Articles:

Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, "Sic Semper Tyrannis? Power, Repression, and Assassination Since the Second World War" [More]

James H. Lebovic and William R. Thompson, "An Illusionary or Elusive Relationship? The Arab-Israel Conflict and Repression in the Middle East" [More]

David Sobek, M. Rodwan Abouharb and Christopher G. Ingram, "The Human Rights Peace: How the Respect for Human Rights at Home Leads to Peace Abroad" [More]

John M. Carey and John Polga-Hecimovich, "Primary Elections and Candidate Strength in Latin America" [More]

Elisabeth Ellis, "Citizenship and Property Rights: A New Look at Social Contract Theory" [More]

Robert S. Taylor, "Democratic Transitions and the Progress of Absolutism in Kant’s Political Thought" [More]

Paula D. McClain, et al., "Racial Distancing in a Southern City: Latino Immigrants’ Views of Black Americans" [More]

Robert R. Preuhs, "The Conditional Effects of Minority Descriptive Representation: Black Legislators and Policy Influence in the American States" [More]

Christopher M. Federico, "Race, Education, and Individualism Revisited" [More]

Brad T. Gomez and J. Matthew Wilson, "Rethinking Symbolic Racism: Evidence of Attribution Bias" [More]

James G. Gimpel, Frances E. Lee and Joshua Kaminski, "The Political Geography of Campaign Contributions in American Politics" [More]

Adam J. Berinsky and Donald R. Kinder, "Making Sense of Issues through Media Frames: Understanding the Kosovo Crisis" [More]

Markus Prior, "The Incumbent in the Living Room: The Rise of Television and the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections" [More]

James H. Fowler, "Altruism and Turnout" [More]

Deborah Jordan Brooks, "The Resilient Voter: Moving Toward Closure in the Debate over Negative Campaigning and Turnout" [More]

Sara C. Benesh, "Understanding Public Confidence in American Courts" [More]

Gregory Koger, "Cloture Reform and Party Government in the Senate, 1918-1925" [More]

Brandon Rottinghaus, "Rethinking Presidential Responsiveness: The Public Presidency and Rhetorical Congruency, 1953-2001" [More]

Abstracts and Files:

Sic Semper Tyrannis? Power, Repression, and Assassination Since the Second World War
Zaryab Iqbal, University of South Carolina
Christopher Zorn, University of South Carolina
Appendix [PDF]
 

The killing of a head of state is among the most severe and consequential forms of political violence. But to date, there have been no systematic studies of the incidence of such assassinations, with the few existing case studies tending to emphasize the uniqueness of those events. Drawing on existing theories of social protest and contentious politics, we argue instead that institutional and sociopolitical factors should be important correlates of assassination. We examine empirically the implications of this theory, using data on the incidence of assassinations of heads of state between 1946 and 2000. Our findings suggest that institutional factors related to leadership succession, institutionalized power, and levels of repression interact to influence the occurrence of such killings. Notable in this respect is our conclusion that, while repressive leaders are at greater risk for assassination, the effect of repression is moderated by executive power, such that weak, repressive leaders in nondemocratic systems face the highest risk of assassination. Our findings dovetail neatly with the broader literature on other forms of insurgency, suggesting that assassinations are but one manifestation of the larger phenomenon of political violence.

This article develops an argument for the anticipated relationship between international conflict and repression within the Middle East. It tests the argument employing a model in which the dependent variable is annual repression levels in a country (based on Amnesty International reports) and two key independent variables are net cooperation (cooperation minus conflict) with and from Israel and between Israel and the Palestinians (based on data drawn from the Kansas Event Data System, or KEDS). Specifically, it tests cross-sectional time-series ordered probit models on seventeen countries in three sub-regional analyses in the 1980-2000 period to determine whether regional repression stems in part from the conflict with Israel. It concludes that the Arab-Israel conflict has strong positive effects on repression throughout much of the Middle East.

Respect for human rights represents self-imposed restraints on the behavior of a government. These limits signify both a domestic norm and a state that has decided to settle political disputes through non-violent methods. When these governments interact in the international system, we suspect that their basic norms of behavior will remain and generate relatively peaceful interactions. We test this contention on pairs of all states from 1980 to 2001 and find that joint respect for human rights decreases the probability of conflict. This relationship is maintained even when one controls for the effect of democracy and its influence on the human rights record of states.

Political parties throughout Latin America rely increasingly on primary elections to select candidates for public office. Where they are adopted, primaries are generally touted as moves toward openness and internal party democracy. Yet politicians and party leaders are concerned with winning elections, and there are reasons to expect that primaries select candidates who are weaker in general election competition than other methods. Using data from every democratic presidential election in Latin America since the late 1970s, we test whether primaries systematically affect candidate strength. We find evidence of a primary bonus –that is, other things equal, primary-selected candidates are stronger than those selected by other procedures.

The United States is undergoing dramatic demographic change, primarily from immigration, and many of the new Latino immigrants are settling in the South. This paper examines hypotheses related to attitudes of Latino immigrants toward black Americans in a Southern city. The analyses are based on a survey of black, white and Latino residents (n=500). The results show, for the most part, Latino immigrants hold negative stereotypical views of blacks and feel that they have more in common with whites than with blacks. Yet, whites do not reciprocate in their feelings toward Latinos. Latinos’ negative attitudes toward blacks, however, are modulated by a sense of linked fate with other Latinos. This research is important because the South still contains the largest population of African Americans in the United States and no section of the country has been more rigidly defined along a black-white racial divide. How these new Latino immigrants situate themselves vis-à-vis black Americans has profound implications for the social and political fabric of the South.

Despite a substantial increase in the number of racial and ethnic minority lawmakers across the United States, scholars have been unable to demonstrate that diversification of representative bodies increases minority group influence over policy decisions outside of small local governing boards. These null findings, however, are primarily due to underspecified empirical designs that do not account for the conditioning effects of racialized political contexts and majority party coalition membership. Using state-level data on welfare benefit levels and a survey of black state legislators, this study shows that black descriptive representation exerts policy influence outside of local governing bodies, but that a highly racialized political context and party control condition the nature and degree of policy influence.

Current work suggests that individualistic values are more likely to be invoked in judgments about welfare recipients when the latter are Black. Nevertheless, this “racialization” hypothesis has yet to be directly tested by looking at whether generalized individualism is more strongly related to hostility toward welfare recipients among Whites when the recipients are Black. In this paper, I conduct this critical test. I also show that this tendency is strongest among college-educated Whites and that it occurs for both descriptive individualism (i.e., the belief that hard work and self-reliance lead to success) and prescriptive individualism (i.e., a normative endorsement of these traits).

This paper demonstrates that cognitive tendencies related to political sophistication produce an attribution bias in the widely accepted symbolic racism scale. When this bias in controlled statistically, the effect of symbolic racism on racial policy attitudes is greatly diminished. Our theory posits that high sophisticates tend to make global/distal attributions, allowing them to associate racial inequality with broader socio-political causes. Less sophisticated individuals, conversely, tend to make local/proximal attributions, thus biasing them against ascribing responsibility systematically. Consequently, less sophisticated individuals tend to be classified as intolerant by the symbolic racism scale, even when controlling for factors such as ideology and anti-black effect.

This article examines the geographic origins of individual campaign contributions to the Republican and Democratic parties and their candidates from 1992 to 2004. It demonstrates that contributions are affected by how potential givers are situated in space. There is a geographic pattern to giving independent of wealth, age, occupation and other individual characteristics that predict donations. Campaign contributors are not only people with resources and incentives to participate, but also part of networks in which social influence can be brought to bear in the solicitation of contributions. The article also shows that the Republican and Democratic donor bases are much more geographically similar than their bases of electoral support.

How do people make sense of politics? Integrating empirical results in communication studies on framing with models of comprehension in cognitive psychology, we argue that people understand complicated event sequences by organizing information in a manner that conforms to the structure of a good story. To test this claim, we carried out a pair of experiments. In each, we presented people with news reports on the 1999 Kosovo crisis that were framed in story form, either to promote or prevent U.S. intervention. Consistent with expectations, we found that framing news about the crisis as a story affected what people remembered, how they structured what they remembered, and the opinions they expressed on the actions government should take.

Scholars have recently reworked the traditional calculus of voting model by adding a term for benefits to others. Although the probability that a single vote affects the outcome of an election is quite small, the number of people who enjoy the benefit when the preferred alternative wins is large. As a result, people who care about benefits to others and who think one of the alternatives makes others better off are more likely to vote. I test the altruism theory of voting in the laboratory by using allocations in a dictator game to reveal the degree to which each subject is concerned about the well-being of others. The main findings suggest that variation in concern for the well-being of others in conjunction with strength of party identification is a significant factor in individual turnout decisions in real world elections. Partisan altruists are much more likely to vote than their nonpartisan or egoist peers.

The effect of negative campaigning on voter turnout has been a major focus of research in recent years. In a path-breaking analysis, Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar found that negative campaigning by Senate candidates significantly depresses turnout. Subsequent studies that emerged to challenge their analysis reached more optimistic findings. Determining who is right is difficult to establish because the methodology of these later studies differs so dramatically from the original study and because a strong theoretical case can be made for each type of finding. Through a careful examination and improvement of Ansolabehere and Iyengar's aggregate analysis of Senate campaigns, this article shows that their initial conclusions regarding the demobilizing effect of campaign attacks were premature. Even using Ansolabehere and Iyengar's own data, it appears that citizens are resilient to the onslaught of negative campaigning. This paper shows that the findings in the literature are not as contradictory as they initially appear, thereby moving it toward closure on this topic and clearing the way for a series of new research questions.

While studies of public confidence in institutions have long been a part of the public opinion literature, systematic analysis of public confidence in America’s lower courts has been missing. This is troubling, especially since support for the rule of law is integral to a democracy and support for courts essential to the operation of the rule of law. I offer an explanation of public support for lower courts, finding that experience with courts, perceptions regarding the fairness of court procedures, and choices made over institutional design, all play a role in explaining the public’s support for state courts.

Several studies have examined the relationship between presidential action and public opinion, however, few explore a direct and continuous connection between presidential rhetoric and public opinion. To measure presidential rhetorical congruence with opinion, I construct a data set of matched opinion and policy statements from President Eisenhower to Clinton. Confirming expectations (while contradicting others), no differences in congruent position taking between presidents who served earlier (Eisenhower to Ford) than those who served later (Carter to Clinton). Importantly, the election effect discovered in the president’s first term is repeated in their second term, in advance of midterm or presidential elections. Methods of public communication present mixed results; statements made on television are less likely to be congruent with public opinion in the first term (but more likely in the second term) while statements made in public speeches are positive for second term presidents, both points suggesting presidents do not “go quietly” into retirement.