Articles:

Paula McClain, "Southern Political Science Association Presidential Address" [More]

John G. Gunnell, "Dislocated Rhetoric: The Anomaly of Political Theory" [More]

Christopher Anderson and Aida Paskeviciute, "How Ethnic and Linguistic Heterogeneity Influence the Prospects for Civil Society: A Comparative Study of Citizenship Behavior" [More]

Karen Ferree, "Explaining South Africa's Racial Census" [More]

Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, "Why do Welfare States Persist?" [More]

Michael G. Findley and Tze Kwang Teo, "Rethinking Third Party Interventions into Civil Wars: An Actor-Centric Approach" [More]

William T. Bianco, Michael S. Lynch, Gary J. Miller, and Itai Sened, "A Theory Waiting to be Discovered and Used: A Reanalysis of Canonical Experiments on Majority Rule Decision-Making" [More]

Micheal W. Giles, Thomas G. Walker and Christopher Zorn, "Setting a Judicial Agenda: The Decision to Grant En Banc Review in the U.S. Courts of Appeals" [More]

Gretchen Helmke and Mitchell Sanders, "Modeling Motivations: A Method for Inferring Judicial Goals from Behavior" [More]

Jessica Trounstine, "Dominant Regimes and the Demise of Urban Democracy" [More]

Dara Strolovitch, "Do Interest Groups Represent the Disadvantaged? Advocacy at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender" [More]

John D. Griffin, "Electoral Competition and Democratic Responsiveness: A Defense of the Marginality Hypothesis" [More]

Sean Nicholson-Crotty, "Reassessing Madison's Diversity Hypothesis: The Case of Same-Sex Marriage" [More]

Cindy D. Kam, "Political Campaigns and Open-Minded Thinking" [More]

Matthew Baum and Angela Jamison, "The Oprah Effect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently" [More]

Scott L. Althaus and Young Mie Kim, "Priming Effects in Complex Information Environments: Reassessing the Impact of News Discourse on Presidential Approval" [More]

Wendy K. Tam Cho, James G. Gimpel, and Tony Wu, "Clarifying the Role of SES in Political Participation: Policy Threat and Arab American Mobilization" [More]

Eric Heberlig, Marc Hetherington, and Bruce Larson, "The Price of Leadership: Campaign Money and the Polarization of Congressional Parties" [More]

Kirk A. Randazzo, Richard W. Waterman, and Jeffery A. Fine, "Checking the Federal Courts: The Impact of Congressional Statutes on Judicial Behavior" [More]

Scott Desposato, "The Impact of Electoral Rules on Legislative Parties: Lessons from the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies" [More]

Abstracts and Files:

Southern Political Science Association Presidential Addres
Paula McClain, Duke University
Dislocated Rhetoric: The Anomaly of Political Theory
John G. Gunnell, State University of New York

Although the estranged relationship between mainstream political science and much of the subfield of political theory has been properly attributed to developments during the last half of the twentieth century, the roots of this alienation are historically deeper. Many of the conversations of political theory are the progeny of a discursive form that attended the birth of modern social science. This genre was a legitimating rhetoric situated in the interstices of social science, philosophy, and politics. The study of the history of political thought originated as such a rhetoric, and it constitutes a paradigm case for examining the extent to which such a discourse can be transformed into a practice of knowledge. This field has succeeded to a greater extent than certain other elements of political theory which, transfixed by the tension between their practical aspirations and academic context, have become anomalous appendages to the social scientific study of politics.

While the positive consequences of social capital and civil society are widely accepted and appreciated, the question of how they originate and can be sustained has received relatively little attention from scholars. In this study, we approach this question from a cross-national and individual-level perspective by examining how population heterogeneity in the form of ethnic and linguistic diversity affects citizenship behavior, measured by cognitive and interpersonal engagement about politics, membership in voluntary associations, and interpersonal trust. Based on data collected in 44 countries, our analyses show that heterogeneity does affect the quality of civil society in a country. However, indicators of population heterogeneity do not have uniformly positive or negative effects on individual-level measures of civil society - while they reduce some, they shore up others.

The shape and aggregate output of welfare states within many developed democracies have been surprisingly resilient in the face of profound shifts in their national settings, and with respect to the global environment of the past 20 years. This contrasts with once-widespread predictions of retrenchment, and it has broadened debates over trends in social policy-making to focus on the phenomenon of welfare state persistence. Research on persistence has not, to date, systematically considered the possibility that welfare states survive because of enduring popular support. Building from recent welfare state theory and the emerging literature on policy responsiveness, we consider the possibility that mass public opinion - citizens' aggregate policy preferences - are a factor behind welfare state persistence. We analyze a new country-level dataset, controlling for established sources of welfare state development, and buttressing estimates by testing for endogeneity with respect to policy preferences. We find evidence that the temporal distribution of policy preferences has contributed to persistence tendencies in a number of welfare states. We discuss results in conclusion, suggesting the utility of further consideration of linkages between mass opinion and social policy in cross-national perspective.

Studies of the decision to intervene into ongoing civil wars should focus on those making the decision, not the conflict. We adopt such an “actor-centric” approach, and discuss third party intervention by emphasizing convergent and divergent interests, and the connections between potential interveners, actual interveners, and civil war states. Our model furthermore differentiates between interventions on the side of the government and opposition, and takes the sequence of interventions in the same conflict into ac- count. The results support our theoretical framework and expectations. This paper thus advances our understanding not only of the effects of intervention, but also the motivation and decision to intervene.

The paper offers a reassessment of canonical attempts to address a fundamental question about majority rule: what is the relationship between the preferences held by the participants and the outcomes that emerge from their interactions? Previous work, based on the analysis of abstract spatial models or relying on data from real-world spatial experiments, has yielded a mass of contradictory findings. Our work applies a new technique for estimating the uncovered set, a concept that describes a fundamental constraint on majority rule: given the preferences of decision-makers, which outcomes can emerge from majority-rule decision-making? By applying the uncovered set to a series of previous experiments on majority rule, we show that their seemingly bizarre and incompatible findings are in fact consistent with a clearly-specified theory of how sophisticated individuals make decisions in majority-rule settings.

The consensus among most scholars of American politics is that judges are policy seekers. Yet we know very little about what motivates judges in other parts of the world. To begin to address this gap, we develop a systematic method for inferring goals from behavior. Using a simple game theoretic framework, we generate a series of testable propositions linking behavioral outcomes to goals for four ideal types of judges: loyalists, policy seekers, institutionalists, and careerists. We illustrate the power of our method with original data on individual and collective judicial decision-making on the Argentine Supreme Court (1976-2000).

Theorists of democracy assert that government is held accountable and responsive to citizens through the electoral process. Elections can offer citizens representative government, but only when certain conditions are met. I provide evidence that when elections become uncompetitive for long periods of time and political coalitions establish dominant regimes the distribution of government benefits changes. Examining 20th century political patterns in nine of the United States' largest cities, I find that dominant regimes establish electoral control, then target core supporters and powerful interests at the expense of the larger community.

How well do interest groups represent the disadvantaged? I examine the policy advocacy of national organizations that represent marginalized groups, focusing on the extent to which they advocate on behalf of intersectionally disadvantaged subgroups of their membership. Combining quantitative analysis of original data from a survey of organizations with information from indepth interviews, I find that organizations are substantially less active when it comes to issues affecting disadvantaged subgroups than they are when it comes to issues affecting more advantaged subgroups. In spite of sincere desires to represent disadvantaged members, organizations downplay the impact of such issues and frame them as narrow and particularistic in their effect, while framing issues affecting advantaged subgroups as if they affect a majority of their members and have a broad and generalized impact. Consequently, issues affecting advantaged subgroups receive considerable attention regardless of their breadth of impact, whereas issues affecting disadvantaged subgroups are not.

Does vigorous electoral competition help to convert citizens' preferences into government action? No, concludes a series of theoretical and empirical studies conducted over the last 35 years. If these findings are correct, efforts to enhance competition such as depoliticizing the redistricting process and achieving greater equity in campaign spending, while perhaps beneficial in other respects, will not improve government responsiveness. However, these studies are limited by a shortage of data, by biased measures of district competitiveness, and by their conceptualization of responsiveness. Using both cross-sectional and fixed-effects modeling frameworks, this study finds that in recent years elected officials who represent more competitive districts are indeed more responsive to their constituents' preferences.

Scholars have long suggested that population diversity should serve as a check on majority tyranny, but empirical evidence for this diversity hypothesis is inconclusive. This essay suggests that mixed findings arise because of the way in which scholars have translated Madisonian writings into statistical tests. It argues that the Federalist papers actually suggest an interactive relationship, where diversity moderates the effectiveness of representative institutions in protecting minority rights, rather than a direct relationship between population homogeneity and repression. The article tests for this moderating effect via a mixed methods approach, which includes a quantitative analysis of the passage of same-sex marriage bans in the American states, as well as a qualitative examination of legislative activity in four states.

This article argues that campaigns do more than shape the electoral choices that citizens make. Campaigns also encourage citizens to engage in open-minded thinking. Analyses of the Senate Election Study show that intense campaigns chip away at pro-incumbent biases, motivating citizens to acknowledge pros and cons regarding the candidates. These gains in open-minded thinking appear among both more and less educated citizens. Intense campaigns provide citizens with the motivation to engage in open-minded thinking regarding candidates for public office. As such, electoral campaigns, as recurring national and sub-national conversations about politics, can fulfill an important social function by pulling citizens into open-minded thinking.

Do the news media provide voters with sufficient information to function as competent democratic citizens? Many have answered "no," citing as evidence the proliferation of entertainment-oriented "soft news." Yet, public affairs-oriented "hard" news is often unappealing to politically inattentive individuals. We argue that news "quality" depends upon how well it enables citizens to determine which candidate best fits their own preferences. In this regard, for politically inattentive citizens, we argue that soft news is more efficient than traditional, hard news. Drawing on the logic of low-information rationality, we derive and test a series of hypotheses using the 2000 National Election Study. We find that politically inattentive individuals who consumed daytime talk shows (a popular form of soft news) were more likely than their non-consuming, inattentive counterparts to vote for the candidate who best represented their self-described preferences. This suggests soft news can facilitate voting "competence" among at least some citizens.

This paper revisits the original psychological literature on priming in order to assess new possibilities for research on priming effects stimulated by news discourse. We detail some important theoretical limitations of existing priming research; propose a method for studying the dynamics of priming effects in real-world, complex information environments; and illustrate the usefulness of this approach with a case study of opinion change during the 1990-1 Persian Gulf Crisis. This case study documents for the first time the daily dynamics of priming effects in a complex information environment, and confirms that priming effects are not merely a function of changes in the volume of news coverage about a given topic. Our findings suggest that news priming effects can be produced by changes in the applicability of relevant knowledge constructs rather than merely by their temporary accessibility in long-term memory, and by cumulative as well as recent exposure to news coverage.

This paper examines the struggle between the legislative and judicial branches by focusing specifically on congressional influences on the behavior of federal judges. We argue that Congress may constrain individual judicial behavior by passing statutes containing detailed language. To test this thesis we borrow from the bureaucratic politics literature to introduce and test a new measure of statutory constraint. Using data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals we find that appellate court behavior is constrained significantly by statutory language, although this constraint is asymmetric across ideology. We discover substantial differences between Democratic and Republican appointees both in terms of statutory constraint and ideological voting. The data indicate judges appointed by Democratic presidents are constrained by statutory language in criminal cases. Similarly, Republican appointees are constrained by statutes in civil rights cases. Yet, neither Democrats nor Republicans are constrained in economic cases.

In this paper, I reexamine the impact of electoral institutions on legislative party organization. A long-running theme in comparative politics is that Brazil’s political party system is weakened by the structure of its electoral institutions. I revisit this research by comparing legislative parties in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies with those in the Brazilian Senate. This comparison allows me to control for political history, constituents, and even the legislative agenda, while providing variance on the key explanatory variable - the electoral system. The Senate is very similar to the Chamber of Deputies - but does not use the much-maligned OLPR rules. The result is a powerful opportunity for testing and inference. The comparisons reveal no consistent or significant differences between institutions.

In 1990, Albert Karnig and I published an article in the American Political Science Review, "Black and Latino Socioeconomic and Political Competition," which examined the extent of socioeconomic and political competition between blacks and Latinos in a set of U. S. cities using 1980s data. We made a number of predictions about the future of racial politics in cities based on our results. This article revisits the cities in the 1990 article to see what changes, if any, may have occurred over the course of twenty years. The results from the original 1980 cities viewed in 1990 and 2000 presents a very mixed picture. The accuracy of our predictions varied over the years.