County, California. Matching surname-coded voter registration records and precinct level returns for state and municipal elections between 1998 and 2002, I find evidence of bloc voting and polarization in every race where a Vietnamese American candidate is pitted against a White candidate. Further, I find evidence of panethnic behavior: Vietnamese Americans consistently rank candidates of different Asian ethnicities as their candidates of choice. Coming in light of recent evidence suggesting that polarized voting is declining in some parts of the United States, the findings have theoretical and instrumental implications for Asian American politics and the study of race and ethnicity.

 

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 Authorities Really Do Matter: Party Control and Trust in Government"
Luke Keele
Supplemental Information
Replication Data File (STATA Format)
PDF Listing of DO File
DO File for Replication Analyses