American Politics Core

Notes from American core with Josh Strayhorn

Author

Affiliation

Stone Neilon

PhD student of political science @ The University of Colorado Boulder

Week 1 - Introductions

• It is important to develop our own instincts about what is good and what is not good work in the field.

• Field is generally divided by behavior and institutions.

  • behavior is really about mass behavior and how people act.

  • Institutions is behavior of elites and actual politicians.

  • Sometimes you have other areas of research that kind of link between.

• Behavior -> institutions -> linkages -> other topics.

Assignments:

• Response papers - 5 of them - any week.

  • 1) identify over arching question of the week. What is big picture question?

  • 2) identify favorite and least favorite reading for week.

    • justify it.

• Propose research for a week.

  • Pick weeks that are closer to your heart.

  • Pitch to Josh a research design that adds to the literature.

Week 2 - Recent Research in the Subfield

In-Class Notes:

• All articles seem to reference polarization.

• These all seem to be “headline” articles.

• lots of survey data.

• More authors is the trend.

• Fowler:

  • Is congress polarizing because the public is polarizing? Or is it other things?

  • Fowler asks about policy preferences.

• Good papers establish topline relationship

  • can we establish the mechanism holds?

Fowler, Anthony, et al. 2023. “Moderates,” American Political Science Review.

Abstract:

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

Bumper Sticker:

Moderates need to be classified better and deserve more focus

Research Question:

How can we better identify moderates?

Why (from a survey perspective) are people moderate?

Background:

• We typically think of moderates in the following:

  • politically unsophisticated

  • uninformed

  • politically incoherent

  • secretly partisan

  • ideologically cross pressured

  • extreme, with patterns of attitudes poorly by a single ideological dimension

• There are obvious survey issues in trying to figure out if someone is a moderate.

Method:

• Sort classically identified moderates into three subgroups of moderate type:

  • those who have genuinely centrist views that are well summarized by a single underlying ideological dimension (spatial)

    • Downsian voters
      • live in single dimension.
    • \(Pr(y=1) = F(\beta_j(x_i-\alpha_j)\)
      • \(x_i\) is the ideological position
      • \(\alpha_j\) is issue

  • those who are inattentive to politics or the survey (unsophisticated)

    • random/incoherent views. The way in which they select answers has no coherence and basically makes no sense.

      • special stats here but basically if they are showing to have a .5 probability for selecting either survey response question - that is essentially random and they are probably an inattentive voter.

  • those who hold genuine views that are not well summarized by a single ideological dimension (someone whose preferences are neither unsophisticated nor well summarized by the spatial model and, second, an ideology score on the liberal–conservative dimension were the respondent to be a spatial type (#1 above).)

    • Conversian respondents (named after Philip Converse)

      • genuine position holders but not well described in a left-right orientation.

      • voters that care about specific stuff -> which might translate into a lack of a wide-ranging belief system.

      • They discriminate between thus if \(\neq\) .5 relative likelihood then they are probably a conversian moderate.

        • issue by issue responses not correlated with each other. Less than .5

        • not completely guessing but no complete structure.

      • no clear structure.

• Assumes responses are perfect representations of preferences

  • The issues have been ordered such that if a Downsian gives a conservative answer on issue one, he or she will necessarily give a conservative answer on issues two and three, and so on such that the three questions divide Downsians at three points along the ideological spectrum.

  • Questions are also ordered by popularity.

    • this ordering and assumptions allows them to figure out who is a “downsian” voter

      • if they conflict with the Guttman scale - that is probably not a downsian voter.

Data:

• Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES)

  • All CCES survey data from 2012 - 2018

  • 280k respondents

• Also use another CCES Model

  • 2010

  • asked 133 policy questions to 1,300 people.

• if the question was ordered they turned it into a binary scale.

  • they wanted all questions to be binary.

Findings:

• Moderates are more attentive to elections (than liberals and conservatives)

  • more responsive to incumbency

  • more responsive to candidate experience

  • more responsive to ideologies

• Most moderates appear to be Downsian

• results suggest centrist voters drive the relative success of incumbents, centrists, and experienced candidates.

• Find 6.5% of CCES respondents are inattentive

  • This is a bit weird to me… Not sure how to say it. THIS IS SURVEY RESPONDENTS!

    • this seems to conflict with the general idea in the american voter that most voters are inattentive.

    • Someone that chooses to fill out a survey is probably less likely to be an inattentive voter.

Mehlhaff, Isaac, et al. 2024. “Where Motivated Reasoning Withers and Looms Large: Fear and Partisan Reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract:

Contemporary American politics has been largely characterized by hyper partisanship and polarization, with partisan-motivated reasoning a thematic concern. Theories of emotions in politics suggest that anxiety might interrupt partisan heuristics and encourage citizens to reason more evenhandedly—but in what domains and to what extent? We use original panel data to assess how anxiety about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19 interacted with partisan attachments to shape political judgment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The structure of our data allows us to assess large-scale implications of politically relevant emotions in ways that so far have not been possible. We find large effects on policy attitudes: Republicans who were afraid of getting sick rejected signals from copartisan leaders by supporting mask mandates and the like. Effects on vote choice for Republicans were muted in comparison, but fear’s large effect on independents may have been pivotal.

Bumper Sticker:

Fear and anxiety can influence partisanship (a little)

Research Question:

• Why, then, did so many Republicans prefer policies starkly different from those suggested by their leaders but so few vote against those leaders?

• How did the anxiety of COVID-19 influence partisan politics?

Background:

• Partisanship influences how people see, act, and listen.

• Anxiety can influence both information gathering and information processing.

• The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented opportunity to test the posited link between anxiety and interruption of partisan habits.

• Partisans typically listen to party elites.

  • but for many republicans during Covid-19, they disagreed with the party elites.

• Accuracy Driven Reasoning: a processing style in which people exert more effort to reach correct conclusions. They “attend to relevant information more carefully,” “process it more deeply,” and “[consider] more alternatives”

Hypothesis:

1. Fearful individuals will be more supportive of pandemic mitigation policies such as mask mandates.

2. Fearful individuals’ accuracy motivations to be visible in the information they consult

   1. they should seek more information, including from sources they do not habitually use.

3. Fear to be associated with a greater likelihood of voting for Joe Biden

   1. why Biden? - because covid-19 mitigation information was more often endorsed by Biden.

4. Fearful Republicans should move further toward support for mitigation policies simply because their attitudes have more room to change in that direction.

Data:

• Qualtrics survey in April 2020

  • w/ follow up interviews in June, September, and October.

• Examine support for five pandemic related policies:

  • mask mandates

  • stay at home orders

  • business lockdowns

  • monitor of public spaces by police

  • mandatory covid-19 testing

• Then assessed the influence of anxiety on information search and knowledge about Covid-19.

• Then evaluated how anxiety altered approval rates of Trump and the CDC.

• Finally, wave 4 is used to examine who the respondent will vote for in the election.

Findings:

• Anxiety about real-world events can decouple partisans’ policy positions from those of their party leaders. Once citizens enter the voting booth, however, their ability to assess accountability and mete out electoral reward or punishment remains deeply affected by partisanship even under pandemic conditions.

• fear of getting sick with COVID-19 can lead citizens to adopt policy positions contrary to party cues.

• the results suggest that anxiety does encourage individuals to pursue accuracy-motivated reasoning, even on a highly politicized issue

• anxiety encourages individuals to seek out new information, to eschew habitual elite cues, and process what they learn with the goal of achieving accuracy, rather than rationalizing partisan talking points.

• At the lowest levels of fear, respondents’ vote intentions were strongly associated with their party identification.

• Fear increases people to check different news sources.

• As fear increased, probability to vote Trump decreases.

  • effect is not as much as the effect of fear on policy preferences (mask mandates, etc.)

• Independents were more affected by fear.

• fear of severe illness did little to attenuate the effect of partisanship on vote choice.

  

Notes:

• I don’t like the way it discusses elite cues.

  • there were so many cues from everywhere all at once.

  • There is also a potential lag going on between cues and individual.

• Very similar to the Charlie Hebdo article we read in comparative.

Hopkins, Dan, Yphtach Lelkes and Samuel Wolken. 2024. “The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage,” American Political Science Review.

I like this one!

Abstract:

While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using natural language processing tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008–2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: Outlets may highlight meaningful social identities—race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship—to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.

Bumper Sticker:

More engagement/demand with articles that include identities in headlines.

Research Question:

1. Have social identities become more prominent in the political information environment?

2. Do the same stories generate more engagement when framed with identity-oriented language?

Hypothesis:

1. Media coverage of social identities has grown in recent decades as outlets adopt identity-oriented coverage strategies (production of identity-oriented content)

2. On social media, news content referencing core social identities is especially likely to generate engagement (audience level reaction to content)

Background:

• Voters may make different voting decisions when the salience of key issues changes

  • What explains changes in salience?

    • A major argument says the media.

• The media may be devoting more coverage to identity driven media coverage

  • however, we don’t know if that is true

    • puzzle!

• Mechanism of focus: audience demand

• Real time data metrics and a highly fragmented and competitive media market is in part what has led to changes in media coverage.

• Economic incentives for media companies to publish this content because it gains more engagement.

• Theory: reliance on audience metrics has increased identity-oriented media.

• Why do social identity coverage generate audience engagement?

  • Social identities serve as filters in a complex information environment, helping individuals identify relevant and actionable information.

  • social identities often serve as a foundation for coordination and collective action

  • social identity cues help individuals understand the applicable group norms in specific contexts

Data:

• All tweets from 19 American media outlets (2008-2021; n = 6,235,014)

• Media outlet URLs shared by Facebook users (2017-2020; n = 553,078)

• News website Upworthy assigned different headlines to different people of similar stories (2013-2015)

Results:

• Posts with identity-related content have higher levels of expressive and social engagement (measured via liking and sharing) than those without it.

• Different outlets are shown to invoke different identities more frequently than others.

• Since 2007, mentions of racial and partisan identities on Twitter have roughly tripled.

• Partisan identities appear in a large proportion of Facebook posts, and the prevalence of other identities in news URLs posted on Facebook is roughly 2–5 percentage points higher, depending on the identity category

Notes:

• This is an interesting article

• I think it fits nicely with other supply/demand explanations of media

  • see Kevin Munger

Chiou, Fang-Yi and Max Goplerud. 2024. “Effective Lawmaking Across Congressional Eras,” Journal of Politics.

Abstract:

A key concept in American legislative politics is the extent to which members are effective, i.e. have the ability to propose and advance bills on important topics in Congress. We propose a new measure of a member’s legislative effectiveness that covers both chambers from 1873 to 2010 and incorporates all 1.1 million introduced bills, opening up a wide range of new opportunities for examining legislative institutions and behavior across this long historical period. To pursue this, we theorize and empirically examine how the determinants of a member’s legislative effectiveness hinge on legislative institutions. While uncovering consistent results with the existing literature that has focused on the period starting in the early 1970s, we find striking differences when examining earlier periods. For instance, we find that ideological moderates have higher effectiveness relative to extremists before 1975, whereas the importance of majority-party membership increases dramatically from 1947.

Bumper Sticker:

We made a new legislative efficiency score that tells us stuff about political history.

Background:

• What does it mean to be an effective lawmaker?

  • “The proven ability to advance a member’s agenda items through the legislative process and into law” (Volden & Wiseman 2014)

• looking at structural institutions to see how it changes efficiency.

• They are creating a new way to measure members’ legislative efficiency

• Primarily focused on role of committee chairs, majority parties, and ideological distance to chamber medians.

• Rule changes + organizational changes separate the legislative eras.

  • what institutional factors caused variation in efficiency.

Hypothesis:

Which factors the authors expect will have the most impact on legislative efficiency in different eras.

Data:

• Create a member-level measure of effectiveness by considering the totality of bills that are introduced into Congress within a term.

• 1873-2010

• Create bill level measure to weigh importance of a bill.

• 1.1 million bills

• look at bill progress + importance. - measure of bill salience.

Results:

• Between the 1890s and 1946, we find that ideological extremism harms a members legislative effectiveness.

• After 1947, we find clear advantages for majority party members.

• the effect of ideological distance on legislative effectiveness disappears from the mid 1970s, coinciding with the increasingly pronounced roles of political parties and committee chairs.

• We also find that committee chairs tend to have higher effectiveness, with the effect being largest during the Textbook Congress in the House while staying stable in the Senate.

• Separate 1873-2010 into four regimes:

  • Early (1873-1888)

  • Pre-War (1889-1946)

  • Textbook Congress (1947-1974)

  • Post-Reform (1975-2010)

Levendusky, Matt, et al. 2024. “Has the Supreme Court Become Just Another Political Branch? Public Perceptions of Court Approval and Legitimacy in a Post-Dobbs World,” Science.

Abstract:

Have perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court polarized, much like the rest of American politics? Because of the Court’s unique role, for many years, it remained one of the few institutions respected by both Democrats and Republicans alike. But the Court’s dramatic shift to the right in recent years—highlighted by its Dobbs decision in 2022—potentially upends that logic. Using both eight waves of panel data and 18 nationally representative surveys spanning two decades, we show that while there was little evidence of partisan polarization in earlier years, in 2022 and 2023, such patterns are clear in favorability, trust, legitimacy, and support for reform. Factors that used to protect the Court—like knowledge about it and support for key democratic values—no longer do so. The Court has also become more important to voters, and will likely remain a political flashpoint, with disquieting implications for the Court’s place in our polity.

Bumper Sticker:

Dobbs bad for Court

Research Question:

Has the Supreme Court become politicized and lost legitimacy in recent years?

Background:

• Court needs legitimacy

• No legitimacy = no power

  • weakest branch

• Reservoir of good will over time

• However, court has lurched farther to the right and acted more politically.

• Favorability \(\neq\) Legitimacy

• Dobbs overturns Roe v. Wade

  • Probably the biggest decision in recent Court history.

Data:

• 18 nationally represented surveys spanning nearly two decades

• Panel data

• 8 wave panel dataset

Results:

• Court has lost legitimacy and favorability

• Democrats see court as less legitimate and this has persisted over time.

• Dobbs really messed up the courts legitimacy

• People more informed and knowledgeable about courts have lost legitimacy

• Increase support for court reforms.

Notes:

• This seems like the same article that Gibson wrote about the effect of Dobbs.

  • Improves upon the Gibson article in three ways:

    • panel data availability

    • timing of panel data allows flexibility in regards to the Dobbs leak

    • data goes into 2023 allowing study of overtime Dobbs effect rather than immediate effect.

Week 3 - Classic Readings in American Politics

Campbell, Angus, Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. Ch. 4.

Partisan Choice - Chapter 4.

• The motivational role of perceptions of the wider political environment deserves greater attention.

Bumper Sticker:

Levels of attitudes impact vote choice.

Main Hypothesis:

• The voting act depends in an immediate sense on the individual voter’s evaluative orientations towards several objects of politics ought to be tested by an examination of the influence of all these orientations at once.
• How do people decide which candidate to vote for

Psychological forces on behavior:

• Voting is the resultant of attitudinal forces.

• voters have orientations to the elements of politics

  • elements include the president, domestic + foreign policy, performance of parties in gov., personal attributes p.67

    • these are evaluated and subsequently shape the orientation as either positive or negative.

      • these combined make up a system of partisan attitudes.

  • basically like approval ratings for stuff.

Partisan Attitude and Voting Choice:

• The psychological measures strongly affect the partisan vote.

• More favorable attitude of Eisenhower = higher % of republicans voted for him

• Less favorable attitude of Eisenhower = Lower % of republicans voted for him.

• data is a small n.

• Note this is just one attitude dimension that does not explain the voting act

  • authors argue the partisan choice is based on a system of partisan attitudes.

• Attitude towards Eisenhower at the extreme ends predicts vote choice pretty well. However, those that are more neutral in their attitude towards Eisenhower (regardless of party affiliation) does not predict vote choice well.

  • Authors need more dimensions to explain vote choice as attitude toward Eisenhower is not enough.

• These graphs are awful.

Findings:

• Evidence for their hypothesis is supported from their sample

  

  Results of their model in predictive power of vote.

• Also looked at the error rate and why it existed.

  • did some qualitative work through interviews

    • “Our interviews suggest that the dynamics of these face-to-face associations are capable of generating forces that may negate the force of the individual’s own evaluations of the elements of politics.” p.76

      • “…For example, one respondent traced an abrupt reversal of his vote intention to the arrival of a brother-in–law from California; another to the pressures he felt from work associates; another to face-to-face badgering by a precinct committeeman.” p.76

        • Seeing a bit of social capital/Gerber, green, Lerimer, in here

• Also showing early signs/evidence of partisan sorting among an individuals network.

The Effects of Attitude Conflict:

• Campaign is important for them as it increases political salience.

• This section seems to ask to what degree does a campaign influence the individuals vote decision.

• They ask when an individual’s vote decision crystallized.

  • majority knew before campaign

    • 2nd most knew after who candidate was.

  • Those that knew earliest had the highest joint relation of those 6 attitudes tested earlier.

    • the decision time of who to vote correlates with a decline in 6 attitudinal relationship.

      • INTERESTING! - the people that are latest to decide have the lowest correlation in the 6 attitudes tested.

        • might these be moderates? Might this explain why candidates start turning to the middle during the general election? Might this be why there is so much focus on the undecided voters?

• The proportion deciding late always is greater as the degree of attitude conflict is greater; at any attitude level.

• persons in the sample who decided late had the highest amount of attitudes in conflict.

• Later voter has less enthusiasm about candidate.

  • more likely to split ticket.

    • “In our data from several presidential election campaigns it is clear that persons who show some degree of conflict of partisan attitude are less likely to be interested in the campaign than those whos attitudes are fully consistent, and they are less likely to care how the election turns out.” p.85

      • this seems to be different from the Fowler et. al reading from earlier.

      • bring this up to Josh.

Converse, Philip. 1964. “The Nature of Belief Systems in the Mass Public,” (reprinted in Critical Review, 2006).

Bumper Sticker:

How do people form their political belief system

Main Focus:

Differences in the nature of belief systems held on the one hand by elite political actors and, on the other hand, by the masses that appear to be “numbered” within the spheres of influence of these belief systems.

Hypothesis:

There are important and predictable differences in ideational worlds as we progress downward through such “belief strata” and that these differences, while obvious at one level, are easily overlooked and not infrequently miscalcualted.

1. As one moves from elite sources of belief systems downwards on such an informational scale, several important things occur

   1. the contextual grasp of “standard” political belief systems fades out very rapidly, almost before one has passed beyond the 10 percent of the American population that in the 1950s had completed standard college training.

      1. The net result, as one moves downward, is that constraint declines across the universe of idea-elements, and that the range of relevant belief systems becomes narrower and narrower.

2. Objects change as we move down as well.

   1. From more abstract to simple/“close to home” objects.

      1. abstract > social groups/charismatic leaders>objects of immediate experience (family, job, etc.)

Definitions:

• Belief system: a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence.

  • Static “constraint” - may be taken to mean the success we would have in predicting, given initial knowledge that an individual holds a specified attitude, that he holds certain further ideas and attitudes.

  • Dynamic “constraint” - refers to the probability that a change in the perceived status of one idea-element would psychologcially require, from the point of view of the actor, some compensating change(s) in the status of idea elements elsewhere in the configuration.

  • idea elements - make up a belief system. No formal definition but seem to be an actors preferences.

    • idea elements vary in centrality.

      • this refers to the importance of the idea element within the belief system.

        • these can change over time. Generally thought that “ends” are supposed to be more central than “means”.

  • Belief systems have ranges

    • the scope of objects that are referents for ideas and attitudes in the system.

      • focus will be on belief systems with wide ranges and some degree of centrality.

  • avoid using ideology because it gets confusing cause like Marx talks about ideology.

Sources of constraint on idea-elements:

Logical Sources of Constraint:

• government revenues, government expenditures, and budget balance are three idea-elements that suggest some purely logical constraints.

  • these positions are contradictory.

    • however, this still does not ensure subjective constraints will be felt by the actor.

• hypothesis 1) logical inconsistencies would be far more prevalent in a broad public.

• constraints among idea-elements visible at an elite level is mirrored by the same lines of constraint in the belief system of their less visible “supporters.”

  • they believes this to be incorrect.

Psychological Sources of Constraint:

• Few belief systems depend on logical constraints.

• Logical contradictions in belief system

  • IMPORTANTLY: elites familiar with the totality of the belief system recognize the logically constrained cluster of ideas.

• There are like mega ideas(?), postures, values that make up prime centrality

  • social darwinism, social change, natural law, the nature of social justice

• Kinda quasi-logic, things that feel like they should go together.

Social Sources of Constraint:

First source of social constraint:

• In the case of the belief system, arguments are developed to lend some more positive rationale to the fact of constraint: The idea-elements go together not simply because both are in the interest of the person holding a particular status but for more abstract and quasi-logical reasons developed from a coherent world view as well. It is this type of constraint that is closest to the classic meaning of the term “ideology.”
• Group identity, social influence, political party*.

Second source of social constraint:

• Shaping a belief system into something that is credible to large portions of the population can only be done by some minuscule portion of the population.

• idea elements of a belief system are diffused in “packages”.

  • (“If you believe this, then you will also believe that, for it follows in such-and-such ways”).

• Information must be successfully transmitted.

• trickling of information is largely due to differences in education

  • but also modified by differences in specialized interest and tastes that individuals have acquired over time.

Active Use of Ideological Dimensions of Judgement:

• Seems to be describing the role of information shortcuts.

• greater constraint a system of multiple elements - the easier it can be packaged and understood.

• Uses ‘yardsticks’ as the term to describe this.

• Hierarchy of respondents:

  • Ideologue: top level - people who had some abstraction conceptualization

    • smallest group
    • know what terms mean and use them accurately.

  • Semi-ideologue: second level - mentioned a dimension but did not seem to grasp fully the dimension/concepts

    • second smallest

  • Group Interest - Third level - failed to rely upon any such over-arching dimensions yet evaluated parties and candidates in terms of their expected favorable or unfavorable treatment of different social groupings in the population.

    • Largest

      • some variation in sophistication at this level

      • less interest in politics.

      • Why aren’t they considered ideologues?

        • they are kinda described as “followers”

    • Think about social groups

    • Cues from social groups.

  • Nature of the Times: Fourth level - residual category - respondents that invoked some policy considerations in their evaluations yet employed none of the references meriting location in any of the first three levels.

    • nature of the times voters

    • Issue reference was a single narrow policy for which they felt personal gratitude or indignation toward a party or candidate. Don’t connect these policies to bigger postures of the party.

  • No issue content: Fifth level - respondents whose evaluations of the political scene had no shred of policy significance whatever.

    • they can be loyal to parties but have no idea what they stand for.

    • devoted attention to personal qualities of candidates.

Other:

• Early on, people could distinguish democrats as liberal because they spent and republicans as conservative because they wanted to save.

  • “spend-save” dimension used quite a bit by the voters surveyed.

• Groups as attitude objects are of higher centrality in masses than elites.

• masses less stable overtime in belief system.

Questions for lecture

• P.11 - not entirely sure what they are talking about - a little confusing.

Mayhew, Peter. 1974. Congress: The Electoral Connection. Chs. 1–2 (selected portions).

How everything in congress works basically.

Chapter 1

• Congressmen are interested in getting reelected

  • this is the core assumption made for analytically purposes in the book. All else is second to this main point.

• growth of “career” congressmen.

  • used to be lots of “volunteerism” - now this has fallen to the wayside.

• Fenno assigns three prime goals to congressmen: (Mayhew cares about re election more than anything else)

  • getting reelected

  • achieving influence in congress

  • making good public policy

• Nomination is through primary

• American congressmen have to mobilize their own resources.

• MP: a congressmen must build a powerbase that is substantially independent of party.

• What can a congressmen do to affect the fortunes of a presidency?:

  • support president in roll call votes (if same party)

• Congressmen typically have narrow victories at some point.

• All members share an interest in doing things to get them reelected.

  • What are activities that are electorally useful to engage in.

    • advertising: an effort to disseminate one’s name among constituents in such a fashion as to create a favorable image but in messages having little or no issue content.

      • good to be known. need a brand.

        • modern version seems to be starting a podcast.

    • Credit claiming: acting so as to generate a belief in a relevant political actor (or actors) that one is personally responsible for causing the government, or some unit thereof, to do something that the actor (or actors) consider desirable.

      • individual accomplishment

        • linking your presence of congress to the success of policy.

      • bringing home the pork.

    • Position taking: public enunciation of a judgmental statement on anything likely to be of interest to political actors.

      • roll call votes

      • statements

      • normative stuff

      • Congressmen should stick to old positions - be “conservative”

        • facing defeat, it may make sense to gamble on new policy positions.

Chapter 2

• Chapter 1 was dedicated to show what activities are electorally useful to congressmen.

  • The goal of chapter 2 is to show what happens when members who need to engage in these activities assemble for collective action

• Committee position can be important for reelection.

  • productivity of the committee

  • power of the committee

  • division of labor

  • The quest for specialization in congress, is a quest for credit.

  • staffing

• Parties are important for reelection

  • members of the same party do not all take the same position

    • they have some freedom to exercise their vote.

  • Party leaders are chosen not to be program salesman or vote mobilizers, but to be brokers, favor-doers, agenda-setting, and protectors of established institutional routines.

• Universalism p.105

  • Looked at from one angle the cult of of universalism has the appearance of a cross-party conspiracy among incumbents to keep their jobs.

• p.27

  • candidate centric elections

  • parties weren’t the focus of elections.

• Biggest takeaway: The ways institution arise out of the incentives that their creator has.

  • why do we have all these institutions- why do we have committes - it allows us to better serve our institutions.

Fenno, Richard. 1978. Home Style, Ch. 1.

• How do congressmen view their home district? What is their perception of it?

  • concentric circles

    • 

      Concentric circle example

    • four concentric circles for each congressman:

      • geographic

      • reelection

      • primary

      • personal

The District:

• The largest of the concentric circle.

• the entity to which, from which, and within which the member travels. It is the entity whose boundaries have been fixed by state legislative enactment or by court decision.

• geographical constituency.

• house members describe their district with political and demographic variables.

• congressmen perception of district \(\neq\) census data

• Why should we care about the perception of congressmen of their district?

  • it may influence how they govern.

  • How they seek reelection

• Congressmen all seem to think of their district on some level of homogeneity/heterogeneity.

• The less conflict a congressman perceives among district interests, the more likely he is to see his district as homogeneous.

• district construction are largely artificial. They do not necessarily represent or encompass real physical social communities.

• “distance acts as a barrier to contact and to interest.” p.7

The Supporters:

• Congressmen do think of a political community within his geographical constituency

  • those in the district that think they will for him.

    • reelection constituency.

  • Starting seeing the district as “that group won’t vote for me”, “I do well with that group”

• “who voted for me last time.”

• The electoral challenger is important.

• redistricting

The Primary Constituency: The Strongest Supporters:

• Congressmen distinguish between weak and strong supporters

The Personal Constituency: The Intimates:

• Center of concentric circle

• the closest people to the member

• advisers/confidants

• “home base”

Neustadt, Richard. 1964. Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, Ch. 1–3.

These chapters are basically all about how the President deals with principle-agent problems.

Written for JFK. Literally.

Chapter 1; Leader or Clerk?:

• When we make judgments about the president, what exactly are we evaluating?

• What is the President’s influence on governmental action?

  • His strength and weakness, then, turns on his personal capacity to influence the conduct of the men who make up the government.

• power means influence

• Two ways to study political power:

  • one way: focus on tactics of influencing certain men in given situations

  • other way: what can this man accomplish to improve the prospect that he will have influence when he wants it? What is its nature and what are its resources?

    • what he does to boost his chance of mastery in any instance, looking toward tomorrow from today

      • this way is the focus of the book.

  • Focus: Eisenhower, Truman, FDR

• President is an invaluable clerk. President can be used by members of congress to help themselves - his actions are useful in their business.

• People look to the president to do something on everything

  • however they cant.

• the growth of the presidency represents a historical need from other parts of government.

• Presidents constituency:

  • Executive officialdom

  • Congress

  • partisans

  • citizens at large

  • abroad

• Presidential power is the power to persuade

  • see example with Eisenhower.

  • not all results can be achieved through orders given by the presidency.

• Look at three events to illustrate point:

  • MacArthur Dismissal

  • Steel mill strikes

  • Little Rock School integration.

• Seems to be discussing principle-agent issue.

• Embedded within these three events is a host of other factors used by the president to help ensure they exert influence in their action

  • president involvement was unambiguous

  • so were his words

  • order was widely publicized

  • men receiving order had control of everything to carry out

  • no doubt of authority

• Favorable factors that ensure compliance more in depth:

  • First factor: a presidential order is assurance the president has spoken.

    • given by the man himself

  • Second factor: Clarity about his meaning (of order)

  • Third factor: Publicity of directive.

  • Fourth factor: the directive is actually able to be carried out.

  • Fifth factor: What he wants is by his right.

• Accomplishing directives without some use of these factors will fall flat for the presidency.

• Important to note the three events were all last resorts.

  • don’t want painful last resorts. Do stuff early as president.

Chapter 3; The Power to Persuade:

• The constitution didn’t separate powers it created a government of shared power

• The essence of a President’s persuasive task is to convince such men that what the White House wants of them is what they ought to do for their sake and on authority.

• Fear of presidential action is important in allowing the president to have greater persuasiveness.

• The power to persuade is the power to bargain

  • status and authority help with bargaining.

• President and congress need each other to do anything.

• President still to some degree has to persuade people within the executive office.

  • lower tier department officials.

• logic and reasoning is not enough for persuasion

  • reminds me of Socrates vs. the Sophists

    • Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts” (Theaetetus 172). He also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth” (Phaedrus 260). The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility —based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion. p.9 Origins of totalitarianism

• “The people on the hill don’t do what they might like to do, they do what they think they have to do in their own interest as they see it.”

• President has to persuade congressmen that what he wants is in the best interest of them.

• president has a lot of soft power - anyone will pick up the phone if he calls.

• President has the ability to grease wheels.

• president power is subtle.

• but of course the president is still powerful.

Dahl, Robert. 1957. “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as National Policy Maker,” Journal of Public Law.

• Supreme court is not solely a legal institution.

Main focus:

• “What is critical is the extent to which a court can and does make policy decisions by going outside established”legal” criteria found in precedent, statute, and constitution.”

• Much of the court’s legitimacy rests upon the fiction that it is not a political institution but exclusively a legal one.

• There are cases where the supreme court is deciding between policy and the solution cannot be found in precedent, statute, or the constitution.

  • thus the court is a national policy maker.

• This motivates the question: “what groups benefit or are handicapped by the Court and how does the allocation by the Court of these rewards and penalties fit into our presumably democratic political system?

II

• The Majority Criterion

  • simply majority vs minority.

  • every conflict within a given society must be a dispute between a majority of those eligible to participate and a minority or minorities; or else it must be a dispute between or among minorities only.

  • Court has three possible outcomes:

    • accord with the preferences of a minority of citizens and run counter to the preferences of a majority

    • accord with the preferences of a majority and run counter to the preferences of a minority

    • accord with the preferences of one minority and run counter to the preferences of another minority, the rest being indifferent.

  • This role is not that important or defended much because congress is a thing and represents this all much better.

  • But then does the court protect minorities from “tyrannical” majorities?

    • well this is also a problematic view according to Dahl

      • Democracy is rule by majority. The principle of majority rule is a logical necessity.

        • for the court to act in this way is to affirm that the court ought to act in a way to deny popular sovereingty and political equality ought to prevail in this counry.

  • How do we even know what the population thinks? What is the majority?

    • pre mass polling

    • uses congress + president as the barometer of “majority” opinion.

  • Justices are appointed by presidents - who don’t usually appoint hostile justices!

    • policy views of the court are never far out of line with the lawmaking majorities of the United States (this is obviously a bit outdated as we see differently today).

  • Lawmaking majorities generally have their way.

  • The court can delay the application of policy for a long time

• Right of Justice

  • basic premise: a country that respects the rights of man or believes in it, the court should defend these rights against a lawmaking majority.

    • but the justices are appointed by the lawmaking majority

      • are their beliefs ever that far out of line with them?

        • do we really think they would go against them?

          • doesn’t look that good:

            • slave owners over slavery

            • white people over black people

            • property owners at the expense of wage earners

• If the court flagrantly opposes the major policies of the dominant alliance

  • legitimacy goes down.

• Court is least effective against a current law making majority and least inclined to act.

• Not majority or minority rule but minorities rule.

• the Court operates to confer legitimacy, not simply on the particular and parochial policies of the dominant political alliance, but upon the basic patterns of behavior required for the operation of a democracy.

• The main objective of presidential leadership is to build a stable and dominant aggregation of minorities with a high probability of winning the presidency and one or both houses of Congress. The main task of the Court is to confer legitimacy on the fundamental policies of the successful coalition.

  • this is really important to me!

• Big takeaway: court does not have the power to stand against strong majorities.

Lecture Notes:

• computers didn’t exist

  • the idea of what the ‘majority’ thought was kinda dubious back then.

• Partisan ID is the biggest predictor of vote choice - big contribution from the American voter.

• ANES comes around 1952.

• Cambell = Michigan mode/school

  • party is enduring personal trait that you get early in life

    • which is previous to party/vote choice.

• political psych is a bit more cognitively involved. - motivated reasoning, etc.

• Look up resource model.

• Converse is all about constraint.

  • logically coherent views - ideologues, if i hold position on x, i hold these position on y.

  • unconstrainted views - knowing one opinion doesn’t mean we know another opinion. not super predictable.

  • Elites have more constraints aka they are more coherent in their belief system.

Week 4 - Political Opinion and Political Psychology

lecture notes:

• Common theme - political attitudes/opinions is DV.

• lots of surveys and experiments

• Zaller is fundamentally interested in how a person responds to survey questions.

• I’m not sure Zaller does a good job of answering/explaining moderates

• ARE VOTERS UP TO THE TASK OF BEING A GOOD DEMOCRATIC CITIZEN? - MAJOR QUESTION OF ALL BEHAVIOR LITERATURE.

• How should we view survey after Zaller

  • well we can still take survey results on their face

  • we do have error.

  • right on average

On-line mode

Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Chs. 2–4.

Chapter 2

*have Josh go over the measurement error discussion - bit confused there.

Aim(s)

1. Show how variations in this elite discourse affect both the direction and organization of mass opinion.

2. Academics make models assuming all citizens to be adequately and equally informed about politics.

   1. Zaller thinks this is dumb and not true.

3. (my thought) Zaller wants to know what an opinion is and how is it influenced.

4. Describe the issues of opinion data.

   1. note: not statistical issues. These are issues outlined by Zaller related to how people think about and are influenced.

Definitions:

• Political elites - persons who devote themselves full time to some aspect of politics or public affairs

  • politicians, higher-level government officials, journalists, some activists, and many kinds of experts and policy specialists.

  • Frames of Reference - news stereotypes

• Party Conversion Thesis - Mass polarization occurred because of party loyal reshuffling

  • liberals moved to democrat (in the context of 1960s race stuff)

  • conservatives moved to republican (in the context of 1960s race stuff)

• ***Opinion Leadership Thesis - Mass polarization occurred because of opinion conversion.

  • Democrats became more liberal

  • Republicans became more conservative

  • This is the one Zaller will focus on.

• “Information carried in elite discourse about politics” - refers to the stereotypes, frames of reference, and elite leadership cues that enable citizens to form conceptions

  • and opinions about events beyond their full understanding.

• Political awareness - the extent to which an individual pays attention to politics and understands what he or she has encountered.

  • heavy emphasis is placed on the ability to understand - the absorption of political communication.

• Political predispositions - stable, individual-level traits that regulate the acceptance or non-acceptance of the political communications the person receives.

  • predispositions are gained during development/life. Think socialization literature.

• Values - “general and enduring standards” that hold a “more central position than attitudes” in individuals belief systems and that “lead us to take particular positions on social issues”

  • should we think of these as idea-elements (Converse)?

• Schema - a cognitive structure that organizes prior information and experience around a central value or idea, and guides the interpretation of new information and experience.

  • multiple schemas available for understanding a phenomenon.

Overview:

• People never get the full record of recorded events and developments. Media distorts and has biases.

  • it is also very simple.

    • despite people saying that the media is too simple, they do not like when it is more extensive and in-depth; “it’s harder to follow”.

• New stereotypes are created and influence how we see things.

• Frames and stereotypes help inform the public

  • which determines how people take sides on political issues

    • for events/news that are both observed and unobserved

• Does the public have any choice in news stereotypes?

  • if they don’t have choice, the public can do little more than follow the elite consensus on what should be done. p.8 (2nd chap)

    • this seems like a supply argument. The more elites -> greater options for the public.

• Most attentive members of the public are most likely to adopt elite pov on the matter.

  • when elites divide, the public tends to split down partisan lines with the elite closest to them.

  • Almost dipping into a little of Foucault with discussion of academia perpetuating racists knowledge.

• Shift in mass attitudes correlates with a shift in elite attitudes.

• Better educated were more likely to adopt elite opinions because they followed them more

• If elite cues can change opinions on race - it can change anything.

• Focus is on the Opinion Leadership thesis.

• Elites on Elite opinion changes (?)

  • see discussion of Newsweek and defense spending

• People vary in political awareness

• overall levels of information are low

• Political awareness is associated with increased exposure to current communications that might change one’s opinion, but it is also associated with heightened capacity to react critically to new information.

  • political awareness and mass opinion is the biggest contribution of the book according to Zaller.

• *** Elites are NOT assumed to have an important role in shaping predispositions ***

  • Predispositions mediate people’s responses to elite information in the manner just indicated, but predispositions are not in the short run influenced by elites.

    • Maybe there is an effect but book doesn’t deal with it.

• I feel there is lots of overlap with Converse and Campbell in regards to political awareness.

• First, one should, whenever possible, use appropriate domain-specific measures of political values, rather than a general measure of ideology, as the operational measure of citizens’ predispositions to accept or reject the political communications they receive. The reason is that ideology, as the more general measure of people’s left-right tendencies, is more likely to miss reactions to a particular issue than is an indicator that has been tailored to that issue.

What is an Opinion?

“The interview situation is an odd social experience. The respondent, on his doorstep or in his living room, is barraged with a set of questions on a wide variety of subjects by a stranger, usually a rather well-educated woman over 30, who carefully notes each response on a sheet of paper. Few people are accustomed to having their every utterance faithfully recorded and many find the experience flattering. And, aware that their views are being preserved for the ages, they do not wish to appear unprepared at that moment. Under these circumstances it is not surprising to find respondents pontificating in a seemingly authoritative, if basically”truthful,” manner on subjects about which they know nothing or to which they have never given any thought whatsoever. . . . (p. 1)”

• Zaller takes this quote and runs with it basically. The book is trying to make sense of the phenomenon described above.

Problems with Mass Opinion Reports

• overtime instability

  • basically there is a lot of random error and we need to focus on this according to Zaller.

• Response effects

  • survey questions content and order can prime responses.

• Question wording effects

  • the content of the question can radically change how people respond to reporting their opinion.

Zaller’s Model:

• I abandon the conventional but implausible view that citizens typically possess “true attitudes” on every issue about which a pollster may happen to inquire, and instead propose a model of how individuals construct opinion reports in response to the particular stimuli that confront them.

  • This model unites in one theory an account of how people acquire information about politics, as sketched in the first part of this chapter, with an account of how they use that information to formulate responses to typical survey items.

• People are continuously exposed to a stream of political news and information, much of it valenced so as to push public opinion in one direction or the other. But, owing to the generally low levels of attention to politics in this country, most people on most issues are relatively uncritical about the ideas the internalize. In consequence, they fill up their minds with large stores of only partially consistent ideas, arguments, and considerations. When asked a survey question, they call to mind as many of these ideas as are immediately accessible in memory and use them to make choices among the options offered to them. But they make these choices in great haste - typically on the basis of the one or perhaps two considerations that happen to be at the “top of the head” at the moment of response. p.36 chapter 2

• The basic claim of the model, thus, is that survey responses are a function of immediately accessible “considerations,” where the flow of information in elite discourse determines which considerations are salient. The reason for response instability, on this view, is that different considerations happen to be salient at different times, which causes people’s survey responses to differ over repeated interviews. Changes in question order or question wording can bring about systematic changes in the considerations immediately salient to people, and hence systematic changes in their survey responses.

Chapter 3: How citizens acquire information and convert it into public opinion

Aim(s)

1. How citizens learn about matters that are for the most part beyond their immediate experience

2. How citizens convert the information they acquire into opinions.

3. How do people acquire information from the political environment and transform that information into survey responses?

Definitions

• Consideration - any reason that might induce an individual to decide a political issue one way or the other.

  • a belief concerning an object and an evaluation of the belief.

• Persuasive messages - arguments or images providing a reason for taking a position or pov.

  • if accepted by an individual, they become considerations.

• Cueing messages - second type of message carried in elite discourse, consist of “contextual information” about the ideological or partisan implications of a persuasive message.

The Model - Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) Model

How individuals respond to political information they may encounter - comprises of 4 axioms.

1. Reception Axiom - The greater a person’s level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely he or she is to be exposed to and comprehend - in a word, to receive - political messages concerning that issue.

   1. specifying the reception axiom in terms of cognitive engagement.

   2. political attentiveness, political awareness, cognitive engagement = all the same thing. = COMPREHENSION! Political awareness = comprehension = are you watching and understanding.

      1. measures a person’s summary score across a series of neutral, factual tests of public affairs knowledge

         1. measure of general, chronic, awareness.

   3. A1 claims that reception of politically relevant communications, whatever their origin, is positively associated with intellectual engagement with a given issue.

      1. not central to the model but Zaller assumes much of the information received is from elite discourse but cant empirically test this.

2. Resistance Axiom - People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and their predispositions.

   1. key here is the information concerning the relationship between argument and predisposition

      1. the probability of an individual acquiring cueing information depends on their level of awareness.

   2. Low attentive individuals seem to pay more attention to the credibility of source

      1. susceptible to authority position.

   3. Political awareness should be associated with resistance to persuasion BUT

      1. this only applies to cases in which the contextual information necessary to evaluate an issue in light of one’s predispositions is, for one reason or another, obscure.

   4. the more abstract the link between a predisposition and a related policy issue, the greater the amount or obscurity of knowledge necessary to perceive the linkage, or the more complicated the chain of reasoning involved, the more important political awareness is likely to be in regulating individual responses to political communication on that issue.

3. Accessibility Axiom - The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related consideration from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.

   1. very much getting into what is going on cognitively.

   2. The brain has to do stuff - people are not computers!

4. Response Axiom - Individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or accessible to them.

   1. people respond to survey questions based on what is “at the top of their head”

      1. they do not canvas their mind.

5. Opinion statements, as conceived in my four-axiom model, are the outcome of a process in which people receive new information, decide whether to accept it, and then sample at the moment of answering questions.

Chapter 4:

• Zaller starts looking at NES data.

• He finds respondents are giving different answers for the same question at different intervals.

• People possess numerous, frequently inconsistent “considerations” relating to each issue, and that they base their survey responses on whichever of them are at the top of the head at the moment of response.

  • political attentiveness is going to influence the attitudes reported by an individual.

• NES Survey Pilot

  • two phone interviews at two different times w/same respondents.

  • Trying to understand what considerations were important in determining respondents’ answers.

    • IMPORTANT: First wave, the interviewer gave the respondent time - they were not required to respond right away

    • second wave, a response was asked immediately.

• RAS model is a set of claims about how citizens acquire “information” and convert it into attitude statements, which is to say, it is a type of information-processing model.

  • attitude statements on particular issues depends on the amount and direction of info available to the public of each issue.

Assumptions of RAS Model:

1. Moderately intense, temporally stable information flows favoring both the liberal and the conservative side of each issue

   1. a competitive media environment between repub and dems.

      1. excludes huge issues like the Iran-Contra.

Deductions:

• Ambivalence Deduction

  • From A2, we know that individuals can reliably resist the arguments to which they are exposed only to the extent that they possess “information” about the implications of the hose arguments for their predispositions

    • most Americans do not rate very highly on political awareness.

      • Citizens will be unlikely to exhibit high levels of resistance to arguments that are inconsistent with their values, interests, or other predispositions.

        • environment evenly balanced on communication - people are likely to internalize many contradictory arguments. Hold both favorable and opposing considerations on the issue at the same time.

• D2

  • a person discussing the liberal side more will probably take the liberal side. vice versa

• D3

  • if people form conflicting considerations on most issues, and if they base their survey responses on whichever of these considerations happen to be at the top of the head at the moment of response, one should expect a fair amount of variability in people’s responses to survey questions.

• D4

  • if people are exposed to a shifting balance of liberal and conservative communications, the balance of considerations in their minds will shift in the direction of the more recent communications, and this will bring about systematic attitude change.

    • but if the flow of communciations remains steady, the balance of positive and negative considerations in each person’s mind should be, on average for each given issue, roughly the same at one point in time as at another.

      • we should expect to find a fair amount of purely chance variation around a stable central tendency.

        • so long as the flow of information in the political environment remains steady.

          • long term score may be 5 but might fluctuate between 3 and 7 over repeated interviews.

• D5

  • more politically aware persons will exhibit less chance variability in their survey responses.

    • better informed persons are more likely to possess the cueing information necessary to reject communications inconsistent with their values

  • Tested by 7 point scale anchored by the two polar positions. In a final stage, they were asked to indicate the position of several prominent political figures or groups on this scale, including Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Michael Dukakis…etc, and political parties.

• D6

  • This will make it more likely that they will form considerations are homogeneously consistent with their values.

    • tested through a measure of ideological consistency at the level of considerations.

• D7

  • and this homogeneity will lead, inter alia, to greater response stability over time.

• D8

  • attitude stability should be weaker for issues on which partisan divisions are hazy or nonexistent, because in such cases the public gets few message cues.

• D9

  • When the degree of public attentiveness to an issue is generally high, it follows that attitude statements on this issue will, in the public as a whole, exhibit less variability, all else equal, than will attitude statements on more remote or abstract issue.

• D10

  • Individuals who care more strongly about issues, will pay more attention to issues and hence exhibit less chance variability in their attitude statements about these issues.

• D11

  • People’s responses to particular questions may, for the reasons just given, vary stochastically around their equilibrium points, but the equilibrium points themselves should remain constant as long as the environment remains stable.

    • over the long run.

• D12

  • People’s open-ended remarks are associated with changes in the direction of their close-ended remarks.

• D13

  • people who mention an equal number of opposing considerations should be more stable only as often as could be expected by chance alone, which is 50% of the time.

Lodge, Milton, Marco Steenbergen, and Shawn Brau. 1995. “The Responsive Voter: Campaign Information and the Dynamics of Candidate Evaluation,” American Political Science Review.

Bumper Sticker

Lecture notes:

• people don’t remember campaign info but are also more responsive to it.

• memory and judgement

• voters evaluate information and remember their evaluation and then forget the information.

  • you might not remember the reasons why but you remember whether you did or did not like it.

• Less cognitive intensive seems to be better.

Taber, Charles and Milton Lodge. 2006. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs” American Journal of Political Science.

Lecture Notes:

• motivated skepticism

• spend more time looking at arguments they are against.

• greater polarization despite being exposed to same information

  • as they are being exposed to greater information.

Bumper Sticker:

People process information through prior bias and double down in the face of new information, resulting in attitude polarization about different issues

prior attitudes + bias for confirming evidence + skepticism of opposing evidence = attitude polarization

Research Question:

How do political beliefs evolve?

What explains political polarization in the face of factual information?

Summary of Theory/Argument:

The authors postulate what they call a theory of affect-driven motivated reasoning in trying to explain when and why citizens actively process biased information. This theory suggests that people will anchor their evaluation of new information in their own biases - being non-skeptical of information that confirms their biases and being “motivated-skepticals” when engaging in information that is counter to their biases - i.e. spending more time trying to discredit new information. The authors propose a process of “partisan processing” that results in attitude-polarization and which is conditional on the strength of ones prior attitudes and the level of one political sophistication. They test the mechanism as a series of hypothesis that assume the following form:

H1: there is a prior attitude effect whereby people who feel strongly about an issue - even when encouraged to be objective and leave their preferences aside - will evaluate supportive arguments as stronger and more compelling than arguments that oppose their prior beliefs

H2: there is a disconfirmation bias, such that people will spend more time and cognitive resources counter-arguing opposing arguments

H3: there is a confirmation bias, such that when free to choose what information they will expose themselves to, people will seek out confirming arguments over disconfirming ones

These combined will results in:

H4: attitude polarization, where attitudes will become MORE EXTREME, even when people have been exposed to a balanced set of pro and con arguments

Which is conditional upon:

H5: the level of attitude strength effect, such that citizens voicing the strongest policy attitudes will be the most prone to motivated skepticism

H6: and the degree of political sophistication effect, such that the politically knowledgeable will be more susceptible to motivated bias than will unsophisticates.

Data/Methods:

• Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control

• The participants (Ps) were recruited from introductory political science courses at Stony Brook University

• Study 1: N=126

• Study 2: N=136

• First Part: Confirmation Bias

• The participants (Ps) were seated at computers and their political attitudes were assessed through the evaluation of a series of contemporary political issues aimed at activating their priors - this was done through random assignment into either condition 1 or condition 2 (see figure 1)

• They rated the items on a series of scales to assess attitude strength (0-100) and attitude position (like-dislike; 9 item scale)

• They then viewed information on an information board, where they could seek out hidden policy arguments by known source alone (see figure 2); the amount of time they spend engaging in each argument was recorded by the software.

• They viewed eight arguments without a time limit, but could only view each argument ONCE

• They then completed the same attitude battery from the beginning of the experiment before filing out demographic information and a political knowledge scale ( to assess sophistication)

• Second Part: Disconfirmation Bias

• administered the battery again, but with the conditions (issues) swapped.

• then asked to rank the strength of 8 arguments (4 pro and 4 con)

• then there was a post test battery AGAIN and a recognition memory test

• they were also asked to list their thoughts regarding two pro and two con arguments they were presented with Arguments were taken from online sources and edited such that they were similar in complexity and length.

Findings:

• strong evidence of a prior attitude effect (H1) such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments.

• Participants counter-argued the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias (H2) - this was supported by the participants spending MORE time on the policy arguments that they disagreed with

• Also find a confirmation bias (H3)—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read - this was supported by the participants seeking out information in the matrix that they agreed with

• Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization (H4) —the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors (H5) and highest levels of political sophistication (H6).

Mondak, Jeff, et al. 2010. “Personality and Civic Engagement: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Trait Effects on Political Behavior,” American Political Science Review.

This paper is rollercoaster for me.

“Environmental forces influence political behavior, but how and to what extent they do differs as a function of indviduals’ traits.”

Bumper Sticker:

Personality affects political behaviors

Questions:

1. In addition to biological factors, do environmental forces also influence personality?

2. Is it not the case that people’s personalities change, and does this not imply a role for influences other than biology?

3. Irrespective of other nonbiological effects, can political behavior alter an individual’s personality?

4. What is the effect of personality on political behavior?

5. Do environmental and trait effects operate independently of one another, or in combination?

Aim:

Principle objective is not merely to identify links between the Big Five and political engagement, but rather to position personality within a broader theory of political behavior, one that also accounts for biological and environmental influences.

Personality and Politics:

• Personality refers to a multifaceted, enduring, internal psychological structure

Big 5:

• Openness to experience

  • seek information and engagement of virtually all sorts.

• conscientiousness

  • a basic dispositional sense of dependability, measured with terms such as “organized” and “reliable” and a volitional component captured by terms such as “hard working” and “industrious.”

    • does higher of this mean more political engagement?

• extraversion

  • socialness

    • working on a petition drive, discussing politics with friends, joining voluntary associations

• agreeableness

  • warm, kind, sympathetic, generous, altruistic

• emotional stability

  • calm, relaxed, stable

  • tense, nervousness.

Personality in Context:

• They are not trying to look at personality traits on political behavior

  • they are trying to position personality within a framework that accounts for biological and environmental influences.

• Personality traits are heritable

• Environmental factors do shape personality

  • they say this must be a huge shock in environment for this to change

    • example Chinese students moving to Canada.

      • I DONT LIKE THIS PREMISE AND CONCLUSION!

Page 90 Issues:

I really do not like the authors discussions on page 90. Page 90 attempts to provide answers for the following questions posited on page 89: 1) Do environmental forces also influence personality?; 2) is it not the case that people’s personalities change, and does this not imply a role for influences other than biology?; and 3) irrespective of other non biological effects, can political behavior alter and individual’s personality?

In regards to question 1, the authors do support the connection between environmental factors and personality; however, they argue it is only manifested during huge “shocks” in the physical environment to cause this change. They use the example of Chinese students changing personality after moving to Canada. I do not contend that biological factors account for most of the variation in personality, BUT I disagree with the strength they assign the environment on personality.

I believe they are understating the role of environmental factors as their premise lies upon a study of college aged students. A more powerful argument would use young individuals as the subject of focus. But again here lies an issue, the power of environmental factors in shaping personality is more pronounced at a younger age, diminishing over time. Personality like politics is a socialization process. However, we cannot know this because this narrow question requires a counterfactual that simply not possible. To fully evaluate this claim we would need to study an individual from the time they are born to adulthood, raised in different contexts…maybe a twin study could accomplish this?

For question 2, the authors do admit that personality changes over time, especially in their adolescence, but they argue this change does not signify a “noteworthy impact of environmental influences.” Citing Costa and McCrae (1988), the changes are minuscule, further, citing a different article from Costa and McCrae (2006), biological influences account for changes in personality across life cycles. I DO NOT BUY THIS.

“As teenagers mature toward adulthood, they consistently exhibit a tendency to become more agreeable and less neurotic. These tendencies are found in all cultures, and even in other species. Costa and McCrae (2006, 27) note that”the hypothesis of intrinsic maturation is supported indirectly by evidence that similar age trends are found in other primates. Indeed, anyonef amiliar with puppies and old dogs can understand how the human decline in Excitement Seeking might be biologically based.”

While I have not read the aforementioned articles, their measurements are suspect. Age is obviously playing a massive role in this. We know from the political socialization literature that political opinions/ideology is strongly influenced by parents and family at a young age. Are we not sure personality is part of that socialization process?

I do agree with the statement that political behavior influencing personality is unlikely.

Personality -> certain political behavior

• okay this is fine.

Personality is rooted in biology, and that effects of political behavior on personality are unlikely.

Do environmental and trait effects operate independently of one another, or in combination?

“Last, we reiterate that because of clear evidence regarding the heritabiltiy of the five-factor trait structure, any findings we report regarding the effects of personality on political behavior will be strongly suggestive of a role for personality as a mechanism linking biology and politics.”

Measuring the Big Five

• Self reported descriptions of personality THIS IS A BIG ISSUE!

  • they at least recognize it and argue that this is not a big issue cause of other tests involving peer evaluations and stuff.

Other Measurement:

DV: ten DVs that collectivel encompass a wide array of participatory acts.

Broockman, David and Daniel Butler. 2017. “The Causal Effects of Elite Position Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication,” American Journal of Political Science.

Lecture:

• Strong external validity.

• Strong Internal validity.

Abstract

Influential theories depict politicians as, alternatively, strongly constrained by public opinion, able to shape public opinion with persuasive appeals, or relatively unconstrained by public opinion and able to shape it merely by announcing their positions. To test these theories, we conducted unique field experiments in cooperation with sitting politicians in which U.S. state legislators sent constituents official communications with randomly assigned content. The legislators sometimes stated their issue positions in these letters, sometimes supported by extensive arguments but sometimes minimally justified; in many cases, these issue positions were at odds with voters’. An ostensibly unrelated survey found that voters often adopted the positions legislators took, even when legislators offered little justification. Moreover, voters did not evaluate their legislators more negatively when representatives took positions these voters had previously opposed, again regardless of whether legislators provided justifications. The findings are consistent with theories suggesting voters often defer to politicians’ policy judgments.

Bumper Sticker

Aims

What causes people to adopt political opinions?

How do they change?

How citizens react when politicians stake out policy positions, including those these citizens oppose, and the extent to which extensive justifications condition any impacts of such position-taking.

Other:

• This article is really getting at the content and style of elite messaging. Whereas Zaller to some degree, is not focused on the content, necessarily.

Week 5 - Partisanship and Polarization

Lecture Notes:

• elites are polarized back in the 1970s

  • so why?

  • is it the masses driving this?

• Abramowitz shall now be known as “Bram-Bram”.

• partisanship is enduring attachment to party

• ideology is bundle of policy preferences.

• Fiorina kinda has bad timing with his argument

• Abramowitz: are people sorting into the right party?

• are moderates turn off from voting in polarization.

• Time and education are big threads in Abramowitz.

• Abramowitz uses constraint method from Converse.

• Iyengar: we think about perceived social distance between groups.

  • feeling thermometer is how like all of affective partisanship is operationalized.

• Mason digs deeper on figure 2 from Iyengar.

  • Liberal and conservative are personal identities.

    • when these are strong identities, these operate similar to party labels.

• partisan identity, ideological identity, measured identity - these are all separate.

• Grossman:

  • republicans have a zoomed out approach.

    • big gov/small gov.

  • democrats see policy more from a pragmatic approach

    • what group will policy help.

Overarching questions:

• Are the masses ideologically innocent?

• Are the masses polarized?

• Is polarization evidence of ideological thinking?

Abramowitz, Alan and Kyle Saunders. 2008. “Is Polarization a Myth?,” Journal of Politics.

Abstract

This article uses data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test Fiorina’s assertion that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth. Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the mid twentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists—they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens. Moreover, contrary to Fiorina’s suggestion that polarization turns off voters and depresses turnout, our evidence indicates that polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.

Bumping Sticker

We think Fiorina is wrong. - Abramowitz and Saunders

Questions:

1. is it just elites that have become polarized?

2. Does the ideological debates between elites have any resonance with the masses?

Background:

• Converse argues much of the american electorate are not ideological

  • Education is strongly correlated with ideological thinking

    • since Converse, Americans have become more educated.

• Elites have also become more ideological and the public knows more about their ideological conflict.

• Consensus on elite level ideological divisions

  • little is known about ideological divisions at the mass level.

Fiorina Claims:

1. Moderation: Most Americans are ideological moderates. There has been no ideological polarization among the public

   1. Fowler et al. might be showing this position to be correct.

      1. Even still - Fowler shows most moderates are ideological moderates.

         1. says nothing about the moderates in relation to the rest of voters.

   2. Abramowitz & Saunders show greater polarization.

2. Partisan Polarization: Partisan polarization is largely an elite phenomenon.

   1. only a few specific groups are truly polarized in their views.

      1. results of Abramowitz shows this to not hold.
         1. yeah this is pretty much just not true.

3. Geographical Polarization: Culture between states is not that big

   1. voters are more similar than they are different.

      1. Abramowitz evidence shows contrary. States have become more polarized.

         1. large difference between very red and very blue states. Socially and politically.

4. Societal Cleavages: Divisions have gone down.

   1. some modest amount of cleavages exist but not super important.

      1. Abramowitz shows religion one of the biggest cleavages

         1. biggest cleavages is not between religions but between religious v. secular.

         2. Fiorina thinks economic cleavages are the biggest

            1. Abramowitz disagrees.

5. Voter Engagement: Growing polarization of elites and activists turns off voters and decreases turnout.

   1. I think this historically has suffered the most

      1. Trump/Clinton, Trump/Biden evidence against this claim.

Debate:

• ‘’we [ordinary Americans] instinctively seek the center while the parties and candidates hang out on the extremes’’ - Fiorina.

  • Abramowitz disagress with this.

• Between Fiorina and everyone else

• Is the public becoming more ideologically aware? Are they using ideological frameworks in thinking about politics?

  • Fiorina thinks no. Converse still holds up.

    • According to Fiorina, the ideological disputes that engage political elites and acti-vists have little resonance among the American mass public: like their midtwentieth-century counterparts, ordinary twenty-first-century Americans ‘’are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold manyof their views very strongly, and are not ideological’’

• Fiorina understates division among the masses.

• deepest divisions are among those most interested, informed and active members of the public

  • so then the question is, have more voters become more interested, informed, and active?

• I didn’t see this stated anywhere, BUT i have a feeling our authors are going to argue that there is more polarization and that there are more ideological thinkers among the masses. BUT Fiorina might counter and say polarization alone is not evidence of ideological thinking in the masses. IDK i think there might be some of that in this moving forward. Not sure havent finished this article yet.

Data:

• ANES Survey

• National exit polls

Method:

1. To test moderation

   1. gather a batter of policy/identity questions from NES.

      1. create a measure of ideological polarization from 0 - 7.

         1. difference between number of liberal and conservative positions indicated.

            1. evidence shows polarization among masses through NES survey from 1982 and onwards.

               1. Question for Josh: How should we view survey data now after reading Zaller?

Findings:

• Polarization increases turnout and other forms of political participation. Use this fact for my walkability paper.

• Education and political knowledge correlates with higher ideological thinking.

• high engagement voter most polarized

• large difference between very red and very blue states. Socially and politically.

  • red states more likely to be religious and own a gun.

  • less likely to have a union member in house (conservative states)

• Religiosity among white voters strongly influences candidate choice

• Religion cleavage bigger than class cleavage.

• It is not just elites that are polarized

  • But they do not address whether polarization in masses is driven by elites

  • is polarization in the masses evidence of ideological thinking though?

    • Or are they just near-ideological voters following the elites?

Fiorina, Morris, Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope. 2008. “Polarization in the American Public: Misconceptions and Misreadings,” Journal of Politics.

Bumper Sticker:

No Abramowitz and Saunders are wrong.

Background:

• Basically says their data is coded incorrect and that this is not actually polarization within the masses.

• Too early to say if polarization actually increases voter turnout.

Iyengar, Shanto, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes. 2012. “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization ,” Public Opinion Quarterly.

Really good article. Favorite one so far this week.

Abstract:

The current debate over the extent of polarization in the American mass public focuses on the extent to which partisans’ policy preferences have moved. Whereas “maximalists” claim that partisans’ views on policies have become more extreme over time (Abramowitz 2010), “minimalists” (Fiorina and Abrams 2009) contend that the majority of Americans remain centrist, and that what little centrifugal movement has occurred reflects sorting, i.e., the increased association between partisanship and ideology. We argue in favor of an alternative definition of polarization, based on the classic concept of social distance (Bogardus 1947). using data from a variety of sources, we demonstrate that both republicans and democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents. We also find that partisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes. the more plausible account lies in the nature of political campaigns; exposure to messages attacking the out-group reinforces partisans’ biased views of their opponents.

Bumper Sticker:

• Americans are affectively polarized.

Question:

• To what extent do partisans view each other as a disliked social outgroup?

• How much does affective polarization matter in the public?

Background:

• Elites are significantly more partisan.

• Authors argue a better way to test polarization is not party identity but rather, affective polarization.

• ” in our view, is that the mere act of identifying with a political party is sufficient to trigger negative evaluations of the opposition, and exposure to prolonged media-based campaigns only reinforces these predispositions.” p.3

• Humans typically categorize themselves into groups. - Tajfel

  • which group becomes salient is important

    • because they give cues.

• Campaign importance has grown.

  • more campaign information cause internet.

    • more exposure.

Data

• National and cross-national surveys in the USA and United Kingdom.

  • 6 data sets

  • ANES, 2008 YouGov poll of US and UK voters, Almond and Verba, 2004 Blair Center Election study, AP-Yahoo! News election study, 2010 Eleven nation study by YouGov.

  • Wisconsin Advertising Project: ads of campaigns.

• feeling thermometers

• using multiple surveys conducted between 1960 and 2010, we describe parallel changes in two indicators of inter-party social distance—stereotypes of party supporters and feelings about marriage across party lines.

Method

• UK serves as the control.

  • parties have strong roots in class system.

• Compare party affiliation with other notable social cleavages.

• After main findings they look at:

  • is affective polarization a consequence of ideological polarization?

  • is exposure to campaign a big reason for affective polarization?

Results:

• Democrats and Republicans score high for when they are in power

• However, as the outparty the trend is downward.

• Partisan cleavage has become bigger than others.

• Growing proportion of people of parents saying they would be displeased if their child married someone from another party.

  • Republicans especially.

• Americans who expressed more positive views of party supporters and negative views of their opponents

• look at figure 1 - the difference between the two lines is affective polarization.

• partisan identities are pulling apart but liberal and conservative identities are not

  • Mason will get at this.

Discussion:

• is affective polarization simply a symptom of divergent movement in policy attitudes among both partisan supporters and party elites?

  • most likely not

  • the weak association between ideological and affective polarization is consistent with the vast literature demonstrating that partisan identity in the united States has only weak ideological underpinnings.

    • For parties to be seen in ideological terms would require an awareness of their policy stances, yet most Americans have difficulty correctly locating parties on issue scales

• partisan identities are primarily affective attachments.

• political scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that the vast majority of the public does not think about parties in ideological terms and that their ties to the political world are instead affective, based on a primordial sense of partisan identity that is acquired very early in life and persists over the entire life cycle

• Iyengar argue political campaigns have played a big role in affective polarization but is certainly not the only one.

  • they get a little at information bubbles and media sorting.

  • I think to some degree the main point here is that elite partisanship is influencing masses.

Mason, Lilliana. 2018. “Ideologues without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities,” Public Opinion Quarterly.

Abstract:

The distinction between a person’s ideological identity and their issue positions has come more clearly into focus in recent research. Scholars have pointed out a significant difference between identity based and issue-based ideology in the American electorate. However, the affective and social effects of these separate elements of ideology have not been sufficiently explored. Drawing on a national sample collected by SSI and data from the 2016 ANES, this article finds that the identity based elements of ideology are capable of driving heightened levels of affective polarization against outgroup ideologues, even at low levels of policy attitude extremity or constraint. These findings demonstrate how Americans can use ideological terms to disparage political opponents without necessarily holding constrained sets of policy attitudes.

Bumper Sticker:

Aim(s):

• This project examines how the social attachments to the terms “liberal” and “conservative” generate affective polarization against liberals and conservatives in the American electorate, even when issue-based ideology is not extreme.

  • In other words, we already know that Democrats and Republicans hate each other, but liberals and conservatives likely hate each other too, for reasons that go beyond partisanship or even issue-based disagreement.

Hypothesis:

1. Identity-based ideology is associated with increasing affective polarization of ideological groups.

2. This relationship will occur even when issue-based ideology is weak or conflicting with identity-based ideology.

Background:

• Polarization: is an increasing distance between partisans in terms of their issue-based ideology, sometimes referred to as “ideological polarization”

Issue based ideology:

• Belief system (Converse) - A system of beliefs can be defined by a set of opinions and the degree to which they form measurable patterns.

Identity based ideology:

• Prior research has found that the names “liberal” and “conservative” confer a sense of group identity that is not neatly connected to any set of issue positions, but nonetheless motivates political judgment

• It is characterized by a uniquely social connection to the groups that hold the labels “liberal” and “conservative.”

Method:

• She measure how strongly they are ideological

• issue based measurement

• marriage question - her own survey

Grossmann, Matt and Dan Hopkins. 2016. Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group-Interest Democrats, Ch. 2.

big claims but very interesting.

Background:

• Author argues Democrats are more pragmatic.

  • Republicans are more ideologically driven.

• The Democratic Party’s character as a social group coalition fosters a relatively pragmatic, results-oriented style of politics in which officeholders are rewarded for delivering concrete benefits to targeted groups in order to address specific social problems.

• Republicans, in contrast, are more likely to forge partisan ties based on common ideological beliefs, encouraging party officials to pursue broad rightward shifts ni public policy.

• As a result, Republican voters and activists are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to prize symbolic demonstrations of ideological purity and to pressure their party leaders to reject moderation and compromise.

• This dynamic is reflected in the partisan attitudes within the public at large.

• Public is operationally liberal and symbolically conservative.

• Republicans more likely to view their party as standing for abstract values.

• Fun interesting quote from FDR:

  • “Roughly speaking, the liberal school of thought recognizes that the new conditions throughout the world call for new remedies. . (that can be adopted and successfuly maintained in this country under our present form of government if we use government as an instrument of cooperation to provide these remedies…the opposing or conservative school of thought, as a general proposition, does not recognize the need for Government itself to step in and take action to meet these new problems. It believes that individual initiative and private philanthropy will solve them-that we ought to repeal many of the things we have done and go back [to prior policies].”

    • pretty much sums of the left-right dimension.

• Republican propensity for ideological thinking is not simply due to religion or education; rather, is is a product of the movement’s successful communication of its version of american political tradition to the party’s electorate.

  • Frank Luntz.

• Strong Democratic identifiers consistently describe politics as a competition among social groups for favorable concrete policies and benefits, whereas strong Republicans explain the salient differences between the parties as concerning a more abstract conflict over the proper role of government.

• Both hold policy positions but differ in REASONING!

• Democrats more closely match social identity

• Republicans more closely match ideological identity as described by Abramowitz & Saunders.

• Republican voters value purists

• Democratic voters value people that compromise.

• David Broockman and Christopher Skovron found that politicians dramatically overestimated the proportion of their constituents who agreed with conservative positions on abolishing welfare programs, implementing universal health coverage, and allowing same-sex marriage.? Though politicians in both parties exhibited this bias, Republicans overestimated conservative issue positions by a much larger margin than did Democrats-usually by more than 20 percent, implying that they viewed the average legislative district as more collectively conservative than the nation’s most conservative districts are in actuality.

  • COOL CONNECTION TO FENNO

  • Broockman.

• Social conservatism history in the US is very deep

• Elite rhetoric reinforces the asymmetries in public support for the views expressed in each party.

• people identify in different parties for different reasons.

• democrats generally define themselves politically through their social group ties and describe their party as representing groups they identify with

• republicans are more likely to represent themselves in their vision of government and society in some abstract battle.

• figure 2-6 kinda the punchline.

Barber, Michael and Jeremy Pope. 2018. “Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” American Political Science Review.

Abstract:

Are people conservative (liberal) because they are Republicans (Democrats)? Or is it the reverse: people are Republicans (Democrats) because they are conservatives (liberals)? Though much has been said about this long-standing question, it is difficult to test because the concepts are nearly impossible to disentangle in modern America. Ideology and partisanship are highly correlated, only growing more so over time. However, the election of President Trump presents a unique opportunity to disentangle party attachment from ideological commitment. Using a research design that employs actual “conservative” and “liberal” policy statements from President Trump, we find that low-knowledge respondents, strong Republicans, Trump-approving respondents, and self-described conservatives are the most likely to behave like party loyalists by accepting the Trump cue—in either a liberal or conservative direction. These results suggest that there are a large number of party loyalists in the United States, that their claims to being a self-defined conservative are suspect, and that group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.

Bumper Sticker:

Ideology is not as sticky as we think

Question:

• Are people conservative because they are Republicans? Or is it the reverse: people are Republicans because they are conservatives?

• Another way of putting this question of party versus ideology is to ask how sincerely held are expressed political and policy opinions and are these opinions based on ideological convictions or group loyalty?

• who is most likely to be a party loyalist? Or, what characteristics will moderate the effects of the treatment?

• to what extent are positions malleable?

Background:

• Very hard to separate partisanship from issue positions or any ideological commitments that may result from those positions.

• Party affiliation has been shown to be a social identity (Campbell et al. Reference Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes1960; Green, Palmquist and Schickler Reference Green, Palmquist and Schickler2004; Greene Reference Greene1999; Tajfel Reference Tajfel1981), to be a heuristic about policy views (Cohen Reference Cohen2003; Rahn Reference Rahn1993), and influence people’s issue attitudes (Layman and Carsey Reference Layman and Carsey2002). People have also been shown to take cues from the party leader’s positions (Lenz Reference Lenz2012).

• Trump is a unique opportunity because he shifts all over the place on policy issues.

• Distinguishing between partisan and policy loyalists is hard. Trump makes this easier.

• The heart of the theory is based on the importance of these partisan cues and how different types of citizens will interpret the cues.

Definitions:

• Partisan Loyalists: unswervingly loyal to their party, but they care very little (if at all) about the underlying issues endorsed by the party.

  • Partisan loyalists merely take the party line on all issues—regardless of whatever that position might be.

• Policy Loyalists: These people exhibit high levels of issue constraint and should be highly loyal to the underlying principles and policies that arise from those principles.

  • Loyalty to those ideas implies that policy loyalists should remain faithful to those principles regardless of which party or partisan leader espouses those views.

• Note: people probably exemplify some degree of both these concepts.

Hypothesis:

• The influence of a Trump cue will demonstrate the existence of a large bloc of party loyalists in the electorate when his influence moves opinion in either a liberal or conservative direction based on the cue.

• knowledge hypothesis is that only the unknowledgeable should react to the cue and behave as party loyalists, presumably because the knowledgeable gain little from the treatment.

• partisan hypothesis holds that those who strongly affiliate with the party of the cue giver should be more likely to be party loyalists.

• approval hypothesis holds that those who approve of the cue giver should be more likely to be party loyalists.

• symbolic ideology hypothesis—self-described conservatives should hold firm to their presumed beliefs and be less likely to be party loyalists because they willingly identify with an ideological camp and as such likely adhere to the policy tenets of that group.

Critical Point To Uncover:

• if the less knowledgeable express more conservative views in the face of a conservative Trump cue and more liberal views in the face of a liberal Trump cue, then this is evidence for partisan loyalism.

  • showing both shows partisan loyalty.

    • If, on the other hand, there is only a reaction to the conservative Trump cue, then the evidence does not support partisan loyalism.

Data:

• representative survey of Americans collected by YouGov survey research company in early 2017, immediately after the inauguration of Donald Trump

  • 1,300 total respondents who were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions and a control condition.

    • Those in the control condition (500 respondents) were presented with a policy statement and then asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the policy statement they had just read.

    • Those respondents who were assigned to one of the three treatment conditions saw a similar statement with a small addition.

      • the treatment was different stimuli citing Trump’s position on the matter. Because he has supported the same policy from different ideological perspectives, it allows the researcher to give the respondent a liberal cue of Trump and a conservative cue.

  • Trump has to have actually taken both sides of an issue at some point.

    • which means these positions are NOT made up.

• Ask 10 questions.

Results:

• partisans emphasize group attachment over issue positions.

• Among Republicans, the politically knowledgeable, those who do not approve of the cue giver, and self-described moderates and liberals are not all that likely to change their views when informed of President Trump’s positions.

• The implication of this unique test is that large, predictable segments of the public—partisans, the less-informed, approvers of the party leader, and even those who claim the most strong symbolic ideological labels—are likely to be influenced more by partisanship than by any issue content.

• First, no group reacts to a cue that comes from Republican leaders in Congress.

  • Trump has some extraordinary sway that republican leaders do not have.

• Democrats and Independents do not react to Trump cues, but Republicans do

• we find strong support for both the knowledge and the approval hypotheses within the broader population.

• Those least knowledgeable and most approving of Trump are more likely to react to a Trump cue

• However, our results run exactly in the opposite direction of the ideology hypothesis. In fact, it is those most likely to call themselves strong conservatives who are most influenced by the cue, regardless of the direction of the cue. Strong conservatives move the most when faced with a conservative Trump cue and when faced with a liberal Trump cue.

  • so their ideological stance is actually a bit shaky it seems.

• Higher-knowledge individuals are more likely to look like policy loyalists than party loyalists. On the other hand, low-knowledge individuals display the opposite pattern.

• The simple truth is that many citizens behave as partisan loyalists rather than principled ideologues.

Week 6

Lecture Notes

Riker

rational choice is to understand the incentive behind people

what are the variations

trying to be clear about the mechanism.

riker is a decision theory.

rational choice = formal theory.

its a toolkit - is it useful?

Institution as a methodology - is a good paper for rat choice institutionalism.

• i am going to hold the instititution fixed

  • look at the behavior under those assumptions

    • important to maintain a consistent mechanism

• Where do institutions come from?

  • why do constitutions come to exist to serve a certain structure.

• We are better now at writing formal theory than Riker was back when he wrote this.

• Downs says voting is not rational - it costs more to vote.

• Eu(vote) = pb-c

• Eu(~vote) = qb

• p-q>/c/b

  • this is downs - they represent that whole thing as P

    • P is really small

      • probability of being pivotal is SMALL!

        • because P is so tiny its always more costly to vote.

• a competitive election influences PB all small.

• Riker introducing the index (the little i) is big contribution.

Gerber Green, & Lerimer

• social pressure with riker

• they are breaking the D term into parts

  • D - extrinsic civic duty

    • Gerber adds this

      • shame

      • external pressure

      • People might think less of me if I didn’t vote.

        • social pressure the other way with Eman.

  • D_i intrinsic civic duty .

    • riker focuses on this one.

• Field experiment

• Hawthorne - people know they are being studied - people will act differently.

• Self-voting record

• Neighbor record

Rowgowski

• Does ideological polarization among elites increase or decrease voter turnout?

  • it either motivates

    • higher B

  • or demotivates.

    • further apart candidates are the more people feel isolated

      • efficacy.

• Data

  • project vote smart

    • send candidates questions about policy

• DV is difference between candidate ideology from vote smart.

• voting as identity? Why do american idol voters vote?

  • socialization as the mechanism behind caring about politics?

Lau

• Voter competence?

• are voters good at making the right decision?

• There is an overwhelming fire hose of information.

• more sohpisticated voters are better at using heuristic.

  • Correct voting? - another paper

• sophisticated voters using hueristics are better at “correctly voting”.

• low sophistication voters are worse.

Bartels

• Accountability and performance dimension.

• ideology v. valience

  • ideology left or right

  • valence is good or not; competent or not.

    • issues everyone wants better.

• Ways voter makes decisions in valence world

  • independent of ideology. Focus on valence.

• Retrospective voting may drive effort from politician.

• How voters think and how politicians act in response.

  • pandering/election literature

    • canes-wrone Harron and schotz

    • Asheworth

    • Bessley

Week 7: Media and Social Media

Lecture Notes:

• There were no channels back in the day.

• Bill Clinton comes in and there are more channels.

• Everything in media is super endogenous.

Prior, Markus. 2005. “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout,” American Journal of Political Science.

Bumper Sticker:

More channels = less political knowledge

Abstract:

Despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that greater media choice makes it easier for people to find their preferred content. People who like news take advantage of abundant political information to become more knowledgeable and more likely to turn out. In contrast, people who prefer entertainment abandon the news and become less likely to learn about politics and go to the polls. To test this proposition, I develop a measure of people’s media content preference and include it in a representative opinion survey of 2,358 U.S. residents. Results show that content preference indeed becomes a better predictor of political knowledge and turnout as media choice increases. Cable TV and the Internet increase gaps in knowledge and turnout between people who prefer news and people who prefer entertainment.

Research Questions:

1. While this debate is far from settled, the issue which precedes it is equally important and often side stepped: as choice between different media content increases, who continues to access any type of political information?

Puzzle:

• Despite increase in media supply, political knowledge among the population has remained the same.

Hypothesis:

1. I propose that such accidental exposure should become less likely in a high-choice environment because greater horizontal diversity (the number of genres available at any particular point in time) increases the chance that viewers will find content that matches their preferences.

2. My second hypothesis thus predicts a widening turnout gap in the current environment, as people who prefer news vote at higher rates and those with other preferences increasingly stay home from the polls.

Background:

• There are more media choices (supply)

  • this decreases the “chance encounters” with political content

• Political knowledge broadly has remained the same

  • some demographics have increased and decreased in political knowledge.

• increase in media choice has created more voluntary segmentation among the population.

• Less supply back in the day. You watched the nightly news after dinner.

• people exposed to news still gain political knowledge - despite lack of interest.

  • ***It is here that the author contributes

    • there is less accidental exposure to NEWS in a high-choice environment

• Selective exposure - you chose what you want.

• news v. not news.

• Political knowledge is measured by current knowledge.

  • who is speaker of house?

Study 1:

• Data: the News & Entertainment (N&E) Survey, a panel survey of 2,358 randomly selected U.S. residents. It was conducted by Knowledge Networks in two waves in 2002 and 2003.

• Respondents were asked from 10 categories to mark their favorite genre.

• Relative Entertainment Preference (REP)

• Greater dislike of news content coincides with a decrease in political knowledge.

• Author checks to see if this shapes voter turnout

  • theorize that more informed citizens = likely to vote and vice versa.

    • more news consumption = more vote

      • finds evidence that support this.

Study 2:

• Same thing with different data

• no direct measures but closely approximated.

Conclusion:

• The analyses presented here show that both are true. New media do indeed increase political knowledge and involvement in the electoral process among some people, just as the optimists predict. Yet, the evidence supports the pessimists’ scenario as well. Other people take advantage of greater choice and tune out of politics completely. Those with a preference for entertainment, once they gain accessto new media, become less knowledgeable about politics and less likely to vote. People’s media content preferences become the key to understanding the political implications of new media

Martin, Greg and Josh McCrain. 2019. “Local News and National Politics,” American Political Science Review.

Bumper Sticker:

Local news go bye bye. This bad.

Abstract:

The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand - or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.

Background:

• Sinclair Broadcast Group is right leaning and has been buying up a bunch of stations.

• A Sinclair owned station will be viewable to 72% of american households.

Data:

• Compare local stations in the same area to Sinclair Broadcast Group stations.

• Transcript and viewership data across 743 stations - in every DMA.

Method:

• Difference-in-Difference & Cross sectional regression

Findings:

• Following the acquisition of Bonten Media Group by Sinclair, the former Bonten stations’ content shifted toward coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, relative to other stations in the same media market.

• we find evidence that Sinclair devotes more coverage to all national politics topics—including some that are harmful to its partisan objective and does not devote more coverage to some topics that might be ideologically beneficial but would also require more investment in local reporting resources.

Policy implications:

• One factor enabling Sinclair’s rapid recent expansion is FCC’s elimination of the “main studio rule,” which required local news stations to maintain a physical studio in the broadcast area. For Sinclair and other conglomerates, the potential for economies of scale resulting from the elimination of the rule is straightforward.

Broockman, David and Joshua Kalla. Forthcoming. “Consuming Cross-Cutting Media Causes Learning and Moderates Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers,” Journal of Politics.

Bumper Sticker:

Cross-cutting media can influence people!

Abstract:

Many Americans consume aligned partisan media, which scholars worry contributes to polarization. Many propose encouraging these Americans to consume cross-cutting media to moderate their attitudes. However, motivated reasoning theory posits that exposure to cross-cutting media could backfire, exacerbating polarization. Building on theories that sustained exposure to novel information can overcome motivated reasoning and that partisan sources on opposite sides cover distinct information, we argue that sustained consumption of cross-cutting media leads voters to learn uncongenial information and moderate their attitudes incovered domains. To test this argument, we used data on actual TV viewership to recruit a sample of regular Fox News viewers and incentivized a randomized treatment group to watch CNN instead for a month. Contrary to predictions from motivated reasoning, watching CNN caused substantial learning and moderated participants’ attitudes in covered domains. We close by discussing challenges partisan media may pose for democracy.

Research Question:

• Does exposure to cross-cutting media reduce polarization?

Background:

• Does exposure to cross-cutting media reduce polarization?

• Do people have a backlash effect when seeing other opinions?

• theories of motivated reasoning argue that exposure to cross-cutting content can back fire and actually make beliefs and attitudes more extreme

  • people may generate ‘counter-arguments’.

    • “A key prediction of motivated reasoning theoryis backlash: exposure to counter-attitudinal evidence will cause people to hold more strongly totheir preexisting positions.”

• We argue that sustained consumption of cross-cutting media can lead voters to learn uncongenial information and moderate their attitudes.

  • uncongenial means unpleasent.

• Stations fundamentally focused on different issues.

• balance test makes sure control and treatment samples are not different.

Motivated Reasoning:

• Motivated reasoning theories argue that motivated reasoning happens in two phases (e.g., Lodge and Taber 2013, p. 152): at the stage of information search, when people seek out confirmatory information

• second, when people process information to which they are exposed

• These are analogous to the Receive (selective exposure) and Accept (information processing) steps of Zaller’s (1992) RAS model (Nyhan 2014)

• Authors argue viewers who engage in sustainted exposure to cross-cutting can overcome motivated reasoning in information processing.

  • partisan sides cover topics differently. Exposure to both sources, may help them understand the cross-cutting info present in the stories and incorporate this into their attitudes

  • sustained exposure can reach a tipping point where individuals may eventually revisit their views.

Data & Methods:

• They literally paid Fox viewers to watch CNN for four weeks.

  • $15 per hour.

    • 7 hours of CNN per week during September

• Conduct test with sample where motivated reasoning is strongest and most likely to exhibit backlash.

• To increase the probability that individuals ‘Received’ this cross-cutting content and thereby to balance their media diets as much as possible, we enforced compliance with viewership quizzes about non-political features of the coverage

Findings:

• They find participants overcame motivated reasoning

• attitude change

• reduced fox learning effects.

• Our experiment supported this argument: Fox News viewers incentivized to watch CNN instead for a month learned information CNN presented, and their attitudes on political issues CNN covered and towards Donald Trump moderated. Despite conducting our study among the population that motivated reasoning theories would most expect to display evidence of backlash or to resist persuasion—highly conservative, regular Fox News viewers—we do not find a single case across all of our measures of statistically significant evidence of backlash, and many cases where we find learning and moderation

Bail, Christopher, et al. 2018. “Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Week 8: Elections and Campaigns

Lecture Notes:

• What actually are the fundamental variables:

  • NOT NATE SILVER

  • Not tracking individual polling responses but fundamental descriptive variabels about the country/electorate

    • economic performance

    • presidential population

    • index on incumbency.

• There is not a lot of data…

  • elections happen every 4 years

  • its not statistically crazy to have predicted all election outcomes.

• Hall talks about valence - basically means candidate competence

  • this probably much different now.

• Political scientists do care about campaigns!

  • campaigns kinda cancel each other out

    • in equilibrium

      • fundamentals will be the decider.

• Advertising isn’t a huge factor

  • its mostly mobilizing

  • cancel each other out

    • kinda a prisoner dilemna

  • this is kinda squishy

    • why do we have attack ads and negative ads?

• Huber:

  • ad exposure -> likeability -> vote choice

    • likeability is a mediator.

  • run without mediator should be larger

  • then include mediator and it should be smaller.

Gelman, Andrew and Gary King. 1993. “Why are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls so Variable When Votes are so Predictable?” British Journal of Political Science.

Abstract

As most political scientists know, the outcome of the American presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people’s opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their rupport for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong. resolutions to this puzzle and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate while reaching a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952-92 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, ‘rational’. In contrast, voters decide, based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as wel! as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification, which candidate to support eventually. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened prefer- ences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of presidential elections - not through misleading advertisements. sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates’ positions on important issues.

Bumper Sticker:

Why do polls vary?

Research Question

• If political scientists can forecast the election outcome reasonably well on the basis of fundamental variables measured before the campaign, why do the polls vary so much?

Hypothesis:

Our working hypothesis is that voters cast their ballots in general election contests for president on the basis of their ‘enlightened preferences’.

Background:

• only focused on presidential elections

Section 1: Forecasting Evidence and Data Summaries

• Rosenstone’s forecasting model appears to be the gold standard for presidential races.

• Use Campbell’s forecast because they couldn’t find a Rosenstone forecast for the 1992 race.

  • They are going to alter it a little. However, below is Campbell’s model:

    • Various variables:

      • nationwide:

        • Democratic candidate’s share of the trial heat polls two months before the election

        • incumbency (0, 1, or - 1, depending on the party)

        • and the change in Gross National Product (GNP) in the preceding year (counted positively or negatively, depending on whether the Democrats or the Republicans are the incumbent party)

      • Statewide:

        • the state’s vote in the last two presidential elections (relative to the nationwide vote in each case)

        • a presidential and vice-presidential home-state advantage (0, 1, or - l)

        • the change in the state’s economic growth in the past year (counted positively or negatively depending on the incumbent party)

        • the partisanship of the state (measured by the proportion of Democrats in the state legislature) and the state’s ideology (as measured by the average of its congressional representatives’ ADA-ACA interest-group rating scores in 1988)

      • Regional:

        • meant to capture various regional effects, mostly from past elections - are dummy variables for the South in elections in which one of the candidates was a Southerner, for the South in 1964, for the deep South in 1964, for New England in 1964, the West in 1976, and for the North Central region in 1980

          • seems like a sort of fixed effects?

• Problems with Campbell model:

  • it is based on a single regression specification that has been chosen because of its close fit to previous electoral data

    • Campbell’s standard errors are probably too low

    • it may be possible to generate better forecasts by choosing a fit by more substantive criteria

    • Standard deviation of Campbell’s estimates is 1.5% - specification uncertainty

      • they square 1.5 to account for more realistic

  • Gelman & King will estimate a model that includes the following variables:

    • 1) the president’s approval rating, included as an interaction with the national presidential incumbency variable;

    • 2) the absolute difference between state and candidate ideologies, as used by Rosenstone

    • 3) an additional regional variable for 1960 indicating the percentage of the state’s population that was Catholic in that year.

  • Campbell’s model ignores the year-by-year structure of the data, treating them as 531 independent observations, rather than eleven sets of roughly fifty related observations each

    • There is a data grouping that Campbell is missing among states.

      • this just seems like fixed effects for the past 11 elections.

    • fit a two-error model - helps account for uncertainty…

      • need to ask josh a bit more about this.

  • Cambell calculates the expected number of electoral college delegates for each candidate by allocating all the delegates in a state to the candidate forecast to get more than half the vote, and then adds over all the states.

    • For each state, Gelman & King model yields an estimate of the proportion of the two-party vote that the Democrat will win.

      • Clinton’s expected electoral vote count is just the sum of the electoral vote in each state, multiplied by the probability that he wins the state.

        • this is a bit confusing?

Section 2: MODELS OF VOTER DECISION MAKING AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

• Previous forecasting models use aggregate data and thus cannot say anything about individual level behavior.

• Voters do take their vote choice seriously.

  • they may not be able to explain their reasons.

• There are fundamental variables in which voters base their vote decision on:

  • include economic conditions

  • party identification

  • proximity of the voter’s ideology and issue preferences to those of the candidates

• Why are some elections harder to predict than others?

  • salience of election

  • lots of stuff going on

  • low visibility elections

  • in presidential elections, a lot of the ‘silly’ stuff is mostly ephemeral

    • By election day, voters are able to vote based largely on accurate measures of their fundamental variables. The argument here is that although presidential campaigns have an important effect, what is relevant is their existence; we expect the details of a completely-run campaign to have a small effect on the election outcome.

      • critically, the campaigns are assumed to be relatively evenly matched.

• Journalists model

  • voters do not take their role in the process very seriously, have very little information or knowledge of the campaign and the issues, and frequently do not vote on the basis of their own self-interest.

  • Basically horse-race model.

  • focus more on character issues

Section 3: Flawed Expectations

• If political scientists can forecast the election outcome reasonably well on the basis of fundamental variables measured before the campaign, why do the polls vary so much? To put it another way, if the journalists’ model is correct, then how can political scientists, or anyone else, forecast the outcome accurately? Alternatively, if the political science model is correct, why do polls vary at all, and why do they respond to specific campaign events such as conventions and advertising campaigns?

• Authors raise several hypothesis that might explain the hypothesis listed above.

• 4 flawed explanations:

  • Measurement theories

    • The polls are meaningless

      • The simplest hypothesis holds that public opinion polls have nothing to do with real observable political behaviour, and are as meaningless as candidates behind in the polls make them out to be. Evidence for this hypothesis is the high rate of non-response, and the perception that respondents do not take the survey seriously, giving insincere or poorly thought-out answers to most questions.

      • BUT polls are connected in some way to observable political behavior

      • polls before the election are good.

      • they are meaningful

      • this hypothesis doesn’t really help us

    • Question wording effects and survey organization methods

      • Zaller esque

      • but doesn’t explain why support for candidates vary so much.

    • Non-response bias

      • another hypothesis: survey respondents selectively refuse to answer

        • show a time series plot that refutes this.

      • surveys reflect engagement

      • bad event for dem candidate?

        • maybe dems don’t answer.

  • Journalist theories:

    • The forecasters were lucky because Bush ran a good campaign and Dukakis a poor one

      • This hypothesis is about the actual campaigning of candidates.

        • In this example, Bush was better and that is the reason for winning.

        • not sufficient evidence to support hypothesis outside of 1988.

    • Unbalanced campaigns or predictable convergence

      • This hypothesis mixes journalists’ and political science theories, in that it accepts the forecast, but still follows the story of the polls to understand why Bush won.

        • doesn’t explain nor forecast that Bush would run a better campaign.

    • Uninformed voters

      • assumes many voters vote based on non-fundamental characteristics.

      • This model explains the swings in the pre-election polls, but does not explain how pre-campaign forecasting methods predict so well, given that the political science forecasts do not even try to account for personalities and campaign events.

  • Political Science Theories:

    • the political science theories take as a starting point that the ability of economists and political scientists to forecast election results accurately months ahead of time is evidence that the election came out just as predicted.

    • Balanced Campaigns

      • Forecast models work because they were balanced campaigns (in 1988)

      • “equal funding”

      • Still doesn’t provide enough explanatory power.

      • The fact that modern presidential campaigns seem to be balanced, which is consistent with the political science model of voter decision making, does not solve the puzzle about why the polls varied so much

        • they say nothing about why polls vary so much.

    • Partisans returning to the fold

      • An elaboration of this hypothesis is that strong partisans come home to their party first, then weaker partisans, and so on

      • Different events bring in different groups of voters, but under the hypothesis being discussed here, the strong ones come home first, then subsequent events bring in others later.

      • The key evidence against this thesis is that the proportion of undecided voters does not drop over the course of the campaign

        • really? is that right? Seems hard to believe.

    • Rational Actor Theories

      • Assumes voters are rational

        • either have full or incomplete info

        • still reject incomplete model

Section 4: Towards an explanation for poll variation

• Our working hypothesis is that voters cast their ballots in general election contests for president on the basis of their ‘enlightened preferences’.

  • we do not require that people be able to discuss these preferences intelligently or even to know what they are; we only require that they know enough that their decisions are based on the true values of the fundamental variables.

    • wonder what this means in an affectively polarized world. Is enlightened preferences now just the party/ideology identity?

  • The function of the campaign, then, is to inform voters about the fundamental variables and their appropriate weights; notably, the candidates’ ideologies and their positions on major issues

    • people DO gather more info through the campaign.

    • At the start of the campaign, voters do not have the information necessary to make enlightened voting decisions. Gathering this information is costly and most citizens have no particularly good reason to gather it in time for the pollster’s visit, so long as it can be gathered when needed on election day.

    • Unfortunately, those who consider themselves ‘voters’ are willing to report to pollsters their ‘likely’ voting decisions, even if they have not gathered sufficient information to make this report accurate

      • this is giving me shades of Zaller.

      • implies the power of media and elites in framing early candidacy.

  • SO campaigns activate the salience of fundamental variables for voters. There is a lag and it takes time for this to penetrate into voters heads. This solidifies as the campaign goes on as voters get more info. - this is how im thinking about this.

    • this fits actually kinda well with Trump’s rise in 2016

    • is there a panel study of voters polled and then how they voted day of actual election?

  • Our hypothesis is that the early position of the polls is a result of the information that is readily available at the start of the general election campaign

  • Perhaps people are not learning about the policies but they are overtime being activated against the other candidate/party.

    • affective polarization.

• Thus, without sufficient knowledge of their fundamental variables, and when asked to give an opinion anyway, most respondents act as they will in the voting booth on election day: they use information at their disposal about their fundamental variables, and report a ‘likely’ vote to the pollster. We believe that this report to the pollster is sincere, but the survey response is still based on a different information set from that which will be available by the time of the election.

  • PUNCHLINE!

Section 5: EVIDENCE FOR ENLIGHTENED PREFERENCES

• Start of campaign: preferences = unenlightened

  • based on a lot of previous lit, they seem to always be unenlightened (to some degree).

  • conventions boost support

  • Graph sucks in this section

  • Independents move most extremely in response to conventions.

  • Some fundamental variables:

    • party

    • ideology

    • race

    • sex

    • income

    • education

      • says edu should have almost no effect? what? no way.

    • region

  • They find Race and ideology matter less at the start of the campaign than at the end, whereas the effect of region among non-whites and the effect of gender are much higher early on.

Conclusion

• King is dismissive of the journalist explanation

  • I am too. BUT

    • “Finally, journalists should realize that they can report the polls all they want, and continue to make incorrect causal inferences about them, but they are not helping to predict or even influence the election”

      • I DISAGREE WITH THIS! I think they do have some impact on the outcome.

        • josh thinks the same.

Huber, Gregory and Kevin Arceneaux. 2007. “Identifying the Persuasive Effects of Presidential Advertising,” American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract:

Do presidential campaign advertisements mobilize, inform, or persuade citizens? To answer this question we exploit a natural experiment, the accidental treatment of some individuals living in nonbattleground states during the 2000 presidential election to either high levels or one-sided barrages of campaign advertisements simply because they resided in a media market adjoining a competitive state. We isolate the effects of advertising by matching records of locally broadcast presidential advertising with the opinions of National Annenberg Election Survey respondents living in these uncontested states. This approach remedies the observed correlation between advertising and both other campaign activities and previous election outcomes. In contrast to previous research, we find little evidence that citizens are mobilized by or learn from presidential advertisements, but strong evidence that they are persuaded by them. We also consider the causal mechanisms that facilitate persuasion and investigate whether some individuals are more susceptible to persuasion than others.

Bumper Sticker:

“Advertising does a little to inform, next to nothing to mobilize, and a great deal to persuade potential voters.”

Research Question

• What effect do campaign advertisements have on those viewing them?

• Does advertising engage citizens in the campaign?

• does it inform them (or enable them to adopt appropriate partisan positions on the issues?

• Does it directly alter their evaluation of the candidates (persuade them)?

Background

• Scant evidence that campaigns (and their advertisements) sway voters

• campaign commercials increase reported turnout propensities, enhance viewers’knowledge of the candidates, and reinforce citizens’ underlying partisan predispositions

• Political advertisements are meant to persuade NOT to turn out to vote.

• Because interest in politics is positively correlatedwith receiving political messages, individuals who do payattention to political advertising are also more likely tobe targeted by campaigns for GOTV efforts and directmail.

• JHJ find evidence that campaign advertisements are persuasive: In media markets where more pro-Bush (pro-Gore) commercials werebroadcast, the proportion of survey respondents indicating they would vote for Bush increased (decreased).

  • however, variation is non-random.

Data

• 2000 presidential election

• DV: NAES individual-level survey measures of expressed preferencesand beliefs.

• IV: unsystematic variation in broadcast advertisements in non-battleground states

Method

• Natural Experiment

  • event in real world that assigns people into groups in a random fashion.

• uses areas adjacent to battleground states BUT in the same media market

• intention to vote. NOT ACTUAL VOTE!

Does Advertising Engage?

• The core empirical hypothesis is that the frequent airing of commercials will cause citizens to be more likely to express interest in the campaign and to turn out to vote.

• We test this prediction by determining whether campaign interest and intention to vote are higher among NAES respondents from areas saturated with presidential campaign advertisements.

• IV: Advertising exposure

  • measured as the ratings-adjusted number of presidential advertisements(in GRPs/1000) broadcast in the local media market inwhich each NAES respondent lives

• DV: vote turnout

• Finding: Advertising does not increase interest in campaign or intent to vote

• Previous findings emphasized an increase but it may because of the high correlation between advertising and grassroots campaign.

Does Advertising Inform?

• both perspectives predict that knowledge of candidate positions and the alignment between a respondent’s opinions and those of her party’s candidate will be greater inareas with more frequent advertisements.

• Respondents were coded as knowledgeable (1 = “Yes” or 0 = “No”) if they could accurately place both candidates on the issue orcould place Bush to the right of Gore on the ideology scale.The only evidence of citizen learning emerges in the case of Social Security reform, for which presidential advertising is associated with a greater ability to place Bush (in favor of personal accounts) and Gore (opposed to personal accounts) in both the panel and cross-sectional analyses.

• Per the column (1) estimate using panel data, and assuming an individual did not previously hold her party’s position on Social Security, a one standard deviation increase in advertising is associated with a predicted increase in adopting her party’s candidate’s position by about 2.5% (from a baseline of 32.5%,simulated 95% confidence intervals of .2 to 5.0%).

• In summary, there is weak and inconsistent evidence for the claim that advertising enhances citizen learning or the adoption of partisan positions.

Does Advertising Persuade

• higher levels of Gore advertising are associated with a decline in Bush’s favorability and these effects are statistically significant.

• DV: likability

• What is the content of these advertisements though?

  • are they affective/negative?

• Per the column (4) estimates,a 1.57 GRPs/1000 increase in Bush’s advertising decreases the probability of obtaining an above-average likeability rating by 3.2% (from a baseline of 56.8%) while an in-crease of that magnitude in Gore’s advertising increasesthe probability by 4.9%

• Lastly, we examine whether advertising affects reported vote intention and find strong evidence that it does. In the panel, a respondent who was initially undecided is predicted to subsequently support Gore 36.1% of the time and Bush 45.9% of the time. Per the column (5)results with the panel data, increasing Bush’s advertising above the average by 1.57 GRPs/1000 is associated with a 9.1% increase in the predicted probability of supporting Bush (95% confidence interval .5 to 18.2%) and a 7.8%decrease in the probability of supporting Gore (95% confidence interval −17.3 to −.3%).

Assessing the Mechanism of Persuasion

• Based on the previous findings, the authors ask why do advertisements persuade vote choice?

• don’t really know

• candidate affect is one promising mechanism

Who is most persuadable?

• A related and important theoretical concern is whetherthe effects of advertising are moderated by individualcharacteristics that determine whether individuals are exposed to campaign advertising and, conditional on beingexposed, whether they are receptive to those messages.Most prominent in this regard is Zaller’s (1992) Receive-Accept-Sample (RAS) model, which predicts that political awareness increases exposure to potentially persuasivemessages, but that at high levels this awareness also allows individual to reject messages that are incongruentwith their (often well-formed) opinions.

• this suggests that both the least and most aware are relatively unaffected by communication, the former because they do not receive it, the latter because they resist it, while individuals lying between these extremes are more susceptible to political communication.

• The greatest evidence of persuasion appears among moderately aware respondents.

• So if I am a campaign consultant, I am going after the moderately aware respondents.

Healy, Andrew and Gabriel Lenz. 2014. “Substituting the End for the Whole: Why Voters Respond Primarily to the Election-Year Economy,” American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract

According to numerous studies, the election-year economy influences presidential election results far more than cumulative growth throughout the term. Here we describe a series of surveys and experiments that point to an intriguing explanation for this pattern that runs contrary to standard political science explanations, but one that accords with a large psychological literature. Voters, we find, actually intend to judge presidents on cumulative growth. However, since that characteristic is not readily available to them, voters inadvertently substitute election-year performance because it is more easily accessible. This “end-heuristic” explanation for voters’ election-year emphasis reflects a general tendency for people to simplify retrospective assessments by substituting conditions at the end for the whole. The end-heuristic explanation also suggests a remedy, a way to align voters’ actions with their intentions. Providing people with the attribute they are seeking—cumulative growth—eliminates the election-year emphasis.

Bumper Sticker

Psych explains why voters weigh election year economies more.

Research Question

• What are voters’ intentions?

• why do recency effects emerge not just with the economy but also in domains such as legislative appropriations,crime, and terrorist attacks?

Background

• Voters tend to reward incumbents when the economy is good 6 months prior to election

• Achen and Bartels argue long term trend don’t move the needle much for the incumbents prospects.

• Short term views of the electorate can influence how officials govern.

Why do voters put weight on election year economies?

• first explanation: voter memories.

  • voters don’t remember that far back

• second explanation: election year economies may be informative of what the president has done.

  • it takes years for a president to enact their policies and fix the economy.

  • Perhaps the election year is the best year to evaluate presidents.

• third explanation: psychological

  • substitute the end for the whole.

  • Voters are asked “How well did the economy perform during the president’s term?” but answer “How has the economy been recently?”

  • “peak-end rule”

    • people evaluate stuff at the peak and at the end.

Data

• lots of surveys

Methods

• survey questions

Findings

• Cognitively easier to evaluate recent year.

• Heuristic!

• People evaluate years differently. Voters continue to put greater emphasis on election year economies.

• Voters appear to want to evaluate the economy as a whole, not just the end. However, since the whole is not readily available to them it requires adding up growth across years—they substitute the end.

Potential issue?

• I am not seeing ANY discussion of the perception of the economy influenced by education OR party id.

  • not big on this one tbh.

Hall, Andrew. 2015. “What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?” American Political Science Review.

• candidate centered elections.

• fenno style

• congressional races are idiosyncratic

Abstract:

This article studies the interplay of U.S. primary and general elections.I examine how the nomination of an extremist changes general-election outcomes and legislative behavior in the U.S. House, 1980–2010, using a regression discontinuity design in primary elections. When an extremist— as measured by primary-election campaign receipt patterns—wins a “coin-flip” election over a more moderate candidate, the party’s general-election vote share decreases on average by approximately 9-13 percentage points, and the probability that the party wins the seat decreases by 35–54 percentage points. This electoral penalty is so large that nominating the more extreme primary candidate causes the district’s subsequent roll-call representation to reverse, on average, becoming more liberal when an extreme Republican is nominated and more conservative when an extreme Democrat is nominated. Overall, the findings show how general-election voters act as a moderating filter in response to primary nominations.

Bumper Sticker:

Research Question

• How much does the party’s electoral outlook suffer in a district where its primary voters nominate a more extreme candidate, relative to the counterfactual in which the same district nominates a more moderate candidate?

Background:

• For these reasons it is important to study not just the immediate electoral consequences of nominating more or less extreme candidates, but also the effects of nominating relatively extreme or moderate candidates on downstream roll-call voting

• See findings

  • Author move to explain the mechanisms behind these findings.

    • extremist may have a valence disadvantage

      • this is unlikely. Extremist candidates were more likely to be previous office holders than moderate candidates.

    • possible demographic difference

      • gender

        • not clearly tested.

    • Interest groups prefer moderates

      • on average interest groups are more moderate.

    • The penalty to extremist grows with voter information

      • districts where more newspaper information about local politics is available— are more able to identify, describe, and rate their representatives.

        • there is a info lag for voter. It may take another election cycle to realize the extremeness of a candidate.

• Extremist could also juice turnout and enthusiasm in the general.

Data

• Estimated ideological positions of primary candidates from 1980 - 2010. - Hall & Snyder (2013).

• estimate donors ideological positions?

• I think he is scaling the ideological position at the time of the primary.

• The analysis uses a special subset of all primary elections—namely, contested primaries with two “viable” candidates who raise enough money to allow for reliable ideological scaling.

• Districts are defined as “safe” if the party’s share of the presidential two-party normal vote, calculated as the average presidential vote share for the redistricting period, is above 60%.

Method

• Regression discontinuity.

\[ Y_{ipt}=\beta_0+\beta_1Extremist \ Primary \ Win_{ipt} + f(V_{ipt}) + \epsilon_{ipt} \]

• \(Extremist \ Primary \ Win_{it}\) is an indicator variable for the extremist winning party p’s primary in district \(i\) at time \(t\).

• Thus \(\beta_1\) is the quantity of interest, the RDD estimator for causal effects from the “as-if” random assignment of an extremist in the general election.

• \(Y_{ipt}\) stands in for three main outcome variables

  • party vote share

  • party victory

  • DW-Nominate score of the winning general election candidate in the ensuing Congress

• \(f(V_{ipt})\) a flexible function of the running variable, the extremist candidate’s vote-share winning margin, i.e., the extremist candidate’s share of the top two candidates’ vote less 0.5, which determines treatment status.

• Later on he connects extremist election to roll call voting.

• Basically we are going to look at coin-flip elections. We are treating these as “as-if” random. IF the election are this close we can basically say this is random.

  • some issues here but we are assuming random

• the drop in figure 2 is the actual treatment effect - the regression discontinuity.

Results:

• Among”coin-flip”primary elections between a relative moderate and an extremist,the nomination of the extremist appears to cause a large decrease in the party’s general-election vote share.

• Finally, the third estimate uses only primaries that occur in districts that are safe for the party holding the primary, i.e., districts where the presidential normal vote is at or above 60% for the party. Here we find almost no penalty to nominating the extremist, perhaps because the partisan voters in the district support whomever the party nominates.

• basically extreme candidates don’t perform well in general election DEPENDENT on their margin of victory in the primary.

  • robust at different cutoff points.

• As we move to the left, i.e., as the winning Democratic primary candidate becomes more extreme, average roll-call voting first becomes more liberal, because the primary winner delivers more liberal roll-call voting. However,as the donor score becomes more extreme, Republicans begin to gain a more significant electoral advantage, and roll-call voting starts to become increasingly conservative.

  • basically there is a backlash effect

  • wonder if this still holds?

  • thinking about affective polarization in this context.

    • perhaps people are more affectively polarized that regardless of the extremeness of the candidate, people now hate the other side so much they still work to keep that extreme candidate in office.

      • not clear.

• Overall, I find that the nomination of the extremist causes a reversal in roll-call voting, producing more conservative roll-call voting when Democrats nominate a more extreme candidate and more liberal roll-call voting when Republicans nominate a more extreme candidate.

  • short term effect

    • this effect does not hold in safe districts.

• Nominating the extremist today continues to cause an ideological reversal in the district’s roll-call voting even eight years (four terms) later. The effect is present in both Republican primaries (where observed roll-call voting becomes more liberal) and in Democratic primaries (where observed roll-call voting becomes more conservative).

Thomsen, Danielle. 2023. “Competition in Congressional Elections: Money versus Votes,” American Political Science Review.

Abstract

Competition among candidates or parties is a necessary condition for democracy. But who counts as a candidate and what counts as competition? The influence of money in American elections makes fundraising an appropriate alternative to vote totals, and it provides a new vantage point to assess the quality of electoral competition. I draw on a dataset of preelection campaign receipts to measure competition in U.S. House primaries from 1980 to 2020. When competition is measured with receipts, it looks markedly worse than vote share measures suggest. Moreover, the difference between vote share and fundraising measures is largest in open-seat primaries, or the best-case scenarios of competition. The disparity between measures is driven largely by candidates who have little chance of winning. The findings shed new light on resource disparities in elections and demonstrate that our conclusions about the quality of competition are tied to our measures.

Bumper Sticker

Money is important in competitiveness in primaries.

Research Question

• How much does money influence primary elections

Background

• Competition among candidates or parties is necessary condition for democracy (Dahl 1956; 1971; Key 1949; Schlesinger 1966; Schumpeter 1942)

• This article departs from the use of vote shares and examines the quality of competition through the lens of fundraising.

• Money is a heuristic for who is winning and losing (in a horse race frame).

• Donations have direct implications for whether candidates can hire staffers and consultants, buy advertisements, and access the goods and services that fuel their campaigns.

• A strong fundraising haul also attracts attention from the media and partisan elites.

• They find that, across primaries from 1900 to 2016, the level of competition is highest in open-seat races and in constituencies with a partisan advantage.

• fundraising is a good predictor of who wins.

Data

• pre-election receipts in more than 16,000 U.S. House primaries from 1980 to 2020

• take money and look at affective number of candidates and observe across.

Findings:

• And although financial long shots do outperform their receipt shares at the ballot box, they overwhelmingly lose and usually by large margins.

• The main finding is that when competition is viewed through the lens of fundraising, it looks significantly worse than vote share measures suggest. The likelihood that primaries are competitive decreases across race types, with the largest difference emerging in open seats. The notion that several viable candidates are vigorously competing for voter support is not borne out when competition is measured with fundraising patterns.

Week 9: Congress

Lecture Notes:

• Why and when does legislative organization change?

• institutions literature

• they fight a bunch

• Krehbiel is good but also wrong - Josh

  • good starting point for how we think about institutions

  • we do rules exist and what do they serve and what are the consequences.

• Partisan stuff was secondary before Gingrich.

• What are the institutions actually doing?

• discharge petition - discharge straight from committee if majority in floor

  • committee loses gatekeeping power.

    • rarely used.

• institutions are patterns repeated overtime in the long run

  • equillibria

    • how institutions produce behavior.

• Josh loves Krehbiel but it hasnt aged super well.

• Krehbiel is setting out to explain why we have certain institutions within Congress.

  • similar storyline to Mayhew

  • members of congress engage in gains from trade

• we want committee members that are loyal to the chamber so they arent trying to “fool”.

• How are committee designed?

• Everything by congress at some point is approved by a majority. - Krehbiel

  • explain why the median of the majority approves this at some point.

• WHY DID RULE CHANGES OCCUR?!

• Seniority is an institution

  • distributive - good at policy

  • informational - expertise

  • whats the evidence between the two?

    • Why are senior members kicked out - this will tell us.

• Hastert Rule - vote doesnt go to floor unless at least a majority of the majority supports it.

Krehbiel, Keith. 1991. Information and Legislative Organization, Chs. 1, 4.

• Krehbiel is trying to explain which perspective is the reason for these institutions to exist.

Chapter 1:

• Article 1 section 5: “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.”

• Debates about legislative organization are debates about public policy and who determines it.

• Legislative organization: refers to the allocation of resources and assignment of parliamentary rights to individual legislators or groups of legislators.

  • rights to propose legislation

  • rights to amend legislation proposed by others

  • rights to employ staff to help study and draft legislation and amendments.

Two Perspectives on Legislative Organization:

Distributive Perspective

• The distributive perspective on legislative organization depicts a legislature as a collective choice body whose principle task is to allocate policy benefits.

• pork barrel model

• Goal: maximize gains from trade reliably and predictably.

  • I think this basically means efficient compromise

  • legislatures mess this up all the time.

    • the solution is institutional:

      • a set of rules and precedents that facilitates gains from trade by assigning parliamentary rights in accordance with intensity-and, in practice, the extremity-of legislators’ preferences.

• Legislators compromise based on a proportional gain

  • give up something less important to gain something more important

    • maximize this.

• There is a trust issue here. What if people reneg on bills.

  • prisoner’s dilemna problem

  • committees help prevent this - certain people are endowed with power to ensure trust.

The Informational Perspective:

• The distributive perspective is formulaic and overly emphasizes local incentives from reelection incentives of the member

• maximizing gains from specialization

• There is also specialization among legislators. Legislators have to organize themselves into what they are best do deal with.

• Information issues in congress. By legislators sorting into committees they specialize, it helps overcome information issues and improves the chamber as a whole.

• The challenge of legislative organization within the informational framework is thus distinctly different from capturing gains from trade for the distributive benefit of high-demand minorities

  • Rather, it is to capture gains from specialization while minimizing the degree to which enacted policies deviate from majority-preferred outcomes.

• The solution in this perspective is to develop policy expertise and to share policy-relevant information with fellow legislators, including legislators with competing distributive interests.

• Basically: assign resources to make legislators specialized

• legislators close to the median of chamber get special parliamentary rights to minimize partisan weaponization.

• expertise of a legislator, improves collective benefit of the chamber.

• uncertainty is the key issue.

  • specifically with policy instruments and policy outcomes.

• we give power (committee membership) to people well suited to help with these issues.

Research Question:

• Are the major principles of legislative organization exclusively or predominantly distributive, or are they first and foremost informational?

• How and why did these legislative institutions arise?

• How and why are these legislative institutions employed?

Primary empirical focus:

• standing committees and their formation

• rules governing the amendment of legislation in the parent chamber

• rules an precedents governing the resolution of interchamber differences in legislation

An Institutional Focus:

• legislative institutions: rules and precedents that act as binding constraints on legislators’ behavior.

Majoritarianism Postulate:

• Objects of legislative choice in both the procedural and policy domains must be chosen by a majority of the legislature
  • procedures and action must be acceptable to the majority.

Uncertainty Postulate:

• legislators are often uncertain about the relationship between policies and their outcomes

Chapter 4:

• Committees existence gives credence to informational perspective.

• Are the major principles of legislative organization predominately distributive or informational?

• WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF COMMITTEES?

  • its not Jeffersonian thinking.

Informational Origins of Committees

• Specialization (not distributive politics) was at the heart of conceptualization of the committee system.

• Committees were conceived as agents of the house.

• basically strong theoretical explanations for division of labor from an informational perspective

• but doesn’t capture the full picture

  • congress is very different from its origins.

  • we also need to discuss the fact that legislators have differing preferences.

The distributive perspective

• self-selection of committees from high demanders

• but still doesnt explain why a collective entity would embrace self-selection

• legislator gives up stuff so they can be an expert on the thing that matters the most for them.

Test:

• use interest groups

• high demanders do get what they want in some policy arenas.

Aldrich, John and David Rohde. 2000. “The Republican Revolution and the House Appropriations Committee,” Journal of Politics.

• Josh doesnt like this

• one big critique of Krehbiel

  • doesn’t think about change/variation

• Why do we have structures that change? What does that tell us when they do change?

Abstract:

This study applies the theory of “conditional party government” to the interaction between the Republican party and the Appropriations Committee in the 104th House, seen in the context of developments since the 96th Congress. As expected by the theory, we find that the relatively homogenous preferences of the Republican contingent in the House led them to adopt new institutional arrangements to enhance the powers of their leaders, which in turn were used to advance the party’s policy goals. Given that the leadership decided to use Appropriations as one of the vehicles of major policy change, they and the Conference sought to monitor the committee’s actions, and to influence it to behave as they wanted. The leaders used their enhanced powers over incentives and with regard to the agenda to advance the party cause. Both leaders and the Conference sought to block policy shifts away from what they wanted, but facilitated changes in the desired direction. Finally, we expected to see evidence of the increasing applicability of the theory over time, culminating in the developments of the 104th Congress, and this expectation was borne out.

Bumper Sticker:

Background:

• Conditional Party Government: it contends that partisan organizational structures in the House—especially those of the majority party—will (under certain conditions) seek to use their powers to shift the policy outcomes produced by the body closer to the median position of the party than would otherwise be the case

  • The “condition” in conditional party government involves the degree of preference agreement within parties and of preference conflict between them. The general contention is that as intraparty homogeneity and interparty conflict increase, so too will the propensity of party members to grant stronger powers to their leaders and to collective party organizations, and to support their exercise of those powers in specific instances

  • BASICALLY: Party = homogenous = stack cards against opponent

• As intraparty homogeneity and interparty conflict increase, we would expect to find stronger party action designed to try to pull the policy chosen away from the floor median position and toward the median position of the party on issues that make up the party’s agenda.

• 104th congress is polarizing

• Newt gets a bunch of power

• centralization of power into Leader

• rules committee sets the term of debate

• even non-committee republicans were expressing disagreement with Gingrich

Schickler, Eric. 2000. “Institutional Change in the House of Representatives, 1867–1998: a Test of Partisan and Ideological Power Balance Models,” American Political Science Review

Abstract:

I examine competing explanations for House rules changes with significant partisan overtones. I sought to identify all rules changes adopted from 1867 to 1998 that were intended either to advantage or to undermine the majority party and its leaders in their efforts to shape the House agenda. I test a majority party cartel model of institutional change against a model that focuses on the ideological balance of power on the floor, that is, on the closeness of the median voter to the median member of the majority and minority parties. I also evaluate the conditional party government approach. The data analysis suggests the preeminent importance of shifts in the ideological balance. Two variables identified by the conditional party government theory, party polarization and party capacity, obtain limited support, but their effect is neither as robust nor as large in magnitude as that of change in the median voter’s position.

Background:

• Committees used to have a lot more power and considerable deference to seniority.

• This changed in the 90s with Newt.

Majority Party Cartel Model

• legislative institutions are designed controlled by majority party

• usurp power and use that power to create institutions to best serve the party members’ interest.

• The Cox and McCubbins theory leads to the substantively important prediction that the majority party will design rules and procedures that generally allow it to pull policy outcomes away from the floor median and toward the majority party’s median position.

  • something of consensus among scholars:

    • as the majority party becomes more homogenous, rules changes that enhance its leaders’ agenda control become more likely.

Conditional Party Governmental Perspective

• also emphasizes the majority party’s ability to shape legislative institutions, but advocates of this theory highlight variation in the degree of partisan control

• contend that the majority party’s influence varies as a function of the party’s internal homogeneity and the degree of polarization in the majority and minority parties’ positions.

Basic insight:

When majority party members agree on basic policy stands-that is, when they have homogeneous preferences they will have stronger incentives to give the party and its leaders increased control over the legislative agenda and decision making. By contrast, when there is disagreement on major policy issues, they will have incentives to give fewer tools to the party and its leaders.

Author’s Argument:

• I argue that shifts in the ideological balance of power on the floor, rather than change in the internal characteristics of the majority party, is the key determinant of changes in House rules

• In this model, the median legislator on the floor is the pivotal decision maker.

• I argue that changes in rules that determine the allocation depend on the ideological balance of power on the floor, that is, on the closeness of the median voter on the floor to the two parties.

• As the floor median (measured along a single, ideological dimension) moves toward the majority party, rules changes in favor of that party are more likely; when the median moves away from the majority party, rules changes that favor the minority party are more likely

  • this seems kinda obvious?

DV:

• I sought to identify all rules changes with significant partisan overtones adopted by the House from 1867 to 1998.

Hypothesis:

1. CHANGE IN HOMOGENEITY. Rules changes that enhance the agenda control of the majority party and its leaders are more likely as the majority party becomes increasingly homogeneous. Rules changes that reduce such majority party advantages are more likely as the party becomes more heterogeneous.

2. CHANGE IN PARTY CONTROL. A switch in majority party control of the House is likely to lead to rules changes in the new majority party’s favor.

3. PARTY CAPACITY. The stronger the major ity party relative to the minority party, the more likely are rules changes that advantage the majority party. The weaker the majority party relative to the minority, the more likely are changes that disadvantage the majority party

4. MAJORITY SIZE. As the majority party’s share of seats becomes smaller, rules changes that advantage the majority party are likely

5. CHANGE IN PARTY POLARIZATION. As the majority party median moves farther from the minority party median, rules changes that advantage the majority party are like

6. CHANGE IN IDEOLOGICAL POWER BALANCE. Rules changes that advantage the majority party and its leaders are more likely when the floor median moves in the direction favoring the majority party. Rules changes that reduce majority party advantages are more likely when the floor median moves in the direction favoring the minority party

Results

• The data analysis shows that the ideological power balance model fares quite well in explaining partisan rules changes. By contrast, the key explanatory variable derived from partisan theories, change in the homogeneity of majority party members’ policy views, does not have a statistically significant effect on rules changes.

Cox, Gary and Mat McCubbins. 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the House of Representatives. Chs. 2, 4.

Lecture Notes:

• Take away this reading as like the kinda “truth”

• parties matter.

• Why parties - Aldrich

• why does the median voter to the right of a democratic majority give power to majority party literature?

  • because if you dont centralize power nothing happens and thus this hurts the party brand.

    • this is better/asnwers khrebial

Chapter 2: Procedural Cartel Theory

Why are there parties in legislatures?

• Parties are created to solve internal collective action problems

  • to solve issues of unpredictability, legislators form political parties to bind themselves together in durable coalitions.

• Parties are created to solve external collective action problems

  • parties are formed primarily to accrue electoral gains
  • party brand

How are parties organized?

• Parties as firms

  • delegation to central agents in order to reduce transaction costs and ameliorate collective action problems

• Parties as partnerships

  • like law or account firms

    • various gradations of senior partners provide overall strategic and tactical direction to the firm

    • the senior partners are committee and subcommittee chairs, majority party floor leaders, campaign finance chairs, and the like.

What do parties do?

• How do they mitigate the collective action problem?

• Parties as floor voting coalitions

  • ensure a cohesive voting bloc

  • party can discipline members

• Parties as procedural coalitions

  • the central issue is the majority party’s ability to control the legislative agenda
  • *** this is important. This is where power is flexed.
  • prevent votes that embarrass members of the party.

How do majority parties control the agenda?

• Parties as allocating proposal rights

• Parties as allocating veto rights

Procedural Cartel Theory:

1. Assumption 1: Members of Congress seek reelection to the House, internal advancement within the House, good public policy, and majority status.

2. Assumption 2: The reputation (or brand name) of a member’s party affects both the member’s personal probability of reelection and, more substantially, the party’s probability of securing a majority.

3. Assumption 3: A party’s reputation depends on significantly on its record of legislative accomplishment

4. Assumption 4: Legislating - hence compiling favorable records of legislative accomplishments - is akin to team production and entails overcoming an array of cooperation and coordination problems.

5. Assumption 5: The primary by which a (majority) party regulates its members’ actions, in order to overcome problems of team production in the legislative process, is by delegating to a central authority.

6. Assumption 6: The key resource that majority parties delegate to their senior partners is the power to set the legislative agenda; the majority party forms is a procedural cartel that collectively monopolizes agenda-setting power.

   1. this is the important one

   2. Procedural Cartel - is a coalition of legislators who constitute a majority in the assembly, share a common label, and cartelize the agenda via the following basic strategy.

   3. Cartels seek to establish a collective monopoly on a particular resource (agenda setting power).

      1. First, the cartel creates (mostly inherits) a set of offices with special agenda setting powers

         1. committee chairs, slots on the Rules committee, and speakership

      2. cartel ensures all members get (or nearly all) agenda setting offices.

      3. Cartel members expect those appointed to agenda-setting offices to always obey.

         1. thou shall not aid bills that will split the party

      4. Cartel members expect rank-and-file members to support the agenda-setting decisions rendered by officeholds when those decisions are made in conformity to the expectations just noted

      5. Cartel leadership takes action to maintain cooperation and coordination within the cartel.

Other:

• Focus on party brand name.
• getting rolled is basically a violation of the hastert rule.
  • these should be rare according to Cox and McCubbins
    • because the party sets agenda
      • negative power

Chapter 4: The Primacy of Reed’s Rule in House Organization

“Our government is founded on the doctrine that if 100 citizens think one way and 101 think another, the 101 are right. It is the old doctrine that the majority must govern. Indeed, you have no choice. If the majority does not govern, the minority will; and if the tyranny of the majority is hard, the tyranny of the minority is simply unendurable. The rules, then, ought to be so arranged as to facilitate the action of the majority.” - Thomas Brackett Reed 1887

Quick Summary

• After Reed’s Rule became a permanent part of House organization, over 80% of the bills allowed to reach the final passage stage in the typical Congress proposed to move policy towards the median voter in the majority party.

  • how does this compare to Schickler?

• they get better data than Binder & Schickler

Main Thesis:

• Our view is that the rules of the legislative game have been heavily stacked in the majority party’s favor since the readoption of Reed’s rules in 1894.

Background

• Reed’s rules comes out after reconstruction. Basically, the House was a mess and majority and minority parties had veto power.

• Reed’s rules break the power of the minority’s power to delay

Reed’s Rule

These come about because there is a logjam of bills in the reconstruction congress. Minority power could gum up the system. Prevent delay!

1. a rule giving the speaker the power to refuse to recognize members seeking to make dilatory motions

2. a rule allowing the speaker to count all members physically present in the chamber during quorum calls, even if those members chose not to answer when their names were called

   1. this is most famous one

3. a rule lowering the quorum in Committee of the Whole and permitting cloture of debate by majority vote on any part of a bill being considered.

4. a rule allowing the speaker to refer House bills, Senate bills, and messages from the president to appropriate committees (including conference committees) without debate.

Punchline:

• Reed’s rules give more power to the majority.

Lee, Frances. 2016. Insecure Majorities. Ch. 6.

• Messaging bills are important.

• specifically framed to inform public

  • goal is to move dial.

  • aimed at communication

• modern congress always changing hands

• these aren’t new but now everyone uses it.

• uses amendment to look at.

  • HAS to be amendments cause majority controls bills that get to floor.

Week 10: Presidency and Interbranch Relations

Lecture Notes:

• Congress wants to delegate to specialized people

  • but Congress needs to make sure they don’t drift away from their policy perspective

    • so how does Congress reign in bureaucracies

      • this is kind of where the big debates are

        • they can exercise oversight over executive

        • nomination stuff

        • committee stuff - see Clinton.

        • discretion

          • Huber and shipman.

  • We give away authority because they are more specialized.

• Notice and comment

  • solicit feedback from people on regulation

• One of the debates hot in the 90s is congress actually really in control? Is it effective? Or are they abdicating?

  • one theory is about Congress and how they don’t care - they just want to be reelected.

Ragsdale, Lyn and John Thies. 1997. “The Institutionalization of the American Presidency,” American Journal of Political Science.

sociology perspective is dialectic between institutions and person.

rat choice still big in institutions. very good at predicting stability of institutions.

congress asked president to do more. They asked because president is better. Probably a division of labor story.

abdication hypothesis.

presidential signing statements

Congressional bills give more or less details (length of proxy).

john d huber & Charles R. Shipan. - spatial model story

Clinton et al. -

Historic institutionalism - why institionts change and develop

Rat choice institutionalism - why institutions stick around

Sociological institutionalism - Independent force. Institutions influence thought process. Shape social norms. Joe manchin believeing in the filibuster is an example. He totally believes that stuff.

Theory:

The institutionalization of the presidency involves the process by which the office as an organization attains stability and value as an end in itself. Stability denotes that the entity cannot be easily altered or eliminated, while value involves the entity acquiring a distinctive identity. More specifically, the presidency becomes institutionalized when it attains high levels of four features: autonomy (the independence of the presidency from other units), adaptability (the longevity of units in the presidency), complexity (the dif ferentiation of subunits and staff in the office), and coherence (the manageable volume of work). Institutionalization results from an interplay between individual interests within the organization and aspects of the environment.

Hypothesis:

Government activity, congressional action, and individual presidents’ efforts affect the degree of institutionalization across the dimensions of autonomy, adaptability, complexity, and coherence.

Methods:

From 1924 to 1992, several descriptive indicators of the four dimensions of in stitutionalization are analyzed, including expenditures, duration of organizational units, employees, and workload. A multivariate model is then estimated for the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, and White House Office using ordinary least squares.

Results:

The presidency emerged as an institution in the 1970s. In estimating the impact of government activity, congressional action, and individual presidents on various indica tors of institutionalization, national government activity-measured by social welfare expenditures and defense expenditures-has the greatest impact. The effect of congres sional activity is more limited. The indicators for differences among individual presi dents have little effect

Background:

• Previous presidential literature typically focuses on the personality, leadership, and decision making style of the presidency.

  • the key feature of the office IS the president.

    • not the institutional nature of the the presidency.

      • Authors are going to shift away from this.

A Framework for Institutionalization:

• We define institutionalization as the process by which an organization “acquires values and stability” as an end in itself.

  • to “institutionalize” is to infuse with value beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand.

    • as an organization achieves stability and value, it becomes an institution.

      • Stability denotes that the organization is no longer a mechanistic entity, easily altered or eliminated. Instead, as an organization institutionalizes, it survives various internal and environmental challenges and achieves self-maintenance-it exists in the future because it has existed in the past

        • value denotes “the prizing of [organization] for its own sake.”

  • Institutionalization results from an interplay between individuals’ interests within the organization and the environment. Individuals, who may already work as a staff or loosely-configured association, use resources to establish the organization, bolster its persistence, and make their activities more routine. The environment creates conditions for the organization to be taken for granted as it conducts specialized activities upon which other units grow to depend (Zucker 1991, 105).

    • greater the institutionalization, the more it acts upon the individuals.

    • As the organization becomes institutionalized, it exhibits continuity and importance in spite of changes in individual or environmental exogenous constraints.

• When does an organization become institutionalized?

  • easier to say when an organization is not an institution then the other way around.

Institutionalizing the Presidency

• For much of its history, the president was literally just the president

  • had no organizational or institutional qualities

• Some disagreement about when the institutionalization of the presidency began

  • some think it started in 1939 with the creation of the Executive Office of the Presidency

    • others think it started before.

      • authors think it started before in 1924 with the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921

        • presidents now had to draft budgets and the bureau of the budget was established to help assemble the document.

• Follow 1924 through 1992 to see how the presidency acquired external (autonomy and adaptability) and internal (complexity and coherence) institutional elements.

• Huntington defines the following as critical for institution:

Autonomy:

• the growth of an organizations budget - which shapes its stability and value.

  • larger the budget the more stable the organization

• As the presidency becomes more institutionalized, administrations are able to offer policy directions free from other parts of the government, notably Congress.

Adaptability:

• the “safety valve” of the institution.

  • the organization is subject to shifts as presidents add and subtract units, but it continues to develop over time, adjusting to these changes, as some new units become part of the enduring composition of the organization

Complexity:

• complexity marks an organization’s increased division of labor and specialization.

• measure of complexity: organization’s total units.

  • staff size is another one.

Coherence:

• Coherence involves the ability of the organization to manage its work load.

• measured with clearance criteria

  • While not ideal, this measure of clear ance volume captures much of what underlies coherence-the deadlines, guidelines, and preferences involved in managing the workload. More uniform volume denotes increased coherence.

• Regularized decision making. NOT AD HOC!

General Conclusion

• Presidency was NOT institutionalized in 1939 with the creation of the EOP.

• it was an organization that started the process of institutionalization

• PRESIDENTS STILL MATTER IN THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION PROCESS!

Determinants of Presidential Institutionalization

• We offer a model of institutionalization specifying that the political environment and the behavior of individuals within the presidency, notably decisions of presidents themselves, shape the process

• Environmental factors:

  • First, the growing activity of the federal government enlarges the independent responsibilities of its several branches.

  • Second, the seeming intractability of major policy problems places demands on the presidency for novel policy solution

    • his reasons here are AWFUL. LOL

      • his evidence supports the theory but his theoretical argument seems bad to me.

  • Finally, congressional activity is apt to affect presidential institutionalization

  -   "The more active Congress is, the more autonomous the presidency is likely to become in order to ensure executive success"

• Results:

  • First, the strongest determinants of changing levels of institutionalization are measures of national government activity.

    • i am confused here because isn’t this endogenous? How are we measuring national government activity? Isn’t government activity a function of the increase in these presidential organizations?

      • Much of the development of autonomy reflects an ongoing government commitment to such issues as social security, medical care, unemployment, and education, as evidenced by the burgeoning social welfare budget. As this national domestic policy commitment en larges and presidents’ policy roles in domestic affairs also expand, the presidential institution grows to match the environmental changes.

Canes-Wrone, Brandice, William Howell, and David Lewis. 2008. “Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis,” Journal of Politics.

Abstract:

An enduring and controversial debate centers on whether there exist ‘’two presidencies,’’ that is, whether presidents exercise fundamentally greater influence over foreign than domestic affairs. This paper makes two contributions tounderstanding this issue and, by extension, presidential power more generally. First, we distill an institutional logic that both supports the two presidencies thesis and implies that Congress has incentives to delegate foreign policypowers to the president. Accordingly, the logic suggests that empirical analysis should incorporate these incentives.Our second contribution, then, is to test for the existence of two presidencies in a domain that Congress cannotdelegate, budgetary appropriations, and a domain that explicitly incorporates delegation, agency creation. Consistent with expectations, we find presidents exercise considerably greater influence over foreign policy.

Research Question:

• Do presidents exercise greater influence over foreign or domestic affairs?

• Do presidents get more control over agencies when they are focused on or foreign affairs?

  • Our institutional logic suggests that even if one controls for other factors that may affect these executive-legislative negotiations—such as the partisan composition of Congress and the individual president—chief executives will tend to get more of what they want for the foreign policy agencies than the domestic one

    • this question is much more interesting than their first.

Background:

• Presidents have more influence over foreign policy.

• previous studies have looked at roll call voting

• constitution gives a lot of power to presidency over foreign policy

• Presidents vis-a-vis foreign policy: These provide incentives to delegate power to president on foreign policy from congress.

  • first movers advantage in the international environment

  • the collection and dispersal of information about foreign policy

  • the different electoral incentives of congressional members and presidents

• The two presidencies thesis, however, does not require that Congress be wholly uninformed about foreign policy—only that it be less informed than in domestic policy.

Methods/Data:

• We examine fiscal year 1969–2000 appropriations data in addition to 1946–2000 agency creation and design data.

  • The budget data enable the examination of a policy that, according to the Constitution, cannot easily be delegated to the executive.

• In each case, the dependent variable captures a component of presidential influence, and the independent variables either assess the degree to which this influence differs for foreign affairs or controls for other factors that could affect policy-making.

• Don’t want an issue of selection effect. So we look at budget.

• ordered probit

Results:

• the magnitude of the effect is notable: the president’s requested change in budgetary appropriations is approximately 8 percentage points closer in foreign and defense agencies than it is in domestic ones.

  • This means that for a foreign or defense agency with previous spending of one billion dollars, a president’s requests will be eighty million dollars closer to enacted appropriations than for acomparable domestic agency.

• The results again indicate that foreign and defense agencies are created to allow significantly more presidential influence than domestic ones

• Setting all other variables at their means, the first model predicts that foreign affairs agencies are 27 percentage points more likely to have all four characteristics that enhance presidential control.

• In sum, we find substantial evidence that presidents secure more administrative influence over foreign policy agencies than domestic ones. Given that bureaucracies are relatively durable, our results point to an evolving bureaucracy where presidents have more and more control in foreign than domestic policy

McCubbins, Mathew and Thomas Schwartz. 1984. “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,”American Journal of Political Science.

• Is Congress actually abdicating their power?

• Key point - absence of oversight is not the absence of intent to oversee.

• This is really important for principle-agent.

Abstract:

Scholars have often remarked that Congress neglects its oversight responsibility. We argue that Congress does not do such thing: what appears to be a neglect of oversight really is the rational preference for one form of oversight - which we call fire-alarm oversight- over another form- policy-patrol oversight. Our analysis supports a somewhat neglected way of looking at the strategies by which legislators seek to achieve their goals.

Background:

• Bunch of scholars basically think congress doesn’t care about its oversight responsibility.

  • Authors disagree and say that this neglect is actually a form of oversight.

• Congressional oversight policy concerns whether, to what extent, and in what way Congress attempts to detect and remedy executive-branch violations of legislative goals.

Police-Patrol Oversight

• Congress examines a sample of executive-agency activities, with the aim of detecting and remedying any violations of legislative goals and, by its surveillance, discouraging such violations.

• literally analogous to a police-patrol.

• surveillance includes reading documents, commissioning scientific studies, conducting field observations, and holding hearings to question officials and affected citizens.

Fire-Alarm Oversight

• Analogous to fire alarms

• congress establishes a system of rules, procedures, and informal practices that enable individual citizens and organized interest groups to examine administrative decisions (sometimes in prospect), to charge executive agencies with violating congressional goals, and to seek remedies from agencies, courts, and Congress itself.

• decentralized!

• involves less active and direct intervention than police-patrol oversight.

• Greater role for citizens and interest groups to help Congress.

Assumptions of Model:

1. Technological Assumption:

   1. Two forms of oversight are available, Police-Patrol and Fire-Alarm

      1. Congress can chose between these two forms.

         1. When writing legislation Congress can include police patrol measures such as sunset reviews, or fire-alarm features such as requirements for public hearing

         2. When it evaluates an agencies performance, Congress can either call oversight hearings to patrol for violations of legislative goals or else wait for alarms to signal potential violations.

2. Motivational Assumption:

   1. congressman want to take credit from supporters - citizens and interest group.

   2. congressman seeks to avoid as much blame as possible for the net costs borne by his potential supporters.

3. Institutional Assumption:

   1. executive agencies act as agents of Congress and especially of those subcommittees on which they depend for authorizations and appropriations.

Consequences:

• Consequence 1:

  • Congressmen tend to prefer fire-alarm oversight.

    • more efficient to take credit through this oversight

    • they already do police-oversight but no one really notices

      • opportunity-cost is negative here.

    • this seems like a division of labor story.

      • fire-alarm provides more time to congressman to do other stuff.

  • Congressmen might miss stuff. They don’t know everything

    • citizens/interest groups alarm the congressmen to what is important and what they might miss.

• Consequence 2:

  • Congress will not neglect its oversight responsibility. It will adopt an extensive and somewhat effective (even if imperfect) oversight policy.

    • When his potential supporters complain of a violation of legislative goals, a congressman gains credit if he eliminates the cause of the complaint.

• Consequence 3:

  • Congress will adopt an extensive and somewhat effective policy of fire-alarm oversight while largely neglecting police-patrol oversight.

Is Fire-Alarm Oversight More Effective?

• First, we do not contend that the most effective oversight policy is likely to contain no police-patrol features, only that fire-alarm techniques are likely to predominate. Second, we do not contend that a predominantly fire-alarm policy is more likely than a predominantly police-patrol policy to serve the public interest, only that it is likely to secure greater compliance with legislative goals; whether such compliance serves the public interest depends on what those goals are.

• A predominantly fire-alarm oversight policy is likely to be more effective-to secure greater compliance with legislative goals-than a predominantly police-patrol policy for two main reasons:

  • First, legislative goals often are stated in such a vague way that it is hard to decide whether any violation has occurred unless some citizen or group registers a complaint.

  • Second, whereas a fire-alarm policy would almost certainly pick up any violation of legislative goals that seriously harmed an organized group, a police-patrol policy would doubtless miss many such violations, since only a sample of executive-branch actions would be examined.

Question:

• The concept of fire-alarm oversight surely requires citizens/interest groups to be aware and communicate their feelings.

  • How would they do that prior to television? How is this actually functioning. This makes sense to me in a modern context with the internet and instantaneous knowledge diffusion/communication.

Clinton, Josh, David Lewis and Jennifer Selin. 2014. “Influencing the Bureaucracy: The Irony of Congressional Oversight,” American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract:

Does the president or Congress have more influence over policymaking by the bureaucracy? Despite a wealth of theoretical guidance, progress on this important question has proven elusive due to competing theoretical predictions and severedifficulties in measuring agency influence and oversight. We use a survey of federal executives to assess political influence,congressional oversight, and the policy preferences of agencies, committees, and the president on a comparable scale. Analyzing variation in political influence across and within agencies reveals that Congress is less influential relative to the White House when more committees are involved. While increasing the number of involved committees may maximizethe electoral benefits for members, it may also undercut the ability of Congress as an institution to collectively respond to the actions of the presidency or the bureaucracy.

Research Question:

• Whom are bureaucracies more responsive to? President or Congress?

• how does the internal organization of Congress shape congressional influence over the bureaucracy?

• We explore whether the institutional structure of Congress and a system of bureaucratic oversight that relies on multiple committees with overlapping jurisdic-tion tends to increase or decrease the ability of Congress to control the bureaucracy when faced with a presidentfrom the opposing party.

Background:

• Members of Congress seek to organize Congress so that they are able to provide input on issues of potential re-election importance

• Scholars take different perspectives on whether an in-crease in the number of committees increases or decreasesthe influence of Congress on agency policies

• As Congress tries to reconcile differences between chambers and among committees, the president may have an opportunity to exert influence

• The incentive to free ride typically increases as the number of committees increases (Gailmard 2009; Laffont and Tirole 1993), and this may affect Congress’s ability to influence agency policy.

• one might question whether the existence of multiple committee overseers is a cause of congressional weakness or a response to previous presidential influence.

Data:

• Survey of federal agency administrators and program managers designed to measure congressional and presidential influence over agency policymaking during 2007 and 2008

  • Of the 6,690 potential respondents, 2,225 executives from 128 different agencies and bureaus provided at least a partial response, and the average agency contains 14 respondents

Results:

• We find that when more committees are involved in monitoring and potentially directing agency policy making, Congress is less influential than the president for determining agency policy.

Discussion:

• One possibility is that as the number of committees involved in overseeing an agency increases, policy disagreements among the involved committees become more likely. Alternatively, more committee involvementmay result in less influence even if committees agree because of collective action problems and increased transaction costs.

• Based on the perceptions and opinions of those individuals most responsible for implementing agency policy, the more congressional committees involved in the oversight of an agency, the weaker Congress is relative to the president. This suggests that the more Congress cares about an issue—at least as reflected in the structure of its committee system—the less influence Congress may have over the direction of agency policy making.

Kinane, Christina. 2021. “Control without Confirmation: The Politics of Vacancies in Presidential Appointments,” American Political Science Review.

• Lack of soft power when you are an interm appointee

  • more legitiamcy and helps the principle agent issue between the bureau and the head.

• multinomial logit/probit are different and make different assumptions.

Abstract:

Scholarship on separation of powers assumes executives are constrained by legislative approval when placing agents in top policy-making positions. But presidents frequently fill vacancies in agency leadership with unconfirmed, temporary officials or leave them empty entirely. I develop a novel dataset of vacancies across 15 executive departments from 1977 to 2016 and reevaluate the conventional perspective that appointment power operates only through formal channels. I argue that presidents’ nomination strategies include leaving positions empty and making interim appointments, and this choice reflects presidents’ priorities and the character of vacant positions. The evidence indicates that interim appointees are more likely when positions have a substantial capacity to act on presidential expansion priorities and suggest that presidents can capitalize on their first-mover advantage to evade Senate confirmation. The results further suggest that separation of powers models may need to consider how deliberate inaction and sidestepping of formal powers influence political control and policy-making strategies.

Research Question:

Hypothesis:

1. Empty Position Hypothesis: A president is more likely to leave high-value positions empty when prioritizing policy contraction.

2. Interim Appointee Hypothesis: A president will always immediately fill low-value positions with interim appointees and is more likely to immediately fill high-value positions with interims when prioritizing policy expansion.

Background:

• “PAS” positions require senate approval

• PAS positions without confirmed appointees could be empty or filled with interim appointees, temporary officials exercising the authority of the position without Senate confirmation.

• The Senate enters the appointment calculus only after a president, again unilaterally, chooses to submit a nominee.

• That is, the crucial question for a president is not as much whether a potential appointee might be confirmed but how much the president’s specific policy priorities can be advanced without a formal appointment.

• an interim appointee can typically fill the position for 210 days after the vacancy began and upwards of 720 days if the respective nominations are withdrawn, rejected, or returned, and these limits are suspended if the Senate does not return the nomination.

• interim appointments offer presidents the flexibility to select individuals who the Senate might not otherwise confirm

• I develop a new measure of the capacity of positions themselves to advance policy priorities to expand or contract the reach of an agency—which I call their Position Value. This position value, which is independent of a particular nominee or appointee, determines whether and when rational presidents strategically forgo appointments and nominations.

  • expansion or contractionary

Data/Method:

• I develop a new dataset that identifies when a president leaves a position empty by design or unilaterally fills it with an interim appointee. These originally collected data capture the status of PAS positions (e.g., empty, interim appointee, permanent appointee), the positions’ capacity to control policy outcomes, and the Senate’s and president’s policy priorities, across all fifteen Executive departments from 1977 to 2016.

• covers a total of 11,043 position-year observations

• Does a theoretical game (I don’t really understand it).

• Estimates a multinomial probit

  • 0 = empty

  • 1 = Interim Appointee

  • 2 = Permanent Appointee

Results:

• Overall, the results indicate that Position Value significantly contributes to the likelihood of both an empty position and interim appointee.

• Taken together, the Interim Appointee and Empty Position Hypotheses produce the expectation that vacant positions are more likely to be filled by interim appointees than left empty when president Position Value is “High Value (expansion)”or “Low Value.”

• Contradiction value was not found to be statistically significant.

Week 11 - Supreme Court

Lecture Notes:

• Justices are insulated

• Attitudinal model argues justices operate exclusively off their own preferences.

SCAMR

Chapter 2:

Legal Model:

• hold in one form or another that justices make decisions influenced by the facts of the case in light of plain meaning, the intent of the framers, and precedent.

• While the court uses these factors to justify its decisions, they do not explain their outcome.

Attitudinal Model:

• This model holds that the Supreme Court decides disputes in light of the facts of the case vis-a-vis the ideological attitudes and values of the justices.

• Basically: Rehnquest votes the way he does because he is extremely conservative.

• attitudinal model begins with the legal realist movement

  • law is not mathematical - it is uncertain.

  • The law always has been, is now, and will continue to be, largely vague and variable. And how could this be otherwise? The law deals with human relations in their most complicated aspects.

• The behavioralists argued:

  • Political science can ultimately become a science of prediction and explanation

  • political science should concern itself primarily, if not exclusively, with phenomena which can actually be described…

  • Data should be quantified and “findings” based upon quantifiable data…

  • Research should be theory oriented and theory directed

• Economic influence:

  • to Rhode and Spaeth: the primary goal of Supreme Court Justices in the decision making process are policy goals. Each member of the court has preferences concerning the policy questions faced by the Court, and when the justices make decisions they want the outcomes to approximate as nearly as possible those policy preferences.

  • They also specify certain rules of the game that will determine the actor’s choices.

• Because of institutional design, justices are basically free to do whatever they want.

Rational Choice Model:

• Riker’s core of rational choice:

  • Actors are able to order their alternative goals, values, tastes and strategies. This means that the relation of preferences and indifferences among the alternatives is transitive…

  • Actors choose from available alternatives so as to maximize their satisfaction.

    • actors are allowed to make errors - as a result of information issues.

    • as Riker recognizes, the allowance of incomplete information means that even for a specific goal, all choices, even the most foolish ones, can be deemed rational because they may result from incomplete information.

  • Goal in rat choice is to find equilibria

    • an outcome is stable in equilibrium

• Viewing justices as policy seekers provides enormous leverage in understanding their behaviors.

Chapter 7:

• Basically Stare decisis is BS and sucks.

• Legal doctrine wack

Chapter 8:

• look at search and seizure cause court is very inconsistent

• use lower court records to determine the facts of the case.

• DV: decision of the SC whether or not to exclude evidence or find a search unreasonable.

• Measure justices ideology through newspaper stories about justices and how they are characterized.

Lax, Jeff. 2003. “Certiorari and Compliance in the Judicial Hierarchy: Discretion, Reputation and the Rule of Four,” Journal of Theoretical Politics.

Abstract:

I develop a formal model of the interaction between auditing by the Supreme Court (certiorari) and compliance by the lower courts, presenting three chal-lenges to the existing literature. First, I show that even discretionary certiorari(the Court can choose which cases to hear) only goes so far in inducingcompliance. Second, the literature often treats the Court as a unitary actor,ignoring the Rule of Four (only four votes are needed to grant certiorari).This rule is generally assumed to limit majoritarian dominance ± this is a puzzle given that the rule itself is subject to majority control. I show that itactually increases majority power by increasing lower court compliance.Finally, while sincere behavior is often taken for granted at the SupremeCourt level, I show that potential non-compliance creates heretofore unrecog-nized incentives for the justices to conceal their true preferences, so as to inducegreater compliance. They can exploit even minimal uncertainty to manipulateasymmetric information in a signaling game of strategic reputation building,further increasing compliance under the Rule of Four.

Research Question:

Background:

• rule of four: only requires 4 justices for certs

  • show, however, that the Rule of Four actually increases majority power by increasing lower court compliance.

• What do we mean by “compliance”?

Carrubba, Cliff, et al. 2012. “Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions?” American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract

Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first is that in deciding a case, justices must resolve a concrete dispute, and that they may have preferences over which party wins the specific case confronting them. The second is that justices who are dissatisfied with an opinion are free to write concurrences (and dissents). We demonstrate that both features undermine the bargaining power of the Court’s median and shift influence towards the coalition median. An empirical analysis of concurrence behavior provides significant support for the model.

Research Question:

Week 12 - Representation

Lecture Note:

• Responsiveness - do lawmakers act and change when policy changes

• congruence - how similar is the policy enacted to what the public wanted.

• figure 3 is interesting. When government is X, public gets tired of X and shifts away.

  • thermostatic model.

Stimson, James, Michael MacKuen and Robert Erikson. 1995. “Dynamic Representation,” American Political Science Review.

Kalman filter:

• its a time series model

• only uses information from years prior, OLS does not do this. It just predicts everything.

• factor analysis

  • dimension reduction techniques.

Abstract

If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of acts of 1 elected and unelected officials. Two mechanisms of policy responsiveness are (1) elections change the government’s political composition, which is then reflected in new policy and (2) policymakers calculate future (mainly electoral) implications of current public views and act accordingly (rational anticipation). We develop multiple indicators of policy activity for the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, then model policy liberalism as a joint function of the two mechanisms. For each institution separately, and also in a global analysis of “government as a whole,” we find that policy responds dynamically to public opinion change. This responsiveness varies by institution, both in level and in mechanism, as would be expected from constitutional design

Research Question

1. If public opinion governs, how does it find its way into the aggregation of acts that come to be policy?

2. does opinion move policy?

3. does opinion influence election outcomes?

4. through what mechanisms does opinion work on policy?

Background

• Dynamic representation: public opinions change, gov officials sensing the change, change their behavior in response.

  • this is pretty endogenous since elites supply information.

  • this def is macro level - aggregate! Don’t make an ecological fallacy! they are not applying it to individuals

• Representation exists when changing preferences lead to changing policy acts. It is dynamic representation because the idea, in its essence, is structured in time.

• “The public makes judgements about current public policy-most easily that government’s actions need to be enhanced or trimmed back.”

  • in an abstract sense, yes. BUT the public’s political knowledge and general sense of what is going on is suspect. They are driven in large part by the cues from the elites they follow.

• as real-world conditions change, or as “politically colored” perceptions of policy and conditions change. And as the simple model indicates, politicians and government officials sense these changes in public judgment and act accordingly. Thus, when public policy drifts away from the pub- lic’s demands for policy, the representation system acts as a control mechanism to keep policy on course.3 The question now is how.

• Postulate 1: Rationality - Rational actors make decisions in the present, but the utility they maximize lies wholly in the future.

  • politicians have an information issue

    • don’t know who they are facing OR

    • what issues will be salient

• Postulate 2: Information - Authors recognize the little public policy knowledge of the public. They argue politicians are tuned into an abstract/national “feeling”

• Postulate 3: Consensus - What elites talk about

  • where do opinions converge?

    • this will likely cause a big shift

Mechanism:

1. elections

   1. changing the politicans in power

      1. change from a liberal to a conservative congressman

2. politicians’ rational anticipation of elections

   1. politicians have an ideal point and an expediance point (points most likely to optimize future election chances)

   2. when politicians perceive public opinion change, they adapt their behavior to please their constituency, and, accordingly, enhance their chances of reelection.

Hypothesis:

1. Strategic adjustment will dampen turnover

2. drive policy through rational anticipation

Data

• Public opinion: Domestic policy mood

  • left v. right. more fed or less

  • temperature check

  • bunch of polls on policy and just estimates a model of aggregate vibes.

    • summary measure

• Policy change: congressional votes

  • congressional rating scales

  • congressional roll call outcomes

  • key votes

  • presidential policy liberalism

  • supreme court liberalism

Methods

• time series of policy and public opinion.

• We wish to estimate coefficients that will represent the policy making effects of turnover and of rational anticipation

• IV: public opinion and election outcomes.

• public opinion is t-1

  • policymaking is at t

    • so there is a lag on public opinion

Results

• Find strong evidence of dynamic representation across the board.

Hibbing, John and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. 2002. Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. Ch. 6.

Chapter 6: Americans’ Desire for Stealth Democracy

• People want more democracy but dont want to be involved.

• People prefer to not think about politics.

• stealth democracy (138)

  • Our government would run better if decisions were left up to successful business people.

  • Our government would run better if decisions were left up to nonelected, independent experts rather than politicians or the people.

  • Our government would work best if it were run like a business.

• Who should and should not get powered is up to the people

  • its hard to figure that out!

• people don’t want self-serving elites

  • they want non-self-interest elites!

• people don’t like to engage with politics (generally).

• It kinda feels like the theory here is that the public wants to exercise fire-alarm oversight in politics.

• people want representatives so it unburdens them of dealing with politics.

• people overestimate how many other Americans share their attitutde on something.

• people don’t like when congress debates

  • people don’t like the procedural elements of democracy because it inherently requires conflict

• They expect people to empower elites who are not motivated by self-interest.

• Stealth democracy tendencys are measured by if a respondant:

  • agreed that “elected officials would help the country more if they would stop talking and just take action on important issues”.

  • agreed that “what people call compromise in politics is really just selling out on one’s principles”

  • agreed either that “our government would run better if decisions were left up to nonelected, independent experts rather than politicians or the people” or that “our government would run better if decisions were left up to successful business people.”

• People are conflict-averse

• something doesn’t sit right with me in this book chapter.

Lax, Jeff and Justin Phillips. 2012. “The Democratic Deficit in the States,” American Journal of Political Science.

Abstract

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state-level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.

Research Question

1. Is policy over or under responsiveness to preferences?

2. How well do states translate public opinion into policy?

   Background:

• How much does opinion influence policy

  • if a state is 30% liberal and another state is 35% liberal, it is likely the state with 35% liberalness will have more liberal policy but how much more liberal?

• Difference between this one Stimson et al. is the measure of specific support.

• ideology is hard to map to latent variables.

• Authors recognize the debate about how much policy voters actually know.

  • this is a theoretical issue and a practical issue. We don’t have the appropriate data to do policy preference questions by state.

• Incongruence can occur when policy is liberal and the opinion majority is conservative or vice versa.

• DV is policy outcome

Method:

• State level policy preferences by voter is hard to source

• Authors get around this by using a Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP). There are two stages:

  • First, individual survey response is modeled as a function of a nuanced demographic and geographic typology, using multilevel regression.

  • Second is poststratification, the estimates for each demographic-geographic type are weighed by the percentages of each type in actual state populations using Census data, so that we can estimate the percentage of respondents within each state who take a particular position.

• Use MRP to estimate opinion for 39 policies set by state governments

• use multiple surveys

  • sourced from iPoll - Roper Center for Public Opinion research

Results:

• Our findings are consistent with a world in which states implement either a largely liberal or largely conservative slate of policies, rather than a policy-by-policy median voter world, in which it is possible to mix and match policies as preferred by opinion majority

• They find that while state policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, it is congruent with majority will only about half the time, revealing a significant “democratic deficit.”

• Responsiveness: Policy is generally responsive to public opinion, especially when the issue is highly salient. Legislative professionalization and term limits enhance this responsiveness.

• Congruence: Policy matches majority opinion only 48% of the time, even with large majorities. This incongruence persists across various issue areas and states.

• Influences on Democratic Performance: Legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience are the largest influences on reducing the democratic deficit. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological direction of incongruence more than the aggregate degree.

• Polarization: State policies are more polarized than public preferences, often overshooting in the liberal or conservative direction relative to the median voter’s specific policy preferences.

• Institutional Effects: Professionalized legislatures and term limits improve congruence, while the citizen initiative and elected judiciary do not significantly enhance majoritarianism.

Gilens, Martin and Benjamin Page. 2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics.

Abstract:

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Research Question:

• What type of constituent is the government most responsive to?

• Do interest groups actually affect policy?

Background:

• 4 types of theories:

  • Electoral Democracy

  • Economic-Elite Domination

  • Majoritarian Pluralism - in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented

  • Biased Pluralism - in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate.

Majoritarian Electoral Democracy:

• attribute U.S. government policies chiefly to the collective will of average citizens, who are seen as empowered by democratic elections.

• median voter theorem

• The “electoral reward and punishment” version of democratic control through elections—in which voters retrospectively judge how well the results of government policy have satisfied their basic interests and values, and politicians enact policies in anticipation of judgments that they expect will later be made by what V.O. Key, Jr., called “latent” public opinion—might be thought to offer a different prediction: that policy will tend to satisfy citizens’ underlying needs and values, rather than corresponding with their current policy preferences.

• this is the classic Downs model.

Economic-Elite Domination

• policy making is dominated by individuals who have substantial economic resources, i.e., high levels of income or wealth—including, but not limited to, ownership of business firms.

  • not just economic resources but also social/institutional power

• the power elite

Majoritarian Pluralism

• Goes back to Federalist paper 10 by Madison.

  • which analyzed politics in terms of “factions”—a somewhat fuzzy concept that apparently encompassed political parties and even popular majorities, as well as what we would today consider organized interest groups, business firms, and industrial sectors.

• Dahl also part of this camp

  • Dahl’s analyses of American politics in terms of “polyarchy” or “pluralist democracy” also come close to our ideal type of majoritarian pluralist theory, since they imply that the wants or needs of the average citizen tend to be reasonably well served by the outcomes of interest-group struggle.

• Mancur Olson complicates this perspective

  • free-rider problem in group/interest formation

  • the free-rider problem thus causes an issue in what and who can form groups/special interest.

Biased Pluralism

• Theories of biased pluralism generally argue that both the thrust of interest-group conflict and the public policies that result tend to tilt toward the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.

• business groups prevail when scope is narrow and visibility low

• More recently, Fred McChesney has made the ingenious argument that campaign contributions from interest groups maynotrepresent quid proquo briberyattemptsbygroups, butinsteadresult fromextortion by politicians who threaten to harm the groups’ interests.

Data:

• 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/ oppose question about a proposed policy change.

• They included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda.” At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.

• Use measures of income

  • divide it into percentiles.

  • will use these income divisions to test the different theories outlined above.

• Measuring interest group

  • Baumgartner et al. found that a simple proxy for their index—the number of reputedly “powerful” interest groups (from among groups appearing over the years in Fortune magazine’s “Power 25” lists) that favored a given policy change, minus the number that opposed it— correlated quite substantially in their cases with the full interest-group index (r=50.73)

    • Gilens use this but slightly modified. Same idea though.

      • coded whether the group was favorable or unfavorable to policy

• DV: a measure of whether or not the policy change proposed in each survey question was actually adopted within four years after the question was asked.

Hypothesis:

Results:

• The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

• Again, the implication of these limitations in our data is that interest groups and economic elites actually wield more policy influence than our estimates indicate.

• When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

• Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent impact upon policy changethanthepreferences ofaveragecitizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

• When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.

Broockman, David and Christopher Skovron. 2018. “Bias in Perceptions of Public Opinion among Political Elites,” American Political Science Review.

Abstract

The conservative asymmetry of elite polarization represents a significant puzzle. We argue that politicians can maintain systematic misperceptions of constituency opinion that may contribute to breakdowns in dyadic representation. We demonstrate this argument with original surveys of 3,765 politicians’ perceptions of constituency opinion on nine issues. In 2012 and 2014, state legislative politicians from both parties dramatically overestimated their constituents’ support for conservative policies on these issues, a pattern consistent across methods, districts, and states. Republicans drive much of this overestimation. Exploiting responses from politicians in the same district, we confirm these partisan differences within individual districts. Further evidence suggests that this overestimation may arise due to biases in who contacts politicians, as in recent years Republican citizens have been especially likely to contact legislators, especially fellow Republicans. Our findings suggest that a novel force can operate in elections and in legislatures: Politicians can systematically misperceive what their constituents want.

Bumper Sticker:

• Politicians have bias in how they perceive their constituency.

Research Question

1. In contexts like these,can politicians indeed systematically misperceive constituency opinion on salient issues?

2. Why did elites polarize first?* kinda a question they are circling around.

3. Why are US politicians’ perceptions of constituency opinion systematically skewed to the right?

Background

• How do politicians perceive their constituents

• Circling back on Fenno 1977

• we argue that biases in politicians’ information environments common across politicians can lead politicians as a whole to systematically misperceive constituency opinion and, in turn,to contribute to systemic breakdowns in dyadic representation like asymmetric polarization.

• authors start with the rise of conservative public sphere outlets.

• Republicans simply got way more political in the 2000s.

• “Politicians’ positions and the policies they make are clearly responsive to public opinion”

  • this is somewhat suspect based on Gilens findings.

Hypothesis

1. we argue that politicians can misperceive constituency opinion dramatically and systematically enough to contribute to significant, one-sided biases in representation such as asymmetric polarization.

2. if certain kinds of individuals are more likely to express their views in the public spheres politicians monitor, then these individuals’ viewpoints may loom disproportionately large in many politicians’ minds as they think about what their geographic constituency wants.

Data

• This original survey evidence spans two years and 3,765 surveys of American politicians,across which we collected 11,803 elite perceptions of constituency opinion intotal. Our main evidence comes from a survey we conducted in 2014 of 1,858 state legislative politicians.

Method:

• To compare elites’ perceptions to reasonably precise estimates of true public opinion, we asked them to estimate constituency opinion on items that were being contemporaneously asked in the2014 CCES, a large sample survey

• Use MRP to impute survey results from CES for state districts. Because we are asking politicans to estimate how much they think their constituents support X policy. We are going to have issues where we won’t have enough observations from the respective districts. Thus we use MRP to help us.

• In addition to the MRP, they also use a lot of math to create average district opinion and average politician opinion and then compare across. This is almost like a pooled version in a way. It is more generalizable. We are losing out on some of that geographic distinction.

• MRP is going to give greater leverage because it estimates support for each issue in all of the nation’s state legislative districts using multilevel regression and poststratification

Results:

• Our evidence reveals that, on average, American politicians from both parties in 2012 and 2014 believed that support for conservative positions on these issues in their constituencies was much higher than it actually was.

• Republicans overestimate how conservative their district is more than democrats. However, democrats also overestimate.

Why (mechanism)

• Authors argue that it is because Republicans are more likely to contact their official (use previous study to back this up)

  • i don’t disagree but I don’t think this is the biggest driver.

• Authors don’t mention it but I really think this is a media story. Either news/social media.

  • One possibility our data suggest is that these misperceptions originate from patterns of mass participation in the public sphere; consistent with this, Online Appendix H shows suggestive evidence that politicians overestimated conservatism the most in districts where Republicans were especially likely to contact legislators.

Week 13 - Parties and Interest Groups

Lecture Notes:

• Goal: pick candidate that represents the best interests of the party.

• Endorsements converging on a few horses, that is the key.

  • it isn’t so much endorsement changing but it signals to voters.

• Lobbying isn’t the same as interest groups.

Cohen, Marty, et al. 2008. The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, Chs 1, 8–9.

Chapter 1: The Outrageous Nomination of Hubert Humphrey

• 1968 Democratic campaign

• Hubert Humphrey is vice president and did not win any states.

• Reforms after began in the Dem party and spread to Republican party after.

• Debate about what kind of elite is most influential in nomination process

• General consensus: parties play no important role in presidential nominations

• Authors argument: parties are still tremendously important in presidential nominations

  • the demise of parties has been exaggerated

  • candidate centered efforts are tremendously important

  • parties provide a ‘threshold’ of who goes on to the next level.

• “One continually hears the declaration that the direct primary [for legislative offices] will take power from the politicians and give it to the people. This is pure nonsense. Politics has been, is, and always will be carried on by politicians, just as art is carried on by artists, engineering by engineers, business by businessmen. All that the direct primary, or any other political reform, can do is affect the character of the politicians by altering the conditions that govern political activity, thus determining its extent and quality. The direct primary may take advantage and opportunity from one set of politicians and confer them upon another set, but politicians there will always be so long as there is politics. (cited in Key 1965, 394-395)

• Nominations used to be more tightly controlled by politicians but now there are more stakeholders involved.

• The party does not have a monopoly but still has a significant amount of power.

• Main Claim: The various leaders, activists, and interest group leaders who seek to influence presidential nominations are more than a collection of individual actors; they meet the standard definition of political parties. They are, in other words, a broad coalition aiming to control not only the presidency, but also Congress, the Supreme Court, governorship, state legislatures, city councils and county boards, and every other locus of political power in the United states.

• THEY STILL THINK PARTIES ARE VERY IMPORTANT!

• Question for Josh: The median voter theory assumes voters know what they want. right?

  • Unari and Zapal AJPS

  • politicians can pick a platform

    • there is platform differentiation.

  • valence literature.

• Parties behave in the same basic way - as vehicles by which the most energized segments of the population attempt to pull government policy toward their own preferences.

  • whether parties succeed in this is irrelevant

• Party is most influential in the invisible primary stage.

• The invisible primary control by the party seemed to be strongly a result of technological limitations. These interactions occurred physically. This has changed now which also has coincided with nomination changes.

• Previous definitions of parties only focused on politicians and their leaders.

  • authors disagree with this definition

  • parties include interest groups, fundraisers, activists, campaign technicians, etc.

Chapter 8 - Anatomy of a Conversation

• A central claim of this study is that parties decide who to nominate for president in long-running national conversation in which party members-officeholders, interest groups, activists, donors-discuss who can best unite the party coalition and win the general election.

• good and funny story on 236/237.

  • but also indicative of personality at the elite level. Not everything is policy based.

• A central claim in our study is that presidential nominations are dominated by a group of party insiders who are generally active in party politics

• sample: 6k individual endorsements between 1980 - 2004.

  • lots of repeat endorsers.

• Authors have four measures of the invisible primary:

  • media coverage

    • measured by newspaper coverage of invisible primary.

      • specifically TIME magazine

        • all reporting of the presidential nomination contenst from january of the year prior to the last issue before the Iowa caucus, 1980-2004.

        • Does media coverage create front-runners in the invisible primary, or does media coverage flow to candidates who are front-runners independent of the media?

  • endorsements

    • main variable

  • candidate support in public opinion polls

    • polls are important less a forecasting tool but more so as to who is popular within the primary race.

  • fundraising.

• How much of these 4 features influence each other?

• they divide data and add different lags.

• 1st results:

  • endorsements at t=1 are significant predictors at t=2.

  • same with polls

• They then look at out-of-group endorsements.

  • out-of-group endorsements will convey more information about acceptability within the party and will, therefore, have greater impact on the dynamics of the invisible primary.

  • endorsements in this model are majorly significant. They affect everything else.

  • Early out of group endorsements are big movers in the invisible primary.

• Still need to show that these endorsements of party insiders, exert a decisive impact on the voter primaries and caucuses that follow.

Chapter 9 - The Voters Weigh In

• What aspect of the invisible primary is most important for the outcome of state primaries and caucuses?

• What if voters are ignorant of leader endorsements? Then they wont matter at all.

• Main point: presidential nominations are fought and win in primary and caucus elections. However, the fight takes place on a playing field that tilts in the direction that party insiders want it to.

• Endorsements matter in Iowa and New Hampshire

  • local officials, activists, and interest-group leaders matter!

• Do endorsements actually matter?

  • yes

    • endorsements by a party actor can help mobilize resources.

      • they can provide volunteers

      • phone banking

      • canvasing

    • They don’t necessarily change peoples vote.

    • certain people may be more suceptable to endorsments.

      • An electorate that is not very interested, not very well informed, and attracted to candidates in significnat part because they are doing well is probably an electorate open to suggestions about whom to support.

    • Endorsements can cue voters.

• momentum is important but is kind of dead as a factor because of the structure of the race.

  • why?

Bawn, Kathleen, et al. 2012. “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics,,” Perspectives on Politics.

Lecture notes:

• party coalitions and their teaming up form the ideological space.

Abstract:

We propose a theory of political parties in which interest groups and activists are the key actors, and coalitions of groups develop common agendas and screen candidates for party nominations based on loyalty to their agendas. This theoretical stance contrasts with currently dominant theories, which view parties as controlled by election-minded politicians. The difference is normatively important because parties dominated by interest groups and activists are less responsive to voter preferences, even to the point of taking advantage of lapses in voter attention to politics. Our view is consistent with evidence from the formation of national parties in the 1790s, party position change on civil rights and abortion, patterns of polarization in Congress, policy design and nominations for state legislatures, Congress, and the presidency.

Research Question:

What evidence do we have to support our argument that parties are controlled by coalition of intense policy demanders?

Main Argument:

• Our view, in contrast, places policy demanders at the center. These interest groups and activists form coalitions to nominate and elect politicians committed to their common program. In our view, party nominees are not so much “constrained” by policy demanders to deviate from what voters want, as genuinely committed to what the policy demanders want regardless of the wishes of the median voter. This view of parties and politicians is as antithetical to Burke’s idea of parties as it is to Schumpeter’s. What makes plausible the survival of our kind of party, despite fierce electoral competition, is the limited attention voters pay to politics, and especially to policy positions and outcomes.

Background:

• Contemporary scholarship views a party as a team of politicians whose paramount goal is to win electoral office.

  • these teams make promises about what they will do if elected.

    • this is not ideal.

• We argue that parties in the US are best understood as coalitions of interest groups and activists seeking to capture and use government for their particular goals, which range from material self-interest to high-minded idealism.

  • In this group-centric view of parties, candidates will, if the coalition has selected them well, have as their paramount goal the advancement of the party program.

• Authors are aware that voters cant really judge what they want

• In our account, parties are no great friends of popular sovereignty. Electoral competition does constrain group centric parties to be somewhat responsive to citizen preferences, but they cede as little policy to voters as possible. Parties mainly push their own agendas and aim to get voters to go along.

  • RECALL GILENS!

Legislative-Centered Theories of Party

• The discipline’s most developed theories of party feature office holders, especially legislators, as the dominant actors.

• how do coalitions form

  • we have three actors

    • 2 of them coordinate and achieve something better than if they didnt.

  • By forming a majority coalition that stays together across votes, A and B increase their pay-offs to 2.

• Parties form because coalitions seek to win. IF there are three individual actors with different policy preferences and 1 wins. The payoffs look like:

  • Actor 1: 3

  • Actor 2: -1

  • Actor 3: -1

    • thus actor 2 and 3 form a coalition to increase their payoffs by 2.

      • The gains from keeping a stable majority together form Schwartz’s and Aldrich’s answer to the question “Why Parties?”

• Why do parties stay together?

  • According to Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins, party leaders control the legislative agenda, suppressing proposals that might split the party and promoting the party program. The policies thus enacted create a “brand name,” valuable for winning elections.

• These are good but perspectives but limited. It only conceives of parties as legislators attempting to win reelection.

Alternate Theory:

• Organized policy demanders strive to recruit and elect candidates sympathetic to their goals, goals typically not shared by most ordinary voters.

• Bargaining among policy demanders constructs not only the party system, but also the ideological space.

• Inevitably, the party programs are less than perfect matches for the concerns of most voters, who respond with varying degrees of trust, adaptation, and confusion.

• The importance of nominations and the nature of voter responses to parties are particularly important points; we next elaborate on each.

• politicians are not the center of the party. Policy demanders are.

Why Nominations?

• Groups of organized policy demanders are the basic units of our theory of parties.

• The long coalition strives to nominate a candidate whom each group trusts to represent its interests in a manner acceptable to the coalition as a whole.

What about voters?

• Downs median voter theorem

  • assumes voters can locate policy preferences

    • doesn’t really hold.

    • cite achen and bartels shark attack paper

• We call the policy region over which aggregate electorates do not enforce their preferences the “electoral blind spot.”

• There is no need for either party, however, to scale back beyond the point where voters notice any difference. As long as parties stay within the electoral blind spot, they are effectively free to nominate any candidate they want.

Competing views of parties

• Edmund Burke’s def of a party:

  • We call the policy region over which aggregate electorates do not enforce their preferences the “electoral blind spot.”

    • schumpeter (and many others disagree)

• Schumpeter:

  • We call the policy region over which aggregate electorates do not enforce their preferences the “electoral blind spot.”

    • Schumpeter’s view emphasizes the extent to which electoral competition drives the actions of politicians and therefore parties.

    • As evidence against Burke’s position, Schumpeter goes on to note that different parties may adopt identical platforms.

• Anthony Downs subsequently connected these points, arguing that platform convergence was a logical consequence of the pressures of electoral competition on officeseeking parties.

Evidence:

• Going to look across history

• Specifically at the Democrats around civil rights

• and at the Republicans around Abortion

• They will argue that these changes on policy and their subsequent salience was driven not by party leaders but by intense policy demanders.

• Democratic legislators most vocal about civil rights came from districts with a high concentration of union membership. Even more so than districts with a large amount of African-Americans.

  • Union membership was strongly vocal about civil rights.

• Authors do not claim politicians are bystanders and not important.

• More informed voters show preferences for moderates but there isn’t a lot of moderates. Media markets are to blame

• Citizens cannot track all policy.

• voters struggle with figuring out what is going on.

• Fail to tow the party line and the party may work against you in the primaries when you are up for reelection.

Main Point:

• We have challenged this syllogism at two points: First, voters do not pay so much attention to politics that politicians must faithfully execute their wishes to win election; within fairly broad limits, obfuscation and phony credit claiming work quite well. Second,interest groups and activists are the dominant players in political parties, insisting on the nomination of candidates who will exploit the limitations of voter monitoring to advance party programs.

Baumgartner, Frank and Beth Leech. 2001. “Interest Niches and Policy Bandwagons: Patterns of Interest Group Involvement in National Politics,” Journal of Politics.

Abstract:

Using data from more than 19,000 reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, we analyze the distribution of lobbying on a random sample of 137 issues and find a tremendous skewness. The median issue involved only 15 interest groups, whereas 8 of the issues involved more than 300 interest groups. The top 5% of the issues accounted for more than 45% of the lobbying, whereas the bottom 50% of the issues accounted for less than 3% of the total. This distribution makes generalizations about interest group conflict difficult and helps explain why many scholars have disagreed about the abilities of lobbyists to get what they want. We also confirm and expand upon previous findings regarding the tremendous predominance of business firms in the Washington lobbying population

Research Question:

Just descriptive statistics

Background:

• 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act expanded reporting requirements

• Businesses and trade associations make up more than half of the Washington lobbying community

• Most policies have very little lobbying going on.

• A few policies have a LOT!

• Most important, the data show that business advantage,while great overall, is even more striking in the cases where the fewest interest groups are active.

Data:

• 19,000 reports

• First, organizations spending less than $20,500 on lobbying in a six-month period need not register: this would exclude small groups operating on a shoe string budget or organizations that lobby rarely.

• Second, the law is aimed at providing a record of direct contacts of government officials that would not otherwise be noted, and, therefore, groups need not report grassroots lobbying, media campaigns, litigation, testimony at hearings, or submissions under notice and comment.

Hall, Richard and Alan Deardorff. 2006. “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review.

Abstract:

Professional lobbyists are among the most experienced, knowledgeable, and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics. Nonetheless, their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories. We revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory. We model lobbying not as exchange (vote buying) or persuasion (informative signaling) but as a form of legislative subsidy—a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence, and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators’ minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives. The theory is simple in form, realistic in its principal assumptions, and counterintuitive in its main implications. Empirically, the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable. In a later section, we briefly bring preferences back in, examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference-centered lobbying should occur.

Research Question:

Background:

• Previous lobby theories:

  • one that conceptualizes lobbying as a form of exchange,

  • the other as persuasion—both mechanisms for changing legislators’ preferences over policies.

• We propose a fundamentally different but fundamentally simple theory of lobbying. The main idea is that lobbying is primarily a form of legislative subsidy—a matching grant of costly policy information, political intelligence, and labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators.

  • The proximate objective of this strategy is not to change legislators’ minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives.

  • basically provide help when policies align.

• Exchange theory

  • buying votes basically

  • quid pro quo

    • this is kinda unlikely

    • what is stopping from the politician reneging?

  • Also, PAC managers give the most to politicans that align with them.

    • if this were true, wouldn’t it be the other way around?

• Lobbying as persuasion

  • In the newer view, information transmission is at the heart of the lobbyist–legislator relationship, but contrary to the older pluralists, that information is not innocuous.

• Direct lobbying, in our view, typically is not a strategy for changing legislators’ preferences over policies. Nor is it about keeping them from being changed. Rather, it is an attempt to subsidize the legislative resources of members who already support the cause of the group.

Assumptions:

1. For a legislator to have much influence on policy, she must work at it

2. Legislators’ resources are scarce

3. For any given period, individual legislators care about influencing more than one policy at a time

4. Legislators care about some issues more than others

5. Relative to legislators, lobbyists are specialists

Hypothesis:

1. Lobbyists will lobby their allies, where “allies” refer to legislators who share the same policy objective as the group.

2. Lobbyists will lobby most their strongest allies, where strength refers to the legislator’s marginal willingness to pay for progress toward the policy objective the member and group share.

3. Lobbyists will not lobby their enemies.

4. Lobbyists will seldom lobby uncommitteds, where uncommitted here refers to legislators for whom it is uncertain whether they favor progress or regress on A.

5. As lobbying increases, so will the participation or “effort” of allies.

6. Lobbying will increase most the participation of the lobbyist’s strongest legislative allies.

7. Lobbying uncommitted legislators or enemies (to the extent that this happens) will not increase those legislators’ participation.

8. Legislators will give access to (be lobbied by) like-minded public interest groups, even if the latter have no reelection-relevant assets.

9. Lobbying by public interest groups without reelection-relevant assets will increase the participation or “effort” of allies.

10. Lobbyists will lobby legislative allies with the most productive enterprises.

11. Lobbying will increase the participation of the lobbyist’s most productive allies.

McCrain, Joshua. 2018. “Revolving Door Lobbyists and the Value of Congressional Staff Connections,” Journal of Politics

Abstract:

Building on previous work on lobbying and relationships in Congress, I propose a theory of staff-to-staff connections as a human capital asset for Capitol Hill staff and revolving door lobbyists. Employing lobbying disclosure data matched to congressional staff employment histories, I find that the connections these lobbyists maintain to their former Hill coworkers primarily drive their higher relative value as lobbyists. Specifically, a 1 standard deviation increase in staff connections predicts an 18% increase in revenue attributed to the lobbyist during her first year. I also find that the indirect connections lobbyists maintain to legislators through knowing a staffer in a legislative office are of potential greater value than a direct connection to a senator given a large enough number of connections. This article sheds additional light onto the political economy of the lobbying industry, making an important contribution to the literature on lobbying and the revolving door phenomenon.

Research Question:

This article establishes a story of revolving door lobbying that suggests staffers who become lobbyists benefit from connections to their staff colleagues, a unique human capital asset they can bring to the private sector.

Background:

Data:

• staff employment book

• legistorm

Week 14 - Thanksgiving (no class)

Week 15 - Race and Gender

Washington, Ebonya. 2008. “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers,” American Economic Review.

Lecture Notes:

• mechanism - daughter increases saience of feminist issues

• doesn’t address mechanism.

• natural experiment.

• fixed effects = within estimator

  • fixed effects on number of children

• random effects is fewer parameters .

  • you estimate two a parameters a mean and variance of the means itself

    • but you dont hurt your degrees of freedom

      • bias variance tradeoff.

      • gelman and hills school - josh likes random effects.

• diff in diff is 2x2

  • 2 categories and before and after.

Abstract:

Parenting daughters, sociologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence parental behavior. I demonstrate that conditional on total number of children, each daughter increases a congressperson’s propensity to vote liberally, particularly on reproductive rights issues. The results identify an important (and previously omitted) explanatory variable in the literature on congressional decision making. Additionally the paper highlights the relevance of child-to-parent behavioral influence.

Research Question:

1. How are congressman influenced by their children in office?

2. What is the effect of having a girl on how a congressman legislates.

Background:

• Women with daughters and men with daughters are more likely to hold feminist views.

• paper does NOT address the mechanism for how this happens. It simply is showing a relationship.

• Child gender affects parental support for feminist policies

Data:

• 105th to 108th congress

• voting record data

  • roll call votes and

  • voter record scores constructed by interest groups.

• What is the effect of having a girl on legislating?

Method:

• Model 1:

  • \(Y_i = \alpha + \beta_1GIRLS_i + \Upsilon + \sigma_i\)

  • runs fixed effects

• Model 2:

  • \(Y_i = \alpha + \beta_1GIRLS_i + \beta_2FEMALE_i + \beta_3RACE_i + \beta_4PARTY_i + \beta_5SERVICELENGTH_i + \beta_6(SERVICELENGTH)_i^2 + \beta_7AGE_i + \beta_8(AGE)_i^2 + \beta_9-\beta_(12)RELIGION_i + \beta_(13)DEMPRESVOTE_i +\Upsilon + \theta_i + \sigma_i\)

  • full model.

• Major assumption: number of female children is a random variable.

• Using internet and newspaper resources, author identifies gender of the first born child for 227 of the 381 members of the 108th Congress who have children.

Results:

• A legislator’s propensity to vote liberally on women’s issues is increasing in the number of female children parented.

Lawless, Jennifer, Sean Theriault and Samantha Guthrie. 2019. “Nice Girls? Sex, Collegiality, and Bipartisan Cooperation in the US Congress,” Journal of Politics.

Lecture Notes:

• women are more socially connected than men.

Abstract:

When women in Congress solve a high-profile problem, their colleagues and the media praise their ability to get Washington’s business done by collaborating and compromising in a way that men do not. The problem with this popularly held view is that it is entirely anecdotal. In assembling several new data sets to test this proposition systematically, we find that women are more likely than men to participate in the kinds of activities that foster collegiality. But we uncover almost no evidence that women’s legislative behavior on fact finding abroad, cosponsoring legislation, or engaging the legislative process differs from men’s. The partisan divide that now characterizes the legislative process creates strong disincentives for women (and men) to engage in bipartisan problem solving. To be sure, women’s presence in Congress promotes democratic legitimacy, but it does little to reduce gridlock and stalemate on Capitol Hill.

Research Question:

1. Do women legislate or act differently in legislative discussions compared to male legislators?

2. Are women more collegial than men?

Background:

• As a result of these friendships—so these popular accounts go—women are more likely to trust and cooperate with one another when it comes to governing.

• First, women are more likely than men to develop personal relationships with their colleagues and, thus, a sense of trust.

  • good evidence for this.

• Second, women, having established this trust, are more likely than men to cooperate with colleagues to move the legislative process along.

  • women, because of the personal relationships they have built, will be more bipartisan than men in moving the legislative process along

  • less evidence for this.

• social capital among political elites.

• A substantial body of research also finds that women are more likely than men to prioritize these personal relation-ships and, as such, to engage in collegial behavior professionally. Konrad, Kramer, and Erkut (2008)

Data:

• Seersucker fashion event

• Secret Santa

• Baseball game

• Lots of difficult data collection!

• Women participate more

Method:

• Does participation influence legislative behavior?

  • authors use four ways to test this.

    • 1: Information gathering through congressional delegation travel.

    • 2: Bipartisan sponsorship and co-sponsorship activity.

      • shouldn’t we look at cosponorship activity between members that participate in these events?

        • why do we expect member X to work more with member Y if member Y doesn’t participate in anything?

    • 3: Procedural votes

    • 4: Senate Amendments

Results:

• Despite anecdotal evidence that women “work better”, evidence in this article does not support that claim.

• Women participate more but that does not translate into any substantive difference in legislating behavior.

• This doesn’t mean they dont make a difference.

Kinder, Don and Nicholas Winter. 2001. “Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy,” American Journal of Political Science.

Lecture Notes:

• Black and whites differ on policy.

• why?

• cant explain why people have different opinions.

Abstract:

Black and white Americans disagree consistently and often substantially in their views on national policy. This racial divide is most pronounced on policies that intrude conspicuously on the fortunes of blacks and whites, but it is also apparent on a wide array of social welfare issues where race is less obviously in play. Our analysis takes up the question of why blacks and whites differ so markedly, distinguishing among four alternative interpretations: one centers attention on underlying differences of class, another on political principles, a third on social identity, and the fourth on audience. Our results are complicated but coherent. We discuss their implications for the meaning of group interest, speculate on the conditions under which the racial divide might close (or widen) in the foreseeable future, and suggest why we should not wish racial differences in opinion to disappear.

Research Question:

1. Why do Black and White Americans disagree?

2. What is the policy divide along a racial dimension?

3. How are the four potential reasons influencing the racial dimension?

   1. which one accounts for the most?

4. To what extent is this racial divide attributable to class differences?

Background:

Basic punchline

• 4 potential reasons:

  • Material interest and Social Class

    • citizens are single minded and care only about preserving or improving their material interest.

      • economic approach

      • is division of race just division of class?

  • Social Identity: Sympathy and Resentment toward Social Groups

    • measure in group and out group apathy

    • thermometer scale

    • white rate black and vice versa

  • Matters of Principle

    • Equality

    • Limited Government

      • differences between Black and White respondents on these two are also noticeable.

  • Audience

    • black Americans tend to express more liberal positions on race policy when interviewed by blacks than when questioned by whites, while white Americans interviewed by whites generally appear more conservative on matters of race policy than when they are interviewed by blacks

    • race of interviewer matters

Data:

• 1992 ANES

  • 1883 White

  • 289 Black

Method:

• Bunch of regressions

• include interaction terms between each IV and race.

Results:

• Class differences are trivial

• two main divides: racial inequality and the welfare state.

• limited government very important among white respondents

• Blacks prize equal opportunity, whites worry about big government, blacks express solidarity with their racial group, racial resentments are common among whites: these are the primary elements of the racial divide on matters of race. Our analysis implies that if differences of principle and identity could be eliminated, the racial divide would drastically diminish.

Enos, Ryan. 2016. “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science

Abstract:

How does the context in which a person lives affect his or her political behavior? I exploit an event in which demographic context was exogenously changed, leading to a significant change in voters’ behavior and demonstrating that voters react strongly to changes in an outgroup population. Between 2000 and 2004, the reconstruction of public housing in Chicago caused the displacement of over 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the removal of their African American neighbors, the white voters’ turnout dropped by over 10 percentage points. Consistent with psychological theories of racial threat, their change in behavior was a function of the size and proximity of the outgroup population. Proximity was also related to increased voting for conservative candidates. These findings strongly suggest that racial threat occurs because of attitude change rather than selection.

Research Question:

1. How does geography influence political behavior

2. When African Americans are removed from the neighborhood, how do white voters respond?

3. did white voters close to the projects vote more or less after the projects were demolished?

Background:

• Is racial threat real?

  • the presence of an out group
  • people are more politically attentive when they feel threatened.

• Conflicting results in past studies

• Big problem = people selecting where they want to live.

• White attitudes of Black people are relatively stable overtime

  • mostly socialized when younger.

    • So should we expect a big difference of context?

• What constitutes “racial threat”

  • not everyone perceives the same way.

• A related difficulty is the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), that is, the possibility that the sometimes arbitrary boundaries of some areal units, such as census tracts, can greatly affect estimates of underlying population parameters.

• When using aggregate data to measure an underlying population parameter, the choice of the areal unit can matter as much as the underlying variation in population characteristics.

• Chicago public housing

  • mostly african american lived

  • some were to be destroyed - chosen exogenously.

• Twelve CHA projects were completely or partially demolished between 2000 and 2004, displacing over 25,000 people.

Data:

• vote choice

• vote turnout

• I obtained the 2004 Illinois voter file and augmented it with demographic data from the 2000 and 2010 Census counts.

• I geocoded the residences of the approximately 1.2 million voters in Chicago and determined their distance from each of the demolished public housing projects using a Geographic Information System

• I was able to identify the exact distance of each voter to the edge of a housing project using data on the two dimensional spatial boundaries of the housing projects.

• I collected a unique data set of property records, including homeownership data and homevalues, for all Chicago voters. I also identified each voter’s race using a Bayesian process based on the voter’s name and location.

• Election returns and precinct GIS data were also obtained from the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

• unit of analysis is individual level.

Methods:

• The treatment is the demolition, and the outcome is the change in white political participation and support for conservative candidates.

• I measure the effects by measuring changes in presidential election turnout between 2000 and 2004.

• Treatment group is voters that lived close to the demolished buildings

• Control is those who lived far away

• diff-in-diff

Hypothesis:

1. H1 (Racial Threat and Turnout): After the demolition of the projects, turnout should decline for white voters close to the projects relative to the rest of the city.

2. H2(Proximity and Size):The salience of a group is a strong predictor of intergroup attitudes (Brewer and Miller 1984). Psychologists have empirically demonstrated the intuitive finding that salience can be a function of the size and “immediacy” of an object (Latan´e 1981; Latan´e and L’Herrou 1996; Latan´e et al. 1995; Lewenstein, Nowak, and Latan´e 1992; Latan´e and Wolf 1981). This leads me to expect a “dose effect,” whereby the treatment should vary with the size and proximity of the treatment. Operationally, the treatment effect should decline as the white voters are farther away from a project and as the population of a project represents a smaller portion of the local outgroup population.

3. H3 (Racial Threat and Vote Choice): After the demolition of the projects, white voters close to the former projects should experience a decline in racially conservative voting relative to the rest of the city.

Results:

• After the demolition, voter turnout dropped by more than 10 percentage points for white voters living nearest to the projects.

• I also demonstrate that whites living near the projects had voted more conservatively than whites living farther away and that this difference disappeared after the removal of their African American neighbors.

• Null effects for Black individuals

  • means this is only going on for white individuals

Harris, Allison. 2024. “Can Racial Diversity among Judges Affect Sentencing Outcomes?” American Political Science Review.

Lecture Notes:

• Districts/municipality courts work alone

  • judges run their own court.

  • so how does the presence of diversity in the building influence how white judges act.

• being around a diverse group effect.

• most diversity is in main Chicago court house.

• Lpm has nonspherical errors by definition

Abstract:

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

Research Question:

• How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality?

• how the composition of a judge’s group of colleagues can influence their sentencing decisions in criminal cases

• how this influence may differ based on a judge’s own personal characteristics

• what this means for disparities in sentencing and how we think about diversity in state and local institutions.

Background:

• Coworker effect

• While research on the effects of racial diversity in the judiciary has largely focused on the impact of individual judges’ identities on decision making, much less work has investigated the impact of racial diversity as a contextual feature of the bench.

• I argue that increasing the representation of racial-minority-group members on the bench decreases racial disparities in felony sentencing, not because of these judges’ behavior, but because their presence alters their peers’ behavior.

• An individual cannot be “diverse.” Individuals contribute to a group’s diversity

• As members of minority racial groups gain representation in homogenous institutions dominated by majority-racial-group members, the altered context can influence the decision making of individuals from all racial groups.

• Non-white government officials working in white-dominated institutions may also face pressures to make decisions that are generally more favorable to majority-group members (Allport Allport1955; Steffensmeier and Steffensmeier and Britt2001).

• However, intergroup contact can lead to negative outcomes

• Repeated, long-term, and positive inter-group contact may lead to more positive outcomes, including decreasing out-group prejudice

• Overall, we might expect these positive experiences with peer racial-out-group members to improve majority-racial-group member officials’ perceptions and treatment of minority-racial-group members.

Mechanism:

• First, the introduction of individuals that increase a group’s diversity may change the type of information exchange that occurs, thereby influencing the knowledge and considerations individuals rely on when making decisions

  • The general process here is that as racial diversity in a group increases, the content of group conversations will include information related to race and racism that leads individuals in the group to more positively evaluate minority-racial-group members, such that future decisions will be more favorable to members of that racial minority group

• Second, seeing and interacting with a more racially diverse set of colleagues may make majority-racial-group institution members desire not to appear discriminatory against out-group members or biased in favor of in-group members in their behavior.

• third, it could remind majority-group-member officials of their own desire to avoid prejudiced behavior

• fourth, a racially diverse group of colleagues may change the extent to which race is a salient consideration in their decision making.

Hypothesis:

• In general, I expect increases in racial diversity among judges to lead to decreases in punitiveness and decreases in race-based sentencing disparities.

• I expect increases in Black judicial representation will lead to decreases in the probability of incarceration and sentence length.

• As the court becomes more racially diverse, I expect white judges to become more lenient toward Black defendants due to the processes described above.

• Black judges may similarly become less likely to incarcerate Black defendants as they gain Black colleagues. However, it is unclear, how many Black colleagues would be necessary in order to alleviate pressures of tokenism Black judges may experience in situations where they are extremely underrepresented.

Data:

• Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois

  • The Circuit is composed of six municipal districts, with the First Municipal District covering the entire city of Chicago. A chief judge presides over the Circuit, which includes nonjudicial offices and the judiciary. The Criminal Division is responsible for hearing most of the county’s felony cases.

• The Cook County, IL, Criminal Division data used for this project include just over 431,000 felony cases heard from 1995 to 2013

  • in which the defendant was not found not guilty

• Each case is identified by a case number, and includes the following information: initiation date; defendant’s last name, date of birth, race, and sex; judge’s name; description of charge; felony class of the convicted charge; final disposition; length of minimum and maximum sentence; courthouse and number of the courtroom where the case was heard.

• The vast majority of judges, for whom I could identify race and gender, are white (79%) and male (79%).

• I measure racial diversity on the bench as the percent of Black judges in the Criminal Division each year.

Methods:

• LPM and OLS

method specification

• where i and j represent a case and a judge, respectively.

• The dependent variable in most of the models is dichotomous, taking a value of 1 if a defendant in a case is incarcerated to prison or jail and 0 otherwise.

• In a few of the models, the dependent variable is sentence length, measured in days.

• The main independent variable is the percent of Criminal Division judges who are Black each year, measured either across all three courthouses comprising the Division, or just in Chicago’s Leighton Building.

Results:

• I find that as the percentage of Black judges in a courthouse increases, white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants.

• These shifts in judicial behavior shrink the Black–white gap in the probability of an incarceration sentence by up to 7 percentage points, greatly decreasing disparities in this outcome.

• Significance only in the Chicago Leighton Building

  • why dont they observe these in the suburban courthouses

    • they dont interact with their black colleagues at the chicago court house.