Articles:

Andrew Rehfeld, "Towards a General Theory of Political Representation" [More]

Katherine Cramer Walsh, "Communities, Race and Talk: An Analysis of the Occurrence of Civic Intergroup Dialogue Programs"[More]

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, "Political Context and the Turnout of New Women Voters After Suffrage" [More]

Jason Barabas, "Rational Exuberance: The Stock Market and Public Support for Social Security Privatization"[More]

Quan Li, "Democracy, Autocracy, and Tax Incentives to Foreign Direct Investors: A Cross-National Analysis"[More]

Alan I. Abramowitiz, Brad Alexander, Matthew Gunning, "Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S. House Elections"[More]

James H. Fowler, "Elections and Markets: The Effect of Partisanship, Policy Risk, and Electoral Mandates on the Economy"[More]

David E. Campbell, "Religious ‘Threat’ in Contemporary Presidential Elections"[More]

Paul A. Djupe and Christopher P. Gilbert, "The Resourceful Believer: Generating Civic Skills in Church"[More]

Jason Webb Yackee and Susan Webb Yackee, "A Bias Towards Business? Assessing Interest Group Influence on the U.S. Bureaucracy"[More]

Diana Mutz and Jeffery Mondak, "The Workplace as a Context of Cross-Cutting Political Discourse"[More]

Wendy K. Tam Cho, James G. Gimpel, and Joshua J. Dyck, "Residential Concentration, Political Socialization, and Voter Turnout"[More]

Scott Ashworth and Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, "Delivering the Goods: Legislative Particularism in Different Electoral and Institutional Settings"[More]

Scott R. Meinke, Jeffrey K. Staton, and Steven T. Wuhs, "State Delegate Selection Rules for Presidential Nominations, 1972-2000" [More]

Geoffrey Evans and Robert Andersen, "The Political Conditioning of Economic Perceptions"[More]

Michael Lewis-Beck, "Does Economics Still Matter? Econometrics and the Vote"[More]

Abstracts and Files:

Towards a General Theory of Political Representation
Andrew Rehfeld, Washington University, St. Louis
Communities, Race and Talk: An Analysis of the Occurrence of Civic Intergroup Dialogue Programs
Katherine Cramer Walsh, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Appendix [PDF]

Why do communities differ in the strategies they adopt to address the challenges of interracial relations? In this paper, I ask specifically why cities choose to pursue or forego provision of aparticular type of social service, civic intergroup dialogue programs on race. I test arguments thatsuch choices arise in response to postmaterialist values, in response to conditions of racialinjustice, and in communities with larger stores of existing resident-government linkages. Theempirical results support the resident-government linkages model, but support the postmaterialistmodel only among high-income cities, while supporting the social justice model particularlyamong low-income cities. The results suggest that community decisions to pursue dialogue aredriven by the needs of marginalized racial groups as much as, if not more than, the desire amongaffluent community members to engage in talk about other racial cultures.

Many observers expected new women voters would respond differently to their politicalcontext than long-enfranchised men. Some scholars anticipated that newly-enfranchised women -- lacking political interest and experience -- would be volatile and highly responsive to context.Others expected political isolation and norms proscribing political activity would insulatewomen from political stimuli. We test these expectations with a Bayesian approach to ecologicalinference and a unique set of aggregate data. While turnout among new women voters isstructured strikingly similar to that of men, the lesser impact of electoral competition, and greatereffect of electoral laws and prior suffrage activism, suggest that the experience of and responseto disenfranchisement shaped women’s turnout after the vote was won.

Some pundits argue that public support for Social Security privatization is unaffected bystock market downturns. Others worry that majorities might flip with each major market swing.Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses support a third perspective, consistent with theories ofa rational public, where citizens update their opinions in reasonable ways in response to changesin the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, and an average of themajor markets. Therefore, the stock market affects Social Security privatization attitudes,particularly when movements in the markets remind citizens of the risks inherent in investing.These findings open new possibilities and create new challenges for including the public inpolicy debates.

While offering tax incentives to attract foreign direct investment has become a global phenomenonand part of economic globalization in the 1990s, it also is political and controversial. But the politicaldeterminants of tax incentive policies have rarely been analyzed. This article fills this gap by makingtwo contributions. First, I offer a theory that explains how political regime type influences taxincentive policy in the cross-national setting. Second, I evaluate the theory with a statistical analysisof 52 developing countries. The findings support my main theoretical expectations. Countries withbetter rule of law offer lower levels of tax incentives, and the effect is stronger for more democraticcountries. In democracies, FDI inflows are negatively associated with the level of incentives.Autocratic regimes maintaining restrictions on foreign entry adopt lower levels of incentives thanthose without restrictions. I discuss the policy implications of these findings.

Competition in U.S. House elections has been declining for more than 50 years and based onboth incumbent reelection rates and the percentage of close races, the 2002 and 2004 Houseelections were the least competitive of the postwar era. This paper tests three hypotheses thatattempt to explain declining competition in House elections: the redistricting hypothesis, thepartisan polarization hypothesis, and the incumbency hypothesis. We find strong support forboth the partisan polarization hypothesis and the incumbency hypothesis but no support for theredistricting hypothesis. Since the 1970s there has been a substantial increase in the number ofHouse districts that are safe for one party and a substantial decrease in the number of marginaldistricts. However, this shift has not been caused by redistricting but by demographic changeand ideological realignment within the electorate. Moreover, even in the remaining marginaldistricts most challengers lack the financial resources needed to wage competitive campaigns.The increasing correlation among district partisanship, incumbency, and campaign spendingmeans that the effects of these three variables tend to reinforce each other to a greater extent thanin the past. The result is a pattern of reinforcing advantages that leads to extraordinarilyuncompetitive elections.

Rational partisan theory's exclusive focus on electoral uncertainty ignores the importance ofpolicy uncertainty for the economy. I develop a theory of policy risk to account for thisuncertainty. Using an innovative measure of electoral probabilities based on Iowa ElectronicMarkets futures data for the U.S. from 1988-2000, I test both theories. As predicted by rationalpartisan theory, positive changes in the probability that the Left wins the Presidency or theCongress lead to increases in nominal interest rates, implying that expectations of inflation haveincreased. As predicted by the policy risk theory, positive changes in the electoral probability ofincumbent governments and divided governments lead to significant declines in interest rates,implying that expectations of inflation risk have decreased. And as an extension to both theories,I find that electoral margins matter for the economy--partisan and policy risk effects depend notonly on which party controls the government, but how large its margin of victory is.

Recent presidential elections have drawn attention to the role religion plays in shaping howAmericans vote and highlighted the political relevance of white evangelical Christians, animportant group within the Republicans’ base of supporters. Evangelicals see themselves as intension with a secular society, which affects their political behavior. Drawing on the venerableracial threat literature, I show evidence that evangelicals respond to “religious threat.” The moresecularists in their community, the more likely white evangelical Christians were to vote forRepublican presidential candidates in 2000 and 1996. These results hold for two distinct ways ofidentifying white evangelicals, using community data at different levels of aggregation.However, secularists do not appear to respond to the presence of evangelicals in theirenvironment.

We investigate the conditions under which members practice politically relevant civic skillsin church, generating a base of resourceful citizens equipped for political activity. Previous researchhas considered congregations to be black boxes, with sometimes unspecified and almost alwaysuntested processes operating to encourage civic skill development. In contrast, we conceptualizechurches as diverse organizations and find evidence that the social homogeneity of church-basedsmall groups allows for greater individual skill development. Moreover, members direct theirenergies toward the church and skill development when they are socially isolated from theircommunities. We also test the efficacy of clergy to promote skill development, finding mixedevidence. Overall, we find considerable support justifying the decision to open the black box andinvestigate the varied ways in which churches promote the acquisition of civic skills.

Political dialogue among citizens offers numerous potential contributions to American politics, butattainment of these benefits hinges largely on the extent to which conversations cross lines of politicaldifference. In what contexts are cross-cutting interactions most likely to thrive? Using data from fivesurveys, we find consistent evidence that the workplace is the social context best positioned to facilitatecross-cutting political discourse. Political discussion in the workplace involves a large number ofdiscussants, and it involves greater exposure to people of dissimilar perspectives than does discussion incontexts such as the family, the neighborhood, or the voluntary association. We next consider whetherworkplace-based interactions are capable of producing beneficial effects. Despite the notoriously weaknature of work-based social ties, we find evidence that workplace-based exposure to differing political viewsincreases people's knowledge of rationales for political perspectives other than their own, and also fosterspolitical tolerance.

We analyze a model of legislative particularism to understand how the provision of con-stituency service responds to variations in institutional and electoral environments. We showthat increased partisan balance in the electorate, single-member districts, and independentexecutives all increase incentives for legislators to provide constituency service. The resultsof the model are consistent with existing comparative-institutional empirical observations.Moreover, the model addresses over time trends in the United States that are not explainedby existing models and yields novel hypotheses that are amenable to empirical evaluation.

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of delegate selection rules forpresidential nominations, yet few have sought an explanation for the variance in these rulesacross the states and over time. In this paper, we ask why state party elites would open theirprocesses of delegate selection to a large and potentially ideologically diverse constituency byholding primary elections rather than caucuses. We develop an account of endogenousinstitutional choice that suggests elites ought to be increasingly likely to open their delegateselection rules as the ideological nature of the party and the state's electorate converge. We testthis claim using a new data set on Democratic Party selection rules between 1972 and 2000, andfind that the degree of ideological convergence is a strong predictor of state party choices to openthe process of delegate selection. These results provide additional support for general theoreticalclaims that characterize political institutions as fundamentally endogenous to the politics theyregulate.

Economic theories of voting argue that party popularity and vote are heavily influenced bythe performance of the economy. Inferences about the direction of causality betweenperceptions of the economy and party support remain questionable, however. This paperevaluates the micro-foundations of economic theories of voting and party popularity usingmulti-wave panel data. We model the dynamic relationships between party support andretrospective economic perceptions—both sociotropic and egocentric—through the 1992-97British electoral cycle. Our findings indicate that sociotropic perceptions are stronglyconditioned by prior opinions of the incumbent Conservative Party and once this temporalrelationship is taken into account, they have little affect on incumbent party popularity.Throughout the electoral cycle, lagged political support has a substantially stronger effect onsociotropic perceptions than the latter have on concurrent party support. Moreover,egocentric perceptions appear to be neither strongly affected nor influenced by party support.The findings of these dynamic individual-level analyses indicate that conventional wisdom islikely to considerably overstate the importance of retrospective economic considerations forpolitical preferences.

Non-democratic "representatives" increasingly act on the global stage, as "representatives" of their dictatorships to the United Nations, or when an NGO represents prisoners of war. Standard accounts of political representation depend upon democratic institutions (like elections) and a certain kind of proper activity (like deliberation and constituent accountability) and thus cannot explain how these people are representatives at all. I argue that the standard account of political representation is thus inadequate to explain political representation throughout the globe. I offer a general theory of political representation which explains representation simply by reference to a relevant audience accepting a person as such. When audiences use democratic rules of recognition, the familiar cases arise. When audiences use non-democratic rules of recognition, nondemocratic cases arise. The result is that political representation, per se, is not a democratic phenomenon at all. The account offers a more parsimonious explanation of political representation, providing a tool for analysis of political representation throughout the globe.