Articles:

David E. Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht, "See Jane Run: Women Politicians as Role Models for Adolescents" [More]

Alastair Smith, "Credibility in Compliance and Punishment: Leader Specific Punishments andCredibility"[More]

EricC.C.Chang and Yun-han Chu, "Corruption and Trust: Exceptionalism in Asian Democracies?" [More]

Simon Jackman and Paul Sniderman, "The Limits of Deliberative Discussion: A Model of Everyday PoliticalArguments"[More]

Anibal Perez-Linan, Barry Ames, and Mitchell Seligson, "Strategy, Careers, and Judicial Decisions: Lessons from the Bolivia Courts"[More]

LeeEpstein, Rene Lindstadt, Jeffrey A. Segal and Chad Westerland, "The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees"[More]

Eileen Braman, "Reasoning on the Threshold: Testing the Separability of Preferences in LegalDecision-Making"[More]

Christophe Crombez, Tim Groseclose and Keith Krehbiel, "GateKeeping"[More]

James H. Fowler, "Habitual Voting and Behavioral Turnout"[More]

William Bernhard and Brian R. Sala, "The Remaking of An American Senate: The 17th Amendment and IdeologicalResponsiveness"[More]

JayGoodliffe.and Darren G. Hawkins, "Explaining Commitment: States and the Convention against Torture"[More]

Stuart Soroka, "Good News and Bad News: Asymmetric Responses to Economic Information"[More]

Brady Baybeck, "Sorting Out the Competing Effects of Racial Context"[More]

Joshua Clinton, "Constituents and Roll Calls in the 106th House" [More]

Ryan Claassen and BenjaminHighton, "Does Policy Debate Reduce Information Effects in Public Opinion? Analyzing theEvolution of Public Opinion on Health Care"[More]

Gabriel Negretto, "Choosing How to Choose Presidents: Parties, Military Rulers and PresidentialElections in Latin America"[More]

Shawn Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Jeffrey Karp, "Politicians Preferences for Electoral Institutions: Self Interest, Values, andIdeology"[More]

Valentino Larcinese, Leonzio Rizzo, and Cecilia Testa, "The Allocation of the US Federal Budget to the States: The Impact of thePresident"[More]

Abstracts and Files:

See Jane Run: Women Politicians as Role Models for Adolescents
David E. Campbell, University of Notre Dame
Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame
Appendix [PDF]
 

Does the presence of female political role models inspire interest in political activismamong young women? We find that over time, the more that women politicians are made visibleby national news coverage, the more likely adolescent girls are to indicate an intention to bepolitically active. Similarly, in cross-sectional analysis, we find that where female candidates arevisible due to viable campaigns for high-profile offices girls report increased anticipated politicalinvolvement. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this effect does not appear to be mediatedthrough beliefs about the appropriateness of politics for women, nor through perceptions ofgovernment responsiveness. Instead, an increased propensity for political discussion, particularlywithin families, appears to explain the role model effect.

The ability of nation A to compel nation B to grant it concessions depends uponthe credibility with which A can commit to punish B for non-compliance. Discardingtraditional unitary actor approaches, we assume policy in each nation is set by mortalpolitical leaders and model the compliance/punishment relation between A and B ina noisy infinitely repeated setting. If nations utilize leader specific punishment, thatis target policies against leaders rather than the nations they represent, then leadersimprove the credibly of their threats to punish non-compliance since citizens haveincentives to depose leaders to restore national integrity.

While voluminous studies have attributed the continuing decline of institutional trust topolitical corruption, the link between corruption and institutional trust in Asia has yetbeen explored systematically. Testing the effect of corruption on institutional trust istheoretically important and empirically challenging, since many suggests that contextualfactors in Asia such as political culture and electoral politics might neutralize the negativeimpact of corruption. Utilizing data from the East Asia Barometer, we ¯nd a strong trust-eroding effect of political corruption in Asian democracies. We also ¯nd no evidence thatcontextual factors lessen the corruption-trust link in Asia. The trust-eroding effect holdsuniformly across all countries examined in this study, and remains robust even aftertaking into account the endogenous relationship between corruption and trust.

Can citizens learn from talking politics with one another? To bring out the logic of deliberation,we focus on a simplified model of political discussion: a oneexchangeargument. Our model rests on three conditions, all commonly satisfied in real life: (1) that only two alternatives areopen for choice – support or opposition to a policy; (2) that as political sophistication increases, sotoo does the probability that citizens will choose the policy alternative more consonant with theirmost thoroughly considered view of the matter; and (3) that arguments on opposing sides of anissue are of equal quality. Taking advantage of a specially designed experiment embedded in alarge public opinion survey in France, we find that the proportion of citizens choosing policyalternatives consonant with their more general ideological orientations does not increase over thecourse of our experiment. In the aggregate, we find that deliberation leads at least as many peopleto ideologically inconsistent positions as it helps people find their way to ideologically consistentpositions. In this sense, we find that deliberation is for naught.

Using survey data from Bolivian trial courts, we explore the relationship between judicialdecisions, career goals, and hierarchical pressures in continental legal systems. Based on aprincipal-agent approach, we hypothesize that inferior court judges are more likely to defer tosuperior courts when they share their interpretation of the law, when they anticipate reversals,and when they fear political manipulation of judicial careers. In turn, superior judges are likelyto exercise informal pressures over inferior court judges who deviate from the former’s legalviews and do not anticipate their preferences. The conclusions emphasize the utility of surveyresearch for the study of strategic compliance in judicial institutions.

One hundred fifteen law students were given a mock brief with identical legal arguments on bothsides of a standing dispute in litigation involving restrictions on political expression of publicemployees. The content of the expression at issue (pro-choice vs. pro-life) and the jurisdictionwhere the case was pending (with vs. without controlling authority on the standing issue) wereexperimentally manipulated. Participants' policy views on (1) abortion, (2) free speech and (3)Hatch Act restrictions were measured to assess their influence on the standing decision. In linewith traditional notions of legal reasoning, participants were able to separate their views onHatch Act restrictions from the standing decision. Opinions on free speech, however, influencedjudgments consistent with attitudinal hypotheses. Also, participants’ opinions on abortioninteracted with speech content to influence judgments – but in a manner not wholly consistentwith legal or attitudinal accounts of decision-making.

Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rulesthat determine who may exercise procedural rights, and in what order. This paperanalyzes several two-stage decision-making models, focusing on one in which thefirst-moving actor has a unique, unilateral, procedural right to enforce the statusquo, i.e., to exercise gatekeeping. Normative analysis using Pareto-dominance criteriareveals that the institution of gatekeeping is inferior to another institutionalarrangement within this framework—namely, one in which the same actor is givena traditional veto instead of a gatekeeping right. The analytical results raise an empiricalpuzzle: When and why would self-organizing collective choice bodies adoptgatekeeping institutions? A qualitative survey of governmental institutions suggeststhat—contrary to an entrenched modeling norm within political science—empiricalinstances of codified gatekeeping rights are rare or nonexistent.

Bendor, Diermeier, and Ting (2003) develop a behavioral alternative to rational choice models ofturnout. However, the assumption they make about the way individuals adjust their probabilityof voting biases their model towards their main result of significant turnout in large populations.Moreover, the assumption causes individuals to engage in casual voting (sometimes people voteand sometimes they abstain). This result is at odds with a substantial literature that indicatesmost people engage in habitual voting (they either always vote or always abstain). I develop analternative model to show how feedback in the probability adjustment mechanism affects thebehavioral model. The version of this model without feedback yields both high turnout andhabitual voting.

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit statesovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democraticinstability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in threekinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintendedconsequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete-time duration model totest all of these explanations on state commitment to the international ConventionAgainst Torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties.We find strong evidence for the importance of norms and all three types of costs,but no evidence supporting state desires to lock in the benefits of democracy inthe face of domestic democratic instability.

There is a growing body of work suggesting that responses to positive and negativeinformation are asymmetric – that negative information has a much greater impact onindividuals’ attitudes than does positive information. This paper explores these asymmetriesin mass media responsiveness to positive and negative economic shifts, and in publicresponsiveness to both the economy itself and economic news coverage. Using time seriesanalyses of UK media and public opinion, strong evidence is found of asymmetry. Thedynamic is discussed as it applies to political communications and policymaking, and moregenerally to public responsiveness in representative democracies.

Context matters, but which context? We live in more than one context; for example, the cities inwhich we reside may differ dramatically from the neighborhoods we call home. When testingthe racial threat hypothesis, previous research has focused upon a single context, usually inisolation from other, potentially competing contexts. This paper argues that racial context iscomplicated for whites, and that multiple contexts need to be considered to assess racial threatseffectively. Using individual evaluations of neighborhood and city, I show that contexts interactin complicated, surprising, and important ways. I find that the presence of African Americansdoes have a negative effect upon white attitudes, but that the effect can be misleading ifexamined in isolation. Scholars need to carefully consider multiple contexts when examiningattitudes, and individuals who inhabit incongruent – that is, conflicting – contexts tell aninteresting story about race and residence in the United States.

This paper examines the extent to which constituency and sub-constituency pref-erences are reflected in roll call voting in the 106th House. Aggregating 100,814 ran-domly selected respondents to measure sub-constituency preferences provides an un-precedented ability to measure sub-constituency preferences in the House. Lookingat the relationship over all votes, "key votes," and on individual votes confirms thatrepresentatives are not completely responsive to the district mean voter, that onlymajority party Republicans are especially responsive to the preferences of same-partyconstituents, and that same-party constituency preferences cannot entirely account forsystematic differences in Republican and Democratic voting behavior.

Students of presidential regimes claim that while the combination of plurality rule forpresidential elections and concurrent electoral cycles favors bipartism, majority rule for electingpresidents favors multipartism. I argue that a reverse causality also affects the relationshipbetween party systems and electoral systems. Using a bargaining model of institutional change,I propose that while dominant and large parties are likely to choose plurality rule and concurrentelections, small parties are likely to choose majority rule. I also argue that military rulers andmilitary-civilian coalitions tend to follow the logic of electoral choice of small parties. Thesehypotheses are supported by a statistical analysis of the determinants of electoral choice in 49cases of constitutional change in Latin America. Mechanisms of choice are analyzed in severalepisodes of electoral reform, including a negative case that suggests explanations of electoralchoice not covered by the model presented in this paper.

We examine whether MPs and candidates for parliament are motivated by electoral selfinterest,values, ideology, or all of these when evaluating proposals for changing electoralinstitutions. Using survey data from four countries (Australia, Germany, the Netherlands andNew Zealand), we find that candidates who won election are less supportive of proposals tochange institutions, while those who lost elections are more supportive of institutional changes.Winning candidates share preferences for institutions that are independent of whether they areaffiliated with a governing or opposition party. This self-interest effect is attenuated by ideologyand attitudes about democracy. Pure self-interest, then, is an incomplete explanation forpoliticians' attitudes towards electoral institutions. We discuss how these findings are related tothe static nature of political institutions.

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the US federal budgetallocation to the States. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominenceto Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of Presidents duringthe period 1982-2000. Our findings suggest that federal budget allocation is affectedby presidential politics. States that heavily supported the incumbent President inpast presidential elections tend to receive more funds, while marginal and swing statesare not rewarded. Party affiliation also matters since states whose governor belong tothe same party of the President receive more federal funds, while states opposing thepresident's party in Congressional elections are penalized. These results show thatpresidents are engaged in tactical distribution of federal funds and also provide goodevidence in support of partisan theories of budget allocation.