The Journal of Politics

Volume 69, Issue 1 (February 2007)

All articles available from Blackwell Publishing.

Articles:

Shigeo Hirano and James S. Snyder Jr., "The Decline of Third Party Voting in the United States" [More]

Cindy D. Kam, "When Duty Calls, Do Citizens Answer?" [More]

Jennifer L. Merolla, Jennifer M. Ramos, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, "Crisis, Charisma, and Consequences: Evidence from the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election" [More]

Jack H. Nagel, "The Burr Dilemma in Approval Voting" [More]

David Stasavage, "Polarization and Publicity: Rethinking the Benefits of Deliberative Democracy" [More]

Justin Crowe, "The Forging of Judicial Autonomy: Political Entrepreneurship And the Reforms of William Howard Taft" [More]

Joshua A. Tucker and Adam Meirowitz, "Run Boris Run: Strategic Voting in Sequential Elections" [More]

Zeev Maoz, Lesley G. Terris, Ranan D. Kuperman, Ilan Talmud, "What Is the Enemy of My Enemy? Causes and Consequences of Imbalanced International Relations, 1816-2001" [More]

Cameron G. Thies and Schuyler Porche, "The Political Economy of Agricultural Protection" [More]

Marc L. Hutchison and Douglas M.Gibler, "Political Tolerance and Territorial Threat: A Cross-National Study" [More]

Shannon Lindsey Blanton and Robert G. Blanton, "What Attracts Foreign Investors? An Examination of Human Rights and Foreign Direct Investment" [More]

J. Judd Owen, "Locke's Case for Religious Toleration: Its Neglected Foundation in The Essay Concerning Human Understanding" [More]

Jeffrey Church, "Selfish and Moral Politics: David Hume on Stability and Cohesion in the Modern State" [More]

Lawrence Ezrow, "The Variance Matters: How Party Systems Represent the Preferences of Voters" [More]

André Blais and Indridi H. Indridason, "Making Candidates Count: The Logic of Electoral Alliances in Two Round Legislative Elections" [More]

Matthew J. Dickinson and Matthew J. Lebo, "Reexamining the Growth of the Institutional Presidency, 1940-2000" [More]

John D. Griffin and Patrick Flavin, "Racial Differences in Information, Expectations and Accountability" [More]

Mark Lubell, "Familiarity Breeds Trust: Collective Action in a Policy Domain" [More]

Abstracts and Files:

The Decline of Third Party Voting in the United States
Shigeo Hirano, Columbia University
James S. Snyder Jr., MIT
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]
This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties – mainly left-wing third parties – declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the third party voting in the pre-New-Deal era was for left-wing third parties, and that this declined sharply during the 1930s and 1940s. We then show that after the New Deal the Democratic Party’s electoral support was higher in areas that had traditionally supported left-wing third parties. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we find little support for the hypothesis that the decline of third-party voting was immediately due to electoral reforms such as the introduction of direct primaries and the Australian ballot, except possibly in the south.

When Duty Calls, Do Citizens Answer?
Cindy D. Kam, University of California, Davis
Manuscript [PDF]

This article proposes that campaigns can serve a social function by drawing citizens into thinking about politics. Through an analysis of experimental data, the article reports that when subtle reminders of citizen duty appear in campaign discourse, citizens respond. Individuals who are reminded of citizen duty are more likely to learn where the candidates stand on issues, to think more about the candidates, and to search for information in an open-minded way. The results suggest that how citizens think about politics is flexible, rather than fixed, and can be shaped in consequential ways by the nature of elite appeals during election campaigns.

Crisis, Charisma, and Consequences: Evidence from the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election
Jennifer L. Merolla, Claremont Graduate University
Jennifer M. Ramos, University of California, Davis
Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, University of California, Davis
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

We investigate how conditions of crisis affect perceptions of charisma and how these, in turn, affect blame attribution and self-sacrificial behavior. Our data are from a 2004 experimental study that preceded the U.S. presidential election, in which we manipulated concerns of a terrorist attack. The results show that those in the Crisis condition rated Bush higher on perceptions of charisma compared to those in the Good Times condition. The Crisis condition also directly and indirectly, via perceptions of charisma, affected whether Bush was blamed for failures in Iraq and our subjects’ willingness to sacrifice their personal resources for his candidacy.

The Burr Dilemma in Approval Voting
Jack H. Nagel, University of Pennsylvania
Manuscript [PDF]

Problems of multicandidate races in U.S. presidential elections motivated the modern invention and advocacy of approval voting; but it has not previously been recognized that the first four presidential elections (1788-1800) were conducted using a variant of approval voting. That experiment ended disastrously in 1800 with the infamous Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Burr. The tie, this paper shows, resulted less from miscalculation than from a strategic tension built into approval voting, which forces two leaders appealing to the same voters to play a game of Chicken. Because the Burr Dilemma poses a significant difficulty for approval voting, this paper urges that researchers give more attention to “instant runoff” reform options, especially the alternative vote and the Coombs rule.

Polarization and Publicity: Rethinking the Benefits of Deliberative Democracy
David Stasavage, New York University
Jeff Manza, Northwestern University
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

Though openness in government has obvious benefits, recent scholarship has devoted less attention to the possibility that it might also have costs. I use a formal framework to investigate the effect of public versus private decision-making on opinion polarization. Existing work emphasizes that public debate helps to reduce polarization and promote consensus, but I argue that when debate takes place between representatives the opposite may be true. When representatives make decisions in public, they face incentives to use their actions as a signal of loyalty to their constituents, potentially ignoring private information about the true desirability of different policies. Anticipating this, constituents will not alter their prior policy beliefs following a debate of this type. When representatives instead make policy decisions in private, they are more likely to allow private information to influence their actions. An important consequence is that even if constituents do not observe actions or statements of individual representatives, they can still use the final policy choice to revise their initial beliefs. I suggest that these conclusions have significant implications for both the literature on deliberative democracy and for discussions of polarization in American politics.

The Forging of Judicial Autonomy: Political Entrepreneurship And the Reforms of William Howard Taft
Justin Crowe, Princeton University
Manuscript [PDF]

In his first four years as Chief Justice of the United States, William Howard Taft convinced Congress to pass two reform bills that substantially enhanced the power of the federal courts, the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice. In this article, I explore the causes and the consequences of those reforms. I detail how Taft’s political entrepreneurship—specifically the building of reputations, the cultivation of networks, and the pursuit of change through measured action—was instrumental in forging judicial autonomy and, subsequently, how that autonomy was employed to introduce judicial bureaucracy. By asking both how judicial reform was accomplished and what judicial reform accomplished, I offer an analytically grounded and historically rich account of the politics surrounding two of the most substantively important legislative actions relating to the federal judiciary in American history. In the process, I also draw attention to a largely neglected story of political development: the politics surrounding the building of the federal judiciary as an independent and autonomous institution of governance in American politics.

Run Boris Run: Strategic Voting in Sequential Elections
Joshua A. Tucker, New York University
Adam Meirowitz, Princeton University
Manuscript [PDF]

Following the 1995 Russian parliamentary election, it was suggested that Russian voters may have used their votes to send a message to the then current Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who was scheduled to run for re-election six months later. Building on this observation, we consider the incentives for information transmission through strategic voting in systems with sequential elections. We find that when an election for a sufficiently weak institution (e.g., a parliament) precedes an election for a strong institution (e.g., a president), in any equilibrium some voters vote against their preferred party in the first election to send a message to candidates in the second election. Following a brief discussion of the intuition underlying this argument, we present a model that allows us to isolate institutional features that affect the prevalence of this type of strategic voting: the relative importance of institutions to voters, the timing of sequential elections and the relative cost of responsiveness by candidates.

What Is the Enemy of My Enemy? Causes and Consequences of Imbalanced International Relations, 1816-2001
Zeev Maoz, University of California, Davis
Lesley G. Terris, Tel Aviv University
Ranan D. Kuperman, University of Haifa
Ilan Talmud, University of Haifa
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix A [PDF]
Appendix B [DTA]

This study explores logical and empirical implications of friendship and enmity in world politics by linking indirect international relations (e.g., “the enemy of my enemy,” “the enemy of my friend”) to direct relations (“my friend” “my enemy”). The realist paradigm suggests that states ally against common enemies, and thus states sharing common enemies should not fight each other. Nor are states expected to ally with enemies of their allies or with allies of their enemies. Employing social network methodology to measure direct and indirect relations, we find that international interactions over the last 185 years exhibit significant relational imbalances: states that share the same enemies and allies are disproportionately likely to be both allies and enemies at the same time. Our explanation of the causes and consequences of relational imbalances for international conflict/cooperation combines ideas from the realist and the liberal paradigms. “Realist” factors such as the presence of strategic rivalry, opportunism and exploitative tendencies, capability parity, and contiguity increase the likelihood of relational imbalances. On the other hand, factors consistent with the liberal paradigm (e.g., joint democracy, economic interdependence, shared IGO membership) tend to reduce relational imbalances. Finally, we find that the likelihood of conflict increases with the presence of relational imbalances. We explore the theoretical and practical implications of these issues.

The Political Economy of Agricultural Protection
Cameron G. Thies, University of Missouri-Columbia
Schuyler Porche, Louisiana State University
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

In this paper we analyze the political economy of agricultural producer support in the OECD countries between 1986 and 2001. We review the variety of theories of agricultural protection created by economists to explain this apparent anomaly. Most of these theories give short shrift to institutional features of the political system by simply assuming that politics is determined by underlying economic factors. We explicitly include political institutional factors, such as veto players, federalism, party fragmentation, and the timing of elections, alongside traditional economic factors to model agricultural producer support. A political economy model demonstrates that agriculture should not be treated as the exception to our understanding of protectionism as is often the conclusion of previous econometric studies. The results of several cross-sectional time-series analyses suggest that agricultural producer support conforms to general patterns of protectionism in other areas of industry.

Political Tolerance and Territorial Threat: A Cross-National Study
Marc L. Hutchison, University of Kentucky
Douglas M.Gibler, University of Alabama
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

The Steps-to-War theory of international conflict argues that territorial issues are more salient than other issues domestically. However, the evidence for this conclusion almost always rests with international conflict outcomes, assuming away the domestic political processes leading to greater salience. In the tolerance literature, several studies note that political attitudes, particularly toward unpopular groups, vary systematically across different states but provide few explanations that account for these differences. We believe these two observations are linked and argue that territorial threats serve as one factor conditioning individual political attitudes that privilege national unity over freedom of expression. Using World Values Survey data collected from 33 countries, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques, our paper confirms this. We find evidence that the type of external threat facing a country matters in moderating individual attitudes, even after controlling for economic and institutional differences across the states sampled. Specifically, we demonstrate how the diffusion from territorial threats to domestic audiences results in a chilling effect on individual willingness to extend democratic freedoms. Thus, we show that territorial issues exhibit greater salience domestically than other types of international issues.

What Attracts Foreign Investors? An Examination of Human Rights and Foreign Direct Investment
Shannon Lindsey Blanton, University of Memphis
Robert G. Blanton, University of Memphis
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [DOC]

Though the prospective relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and human rights has long been a prominent issue within the global political economy, the linkage is empirically underdeveloped. Rather, the conventional wisdom that FDI and respect for human rights are inherently contradictory has persisted. Instead, we posit that respect for human rights may encourage FDI. To examine this issue, we assess the direct effects of human rights upon FDI as well as the extent to which human rights indirectly affects FDI through its impact upon human capital. Using a system of simultaneous equations, we find respect for human rights to have a positive impact upon FDI.

Lockeâ€™s Case for Religious Toleration: Its Neglected Foundation in The Essay Concerning Human Understanding
J. Judd Owen, Emory University
Manuscript [PDF]

Although the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is considered Locke’s magnum opus, its relation to his political philosophy has been a perennial puzzle for scholars. Scholars have typically focused on the question of Locke’s natural law doctrine in the Essay and the Two Treatises. This article takes a different approach to uncovering the political significance of the Essay by relating the theological importance of its epistemology to Locke’s doctrine of religious toleration as found in the Letter Concerning Toleration. Crucial arguments supporting Locke’s case for religious toleration are to be found, not in the Letter, but in Essay, which seeks to elevate a limited but relatively uncontroversial natural theology above the disputed uncertainties inherent to revealed theology. Though not on the surface a political work, the Essay is fundamental to Locke’s political theology of toleration.

Selfish and Moral Politics: David Hume on Stability and Cohesion in the Modern State
Jeffrey Church, University of Notre Dame
Manuscript [PDF]

In Hume’s dialogue with the Hobbesian-Mandevillian “selfish system” of morals, Hume seems to reject its conclusions in morals, but accept them in politics. No skeptic of moral claims like Mandeville, Hume sought to ground objective moral standards in his moral sentiment philosophy, yet, like Mandeville, Hume argued that in political life human beings act based largely on self-interest and a limited generosity. I argue that Hume, however, is ultimately ambivalent about the selfish system’s conclusions in politics. He puts forth both a non-moral and a moral solution to the problem of cohesion in modern liberal states. First, he agrees with the selfish system’s non-moral tactic of channeling the self-interest of citizens through wellconstructed institutions toward salutary ends. Second, arguing that the first solution is insufficient for the health of a political regime, Hume seeks to expand the limited moral sense of citizens through moral and aesthetic education and through an empowerment of local politics. Hume’s second solution is a means within liberalism to combat its own tendencies toward the dissolution of communal ties and the creation of conditions ripe for the emergence of “sensible knaves.”

The Variance Matters: How Party Systems Represent the Preferences of Voters
Lawrence Ezrow, University of Essex and the Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

Cross-national analyses are presented that suggest that changes in the variance of voters’ policy preferences - in twelve Western European democracies from 1976 to 1998 - are associated with corresponding changes in the variance of policy choices on offer in these party systems. This finding is labeled the Voter Distribution Effects Result. There is also evidence to support a second major finding, the Electoral Laws Result, which states that voter distribution effects, i.e. the effects associated with changes in the variance of voters’ policy preferences, are stronger in political systems that feature less proportional electoral rules (e.g. plurality voting systems). These findings have implications for party strategies and for our general understanding of political representation.

Making Candidates Count: The Logic of Electoral Alliances in Two Round Legislative Elections
André Blais, Université de Montréal
Indridi H. Indridason, University of Iceland
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

Electoral systems have been shown to influence strategic voting and the development of party systems but the focus has rarely been on the strategies that parties adopt to take advantage of the electoral system under which they compete. Electoral pacts form one such strategy. We present a theory about the formation of electoral pacts in majority run-off elections and pay special attention to the consequences of the presence of extremist parties. Analyzing the 2002 French legislative elections we find that the Socialists and the Greens were more likely to form an alliance (and to agree on a common candidate) in closely contested constituencies and where there was a potential of coordination failure on the right. Finally, we show that the agreement primarily benefited the larger party.

Reexamining the Growth of the Institutional Presidency, 1940-2000
Matthew J. Dickinson, Middlebury College
Matthew J. Lebo, Stony Brook University
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

Scholars differ regarding the reason for the institutionalization of a large, functionally specialized White House-centered presidential staff system during the last six decades. Among the factors cited is a general growth in government size and complexity, increases in the presidential workload, and the institutional rivalry between the president and Congress. However, using new advances in time series analysis based on fractional integration, we show that these models of staff growth are plagued by conceptual and methodological shortcomings that render their substantive conclusions unreliable. In response, we develop and test a comprehensive explanatory model that combines elements of previous research but uses fractional integration to account more accurately for whether newly created staff positions are institutionalized. We find that presidential staff growth is driven primarily by changes in presidents’ bargaining relations with Congress, the media and the public, and only secondarily by a general growth in government’s responsibilities.

Racial Differences in Information, Expectations and Accountability
John D. Griffin, University of Notre Dame
Patrick Flavin, University of Notre Dame
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

Citizens contribute to the process of democratic accountability by acquiring information about their elected officials’ behavior, comparing this information to their expectations regarding substantive representation, and voting in elections based on the result of this comparison. However, citizens possess varying levels of information about, and different expectations of, Representatives’ voting behavior. This raises the possibility that some citizens are more likely to hold their Members of Congress (MCs) accountable than others. We find that there are substantial racial disparities in democratic accountability between whites and African Americans, and that these disparities stem from African Americans’ relative difficulty acquiring information about their MCs’ voting behavior, as well as from this group’s unique expectations of their MCs. These racial differences in information and expectations are exacerbated by descriptive representation, but not because descriptively represented African Americans are less informed. Finally, whites’ accountability advantage persists when the analysis is limited to each racial group’s most salient issue domain.

Familiarity Breeds Trust: Collective Action in a Policy Domain
Mark Lubell, University of California, Davis
Manuscript [PDF]
Appendix [PDF]

Researchers are currently refining the concept and theory of trust to focus on identifying the bases of trust within specific domains. This paper examines the development of trust within the domain of agricultural water policy, where trust is a critical resource for solving collective-action problems. The analysis uses data from a mail survey of farmers in agricultural water policy to integrate three theoretical frameworks: the conventional generalized trust perspective, Levi's transaction cost theory of trust, and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's Advocacy Coalition Framework. The results demonstrate that while there is a close relationship between the attitude of trust and beliefs about the behavior of policy actors, that the dynamics of trust within policy domains should be understood within the context of institutional structures and competing political values.