Comparative Behavior

Comparative Behavior with Jennifer Fitzgerald

Author

Affiliation

Stone Neilon

PhD student of political science @ The University of Colorado Boulder

Week 1: General Introductions & Syllabus

This week was primarily introductions from other classmates and the professor. Some discussion included expectations and what the class would look like.

Syllabus

Week 2: Intro to Comparative Political Behavior

Anderson, Christopher J. 2009. “Interaction of Structures and Voter Behavior.” OHPB CH. 31: 589-609.

Bumper Sticker: Rules & context influence and are influenced by behaviour! (British spelling)

Abstract: This article discusses and reviews the growing literature on the nexus of macro-level structures and individual behaviour that some studies are a part of. It looks at the effects that macro-level institutions and contexts have on citizen behaviour, along with how political institutions and the environment where citizens form opinions and act, help in moderating the effects of individual-level factors on citizen behaviour. The modelling structures and behaviour, effects of structures on voter behaviour, and the interactions of structures and behaviour in research on economic voting are some of the topics covered in the article.

Outline:

• Does x cause behaviour y? It depends!

  1. Example: Does institutional performance affect people’s sense of whether their political system is legitimate?
     • Answer: The impact of corruption on system support is conditional on whether citizens are supporters of the incumbent government.
  2. Studies are getting better at using institutions and context to predict the effects of citizen behaviour.

• Comparative study of structures and behaviour = citizens in context 

• Context and behaviour intimately connected by:

  1. Formal and informal rules; people’s preferences, attitudes, and behaviour affect the establishment and functioning of rules
  2. Citizens are exposed to variable social, political, and economic environments that they are supposed to understand, interpret, and sometimes shape

• Advances in surveys, replication, and computing have allowed for cross-national and multi-level research into behaviour

• 1980s and 1990s renewed focus on institutional questions across polysci that could be tested, as well as interest in developing contextual theories of political behaviour

• Comparative study of behaviour politics has investigated macro-level contexts/structures:

  1. Institutions

  2. Structural conditions

• Interaction between structures and behaviour presumes several things:

  1. Politics is about the interaction of people’s values and the rules and conditions that govern the implementation of those values
  2. The rules and realities in which citizens make choices are themselves a function of people’s values
     • “Put another way: contexts are critical for understanding the decisions people make because they affect different people differently, and people’s decisions, in turn, shape the nature, shape, and stability of these contexts” (678).

• Common approach assumes that context shapes behaviour; assumes behaviour to be DV and that it is exogenous and stable

  1. Do institutions have direct effects on behaviour?

     • Voting example: structures can affect voters directly, indirectly, and interactively (or contingently)
       • Direct: rational choice theory; individuals weigh costs and benefits of voting and act accordingly
       • Indirect: behaviours of elites within electoral rules empower or constrain citizen choices; structures have consequences but these consequences have secondary (or indirect) effects on behaviour
       • Contingent: effect of some structural feature strengthened or weakened, depending on presence of some 3rd variable; the turnout gap between individuals with many and few resources is particularly pronounced in countries where the cost of voting is high

{INSERT PHOTO HERE}

• Recent studies have looked at how the nature of a country’s representative structures interacts with the willingness of voters to punish governments for bad economic performance
  1. Bad economy impact hinges on ability of voters to hold gov’t responsible
  2. Institutions can hamper this ability of voters to reward or punish gov’ts
  3. Clarity of responsibility also varies over time within (and across) countries b/c of election outcomes that change bargaining power and reshape context
  4. Also contingent upon credible alternatives for voters to vote into office
• Interactions of vote choice and structures in research on legitimacy

  1. What role do institutions play in moderating sense of loss or victory citizens feel?

     • Institutions shape the responses of winners and losers; citizen attitudes toward democratic institutions shaped by country’s political context
• “At the end of the day, what is particularly noteworthy about cross-level investigations of behavioural politics is that they hold the promise of producing a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of political life by connected hitherto unconnected streams of scholarship in the areas of institutions, political economy, policy, and behaviour and allowing us a better and more complex empirical and theoretical handle on the hows and whys of citizen politics” (690).

Chong, Dennis. 2013. “Degrees of Rationality in Politics.” Ch. 4 in Leonie Huddy, David O. Sears and Jack S. Levy, Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press

NEED TO UPDATE!

Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism.” American Sociological Review 24(4): 482-501.

Dependent Variable: Support for democracy 

Independent Variable: Authoritarian predisposition of the lower strata 

ANTECEDENT FACTORS OF IV: Lower strata lack “sophistication” and suffer economic and  psychological insecurities (intervening variables). 

KEY TERMS:

authoritarianism, democracy, strata, liberalism (political and economic),  conservatism, communism, socialism 

PUZZLE:

The intellectual left has a hard time reconciling the normative position of a  “proletarian” revolution as a necessary progressive force and the evidence of a “totalitarian degeneration of Communism” (quoting “The Choice of Comrades,”Encounter, 3 (December 1954), p. 25. Arnold A. Rogow, cited p.482).  

KEY ARGUMENT:

Following evidence and psychological research on personality traits of  different society’s strata, Lipset posits that the lower strata are predisposed to support  authoritarianism due to a lack of “sophistication” and facing economic and psychological  insecurity. The lower class will support economic liberalism but not political liberalism, while the  middle and upper class will support political liberalism. Hence, according to Lipset, there is a  natural link between the lower-class attitudes and their support of Communism. 

-Pre-1914: working-class supported both economic and political liberalism 

-Post-1914: “The intransigent, intolerant, and demonological aspects of Communist ideology attract members from the lower class of low-income, low-status occupations, and little education” (483).

DEMOCRATIC VALUES AND STRATIFICATION:

• “Leftism/economic liberalism associated with socio-economic status” (485). • “Psychologically oriented investigators have studied the social correlates of authoritarian  personality structures as measured by the now famous F scale”(Adorno, 1950, cited p.  486). 

• Even in conservatism, economic status predicts tolerance levels (see Eysenck, 1956 and  Stouffer, 1955, cited p.486)

AUTHORITARIAN RELIGION AND STRATIFICATION:

• Fundamentalist and chiliastic/millennial religious tradition as a predisposition for drastic  and rapid measures demanding authoritarian order. 

• The appeal of fundamentalism to the lower class acts as a pressure valve in a utopian world  where the upper class no longer dominates. 

• See Engels and his take on evangelism (488). 

TYPICAL SOCIAL SITUATION OF LOWER-CLASS PERSON

• “There is consistent evidence that degree of formal education, itself closely correlated with  social and economic status, is also highly correlated with undemocratic attitudes” (489). • Education predicts attitudes better than occupation (Morris Janowitz and Dwaine Marvick study, cited pp.489-490). 

• Principal factors predisposing the lower class to authoritarian attitude are a lack of  “sophistication,” economic security, and psychological security -> mental shortcuts and  need of immediacy = “surviving”  

THE PERSPECTIVES OF LOWER-CLASS GROUPS

• Principal factors predisposing the lower class to authoritarian attitude are a lack of  “sophistication,” economic security, and psychological security -> mental shortcuts and  need of immediacy = “surviving”

• Incapacity of mental abstraction and fixed mental context

EXTREMISM AS A COMPLEX ALTERNATIVE: A TEST OF HYPOTHESIS

• When the Communist Party is small and weak, it tends to uphold non-economic  liberalism/democratic values because of the presence of intellectual leadership. 

• When the Communist Party (or Socialist in some cases) is a mass party, it tends to be more  authoritarian (or less committed to democratic values) because it has stripped its  intellectual leadership.

• Underdeveloped countries/economies exacerbate the problems of the lower class and  increase the predisposition to authoritarianism on a like-for-like basis. 

• This argument is evaluated subnationally and supports the urban/rural predisposition to  uphold democratic values and political liberalism.

HISTORICAL PATTERNS AND DEMOCRATIC ACTIONS

• Historically, the left has been responsible for democratization; intellectual leadership still  supports democratic values, but the masses of the lower strata do not understand the  implications of the left beyond economic value to them. 

• Conservatism is vulnerable in democracy for demographic reasons (500). • Neither conservatism nor the authoritarian predisposition of the lower class should be seen  as a threat to democracy. 

• Educational attainment is an essential “Social Requisites of Democracy” (Lipset, 1959). 

Zuckerman, Alan S. 2005. “Returning to the Social Logic of Political Behavior.” Ch.1 in Alan S. Zuckerman, Ed., The Social Logic of Politics: Personal Networks as Contexts for Political Behavior. Temple University Press.

Chapter 1: Returning to the Social Logic of Political Behavior

Bumper Sticker:

“Despite a period of deviation from theory, social logic is important for studying political choice.” 

Summary: 

This chapter offers an intellectual history of the critical texts that defined the research orientation of political behavior. Is focuses on how traditional theories from sociology and psychology informed our understanding of political behaviors through interactions with primary groups. However, along the way, the political science discipline that studied behavior began undergoing changes to the way behavioral study was approached - emphasizing, instead, individual level survey research and a reconceptualization of social logic. Fortunately, social logic is back on the mend. 

Research Question/Purpose: 

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the reasons for which those who study political choice and behavior should return to the social logic of the original behavioral revolution in political science. 

Data/Methods: 

There is no data used. Passages, statements, and long quotations stand in for the data. Draws on authors such as Campbell, Converse, Miller, Stokes, Verba Findings: 

We need to return to our roots an incorporate social logic back into behavioral political science 

Interpersonal relationships can both prevent and facilitate change 

Many scholars broke away from social logic, pursuing instead individual level analysis from surveys and redefining social logic to fit their particular needs Newer research is returning to social logic

Definitions: 

Social Logic of Politics:

a theory of politics that emphasizes the ways in which social factors (social identities, distribution of power across groups, public opinion) influence individual behaviors and how those interact with institutional structures to effect the political process. 

Discussion Questions: 

What are the consequences of the social logic of politics for our understanding of those communities/persons with intersectional identities? Is this theory anglo centric, or does it retain its superior qualities across groups? 

How might association through primary groups have an impact of institutions? At what point does the saliency of group association diminish? Do our politics/attitudes change drastically with each primary group we grow closer to, or do those groups we first develop our attitudes through matter most? 

Additional Notes: 

Intro: 

The immediate social circumstances of people’s lives influence what they believe and do about politics 

Immediate social circles are powerful forces in swaying ones political beliefs and actions 

Group relationships are important for fixing and maintaining opinions in relation to large parts of the political system (such as parties) (Key, 1961) 

Sources in Sociology: 

particularly influential were Lazarsfeld, Katz, Berelson, Gaudet, and McPhee Electoral Sociology was where the onset of the behavioral revolution in political science first observed electoral choice 

Voting is a reflection of our behavior - of our conversations with other people and the attitudes we shape through those interactions 

By this logic, we vote based on how the relationships we have shape us This is counter to theories of voting as a rational act 

Sources in Social Psychology 

particularly influential were Kurt Lewin and Leon Festinger 

helped explain conformity

sharing an identity (social class, ethnicity, religion, etc.) does NOT define a social group 

opinions, preferences, and beliefs are a joint function of how “real” the matter is, the views held by the members of a person’s groups, and the persons own conceptions joining a group tends to produce changes in opinions and attitudes toward alignment with the group 

The Turn Away from the Social Logic of Politics 

Started to examine individuals instead of groups 

Began surveying a lot (members of the same social circles shouldn’t be surveyed together -- its no longer as-if random, and you introduce bias into your survey responses) 

Turned social groups into objects of individual identification 

Electoral research shifted towards understanding party identification and perceptions of candidates 

What factors explain this shift away from the social logic? 

One set derives from decision to use national sample surveys as the exclusive source of empirical evidence of behavior 

Another set derives from theory issues -- PoliSci insisted that sociologists couldn’t explain electoral decisions or outcomes -- opted instead for immediate determinants of vote choice: attitudes and calculations 

Statistics professors, rearing political sciences, conveyed cherished assumptions of independent sampling -- which makes it nearly impossible to capture the psychology of inter-dependance 

Recognizing that data problems inhibited their ability to follow theoretical preferences 

Campbell, Converse, Miller, Stokes altered the definition of the social group and conceptualized it according to a personal perceptions regarding a reference object - taking it far away from its original intent/definition from Lewis Many others would make even larger breaks, such as Key and Downs (immediate circle provides no more than time-saving sources of information to calculating citizens) 

Returning (Again) to the Social Logic of Politics 

We returned! 

Michigan survey responses can be used to study the role of immediate social structures on political choice and behavior 

Ton of other research is starting to do the same thing

Week 3: Political Beliefs/Political Decision-Making

Converse, Philip E. 2006 [1964]. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Critical  Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 18(1): 1-74

Normative question: 

Does the citizenry have the “capacity” to participate in democracy? Concern the age-old  question of the demos’ potential to access information and process it in a way that would be  individually coherent in election expressions. Converse’s (1964) “The Nature of Belief Systems  in Mass Publics” marks a turning point since it can quantitatively/statistically demonstrate

democracy defenders’ worst fears: the mass public competence for a normative functioning of  democracy is blight. This question has also been approached with similar results by Lipmann (1922), “Public Opinion” and Schumpeter (1950), “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” (see  also Bennett, 2006, “Democratic Competence, Before Converse and After”). 

Bumper Sticker:

Mass Public: Ideologically Innocent  

DV:

Degree of Belief System Coherence (Individual) (a continuum)

IV:

Level of Constrained Idea-Elements (a continuum)

Data:

Converse stipulates that the degree of coherence of the mass public belief system is contingent on the level of constraints of the idea-elements populating a belief system: the more constrained, the  more coherent. This, in turn, predicts a degree of capacity to participate in democracy according  to one’s self-assessed ideological placement. Idea-elements are mainly constrained by the  transmission of information and its digestibility. For this reason, Converse finds that 15% of the  population is deemed ideologue or near-ideologue (possessing a coherent belief system = elite political actors). In contrast, the remaining 85% (the masses) float between having a particular  interest (issue public) or having no idea. If ideology is not driving most of the public’s opinion  incentive, what is? Converse suggests that “visible” social groupings serve as a stable heuristic  informing public opinion: party ID (.70) has more bearing than policies, but policies concerning  visible groups (school desegregation .45) have more bearing than regular policies (government and housing .28). This “ideology by proxy” might produce idiosyncratic outcomes as well: the  working man associating with Socialists against the rich but against government reigning of private  enterprise’s provision of public goods. 

PICTURE HERE

Acquiring and processing information is contingent on education. Education is more prevalent in  higher strata of society (Lipset, 1959, “Social Requisite of Democracy”).

PICTURE HERE

Interesting proposition: “The net result of these circumstances is that the elites of the leftist parties enjoy a”natural” numerical superiority, yet they are cursed with a clientele that is less dependable or solid in its support. The rightist elite has a natural clientele that is more limited but more dependable.”

Huckfeldt, Robert. 2009. “Information, Persuasion and Political Communication.” OHPB. Ch. 6: 100-122.

Bumper Sticker:

Social networks allow us to rethink and re-conceptualize the role of groups in mass politics and public opinion.

Abstract

This article presents a survey and interpretation of the contributions made by #network #theories on the study of citizens and democratic policies. The article serves as an overview of the topic. It begins by locating the network research within the rich substantive and theoretical tradition of individually and #group-based studies of #electoral #politics and #public #opinion . It addresses some methodological issues in the study of political information #networks. The article ends with the discussion of theoretical and substantive insights that were generated in several studies, such as the study of communication and persuasion among citizens.

Research Question:

What is network analysis? What are the theoretical and substantive insights that we can derive from it, particularly regarding the study of communication and persuasion among citizens? What are some of the methodological issues of network analysis?

Summary/Theory/Argument:

The author sets out to analyze the contribution of network theories, which have provided us the ability to analyze citizen and democratic politics from across the micro-macro spectrum. Network theories draw on the importance of groups, communities, and political information networks among and between individuals (Downs 1957) while incorporating a conceptual apparatus that extends far past the traditional notions of primary groups, organizations, and societal groups in order to define the relationships that exist among individuals at multiple levels of analysis. Despite its advantages, there are still some methodological issues with network analysis.

Data/Methods:

It is a literature review so no real data/methods.

Findings:

What is network analysis and how does it fit into the existing literature on the study of individuals and groups?

• Network studies can be seen as a particular species within a larger genus—as one type of a contextual analysis of politics (Knoke 1990)
• networks are formed at the complex intersection between individual preference, individual engagement, and individual location within particular contexts.
• Eulau (1986) and Przeworski and Teune (1970) define contextual factors in terms of the aggregation of individual characteristics that affect individuals through processes of social interaction.
  • Network Studies diverge from contextual studies in their effort to incorporate a direct mapping for the particular patterns of recurrent interaction among actors.
• Individual level and aggregate level analysis both suffer from the same problem: they ignore the implications that arise due to patterns of individual interdependence located in time, place, and setting.

What are some of the methodological issues of the study of political information networks?

• Absent direct measures on patterns of communication, neither the individual measures nor their associated aggregate versions directly address the specifics of communication and persuasion among the individuals who make up the aggregates.

• Network studies are particularly useful in analyzing well defined populations - such as clergies, political elites, court, and legislatures.

  • an unfortunate limitation of egocentric networks is the failure to embed dyads within larger networks and in the context of all other dyads in that same network.

  • However, they aren’t straightforward when analyzing large populations - which is the primary object of study for scholars concerned with studies of mass behavior (egocentric network survey questions and snowball surveys can help address this; pg. 5-6)

• Political communication networks are created at the intersection of individual choice (demand) and environmental supply (which is stochastic).

What are the substantive and theoretical insights generated by it?

• People are more inclined to discuss politics with others who share similar political beliefs

• Studies ALSO demonstrate that patterns of both agreement and disagreement can be profitably understood within complex processes of communication and persuasion

  • This means that there is persistent heterogeneity of opinions in less-dense (larger) social networks people aren’t as afraid of disagreement as we initially thought

• Political heterogeneity in the form of cross cutting cleavages can depress political participation BUT increased levels of tolerance (which might be good?)

• Political communication networks are more important in less developed democracy, where parties are less institutionalize and politics is more volatile

• Diversity of group discussion decreases the susceptibility of individuals to issue framing by elites

• Network studies of political communication and persuasion provide a theoretical, analytical response to the human limitations of the citizen in democratic politics.

  • this is important because it to do with the cognitive limitations of individuals in being self-contained, fully informed, independent maximizers

  • particularly useful is social capital - which allows people to rely on one another for accurate information

• political interdependence among citizens helps to explain why public opinion in the aggregate is more sophisticated than the opinions held by the average citizen - its more fully informed

• solutions to collective action problems can be seen as occurring within networks of relationships among strategic actors who use the information they acquire through repeated interactions to facilitate group efforts

Marcus, George, Pavlos Vasilopoulos, and Martial Foucault. 2018. “Emotional Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Addressing the Authoritarianism Puzzle.” Political Psychology 39(3): 557-575.

Bumper Sticker:

Threat + conservative OR liberal ideology = increased authoritarian preference

Summary:

The literature shows an interaction between threat and public preference for authoritarianism. There are two lines of literature that provide contradictory findings:

• One argues that threat increases authoritarian preferences among those that are more prone to authoritarianism

• Another argues that threat is associated with a switch in ideology among those who are normally non-authoritarian Using a two-wave panel study of the French population taken before and after the January 2015 twin attacks in Paris, the authors find that the two occur simultaneously.

Research Question:

What best explains the relationship between individual perceptions of threat and increased preferences for authoritarian policy?

Is the increase in support for authoritarian policies following a terrorist attack the result of:

1. conservative and authoritarian prone individuals just more strongly manifesting their disposition in response to threat

2. OR increases in ideological “switching” to support authoritarian policies in light of threatening events?

Theory/Argument:

The authors argue that the endorsement of authoritarian policies can be explained by the theory of affective intelligence. When people experience anxiety due to novel circumstances, such as that induced by terrorist attacks, they will abandon their habitual political attachments and attend to the circumstance in a risk-averse and conservative manner.

• H1: increased anger will enhance decision making based on past dispositional convictions, leading to increased polarization between left and right wing individuals (strengthen authoritarian tendencies for right-wing and weaken those same tendencies for the right)

• H2: increased anxiety will initiate decision-making that is less reliant on extant convictions and hence make those on the left end of the left-right scale more attentive and responsive to calls from the right to adopt authoritarian policies.

Data/Methods:

• Two-wave panel taken before and after the January 2015 twin attacks in Paris

• Data retrieved from the CEVIPOF barometer of political confidence

  • survey was conducted using a representative sample containing 1,524 respondents in two waves

• Construct two OLS models

  • one measures attitude change as a function of demographic variables, ideology, as well as anxiety and anger

  • second model includes two interaction terms that assess fear and anger with the left-right scale respectively with the expectation that the effect of fear and anger on authoritarian policies with be conditional on prior ideological conviction

Model 1:

\[ Attiude_{t2}=fear_{t2}+anger_{t2}+left/right\: scale_{t1}+attitude_{t1}+demographics_{t1} \]

Model 2:

\[ \begin{align}Attitude_{t2} &= fear_{t2} + anger_{t2} + left/right\: scale_{t1} \\&+ fear_{t2} * left/right\: scale_1 + anger_{t2} * left/right\: scale + attitude_{t1} + demographics_{t1}\end{align} \]

Dependent Variable:

• support for authoritarian policies

• a scale consisting of all available items in the study that measure adoption or rejection of authoritarian politic preferences

  • each item (survey question) was measured using 4-point response option (higher values = support for authoritarian policies)

  • only one factor possessed an eigenvalue over 1

Independent Variable:

• emotional reaction to the terrorist attacks

Findings:

• Threat increases authoritarian preferences among those who are more prone to authoritarianism AND those with non-authoritarian ideology

• Overall, people who felt fear following the attack were more likely to have switched their opinion in an authoritarian direction

• Left-wing citizens who felt predominantly fearful after the attack were more likely to change in the direction of endorsing authoritarian policies

• Right-wing citizens who felt predominantly fearful did not experience a change in direction of endorsing authoritarian policies

• Right-wing citizens who gelt predominantly angry following the attack experienced heightened endorsement of authoritarianism

• Left-wing citizen on the far-left who felt predominantly angry were the least likely to support authoritarian politics following the attacks (see figure 3) but is not statistically significant

• H2 is supported by the first OLS model

• H1 is not supported UNTIL the conditional model

Importance/Contribution:

• contributes to our understanding of individual level variation in the endorsement of authoritarian policies as well as our understanding of attitudinal polarization (why fear might reduce polarization across a public)

• important because the psychological mechanisms that account for the public’s reaction to terrorist attacks is key to understanding enhanced support for the restriction of civil liberties

• also advances and systematizes the literature of emotions and politics by assessing the impact of anxiety and anger on the formation of political attitudes

• takes advantage of REAL threat perceptions, instead of experimentally manipulated ones

• has external validity (uses a representative sample of the French population)

• challenges conventional wisdom that emotions are irrational, turbulent states that hinder reasoning - affect activates political reasoning

Definitions/Concepts:

Theories of Affective Intelligence

• provides a framework for understanding the interplay of fear and anger with ideological convictions

• with respect to anxiety, the theory holds that when citizens find themselves in novel circumstances, they tend to break from habitual political attachments (ideology/partisanship) and actively try to attend to contemporary circumstances about their environment.

• with respect to anger, the theory holds that it may trigger authoritarian policy preferences through the activation of habitually learned routines, activating conservative or authoritarian attitudes among individuals who already hold a right-wing disposition.

  • it is not the potency of threat the increases anger, but rather the degree of normative violation

Terror Management Theory (TMT)

• people feel threatened by their own death and therefore adopt worldviews that allow them to find meaning and worth in their lives.

  • awareness of ones death can cause anxiety

  • is used to explain that mortality-related threat reinforces extant political beliefs regardless of whether these are liberal or conservative.

  • political ideology serves as a protective shield against death anxiety.

Left-Right Ideological Identification

• defined by the authors as the an organized cluster of political values that make some individuals more inclined to support some political ideas than others.

Threat

• defined by the authors as an exogenous event that poses harmful consequences for the individual or her environment and evokes negative emotional reactions.

Anxiety

• elevated in threatening circumstances and is one of the prime emotional reactions to a terrorist event when heightened, conveys a perception of increased risk and prompts individuals to adopt risk-averse behavior to eliminate or avert the threat

Anger

• generated when people are obstructed from reaching a valued goal by an external agent whose conduct is deemed unfair and in cases when a threatening stimulus is perceived

Threat Stimulus

• Assessed on two distinct grounds:

  • is the event novel? (+anxiety)

  • is the event a normative violation by a familiar enemy (+anger)

Schwartz, Shalom H., et al. 2014. “Basic Personal Values Underlie and Give Coherence to Political Values: A Cross-National Study in 15 Countries.” Political Behavior 36(4): 899-930.

Bumper Sticker:

Personal values explain political values!

Independent Variable:

Basic Personal Values

Dependent Variable:

Political Values

Research question: Do political attitudes and values of the general public form a coherent system? If so, what accounts for this structure and gives political values their coherence?

• Political values = political expressions of more basic personal values

• Basic personal values = security, achievement, benevolence, hedonism; organized on a circular continuum that reflects conflicting/compatible motivations

Data: data from 15 countries using 8 core political values and 10 basic personal values

• Adults eligible to vote in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Greece, Finland, Israel, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and UUS

• Except in Australia, UK, Germany, & Turkey, respondents recruited by university students and completed self-report questionnaire individually

Methods:

• use basic personal values to predict expected political values; different hypotheses for 12 non-communist and 3 post-communist countries

• Data gathered in local language of each country

• Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) measure of 40 short verbal “portraits” of different people matched to respondents’ gender, each describing a person’s goals, aspirations, or wishes

  • 3-6 items measure each value

  • For each portrait, respondents indicate how similar the person is to themselves from “not like me at all” –1 to “very much like me” –6

  • Multimethod-multitrait analyses of the 10 values measured with PVQ and with the Schwartz Value Survey

Findings:

• correlation and regression analyses support almost all hypotheses

• Basic values account for substantially more variance in political values than age, gender, education, and income

• Multidimensional scaling analyses demonstrate graphically how circular motivational continuum of basic personal values structures relations among core political values

• This study strengthens assumption that individual differences in basic personal values play a critical role in political thought (seems kinda obvious).

NEED TO INSERT FIGURES/PHOTOS!

Taber, Charles S., and Milton Lodge. 2006. “Motivated Skepticism in Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50(3): 755-769.

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).

Week 4: Partisanship/Party Preference

Achen, Christopher. 2002. “Parental Socialization and Rational Party ID.” Political Behavior 24(2): 151-170.

Abstract:

Bumper Sticker

Model

Bankert, Alexa, Leonie Huddy, and Martin Rosema. 2017. “Measuring Partisanship as a Social Identity in Multi-Party Systems.” Political Behavior 39(1): 103-132.

Bumper Sticker:

“multi-item scales of partisanship can work in and across multi-party systems”

Research Question:

How (if at all) can we create a multi-item scale that measures partisanship across multi-party systems?

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Most national election studies tend to rely on a single measure of partisanship. Such measurements tend to vary in terms of how they are phrased on surveys and also struggle to capture the range of partisan identity, typically at the low and high ends of the spectrum. The authors believe that they can develop a multi-item scale of partisan identity that better predicts political behavior ACROSS various multiparty democracies than the traditional single item scales common on surveys. 

Data/Methods:

Partisan Identity Scale

Creates an Eight-Item Scale of Partisanship that is derived from Social Identity Theory Derives three (3) hypothesis to test whether the scale is better than traditional models: H1: The Partisan Identity Scale should differentiate equally well among low, middling, and high levels of identity to best uncover the link between identity and political activity across its full range. Expect each scale item to provide more complete information about partisan strength than the traditional single party identification item. 

In terms of the IRT analysis, this means that each item’s information function will be more peaked and contain greater information than the standard single measure of partisan strength. In the three European multi-party systems under study, we expect both lower and higher levels of partisan intensity to remain less well detected when measured with the traditional item

H2: the partisan identity scale to exhibit all three types of invariance, which means that the fit of the metric invariance model will be no worse than the fit of the configural model, and that the fit of the scalar model will be no worse than that of the metric model. 

H3: The partisan identity scale should more powerfully predict in-party voting and political engagement than the traditional party identification item. We also expect the partisan identity scale to better predict political behavior than a multi-item indicator of ideological intensity 

Data:

Uses Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K. as the three countries with which to derive and apply the scale.

Netherlands:

2012 Dutch Parliamentary elections among members of the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel. The LISS contains 5000 households, entailing 8000 individuals Data are drawn from three time points: August 2012 (‘’Elections 2012’‘), after the national election in September 2012 (’‘Dutch Parliamentary Election Study’‘), and again as part of a module in December 2012/January 2013 (’‘Politics and Values: Wave 6’’).

Sweden:

Swedish data were drawn from the Swedish Citizen Panel, a largely opt-in online panel run by the Laboratory of Opinion Research (LORE) at the University of Gothenburg. 

Utilize data from Panel 8 (11/14/13–12/18/13) and add-on Panel 8-2 (12/10/13–1/7/14). 16,130 panelists were invited to take the Panel 8 survey and 9279 completed it for a completion rate of 64 %. 

2000 panelists were invited to complete Panel 8-2 of which 1496 answered the survey. All panelists in Panel 8.2 and a randomly selected 2000 panelists in Citizen Panel 8 received the identity model. 

Our analytic sample is confined to those in Panel 8 and Panel 8-2 who completed the identity items (N = 2464). 

UK:

Data for the U.K were taken from the 2015 British Election Study (BES), an online panel study conducted by YouGov. 

draw on data from pre-election wave 3 of the BES, conducted between September 19, 2014 and October 17, 2014 and pre- election wave 4, conducted in March 2015. 

In total, 27,839 respondents participated in wave 3 and 6141 were randomly assigned and 5954 completed a module that included the partisan identity items. 

In wave 4, 16,629 respondents participated and 3500 of them completed the partisan identity module.

Measures:

Partisanship Strength by Country vs. Partisan Identity Strength (the 8 Item Scale that is also known as the Partisan Identity Scale) 

Methods:

the methods are pretty complex, but essentially each hypothesis undergoes a different set of tests/inquiry. 
H1 - figure 1 shows how the 8 item scale that the authors derived is better measure of latent partisan strength than the individual measures in each country. This is also event in the peaks that you can see in each figure. They are more much more sensitive to to the full range of the low- high spectrum. H2 - invariance is measured using R software to perform multi-group confirmatory analysis (CFA) Configural invariance is a good fit 

The partisan scale has the same metric across countries 

Its also scalar across countries 

H3 - analyse the determinants of in-party voting using a logistic regression model 

Partisan identity strength has a sizeable influence on in-party voting and its effects exceed that of partisanship strength. 

Partisan identity predicted in- party vote and participation while holding partisan strength constant

Findings:

Levels of partisanship have decreased in Europe in recent decades. 

The eight-item partisan identification scale: 

• provides greater information about partisan intensity than the standard single-item

• possess the same measurement across all three countries 

• better predicts in-party voting and political participation than ideological intensity measures

Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. Ch 6 & 7.

Bumper Sticker:

Party ID influences attitudes and behavior & is sticky!

• Mostly descriptive statistics. Lots of tables and figures.

Research Question:

What are the various impacts of individual party identification?

Data:

• Self-identified party identification from individuals on repeated cross sections of national population from 1952-1956 and strength and direction of partisan orientation

General Notes: TK

TK TK TK TK

Keele, Luke, and Jennifer Wolak. 2006. “Value conflict and volatility in party identification.” British Journal of Political Science 36(4): 671-690.

Bumper Sticker:

*Value conflict can explain why partisanship assumes both a steady AND changeable nature

Research Question:

The paradox of partisanship: Why is partisan identification stable for some people and not stable for others?

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Keele and Wolak seek to explain why some people are more prone to #partisan “instability” (or “volatility”) than others. To the authors, the reason for this has to do with the “hierarchy of values”. When people have obvious values that rank higher than others (humanitarianism, egalitarianism, equality) AND these #values align with political elites values, then partisan identity remains a steady tool with which to measure the political world against. HOWEVER, for some people, the values rank similarly and therefore cause conflicting #preferences that individuals struggle to resolve. Competing values will produce #volatility in partisan opinions specifically when individuals endorse values that cross the fault lines of partisan dialogue 

Data/Methods:

Data: ANES data from 1992, 1994, and 1996

Model: Estimates several heteroskedastic regression models as well as ordered probit models The heteroskedastic regression models are used because they expect differences in the response variance of party identification survey items to reflect value-conflict 

this is because citizens with ideologically inconsistent value structures will struggle to identify with one party or another 

there should be unequal variance across observations (which is heteroskedastic) 

this heteroskedasticity is modeled to see if those who experience value conflict reveal less predictable responses to party identification survey items than those who do 

Independent Variable:

Value conflict 

is measured using 4 core values in American Politics: 

Egalitarianism, limited government, moral traditionalism, and humanitarianism 

The measures for these values are derived from a set of ANES survey questions on each value

1992 and 1996 are the years they were taken from (1992 is missing humanitarianism)

Dependent Variable:

Partisan Instability 

Two “manifestations” 

• predictability of survey response (those experience value conflict should have less predictable responses to partisan questions) to two survey questions: 

  • seven-point party identification scale and ideological self identification scale 

• change in party identification over time (this one is tested using the 1994 and 1996 panel data) 

Findings:

1992 and 1996 elections reveal value-driven volatility in partisan identification 

• Instabilities in political views reflect either: 

  • low information (for some) 

  • trade-offs of the political world that cause conflict of values 

Value conflict will disrupt partisan stability when an individuals value organization is non-ideological - i.e. it doesn’t quite fit the rhetoric or portrayal by the liberal vs. conservative, left-right spectrum. what makes it non-ideological is that you support values on BOTH sides 

Those that have values the match political elites leads to stable partisanship 

Those that have internalized value organization that doesn’t match elites leads to conflicts of values and partisan volatility. 

Elites identify and interpret core values to justify their policy positions 

Values and ideology are traditionally distinct concepts - but values can be distributed along an ideological spectrum

Hatemi, Peter K., et al. 2008. “Is there a ‘Party’ in Your Genes?” Political Research Quarterly 62(3): 584-600.

Bumper Sticker:

Genes don’t choose party, but they influence intensity!

Independent Variable:

Twins! MZ and DZ and familial party ID and intensity

Dependent Variable:

party identification and party intensity

Research question:

Do your genes determine political party identification?

Hypothesis:

• Party identification (PID) is primarily the result of familial socialization and not other latent social or genetic influences.

• Partisan intensity is influenced by genes as well as the environment.

Data:

• Data collected in mid- to late 1980s as part of Virginia 30,000 Health and Life-Style Survey for Twins (VA30K)

Methods:

• Polychoric correlations by twin pair zygosity calculated for each of the traits.

• Correlations between PID, partisan intensity, sociodemographic items, selected personality traits, and political attitudes calculated for males & females separately

• Using structural equation modeling (SEM), variance of phenotypes separated into additive genetic (A), common environmental (C), & unique environmental influences (E)

Findings:

• NOPE – your genes don’t determine your political party

BUT!

• Genes play a pivotal role in the strength of your party ID

General notes:

• Direction and Intensity of Political Affiliation

  • Family member political affiliations are highly correlated

    • Largely held as evidence of familial socialization

    • Researchers have failed to consider possibility of genetic component

  • Other social traits, behaviors, and attitudes are genetically influenced

    • Church attendance

    • Issue positions

    • Political ideology (isn’t this what we’re already talking about?)

  • We need to know both direction and strength of partisan attachments

• Behavior Genetics and Biometric Theory

  • Developed in an attempt to understand why individuals in a population differ

    • Analyses explain variation around a population mean = info on individual differences in a population

    • Phenotype (specific trait value) = combo of genetics + environment

    • Monozygotic (MZ) twins often used in behavior genetic pop samples

    • If PID is influenced by genes, co-twin correlation of MZ twins should be higher than that of DZ twin pairs

  • Maximum likelihood (ML) structural equation modeling (SEM) most commonly used to analyze twin samples (Bayesian also used)

    • Tests validity of theories

• Model Assumptions and Addressing Critics of Biometric Designs

  • Classical Twin Design (CTD) assumes no differences in means (or prevalences) and variances of different zygosity groups

  • Also assumes magnitude and correlation of shared environmental influences are the same for MZ and DZ co-twin pairs (“equal environment assumption”)

  • Current polysci critiques outdated a priori assumptions that don’t test predictions

  • “The heuristic that genes influence behavior is unashamedly empirical, because that is the nature of science” (586).

  • Limitations exist:

    • Twin samples are not random

• Describing the Sample and the Measurement of Concepts

  • Data collected in mid- to late 1980s as part of Virginia 30,000 Health and Life-Style Survey for Twins (VA30K)

  • PID assessed by survey question: “Write in the number which best describes [your] political affiliation: (1) don’t know (2) always supports Republicans (3) usually supports Republicans (4) varies (5) usually supports Democrats (6) always supports Democrats (7) other (8) prefer not to answer.”

    • 2 or 3 = Republican, 5 or 6 = Democrat, 4 = varies

    • Partisan intensity determined by usually and always

  • Sociodemographic variables: age, income, education, religion, occupation, marital status, church attendance

  • Political attitudes assessed using 28-item version of Wilson-Patterson attitudes inventory

    • Selection of covariates for partisan intensity include measures from Eysenck’s Personality Quotient (EPQ) with 3 main personality factors:

      • Psychoticism (versus impulse control)

      • Extraversion (versus introversion)

      • Neuroticism (versus instability)

    • Two additional subfactors – impulsivity and social conformity – also in sample and included in analysis

Definitions:

• Monozygotic (MZ) twins = twins developed from a single fertilized ovum that are genetically identical

• Dizygotic (DZ) twins = twins from 2 different fertilized ova by different sperm; on average only sharing 50% of segregating genes (like non-twin siblings)

• Additive genetic (A) = combined influence of all genes

• Common environment (C) = common or shared among family members, including familial and cultural socialization

• Unique environment (E) = idiosyncratic (unique) personal experience and all environmental stimuli unique to the individual

• A priori = knowledge independent from experience

• Collapsed variable = combining several cases into single lines

• Polychoric correlation = A technique for estimating the correlation between two hypothesized normally distributed continuous latent (indirectly measured) variables, from two observed ordinal variables

• Discriminant function analyses = serve the same purpose as beta weights in linear regression and indicate the relative importance of the covariate in predicting the dependent variable

Week 5: Vote Choice - Socio-Contextual Mechanisms

Arzheimer, Kai. 2009. “Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002.” American Journal of Political Science 53(2): 259-275.

Huber, John, Georgia Kernell and Eduardo Leoni. 2003. “Institutional Context, Cognitive Resources, and Party Attachments Across Democracies.” Political Analysis 13(4): 365-386.

Bumper Sticker:

Party attachment follows from group identities when:

• The individual identifies as a member of the group
• Competing group identities are both in support of the same party.
• (also) Systems that help individuals evaluate party performance increase partisanship and this effect is most strongly associated with the least-educated individuals.

Independent Variable:

salience of groups, group cross pressures, & permissiveness of electoral system 

• measured through social heterogeneity, number of political parties, effective number of legislative parties

• Retrospective clarity:

  • Effective number of legislative parties (as this increases, more difficult to assess responsibility for policy outcomes

  • Party cohesion (vote for candidate captures degree of interdependence between voting for a candidate and the candidate’s party)

  • Candidate control of ballot (captures candidates’ control of (1) access to a party’s label and (2) manipulation of ballot rankings in party list systems

  • Age of party system (logged and weighted by vote proportion age of up to the top 6 vote-receiving parties in CSES election)

• Education:

  • 1 (low) to 8 (high)

Dependent Variable:

Party attachment

Research Question:

Do some political systems encourage the formation of party attachments more than others? Are social structures or governmental institutions most important? Are the effects of political context the same for all individuals?

Hypothesis:

• A country’s social and institutional context should have a systematic impact on party attachments.

• The impact of social and institutional context does not operate the same on all types of individuals.

Data:

• Countries with a 9 or 10 on Polity IV for at least the 2 years immediately prior to first module of that country’s CSES election survey (1996-201) = 25 countries (Thailand removed for corruption-plagued 2001 election)

• Party attachment measured by answers to 2 CSES questions:

  • “Do you usually think of yourself as close to any particular political party?”

  • If yes, “What party is that” = party attachment; if no, = independents

Methods:

• Two-step estimation procedure:

  • Probit model for each country estimating effects of individual-level attributes on likelihood of being a partisan

  • Linear regression to test socialization and institutional hypotheses with weighting matrix to weight coefficients from first-level regressions by their precision

Findings:

• Voters form attachments when group identities are salient and complimentary.

• Institutions that help voters evaluate parties increase partisanship.

  • These institutions retrospectively evaluate parties through party discipline and the number of parties in government.

  • These institutions have the greatest influence on voters with the least education.

Pattie, Charles, and Ron Johnston. 2000. “People Who Talk Together Vote Together: An Exploration of Contextual Effects in Great Britain.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(1): 41-66.

Abstract:

Many students of British voting patterns have tested for the existence of contextual effects, which postulate that voters are influenced by events and people in their local milieux. One of those contextual effects is the neighborhood effect, whereby individuals are influenced by the nature of the politically relevant information circulating within their social networks, many of which are spatiallyconstrained to their local area. Although ecological analyses have identified patterns consistent with this hypothesis, there have been virtually no direct investigations of the effect, largely because of the absence of relevant data. Using information from a large, clustered survey of voters at the time of the 1992 general election, this paper uncovers clear evidence of such effects: people are much more likely to change their votes in a particular direction if those with whom they discuss political issues support that direction, especially if they are members of the respondent’s family and are the individuals with whom they discuss politics most.

Bumper Sticker:

Who we talk to is as important as who we are and who we talk to is very much influenced by where we live — we are what we are, and do what we do, because of where we are, and have been OR those who talk together tend to vote together.

Research Question:

Does the neighborhood effect have an impact on voter decisions?

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Most researchers have accepted that voters are influence by their immediate social and geographical environments as well as their own individual circumstances. However, the way in which such contextual factors operate is contested. Most explanations point to spatial variation in economic and political contexts and the driving force behind voter’s decisions. That is, “nonsocial” context on economic and political conditions at the local and national level compose the voting repertoire with which individuals draw on at the polls.

However, the authors speculate that the influence of immediate social networks (family, friends, colleagues) on individual opinions informs their voting behavior. Early research explored such possibilities, but scarcity of data left this “neighborhood effect” to be abandoned if favor of explanations that could be explored.

Hypothesis:

Main hypothesis: Each group would be influenced by the dominant nature of electorally relevant information in their social networks—those who changed the party that they supported should be in networks where support for their new party is strong, whereas those who remained loyal to a party should be in networks that give it strong support.

Data/Methods:

• Explores contextual effects on voting behavior in Great Britain

• Uses data collected in the British Election Study (BES) from the 1992 British General Election, which lends itself to the data requirement of networks of people living in the same locality.

  • The data uses a cluster rather than a random sample: 210 “points” (which are polling districts made up of 1,000-2,000 voters).

  • Used a stratified random design with a random sample of respondents selected from the electoral roll for the district

  • Produces 2,526 individuals with an average sample size of around 16 per cluster, with a peaked distribution between 16 and 19

• Authors chose to focus on why some respondents, from their own recollection, changed their vote between 1987 and 1992 while others did not

• By aggregating the reported 1987 votes of each BES respondent by polling district, the authors were able to estimate the vote share there for each of the three main political parties that fought in all British constituencies in both 1987 and 1992: Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat (Alliance in 1987).

• First analysis:

  • Contrasts those who switched their vote to a particular party in 1992 (coded 1) against those who didn’t (coded 0)

  • Gives 3 dependent variables:

    • 1. switch to conservative 2) switch to labor 3) switch to Liberal

  • Employs a Logistic Regression (because the DVs are binary)

  • Then does the same thing but looks at those who defected (voted for each party in 1987) So those who voted for a particular party in 1987 and again in 1992 (the loyalists) against those that voted for another party/ didn’t vote at all in 1992 (the defectors)

• Second analysis:

  • looks at the impact of conversations with the individuals respondents named as the first (primary) discussant of politics and analyzing how that affected transitions to each party

  • Measures those who who didn’t vote for the same party in 1992 as they did in 1987 against those who did

  • Also looks at those who defected versus those who didn’t

• Third analysis:

  • Assesses the degree to which cross cutting relationships impact vote choice by bringing in two additional discussants that the respondents listed

  • The more discussants who support a particular party, the greater the expected probability that an individual will switch to that party, and the less the probability that he or she will defect from it.

• Fourth analysis:

  • It’s possible that discussants don’t live in the same neighborhood (i.e. context) as the respondent. Therefore, there a chance that political context and conversations on voting linked, or could they be separate?

  • hypothesize that the more support a party has in a locality (the independent variables employed in the regressions reported in Tables 3 and 4), the greater the probability that individuals there will encounter, talk to, and be converted by that party’s partisans

  • tested by dividing the respondents according to how many discussants they report having a particular partisanship, which can vary from 0 to 3.

Findings:

• Social networks are indeed important influences on voting decisions

  • Families who talk together, vote together! (kinda) - voters were more likely to vote/not vote for a party based on conversations they had with their families

  • More accurately: those who talked together tended to vote together.

  • Conversations with friends are also important

• First analysis:

  • the more their local area was dominated by supporters of a particular party, the greater the probability that individuals switched their support to that party between 1987 and 1992—if they had not voted for it at the first of those two election

  • local context did not influence voters’ decisions to abandon a party they have previously supported, but that the choice of which party to switch their support to was influenced by local conditions—which is the hypothesized mechanism that underlies the neighborhood effect.

• Second analysis:

  • Those who did not voter conservative in 1987 were more likely to vote conservative in 1992 if their primary discussant was conservative

    • talking to Labour or Liberal party discussants made not conservative voters less likely to vote conservative (duh)

  • Same results hold for other parties - voters were more likely to vote for a particular party if the primary discussant was a member of that party

  • Frequency of conversation about politics appeared to have no influence

  • those people who voted for a party in 1987 were less likely to vote for another party in 1992 if their primary discussant had been a supporter of the same parter when compared to their discussant being from another party or having no discussant at all

• Third analysis:

  • More likely to support and less likely to defect if the discussants were from the same party

• Fourth Analysis:

  • If a respondent had more discussants from a particular party, then there was also an associated increase in the number of votes for that party in the respondents district

  • This shows that there is a link between spatial and communicative contexts, supporting the neighboring effects.

• It is not logical to ignore social networks, and conversations within them, as a possible influence on the voting decision of individuals

Non-Findings:

• Can’t distinguish if the influential conversations are locally based

• They know that the conversations matter, but they have no information on the relative locations of the individuals involved in those conversations (how immediate are they?).

• Also don’t know what the content of the conversations were

NEED TO ADD WESTHOLM

Week 6: Vote Choice - Economic Motivations

Bratten, Michael, and Robert Mattes. 2001. “Support for Democracy in Africa: Intrinsic or Instrumental?” British Journal of Political Science 31(3): 447-474.

Bumper Sticker:

African democracy persists b/c of economic AND political change.

Independent Variable:

economic, political, and general performance factors on democratic regime

Dependent Variable:

attitudes about democracy

Research Question:

Why do Africans support democracy?

Hypothesis:

• Explanatory factors: why variation in support for/satisfaction with democracy?

  • Social characteristics of population such as literacy, income and gender

  • Economic goods: popular perceptions of national economic conditions, personal quality of life, and access to materials and services shape feelings about democracy

  • Political goods: Is the delivery of civil rights and political equality enough?

  • General performance factors: citizens’ overall assessment of governmental performance for 3 reasons:

Data:

• 3 separate surveys on political attitudes in Ghana, Zambia, and South Africa

  • Zambia: 1,182 respondents following “dubious” 1996 election

  • South Africa: 3,500 stratified by race, province, community size in 1997 following free & fair elections

  • Ghana: 2,005 respondents in 1999 following free & fair 1996 elections

    • All 3 surveys included questions on citizen understanding of the meaning of democracy, support for, and satisfaction with democracy in theory and n practice

Methods:

Multiple regression in OLS

Findings:

Popular support for democracy in African countries similar to other Third Wave countries

• Lower levels of mass satisfaction w/regime performance in African countries

• General public in African countries thinks instrumentally: support for democracy hinges critically upon popular approval of government achievements

• Outside of South Africa, many Africans value political goods

Additional findings:

1. Africans [here] more likely to associate democracy w/individual liberties than w/communal solidarity, especially if they live in urban areas.

2. Popular conceptions of democracy have both procedural and substantive dimensions (though the former is more common than the latter).

3. Citizens rank procedural and substantive attributes in different order across countries.

4. Rankings differ even within the category of political goods

Benton, A. L. (2005). “Dissatisfied Democrats or retrospective voters?”, 38(4), 417–442.

Abstract:

This article examines recent trends in #Latin-American #voting-behavior and casts them in terms of sincere (economic) and strategic (electoral) concerns. It argues that thanks to years of economic adversity, Latin Americans have developed long, sophisticated #economic-memories . Although this has resulted in rising frustration with democratic government, according to recent opinion polls, it has not always led voters to #punish all parties responsible for hardship at election time. A panel study of the region’s presidential systems demonstrates that citizens punish incumbents by voting for established #nonincumbents when electoral laws reduce opportunities available to small parties in the systems, even if #nonincumbents have also been blamed for hard economic times. More #permissive-electoral-systems , in contrast, encourage citizens to reject all parties responsible for economic decline. The analysis demonstrates how economic and electoral concerns interact to affect voting behavior, #political-accountability , and #public-opinion in Latin America.

Bumper Sticker:

Economic Evaluations Voter Laws Voter Behavior

Research Question:

If most Latin Americans have faced economic hardship during successive governments, why do they reject both the incumbent and non-incumbent parties in some systems and only the incumbent party in others?

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Many Latin American economies have experienced some form poor performance that has resulted in different forms of electoral punishment. Barton, drawing on previous literature regarding economic theories of voter behavior, devises a theory that enables her to assess the institutional features that interact with economic performance to determine who voters choose to punish in subsequent elections. In highly permissible systems, where there are more parties to choose from, voters memories of economic performance can interact with electoral strategies to allow the punishment of multiple parties (as has been the case in multiple countries). However, more restrictive systems, which limit the number of viable parties, forces voters to focus their punishing efforts on the incumbent alone, as they require an alternative option of some form and therefore increases support for the form incumbent.

Data/Methods:

• panel data from 13 Latin American Countries

  • required (a) to be a presidential system and have had (b) more than one party win the presidency, so that current and former incumbents compete; (c) to have elections deemed free of fraud by international observers, so that their results reflect voters’ reactions to party performance; and (d) to have an economic crisis and/or economic reform during democratic rule.

  • in these countries, 64 elections were held, with 39 instances in which current and former incumbents competed for power

Independent Variable:

economic performance as measured by the percentage change in GDP per capita during each parties last 2 years in office.

Dependent Variable:

• Change in support for incumbents - measured as the difference between votes received by an incumbent party in presidential elections while in office and votes received in the previous election when the party won.

• Change in support for non-incumbents out of power - measured as change in support received in elections after leaving office and support when the party originally came into power.

Model:

• Uses OLS with #panel-corrected standard errors #PCSEs , which were selected because of the limited number of countries and small (often unbalanced) number of observations in each panel.

Hypothesis:

• H1: When incumbent parties are blamed for poor economic performance, they will lose support, regardless of the electoral system used to elect them.

• H2: Nonincumbent parties previously in power will derive greater electoral benefits in restrictive, compared with permissive, electoral contexts when incumbent parties are blamed for economic decline, all else being equal.

• H3: Former incumbents blamed for economic decline will continue to receive lower levels of support in permissive, as opposed to restrictive, electoral contexts, all else being equal.

• H4: Current incumbents will gain support in permissive, as opposed to restrictive, electoral contexts when former incumbents are blamed for economic decline, all else being equal.

Findings:

Hypothesis	Support	Details
H1	Yes	incumbent parties’ support decreases with economic downturns, without regard to institutional change (p.430)
H2	Yes	when electoral laws construct institutional barriers to small parties (restrictive), groups once holding the presidency will suffer losses in support when incumbents manage economic growth; as GDP declines, parties previously in power begin to experience a surge of supprot (p.431)
H3	Yes	accounting for the presence of Honduras, there was no relationship between poor economic performance and punishment of former incumbents in restrictive systems; there was a relationship between poor economic performance and the punishment of incumbents in permissive systems (pg.436)
H4	Yes	nonincumbents’ performance has implications for incumbents’ support. As predicted, incumbents gain about 10% of the national votes when nonincumbents are responsible for neoliberal economic reform in all electoral settings

Other Findings:

• Restrictive institutions reduce the incentive for voters to waste support on parties unlikely to win.

• Rather than helping nonincumbents weather the electoral effect of incumbents’ economic growth, runoffs cause nonincumbents to suffer additional electoral losses.

Lewis-Beck, Michael S., and Mary Stegmaier. 2009. “Economic Models of Voting.” OHPB. Ch. 27: 518-537.

Bumper Sticker:

The state of the economy can help predict voter decisions.

Purpose:

This is a literature review on micro-level, survey research studies of economic voting in the U.S., Britain, France, and Globally.

Overview:

Questions regarding the precise nature of economic voting led to four general “types”.

1. Retrospective Voting
   1. Originating with V.O. Key (1966), this type of voting occurs when voters review the performance of the incumbent government.
2. Prospective Voting
   1. Originating with Downs (1957), this type of voting occurs when voters look to the future and vote according to the governments potential economic performance.
3. Pocketbook Voting (personal finances)
   1. This theory of voting suggests that when personal or household financial conditions have deteriorated, voters will punish the incumbent.
4. Sociotropic Voting (national economy rather than personal finances).
   1. This theory of voting suggests that voters are more likely to be considering the national economic situation when casting their vote.

Of these types, the retrospective sociotropic and prospective sociotropic appear to be the most relevant across empirical evaluations. That is, people tend to vote based of their perceptions of national economic performance, both in the past (retrospective sociotropic) and the future (prospective sociotropic). The type of voting that is cued depends on whether or not an incumbent is running, and therefore a reliable place to point blame. Essentially, the reward-punishment hypothesis holds up across settings, with slight variation according to group membership (party id, gender, etc.), institutional context (voting system, prime-minister v. president, number of parties) and economic context (personal, neighborhood, national).

Findings:

United States:

• ANES is good source for election studies
• Most theories of economic voting focus on the U.S.
• Pocketbook voting is weak in presidential elections -- sociotropic is strong
• Strength of economic voting can cary based on context -- such is the case when considering the attribution of responsibility (e.g. the attribution of blame to particular party/candidate/branch of government)
  • in the U.S. the presidency is an important institutional context for which to blame punish electorally
• While other types of factors matter and interact them, sociotropic economic effects (both retrospective and prospective) themselves cannot be understated when assessing the general behavior of the voter population.

Britain:

• BES is a good source for election studies
• British voters show the same trends of reward and punishment regarding economic voting
• There may be important regional contexts
  • Johnston 1997 finds that when voter’s perceptions of their neighborhoods are that they are worse off, they will punish the incumbent
• Retrospective and Prospective are both important
• Perceptual shifts in economic conditions are almost as great as realigning with a different party (Clarke et al. 2004)

France:

• Eurobarometer and FNES are good sources for election studies
• A general finding—significant retrospective sociotropic effects, but no retrospective pocketbook effects
• It is largely sociotropic and more or less equally retrospective or prospective, depending in part on the institutional context.
• The French voter is sophisticated, knowing whom and how much to blame.
  • When government is unified, the president is the lightning rod for economic discontent. However, under cohabitation, the burden shifts to the prime minister.
• Smaller parties are blamed less than large parties, legislative candidates are blamed less than presidential candidates, and presidential candidates who are prime minister are blamed more than presidential candidates who are not prime minister.

Cross-National Studies:

• Similar trends have been found in cross-national studies
  • Lewis‐Beck and Mitchell (1990), on the five major western European countries; Chappell and Veiga (2000), on thirteen western European nations; Pacek (1994) and Tucker (2001) on central European samples; Remmer (1991) on twelve Latin American countries; Pacek and Radcli (1995) on eight low‐income nations; Wilkin, Haller, and Norporth (1997) on a worldwide sample of countries.
• Important Takeaways:

  • Responsibility Hypothesis seems to hold - that when responsibility is hard to pin down, voters are less likely to punish incumbents - this is an important contextual factors

    • Such is the case in more countries with more “coalitional complexity” -- when more parties make up the incumbent government, is it difficult to assign blame

    • Presidential Systems and systems with more restrictive electoral laws tend to strengthen the economic vote

    • In the context of globalization, there is a significant decrease in economic voting in the face of open trade, as electorates can’t assign blame to the government alone

Week 7: Societal Cleavages

Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2003. Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 1&2.

Bumper Sticker:

Modernization theory applies to positive gender equality attitudes!

IV:

societal modernization

DV:

gender equality attitudes

Research question:

How has modernization changed attitudes towards gender equality? How much does culture matter for gender equality compared to levels of societal development and legal-institutional structures?

Hypotheses:

1. Societal modernization brings changed cultural attitudes toward gender equality through:

   1. a transition from traditional to secular-rational values, and

   2. a transition from survival to self-expression values.

2. These shifts are coherent and predictable, and can be shown through:

   1. Cross-national comparisons

   2. Sectoral comparisons (most secure vs. less secure sectors of the public)

   3. Gender comparisons

   4. Generational comparisons

   5. Religious legacies – controlling for society’s level of GNP per capita & workforce structure, Islamic societies will be less supportive of gender equality (19)

Data:

• Evidence of changing attitudes towards gender equality in over 70 countries using the World Values and European Values surveys from 1981-2001

• Types of societies:

  • Human Development Index 100-point scale of societal modernization using adult literacy and education, life expectancy, and real per capita GDP

    • Postindustrial societies = 28 states w/HDI over .9 and mean per capita GDP of $29,585

    • Industrial societies = 58 states w/HDI .74-.899 and GDP of at least $6,314

    • Agrarian societies = 97 states w/HDI <.739 and GDP of $1,098

• Types of states:

  • Gastil index, 7-point scale used by Freedom House, as a standard measure of political rights and civil liberties (higher score = higher levels of democracy)

  • Length of democratic stability from Freedom House ratings, 1972-2000

    • Older democracies = 39 states w/> 20 yrs as dem & 5.5-7.0 FH rating

    • Newer democracies = 43 states w/< 20 yrs as a dem & 5.5-7.0 FH rating

    • Semi-democracies = 47 states w/< 20 yrs as a dem & 3.5-5.5 FH rating

    • Non-democracies = 62 states w/FH rating of 1.0-3.0

• Analysis of cultural attitudes using World Values Survey (WVS) pooled survey with all waves; combined with Eurobarometer Survey and Political Action Study to fill in gaps

Methods:

• “Convergence model” using Przeworski & Teune’s “most different system” design

  • Seeks to maximize contrasts among societies to distinguish systematic clusters of characteristics associated with different dimensions of gender equality

Findings:

• Cultural traditions are enduring in shaping men’s and women’s worldviews (but not enough on their own)

• Slow shifts are taking place to move from traditional towards more egalitarian sex roles

• Where there are more egalitarian attitudes, these are systematically related to the actual conditions of women’s and men’s lives

Questions:

1. Inglehart & Norris describe social modernization and the gender equality attitudes that accompany it as “probabilistic, not deterministic” (11). But if these slow attitudinal changes are happening across the majority of the population, how do we account for democratic backsliding and the rise of violence against minorities in postindustrial countries following exogenous shocks/social strains? (think terrorist attacks, economic shocks like the 2008 recession, mass migration/immigration from Syria, etc.). Do we think that these represent latent variables that were always present? Are they blips along a long-term progressive path? Or do they represent something more insidious?

General Notes:

• This book sets out to understand how modernization has changed cultural attitudes toward gender equality and to analyze the political consequences of this process

• Core arguments: people’s lives have been changed in 2-stage modernization process:

  • Shift from agrarian to industrialized societies

  • Move from industrial to postindustrial societies

• Chapter 1: Introduction – Explaining the Rising Tide of Gender Equality

  • Women’s progress worldwide uneven – lagging in government representation

  • UN encouraged states to recognize women’s rights through Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 1979

    • “...the role of the state is now widely understood to be central in actively consolidating and reinforcing gender equality” (7).

  • Cultural barriers: perceptions of appropriate division of roles in home and family, paid employment, and political spere shaped by predominant culture – the social norms, beliefs, and values in society

    • Thes norms, beliefs and values rest on levels of societal modernization and religious traditions

    • Gender = the socially constructed roles and learned behavior of women and men associated with the biological characteristics of females and males

    • Cultural change not sufficient itself for gender equality but is a necessary condition for gender equality

  • Modernization brings systematic, predictable changes in gender roles in 2 phases:

1. Industrialization → women into paid workforce → reduced fertility rates, increased literacy and greater educational opportunities → greater female participation in representative government (but still less power than men)

2. Postindustrialization → women rise in management and professions → women gain political influence in elected & appointed bodies (over half of women worldwide haven’t entered this phase yet)

• Changes probabilistic, not deterministic (11)

• Chapter 2: From Traditional Roles toward Gender Equality

  • Four major predictions – expect to find systematic differences in cultural indicators of gender equality:

    • between societies based on their level of economic development

    • within societies based on generational cohorts

    • between women and men, and

    • within societies based on structural and cultural factors such as education and class

• This chapter analyzes indirect attitudinal evidence

• This study develops a Gender Equality Scale by combining 5 items from the pooled 1995-2001 World Values Surveys/European Values Surveys

  • MENPOL Q118: “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do.” (Agree coded low) (1990-2001 WVS/EVS)

  • MENJOBS Q78: “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.” (Agree coded low) (1990-2001 WVS/EVS)

  • BOYEDUC Q119: “A university education is more important for a boy than a girl.” (Agree coded low) (1990-2001 WVS/EVS)

  • NEEDKID Q110: “Do you think that a woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled or is this not necessary?” (Agree coded low) (1981-2001 WVS/EVS)

  • SGLMUM Q112: “If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn’t want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?” (1981-2001 WVS/EVS)

    • Principal component factor analysis revealed that all 5 items tap a single dimension (see Table 2.1) w/Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.54*

• Gender Equality Scale summed across items & standardized to 100 points

  • Mean score for postindustrial societies = 80%; 68% for industrial; 60% for agrarian

Figure 2.2: plot of logged GDP per cap vs. Gender Equality Scale; R2 = 0.54

Iverson, Torben, and Frances Rosenbluth. 2006. “The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross-National Variation in the Gender Division of Labor and the Gender Voting Gap.” American Journal of Political Science 50(1): 1-19.

Bumper Sticker:

“Bargaining power in the home explains gender gap for labor and voting”

Research Question:

What explains cross-national variation in the gender division of labor and the gender voting gap?

Summary/Argument:

The traditional “efficiency model” proposed by economists in explaining gender division of labor as the the outcome of a coordination game, whereby specialization in household versus market skills are reinforced by childhood socialization intended to maximize offsprings chances of success later in life, is itself incapable of explaining the stark differences in female labor force participation across economies of comparable levels of development.

Builds on economic bargaining models to show that the division of labor puzzle can only be understood by treating marriage as a incomplete contract that is potentially subject to termination. When such is the case, both men and women have an incentive to cultivate their outside options by entering into paid work, and the distribution of unpaid work is determined by bargaining powers dependent upon the political-economic factors outside the family.

What is important is that divorce is an option that varies across contexts. In places where divorce is a more viable, then outside options become important for long-term welfare. Meaning that both sexes will prefer social and economic policies that maximize these options, even if it reduces household income or other measures of aggregate welfare.

Men are disincentivized to support their wives working because 1.) it increases her agency/options to exit the marriage and 2.) increases the amount of work he has to do in the home. Additionally, women in specific skills economies typically bear a bigger penalty for career interruptions such as for child rearing, they face more limited work opportunities and may invest less in their market-relevant education as a result. This, in turn, weakens their bargaining power at home, and they get stuck sweeping floors more of the time than their counterparts in economies that specialize in general skills. This occurs unless the government steps in and adopts policies to counter the disadvantages of women in specific skills countries. This is where the gender gap in preferences enters the story.

Lijphart, Arend. 1979. “Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting: The ‘Crucial Experiment’ of Comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa and Switzerland.” American Political Science Review 73(2): 442-458.

Bumper Sticker:

Religion and Language Highly Influence Voting Preferences!

IV:

Religiosity, class, and language

DV:

Party choice/voting behavior

Research question:

How do language and religion influence voter preferences?

Data:

• Survey data from 4 separate countries around roughly similar time periods

Methods:

• Multivariate analysis comparing 4 countries

  • AID technique – automatic interaction detector (tree analysis)

Findings:

• In “decisive trial of strength,” religion is the most influential factor, followed closely by language, with class a distant third.

Questions:

1. Lijphart’s methods may have been advanced by 1979 standards, but if you were to design a modern study that tested the same variables, how would you design it?

2. Why is there no mention of apartheid and its effect on South African voter preferences? Does this amount to omitted variable bias that can be corrected in the model or does the South African case present so many problems as to favor removing it from the study?

General Notes:

• 2 especially important social and demographic bases of voting behavior on party choice:

  • Social class

  • Religion

• What about language?

  • Linguistic cleavages fairly uncommon in Western democracies

  • 3 Western countries that are linguistically divided: Belgium, Canada, & Switzerland

    • South Africa an interesting 4th case due to its white electorate and persistence of competitive free elections since 1945, high rank on socioeconomic indicators of industrialization, and Christian cultural origins

• Alternative Comparative Strategies: The value of a “crucial experiment”

  • Alford’s index of class voting: divide voters into manual and non-manual workers and parties into left and right

  • Religious & language dimensions: dichotomous division of Protestants and Catholics, frequent churchgoers (at least twice/mo.) and those attending infrequently or never, and people speaking the majority language vs. speaking the minority language

  • Table 1: classification of political parties in 4 systems

  • Table 2: indices of class, religious, and linguistic voting in the 4 countries; top half unadjusted (uncontrolled) indices; adjusted lower half represent “pure” voting index of a particular independent variable when the other independent variables are controlled

    • “Alford’s indices of voting, which are differences in proportions, can also be interpreted as the regression coefficients for the regression of party choice on the independent variables if these dichotomized variables are given the numerical values of 0 and 1. This important characteristic of the index makes it possible to use multiple regression analysis to compute controlled indices of voting” (445).

  • Class doesn’t have much effect (except +21 for Switzerland)

  • Table 3: percentages of support for the “religious” parties among respondents classified by 4 frequencies of curch attendance and church affiliation

    • nonpracticing Catholics bheave very much like Protestants

  • Table 4: percentages of support for th “religious” parties cross-tabulated according to religion and language

    • Religion and language are mutually reinforcing determinants of party choice in Belgiium, Canada, and Switzerland

• Tree Analyses of Patterns of Party Choice – presented in Figures 1-4

Lyons, J., Utych, S.M. 2023. “You’re Not From Here!: The Consequences of Urban and Rural Identities.” Political Behavior 45: 75–101.

Bumper Sticker:

“Rural and Urban identities exist and influence preferences in predictable ways”

Research Question:

1. To what extent do urban and rural identities exist above and beyond other factors like party and race?

2. Are these identities consequential for the ways in which people evaluate the political and non-political world?

Abstract:

As the American political landscape becomes increasingly divided along urban–rural lines, it raises the prospect of deepening social identities that are tied to one’s community-type. As community-type becomes an important social identity, it can lead to favoritism of one’s community in-group, or denigration of one’s community out-group. We explore the extent to which urban and rural identities exist above and beyond other factors like party and race, and whether they are consequential for the ways in which people evaluate the political and non-political world. Using national survey data, we demonstrate that people in both urban and rural locations hold beliefs that are consistent with a community-type social identity that is independent of other factors which are correlated with the urban–rural divide. We use two different experiments to assess the consequences of this identity, finding that there are distinct effects in the political arena when allocating government resources, and in the non-political world when judging hypothetical job applications. These effects are generally smaller in magnitude than other factors, such as partisanship, but suggest that community-type identities are important in politics.

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Lyons and Utych set out to assess what appears to be a growing divide between rural and urban party affiliation and voting patterns.They explore the extent to which people use information about rural and urban community types to form impressions about American politics, as well as how people use this information to make decisions about political and non-political matters. If people are using urban and rural identities in similar ways to partisanship, and partisanship uses group identity as a way of perceiving the world, then there is a chance that people may be using geographic information such as urban and rural community type to evaluate the political and interpersonal landscape around them.

They focus on discriminatory behaviors. If urban and rural community types are taking on the qualities of social identities, then the in-group and out-group processing of information along lines of community type should be salient. That is, those from urban (rural) locations should confer a preference to urban (rural) locations/people, and a penalty to rural (urban) locations/people when making decisions that allocate resources, benefits, or opportunities.

Data/Methods:

Uses three different studies

First Study:

1. First, uses National Survey Data to show that people perceive values differences between people who live in rural and urban places -- appear to be driven by more than just party or race

   1. do people who live in rural (urban) areas think that people who live in urban (rural) places are different than them, and do they think that they are getting an unfair shake from government relative to those who live in other community types?

   2. Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (Wave 32)

   3. Ordered logit

IV:

whether the respondents live in urban or rural setting

DV:

1. perceptions of others values

   1. used by creating a dichotomous variable from three survey questions (p.80)

2. perceptions of government distribution of resources across community types

   1. also created a dichotomous variable from survey questions (p.84-85)

Second Study:

1. Second, uses a conjoint experiment to explore where urban or rural identities are consequential for how people distribute resources in a hypothetical political scenario

   1. conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in July 2019.7 We recruited 572 respondents to participate in the study, who were paid $1.25 to participate in a study that took less than 10 min, on average.

      1. over representative of young, liberal, white, educated, male

      2. First, participants were provided a sample pairing of two cities, to familiarize themselves with the task. Participants were told they were in charge of allocating $50,000 in highway funding between two cities. These cities were randomly assigned to vary on three dimensions—location (urban, suburban, or rural), mayor partisanship (Republican, Democrat, or non-partisan), year of last investment (2006, 2012, or 2018), percentage African-American (5%, 20%, or 65%) and average household income ($30,000, $60,000, or $90,000). Each individual completed the practice trial, and then 15 test trials.

      3. key variation is based on the “location” variation, allowing us to compare how individuals allocate funding between urban, suburban, and rural areas.

      4. One observation for each trial includes city characteristics for City A, while the second observation includes city characteristics for City B.

D.V.

1. the allocation decision between City A or City B, which takes a value of 1 if the respondent allocates funding to that city, and 0 if they allocate funding for the other city.

Findings:

1. Find that rural identities influence opinions and that partisans react to urban and rural information in expected ways

2. Find that Democrats are more likely prefer urban areas to suburban areas, but not difference in the allocation of resources between Urban and Rural Republicans, however, are more likely to allocate to rural areas

3. No location based preferences for rural respondents

Third Study:

1. Third, uses a resume experience to test discrimination in a non-political setting, finding that people evaluate hypothetical job applicants more favorably when they are from the same community types

   1. recruited 1467 respondents via MTurk who live in urban or rural areas13 to participate in the study, who were paid $0.50 to participate in a study that took roughly 2.5 min to complete, on average.

   2. Participants shown a hypothetical resume and then asked to rate the applicant on a series of evaluative criteria/ traits

   3. participants had preference for co-location

Expectations:

• urban and rural identities are formative for the way in which people view themselves and others, and it is in ways that go above and beyond race, partisanship, and other demographic or socioeconomic factors

• Democrats should discriminate in a fashion that confers favor to urban locations or people, while Republicans should show a preference for rural locations or people.

Findings:

1. Both urban and rural locations hold beliefs that are consistent with a community-type social identity that is independent of other factors

2. Each identity has a distinct impact on the political arenas when is comes to allocating government resources

3. Also has an impact in the non-political world when judging job applications

4. Effects are smaller than other factors, such as partisanship

5. Less educated community residents are more likely to perceive values difference

   1. In rural places, so are younger people, males, whites, liberals, and non-religious service attenders

   2. results are particularly related to rural areas

6. For government resources

   1. People who are older, more educated, Republicans and very conservative are the most likely to believe that urban area get more than their fair share of resources. By far the largest effect is from ideology (0.57 change in predicted probability across the full range), with partisanship (0.47 change in predicted probability) and age (0.22 change in predicted probability) also resulting in meaningful changes in predicted probabilities.

7. urban residents appear to have a well-defined out group, but it isn’t rural areas, it is the suburbs

Posner, Daniel N. 2004. “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi.” American Political Science Review 98(4): 529-545.

Bumper Sticker:

When it comes to groups, relative size matters

Research Question:

Why do some cultural differences matter for politics and others not?

IV:

Political salience of cultural difference

DV:

Relative group size for coalition-building= cultural demography theory

Unit of Analysis:

cultural dyad= relationship between the two groups on either side of the border, not the individual ethnic group

Data/Methods:

Collect data on the border in July and August 2001: questionnaire in 4 villages/each pair facing each other across the border.

• Homogeneity of populations (equidistant from Ngoni population that could have “contaminated” the sample villages)

• Similarity, control naturally for geo and eco factors by choosing pairs in the same vicinitude

• Exposed to similar national political affairs and markets (proxied by paved routes)

• 42 interviews in each Zambia villages/48 in each Malawi villages= 180 total obs.

• Focus groups as supplement

Findings:

• Each group understand objective differences (Malawians more negative about the other)

• Difference in how they would allow the other group to integrate their lives politically or in the family sphere= Malawi side prefers separation at more than 50% on average where it is 20% on the other side (series of categorical mean tested differences)

• Biggest predictor is the physical location of the village NOT objective cultural difference.

• The physical location makes a political salience of intergroup difference=how much they attach meaning to their differences (537)= Meaning-making (Wedeen)

Week 8: Protests/Social Movements/Violence

Dalton, Russell, Alix Van Sickle and Steven Weldon. 2009. “The Individual-Institutional Nexus of Protest Behavior.” British Journal of Political Science 40(1): 51-73.

Bumper Sticker:

micro-macro multilevel analysis matters in political action behavior

Research Question:

What kind of individual/contextual interplay favors a behavior inclined to political action such as protests?

IV:

protest behavior

DV:

micro-macro nexus

Findings:

The cultural modernization theory of protest: economic and political development favors protests helping resources such as education and membership to organization (akin to Klandermans) to flourish fostering mobilization =/ grievance is a predictor in developing countries.

Klandermans, Bert. 2002. “How Group Identification Helps to Overcome the Dilemma of Collective Action.” American Behavioral Scientist 45(5): 887-900.

Bumper Sticker:

voluntary membership to ID group matters for political action such as protests

Research Question:

Which type of group identification will spur political action?

IV:

protest

DV:

type of group id (cognitive, evaluative, affective)

Mechanism:

depersonalization and politicization

Findings:

Affective and behavioral ID predisposes political action such as protest and protest participation solidifies behavioral ID.

Depersonalization:

• individual become the member of a group

• which group will the individual adhere to? Cross pressure issues in competing worldviews-

• salience is context dependent for various individuals (Turner, Oakes, Hallam and McGarty (1994)

• imposed identities…isn’t this like involuntary membership? although perception of environment must play a part.

Personalization:

• definition of a group versus another: we versus they (social movement literature) social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) collective action is part of status-improvement strategy (other 2 are “leaving a group” or “become member of a better appraised group”)..depending on structural characteristic of the situation..***Isn’t there a certain stability in some groups ID that makes them eternally attractive and some other eternally avoidable?***

• what is the relation with authority? Collective action as a last resort attempt

Koopmans, Ruud. 2009. “Social Movements.” OHPB. Ch. 37: 693-707.

Bumper Sticker:

What does the political science literature discuss in relation to social movements and Democracy?

Classical Perspective:

These theories might be problematic because of ideological differences in the actual social movements and the scholars who studied them. (the scholars didn’t like the social movements so that is why their theories are rather dismissive of the people that make them up.)

1. Pre 1960 Perspective - In social movements, people lose their individuality and become susceptible to irrational behavior, which may include great bravery and sacrifice for the group, but also uncontrolled violence towards outsiders. Mostly negative view of social movements. 

   1. “Crowd-psychological ideas” - Max Weber (charismatic leadership), Emile Durkheim (collective conscience), Gustave Le Bon. 

2. Adorno perspective - “In search for new social anchors, the uprooted and isolated individuals of mass society were seen as easy targets for totalitarian mass movements of the left and right. Such movements were moreover seens as attracting particular types of ‘authoritarian’ personalities.”

   1. Motivated by theories of “mass society”

   2. Rapid social change was seen as breaking down traditional social ties and norms.

3. Theories of Relative Deprivation - gap between what people get and what they expect and aspire to get on the basis of past trends and comparisons with other groups.

   1. Deprivation leads to frustration and striking out at perceived sources of anger.

Resource Mobilization Perspective:

1960s radical movements changed everything. Mancur Olson’s economic theory of collective action changes everything.

1. Mancur Olson perspective - social movements were interpreted as rational, utility maximizing actors, and new vocabulary. 

   1. Basically rat choice.

   2. Emphasized group solidarity and the integration of individuals into social networks rather than breakdown of social norms and social uprootedness. Not just a bunch of isolated weirdos. - KEY DIFFERENCE FROM CLASSICAL PERSPECTIVE.

   3. Problems with it: downplays context and just typical issues with rat choice.

Political Opportunity Structure Perspective:

Want more focus on external factors in shaping social movements. Mobilization + classical theories focused on internal factors.

1. Political opportunity structures - argue that variations in the amount and types of social movement activity can be explained by variations in the political context that they confront. 

   1. Social movement structure/existence is related to factors such as electoral volatility, composition of party system, inst. Centralization, separation of powers, political elites.

   2. Contrast French protests to Swiss protests. French are bigger because of more centralization.

   3. Still problematic - diminishes the conception of agency. Opportunities are not decided by external factors but creative individuals that set the plan/agenda. 

Evolutionary Model Perspective:

Focus on interplay of movement-external (environmental selection) and internal (variation/innovation and retention/diffusion) elements.

• New model.

• Does not require strong assumptions about cognitive or psychological mechanisms that generate strategic decisions of movement activists and their opponents.

• Bridge between agency-orientated and structural perspective within social movement research.

Thomas, Jakana L., and Kanisha D. Bond. 2015. “Women’s Participation in Violent Political Organizations.” American Political Science Review 109(3): 488-506.

Bumper Sticker:

Lack of opportunity for women extends to violence and terrorism!

Research Question:

What explains the form and frequency of women’s participation across violent political organizations (VPOs)?

IV:

Violent political organization (VPO)

DV:

Women’s participation in group and member of violent political orgs (dichotomous) & women in combat roles

Hypothesis:

1. As a VPO grows larger, it is more likely to include women participants.

2. VPOs that rely on terrorist tactics are more likely to involve women than organizations that do not use terrorism.

3. VPOs with agendas that support gender equality are more likely to include women than organizations with gender-neutral agendas.

4. The likelihood of women’s participation in a given VPO is related to the number of other violent organizations operating in its politically-relevant environment.

Data:

• Mix of qual/quant; original cross-sectional dataset on presence of women, women’s roles and key organizational-level characteristics of 166 violent political orgs across 19 African countries 1950-2011

Methods:

• Purposive stratified sampling to select 19 countries

• logistic regression models in multivariate setting; 4 sets of results each (see Tables 3 & 4)

  • Base model in column 1

  • Full set of explanatory variables column 2

  • Controls in supply-related characteristics column 3

  • Controls for any additional group-level covariate column 4

Findings:

• Organization-based opportunities for women’s participation explain female membership in violent political organizations.

Questions:

1. Is this generalizable (lol)?

2. I get the impression that the leadership of VPOs is/assumed to be men. Is this the case? Are there examples of VPOs led by women?

3. There also appears to be an assumption that women participate in VPOs for rational reasons such as being victimized, fighting for increased political rights, etc. Outside of Islamic fundamentalism, are there other ways in which women can be radicalized to participate in violence that the study fails to control for?

General Notes:

• Most studies ignore women’s participation in VPOs

• If they do examine this phenomenon, it’s through case studies or small-N studies, and focused on “supply-side” dynamics (what characteristics condition women towards violence) rather then “demand-side” dynamics (ways in which different organizational preferences & behaviors work to facilitate or impede women’s presence in VPOs)

  • “Women’s voluntary participation in violent politics is tied invariably to the availability of opportunities” (489)

• 3 assumptions:

1. Recruiter and female participants choose purposefully among action alternatives to maximize benefits and minimize costs (everyone thinks like an economist)

2. Each organization’s ability to succeed depends on ability to attract and retain members willing to engage in violence

3. To be successful, leaders must be able to persuade potential members to overcome collective action problems while frustrating opponents’ ability to do the same

• Reasons for why women join VPOs mimic reasons why individuals join; that is, they are not particular to women

  • Supply-side reasons alone not enough to explain variation in participation between men and women in VPOs

• Case study: Eritrea (1961-1991) and their war for independence

  • ELF included marginal number of women and mostly in support roles

  • EPLF split from ELF & included women in all aspects of org throughout its existence

  • After victory in war with ELF and major gains in war against Ethiopia, EPLF saw flood of women’s participation

    • EPLF instrumental in establishment of National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW) in 1979

    • Remained committed to women’s participation

Tufekci, Zeynep, and Christopher Wilson. 2012. “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square.” Journal of Communication 62(2): 363-379.

Bumper Sticker:

Social media increases protest participation and communication!

Research Question:

Did social media use shape how individuals learned about protests in Egypt, how they planned their involvement, and how they documented their involvement?

IV:

Social media use (Facebook)

DV:

Participation in protest in Tahrir Square

Data:

• Survey of media use by Egyptian protestors Feb. 24-27th

• 1,050 completed interviews w/people who had participated in Tahrir Square demonstrations (estimated response rate of 60%)

• Questionnaire in Arabic and on paper, 25-45 min long w/90 mandatory and 46 optional questions

• Use of media & previous protest participation dichotomous

• Education from 1-7 (no formal - postgraduate)

• Where did you first hear about protests?

• Did you produce/share visuals and through what method?

• What date did you join the protests?

Methods:

• Snowball sampling approach in semicontrolled public spaces like cafes and parks)

Findings:

• ~92% of respondents used phones & 82% used phones to communicate about protests

• ~52% had FB profile and almost everyone who did used it to communicate about protests

• Young people more likely to have attended previous protests or on Jan. 25

• Those who had previously attended protests more likely to have used print media for info

General Notes:

• Egypt 2005: social media & satellite TV the main public spaces where politically sensitive subjects could be openly discussed and dissent expressed

  • After Tunisian protests in Dec. 2010, a first protest date was planned for Jan 25, 2011 to express solidarity

  • After 18 days of sustained protests, Mubarak resigned on Feb 11

• Despite persistent corruption, authoritarians have remained in power in countries like Egypt

  • Collective action problem of protest benefits dictators

  • Social media alter tenets of collection action problems, along with:

    • Better journalism (Al-Jazeera)

    • Rapid expansion of the internet

    • Dramatic increase of citizen connectivity (cell phones, for example)

Week 9: Ethnicity/Tolerance

Hopkins, Daniel J. 2010. “Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition.” American Political Science Review 104(1): 40-60.

Bumper Sticker:

Changing demographics X issue salience = anti-immigration attitudes

Research Question:

Under what conditions do people’s local experiences influence their political attitudes?

IV:

change in demographics and immigration salience/coverage

DV:

immigration attitudes and anti-immigration ordinances

Hypothesis:

• People living in changing communities will have more negative attitudes on immigration provided that immigration is nationally salient, and thus that frames related to immigration are available to politicize people’s day-to-day experiences.

Data:

• 11 surveys about politics & public affairs that included the same question about levels of immigration; included county-level geocodes

  • GSS: 1994, 1996, 2000

  • NES: 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2004

  • SCCBS: 2006

  • KN: 2009

• Salience of immigration measure: index of monthly mentions of immigration by 2 network news programs (ABC & CBS news) and country’s most widely circulated newspaper (USA Today) using Vanderbilt Television News Archive and LexisNexis database

Methods:

• Descriptive statistics, correlation, and predicted probabilities

• Index measure: Sum of immigration stories that month divided by avg number of immigration-related stories per month over time period Jan. 1992-Feb. 2009

  • Salience measure t = (# of ABC stories)/1.8 + (# of CBS stories)/2.0 + (# of USA Today stories)/38.1

• Support for immigration measured in pooled dataset of 15,851 respondents in 1,908 different counties

  • County-level change remarkably stable over time

• Immigration salience matches each respondent to avg level of immigration coverage in 6 months prior to respondent’s interview; missing data imputed

Findings:

• Strong negative interaction between salience and residence in a changing county

Questions:

1. Table 4 shows the percentage of demographic voters in a county as a control, but the paper doesn’t discuss it much. Would the findings hold up if repeated now, and would they change significantly given variation in a blue or red county?

2. With the recent actions of Republican governors exporting immigrants to blue counties with low-immigrant populations, would we see the kind of anti-immigrant sentiment that this paper predicts? Why or why not?

General Notes:

• According to theories of racial threat, rising numbers of immigrants will threaten long-time residents’ political power and economic status

  • This generates political hostility in heavily immigrant areas

• This article develops the politicized places hypothesis to explain how and when local demographics influence attitude and local politics

  • 3 factors minimize threat immigrants pose to long-time residents:

    • Immigrants are often unable to vote

    • Immigrants tend to work in segmented labor markets

    • Immigrants tent to live in segregated communities

  • Politicized places hypothesis (PPH): when communities are undergoing sudden demographic changes at the same time that salient national rhetoric politicizes immigration, immigrants can quickly become the targets of local political hostility

• Realistic group threat: the presence of an outgroup in sufficient numbers will generate competition for scarce resources and thus local hostility

  • Local; threat might be acute in places of relative/increasing resource deprivation or rising outgroup political power

  • These assumptions don’t hold for immigrants – leads to politicized places hypothesis

• Politicizted places hypothesis assertions:

  • Resolves issue of local inattention to demographics by arguing that while levels of ethnic heterogeneity might escape notice, changes are less likely to do so

    • Demographic changes might not be seen as having political ramifications unless frames are available that make those ramifications clear

    • Past work presents compelling evidence that framing effects can shape extent to which Americans’ attitudes toward public policies are racialized

  • PPH specifies conditions of everyday life that make symbols or rhetoric more or less influential

    • Central claim of PPH: At times when rhetoric related to immigrants is highly salient nationally, those witnessing influxes of immigrants locally will find it easier to draw political conclusions from their experiences.

      • The driver is changes in demographics in affected places

Kalyvas, Stathis. 1999. “Wanton and Senseless? The Logic of Massacres in Algeria.” Rationality and Society 11(3): 243-285.

Bumper Sticker:

“Mass violence against civilians is not irrational”

Purpose:

This paper seeks to address a gap in the literature on revolutions and rebellions - which has focused preconditions and outcomes. Instead, the authors explore the content of these events. The goal of the paper is to check the plausibility of tentative thesis - that mass violence can be perceived through a rationalist framework

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Traditional explanations for why insurgent groups choose to engage is mass violence have focused primarily on ideology as the main explanatory factor. The authors argue that, counter to traditional accounts, mass violence against civilians is strategic with aims of maximizing civilian support. They sketch a theoretical framework for the analysis of civil wars to see how it fares in one particular case: insurgent violence in Algeria. 

Method/Finding:

• Focus on insurgent violence in Algeria in 1996 during the civil war, which started in 1992 after the Algerian Military (Incumbents) “aborted” the parliamentary election and terminated democracy 

  • This deprived the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) of a sweeping victory and they eventually become outlawed insurgents that formed into two groups - the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) and the GIA (which is believed to have contributed to most of the Massacres. 

• Generalized out to other countries at the end of the paper. 

• They find that Massacres tend to happen under conditions of fragmented rule, support for the incumbent state, and escalating violence.

• They were not random, but attacked specific neighborhoods

  • Families of sympathizers were left alone 

  • Victims belonged to three groups

    • Local opponents who supported incumbents 

    • People supporting competing insurgent groups 

    • Former sympathizers who switched allegiance (most targeted this group)

Definitions:

• Massacre

  • Defined narrowly as large-scale, face-to-face violence against civilians targeted in groups and in the context of a civil war.

• Violence

  • Measure in it most basic form: homicide 

Hjerm, M., Eger, M.A., Bohman, A. 2020. A New Approach to the Study of Tolerance: Conceptualizing and Measuring Acceptance, Respect, and Appreciation of Difference. Social Indicators Research 147: 897–919.

Bumper Sticker:

Tolerance and prejudice should be measured/studied separately!

Research Question:

How should we measure tolerance, and how does it differ from measures of prejudice?

IV:

DV:

Data:

• 2 datasets measuring tolerance:

  • Swedish sample

    • 1,107 individuals surveyed w/response rate of 27.6%

  • Cross-national sample from Australia, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, & the US

    • 6,300 respondents through online survey

• Questions aimed at reactions to diversity rather than attitudes toward specific groups

Methods:

• Structural equation modeling and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to analyze tolerance across samples and demographics

  • Tolerance is a latent (hidden) variable

• SEM: “contain postulated causal connections among a set of latent variables, and causal connections linking the postulated latent variables to variables can be observed and whose values are available in some data set”

Findings:

• Tolerance is best understood as a 3-dimensional concept, involving:

  • Acceptance of difference

  • Respect for difference

  • Appreciation of difference

General Notes:

• Previous research on tolerance has often mixed up the concepts of tolerance and prejudice, leading to various problems. To address this issue, this research aims to differentiate between the two.

  • conflation of tolerance with prejudice has made it difficult to understand what tolerance truly means and how it differs from dislike or disapproval of certain groups.

  • distinguishing analytically between tolerance and prejudice. 

  • define tolerance as an abstract value orientation towards diversity, without focusing on specific groups, ideas, or behaviors. This allows authors to analyze tolerance both within societies and across different societies.

  • suggests that tolerance is best understood as a three-dimensional concept, involving acceptance of, respect for, and appreciation of difference.

  • found that only an appreciation of difference has the potential to reduce prejudice.

    • demonstrates the validity of these measures and their independence from welfare attitudes. 

    • Results suggest that only an appreciation of difference can reduce prejudice, but relationship btwn tolerance/other outcomes remain unclear.

• There are two main approaches to studying tolerance. 

  • The first sees tolerance as permitting something disliked, suggesting that prejudice is necessary for tolerance. 

    • This view implies that one can only be tolerant if they’ve been prejudiced before. Empirical studies following this approach often start with the assumption that certain groups are widely disliked.

    • However, this method makes it hard to separate tolerance from prejudice in practice.

  • The second approach defines tolerance as a positive response to diversity itself, without requiring prior prejudice. 

    • This view focuses on subjective reactions to diverse values, behaviors, and lifestyles. 

    • Although this conceptualization is analytically distinct from prejudice, previous studies using this definition still rely on measures of prejudice, limiting our understanding of tolerance.

• Both approaches have methodological issues. They either link tolerance closely to prejudice or fail to measure tolerance in a way consistent with its definition. 

  • Additionally, previous research has often overlooked the multidimensionality of tolerance and lacks abstraction in its conceptualization and measurement. 

  • To address these limitations, the study advances a new conception of tolerance and develops measures consistent with this definition, avoiding the pitfalls of previous approaches.

  • propose a new understanding of tolerance as a value orientation towards difference, which focuses on how individuals respond to diversity itself rather than merely putting up with disliked aspects. 

  • This definition is abstract and distinct from previous concepts, not requiring the identification of objectionable groups or behaviors. 

• draw on Forst’s dimensions of tolerance: 

  • Acceptance

  • respect for difference

  • appreciation of difference.

    • These dimensions represent different levels of engagement with diversity, ranging from basic acceptance to a deeper appreciation. 

    • this approach allows for the measurement of various expressions of tolerance without relying on specific groups or behaviors, making our measures politically and temporally neutral. 

    • This framework provides a clearer understanding of tolerance and facilitates its empirical investigation.

    • 8 positively worded items were selected to capture three dimensions of tolerance: acceptance, respect, and appreciation. 

• Descriptive statistics show moderate to high levels of tolerance among respondents

Sears, David O., and Christia Brown. 2013. “Childhood and Adult Political Development.” Ch. 3 in Leonie Huddy, David O. Sears and Jack S. Levy, Eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press.

Bumper Sticker:

“Experiences during early childhood are largey  responsible for partisan predispositions and political leanings in adult life” 

Purpose:

This chapter examines the life histories of political orientations as they evolve from early childhood through old age.

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Sears and Brown (2013) employ a life history perspective (framework) to understanding how political orientations evolve across the human lifespan. The use of this framework provides some helpful insights: 

1. Is addresses the constant tension between continuity and change as played out throughout an individuals lifespan

2. It helps us to understand the origins of orientations that are politically consequential among adults, whether concerning politics specifically or intergroup relations. 

Findings:

This review has suggested that partisan predispositions are most likely to be acquired in early development, if not quite as uniformly early as originally thought.

• The authors suggest that this is due the role of “time” which is treated as an independent variable that takes three forms

  • The persisting effects of early experiences

  • The major events or “the times” that characterize the environment an individual has experienced 

  • The life stages of development - children, adolescents, adults all have different cognitive capabilities 

• Based on the various ways fo thinking about time, the authors pose four alternative models of the full political life cycel that are often contrasted in the literature and which speak to Campbell’s conception of party identification being shaped by early learning behavior, persistence, and later influence on voting behavior. 

  • four alternative models of the full political life cycle have often been contrasted: 

  • (1) persistence: the residues of preadult learning persist through life; 

  • (2) a variant, impressionable years: orientations are particularly susceptible to influence in late adolescence and early adulthood, but tend to stabilize thereafter

  • (3) its major alternative, lifelong openness: individuals remain open to influence throughout later life, including by “the times”

  • (4) life cycle: people show distinctive specific propensities at different stages of life (this one is particularly difficult to pin down)

Definitions:

• The Life-History Perspective

  • a theoretical framework within political science that draws on insights from biology, psychology, and sociology to understand the trajectory of political systems over time.

Additional Things:

• The life history perspective of political development is a theoretical framework within political science that draws on insights from biology, psychology, and sociology to understand the trajectory of political systems over time. This perspective views political development as akin to the life cycle of an organism, with distinct stages of growth, maturation, decline, and potential renewal.

Key features of the life history perspective of political development include:

1. Stages of Development: Similar to biological life cycles, political systems are seen to progress through various stages of development. These stages may include periods of consolidation, expansion, crisis, and transformation. Each stage is characterized by specific challenges, opportunities, and dynamics.

2. Adaptation to Environmental Pressures: Just as organisms adapt to their environments to survive and thrive, political systems must adapt to changing societal, economic, and environmental conditions. This may involve institutional reforms, policy adjustments, or shifts in political strategies to address new challenges or opportunities.

3. Resource Allocation and Trade-offs: The life history perspective emphasizes the importance of resource allocation and trade-offs in political development. Political systems must allocate scarce resources, such as financial capital, human capital, and political capital, among competing priorities and objectives. Decisions about resource allocation may have long-term implications for the trajectory of political development.

4. Reproduction and Inheritance: Political systems often inherit institutional legacies, cultural norms, and social structures from previous generations. These inherited traits shape the opportunities and constraints faced by contemporary political actors and influence the trajectory of political development. Similarly, political systems may reproduce themselves through processes of institutional continuity, elite reproduction, and socialization.

5. Variation and Diversity: Just as biological organisms exhibit variation and diversity within and across species, political systems display variation and diversity in their structures, institutions, and practices. The life history perspective recognizes that different political systems may follow distinct trajectories of development due to historical legacies, cultural norms, and contextual factors.

6. Adaptive Responses to External Shocks: Political systems may face external shocks and disruptions, such as economic crises, wars, or natural disasters, that necessitate adaptive responses. The life history perspective emphasizes the importance of resilience and flexibility in responding to external shocks and maintaining political stability and legitimacy.

Partisanship is apparently a really salient predictor of mate choice lol 

Tajfel, Henri. 1982. “Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations.” Annual Review of Psychology 33(1): 1-39.

AWFUL READ! NEVER WRITE A LIT REVIEW LIKE THIS GUY!!!!

I did my best to try to take the major themes of each section but he just throws every possible research paper on the subject at you. Literally a whirlwind of information.

Introduction:

Intergroup behavior: “Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identification, we have an instance of intergroup behavior.”

What is a group?:

• external : outside designations. Ex - bank clerks, hospital patients, etc.

• Internal: “group identification” 

  • To achieve “identification” 

    • cognitive - awareness and membership 

    • Evaluative one - awareness is related to some value connotation

    • Emotional investment in awareness and evaluations. 

Individual Process in Intergroup Behavior:

1. From Individual to Group Impressions

   1. How cognitive structures determine certain aspects of intergroup attitudes.

      1. We are trying to understand cognitive processes and relate it to interpersonal behavior.

   2. Discussion of stereotypes 

      1. Cognitive mechanism: since members of minority groups often represent “infrequent” stimuli and therefore a conjunction of their relatively rare appearance with some of their actions lends itself to the construction of “illusionary correlations” and thus to stereotyping.” 

   3. Solo status research: When an individual is not part of the group or they are “solo” (think Black man with a group of white men), the Black man will have polarized evaluations compared with evaluations of the same person identified as belonging to the majority group. Aka more variation in view of Black man from white colleagues compared to less variation in view of white guy by white colleagues. 

      1. Note: this is not equal across group identities. Some groups still face this issue more than others when the group is mixed. Seems kind of like a primitive concept of intersectionality being developed. 

Group Membership and Intergroup Behavior

1. The Scope and range of Ethnocentrism

   1. Sumner coins term

      1. Also develops ingroup/outgroup

      2. Argues ethnocentrism is universal

         1. Not exactly true 

            1. Generates questions that ask about conditions that give rise to ethnocentrism 

               1. In sum, “which differences are emphasized under what circumstances appears to be flexible and context dependent; this flexibility permits individuals to mobilize different group identities for different purposes.”

2. The Development of Ethnocentrism

   1. Lots of debate 

   2. Children adopt status + image of their group from outgroup (sometimes) 

      1. Tension between status development from perception of both ingroup and outgroup

   3. The growth of group self respect in underprivileged minorities, closely related to socioeconomic, political, and psychological changes both inside the group and outside of it, would result in a corresponding decrease of ingroup devaluations and of low comparative expectancies. 

      1. Long process. 

      2. Sociopsych transformation is the effect of socioeconomic and political change. 

3. Intergroup Conflict and Competition

   1. Interpersonal and intergroup behavior

      1. Two different approaches 

         1. The “interpersonal extreme” defined as interaction between two or more individuals which is very largely determined by their individual characteristics and the nature of the personal relations between them - Deutsch

         2. The “intergroup extreme” defined as interactions which are largely determined by group memberships of the participants and very little-if at all-by their personal relations or individual characteristics. - sherif 

   2. Intergroup conflict and group cohesion

      1. Does conflict promote greater cohesion inside the groups engaged in it? At the limit, can conflict create a cohesive group where only a loose structure existed before? 

         1. Yes, but conditions. 

            1. What happens if all members of a group are not equally affected by the conflict?

            2. Or when the consensus about threat, when it is dubious, cannot be transformed by the leadership into an “authoritatively enforced cohesion”?

            3. Or if a group is unable to deal with threat or to provide emotional support? 

      2. There is a connection between in group cohesion and intergroup conflict

   3. Power and status in intergroup behavior 

      1. Initially a peripheral focus in the field. But gaining steam. Four research trends 

         1. Functioning of minorities

         2. The experimentally induced effects of intergroup power relations 

         3. The effects of status on intergroup attitudes 

         4. Role played in intergroup behavior by the perceived illegitimacy and/or instability of social differentials. 

4. Social categorization and intergroup behavior 

   1. Social categorization: cognitions, values, and groups 

      1. Stereotypes are categorization.

         1. Cognitive function: resulting in the accentuation of similarities and differences, was the utilization of the category membership of individual items for ordering, systematizing, and simplifying the complex network of social groups confront individuals in their social environment

         2. Value functionL resulted in a still more emphatic accentuation of these same, similarities and differences when they were associated with subjective value differentials applying to social categories. 

         3. “As a result of the categorization process, within-group differences become minimized and between-group differences become exaggerated”

            1. Salience of identity? 

         4. The value and cognitive functions of social accentuation provide a basis for the understanding of the structure and direction of biases in intergroup attitudes and stereotypes, but they cannot tell us very much about the contents of the groups’ reciprocal conceptions. 

   2. Social categorization and intergroup discrimination

      1. Boys and holiday camp experiment. Once boys found out about other groups existence they started to form ingroup-outgroup identities before anything started. 

         1. What are the minimal conditions that would create intergroup discrimination? 

      2. Common fate

   3. Social identity and social comparison 

      1. Social identity is defined as “the part of the individuals’ self-concept which derives from their knowledge of their membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance of that membership.” 

      2. “The social group is seen to function as a provider of positive social identity for its members through comparing itself, and distinguishing itself, from other comparison groups along salient dimensions which have a clear value differential”

The Reduction of Intergroup Discrimination:

Intergroup Cooperation and superordinate Goals 

1. Intergroup cooperation leads to less discrimination than intergroup competition. 

1. Intergroup Contact

   1. It is just like one paragraph? IDK not much discussion. 

      1. If you want to know more about this stuff check out more modern literature from Ryan Enos (in my opinion -Stone) 

2. Multigroup Membership and “Individualization” of the Outgroup  

   1. Tribes provide evidence of this

      1. Crossing of memberships

         1. Some research shows a reduction of discrimination

         2. This breaks up the homogeneity of the outgroup.

Week 10: Spring Break (NO CLASS!)

Week 11: Civil Society/Social Capital

Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton University Press. Ch. 1-3.

Bumper Sticker:

Political Participation is important for democracy

Preface:

“The characterization of The Civic Culture as celebrating popular apathy came out of a popular mood that extended into academic circles, which accorded little importance to the policy-making and performances side of democratic government. It overlooked the fact that democracy not only required popular participation but that elected leaders had also to govern, and that governing required obligation, patience, and trust. It was this necessary mix of activism and participation with other important ingredients that The Civic Culture celebrated.” (preface) 

Chapter 1: An Approach to Political Culture:

• Political culture of democracy and the social structures and processes that sustain it. 

  • A new political world culture is developing. 

    • “Participation explosion”

  • “What must be learned about democracy is a matter of attitude and feeling, and this is harder to learn”. (p.4) 

• The Civic Culture:

  • Combines modernity with tradition

  • A culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permeated change but moderated it

  • “The working class could enter into politics and, in a process of trial and error, find the language in which to couch their demands and the means to make them effective” (p.6) - kinda reminds me of historical institutionalism. 

  • Individuals are not only oriented to political input, they are also orientated positively to the input structures and the input process. 

    • The civic culture is a participant political culture in which the political culture and political structure are congruent. P.30 

• What is democratic culture? How does it spread? What attitudes and behaviors must be present to create democracy?

• Democracy is maintained by an active citizenry. More info, more involvement, and a sense of civic responsibility are essential. 

• Looks at 5 countries: United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico

  • A bit concerned about these choices. 

  • These countries help escape an American focus - I disagree. 

• Political Culture:

  • Refers specifically to political orientations - attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes towards the role of the self in the system. 

  • Psychological orientation to social objects. 

  • When we speak of the political culture of a society, we refer to the political system as internalized in the cognitions, feelings, and evaluations of its population. People are inducted into it just as they are socialized into nonpolitical roles and social systems. P.13 

• The political culture of a nation is a particular distribution of patterns of orientation toward political objects among the members of a nation. What are those orientations? (see below) 

• Political Orientation:

  • Orientation refers to the internalized aspects of objects and relationships.

  • Includes three types: 

    • 1) cognitive orientation - knowledge and belief about political system

    • 2) affective orientation - feelings about political system 

    • 3) evaluational orientation - judgments and opinions about political objects 

• We have classified orientation but we now must classify objects of political orientation. 

  1. System as general object 

  2. Input objects  

  3. Output objects 

  4. Self as object 

• Characterizing political culture is done by understanding the various orientations toward the various objects. The types of political culture according to the authors are: 

  1. Parochial Political Culture

  2. Subject Political Culture 

  3. Participant Political Culture 

• “In the civic culture participant political orientations combine with and do not replace subject and parochial political orientations. Individuals become participants in the political process, but they do not give up their orientations as subjects or parochials.” p.30 

• “Thus attitudes favorable to participation within the political system play a major role in the civic culture, but so do such nonpolitical attitudes as trust in other people and social participation in general. The maintenance of these more traditional attitudes and their fusion with the participant orientations lead to a balanced political culture in which political activity, involvement, and rationality exist but are balanced by passivity, traditionality, and commitment to parochial values.” p.30

• The connecting link between micro and macro politics is political culture.

• Survey of 5 nations - 1000 interviews in each country. Interviews take place in 1959. US takes place in 1960

Chapter 2: Patterns of Political Cognition

• Recall the classification types of political culture: Parochial, Subject, Participant. 

  • Of the 5 countries - parochial and subject are rare. 

1. Measures of cognitive content and processes:

   1. How much importance is attributed to national and local government

   2. Awareness and exposure of and exposure to politics and public affairs 

   3. Political information adult population possesses 

   4. Measure of the readiness of these populations to make choices or entertain opinions about political issues and problems.

• The impact of government: To what extent do the people in these countries perceive government as having an effect on them as individuals? To what extent do they see their lives as related to the activities of governments? 

  • Americans and British respondents in the great majority perceive an impact of their national and local governments and ascribe high favorability 

  • Germans are similar but a larger percentage are more skeptical in saying the governments sometime improved conditions 

  • Italians attribute high favorability to gov 

  • Minority of Mexicans attribute significance to the government and is skeptical in the benefits of the government. 

  • From the results the authors say: 

    • US, Britain, German are bulk “allegiants” 

    • Italy, and mexico (mainly mexico) are majority subject and parochial. 

  • Education correlated with awareness of the significance of the government

• Awareness of politics: Do people pay attention to political and governmental affairs (even campaigns)?

  • The civic culture, as we use the term, includes a sense of obligation to participate in political input activities, as well as a sense of competence to participate. 

  • Education correlated with higher interest.

• Having information and Opinions: Can people identify national leaders and can people identify cabinet offices or departments at the national level of government? 

  • Germans, English, and Americans have higher well-informed respondents. 

  • Mexico the worst

  • Except italy, low information high opinions are common

  • british , American, and germans are more cognitively oriented to the input and output of government

    • Mexicans and Italians are alienated and parochial.

Chapter 3: Feeling Toward Government and Politics

• Generalized attitudes toward the whole: toward the nation, its virtues, accomplishments,

  • System affect: see above 

    • National pride 

      • “Speaking generally, what are the aspects of this country that you are most proud of?”

      • Italians have more pride in items not related to politics 

      • Americans and British had higher rates of indicating government/political/public policy items. 

      • Germans are less prideful in politics. More prideful in science contributions, economy, and personal virtues. 

      • Mexicans are interested in politics and have high political pride

        • Is the Mexican revolution responsible?

      • Better occupation correlates with more political pride 

        • Except in germany and Italy 

          • Suggests alienation from system

            • Both have fascist past? 

  • Output affect: expectations of treatment by government and police

    • Attitudes toward the executive/gov affecting respondents. 

    • If expected to treat fairly then we expect favorability to government authority from respondent 

    • Respondents were asked two hypotheticals 

      • Mexicans continually are more alienated

      • Police had high favorability…more than government officials - except in mexico. 

  • Input affect 

    • Feelings people have about the agencies and processes involved in the election of public officials and enactment of general public policies. 

    • Concerned with face-to-face communication.

    • Measures:

      • How much do respondents report discussing politics 

        • Talking politics is an active form of politics

          • Mass media is passive 

            • Are people becoming more passive in politics? 

        • Talking politics also indicates some sense of safety in political communication.

Avdeenko, Alexandra, and Michael J. Gilligan. 2015. “International Interventions to Build Social Capital: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sudan.” American Political Science Review 109(3): 427-449.

Bumper Sticker:

CDDs may increase local participation but they don’t increase social capital!

Research Question:

Do community-driven development programs increase social capital in developing countries?

IV:

DV:

Hypothesis:

1. Communities that received the CDD program will have larger social networks.

2. The average amount of returns (benefits) in the trust game will be larger in treated communities than in control communities.

3. The average amount entrusted in the trust game will be larger in treated communities than in control communities

4. The probability of an individual contributing in the public goods game increases with the size of their social network

5. Average contributions to community public goods will be higher in treated communities than in control communities

6. Community governance will be more inclusive in treated communities than in control communities

7. Average civic participation will be higher in treated communities than in control communities

Data:

• CDD program: 4 out of 6 needy villages chosen randomly in Sudan

• Field experiment: 24 communities in rural Sudan (16 treated and 8 control groups) surveyed (475 total subjects; 576 households)

Methods:

• Randomized field experiment using community-driven development program using OLS estimates of mean of the DV in control community vs average treatment effect (ATE) and lab-in-the-field techniques (games) measuring networks and norms

Findings:

• CDD programs produced increased participation in local governance but caused no increase in social capital.

  • Citizens may respond to more inclusive local governance with greater participation simply because it increases the expected benefit of participating, rather than true increases in social capital.

General Notes:

• International community trying to foster bottom-up change in developing countries

  • Community-driven development (CDD) meant to improve public service delivery in poor areas through creation of more inclusive governing institutions and social capital

  • This paper uses randomized field experiment in Sudan to study the Community Development Fund (CDF) – a $95 million program implemented in 616 war-ravaged communities in the country between 2008-2001

  • 915 projects completed by 2013, providing services to over 2 million people

    • Included construction of primary schools, health, water-supply, and solar-electrification facilities, and midwife training

  • This study assesses whether program caused more participatory local political institutions and increased social capital (as was intended)

• Theory: expanding villagers’ social networks will increase prosociality

  • Social capital = social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them (Putnam 2000)

    • Social capital also = number of network links multiplied by the quality of trust between the persons in those links (Rothstein 2005)

    • Prosocial norms (like trust) are a necessary condition for social capital

  • Authors surveyed subjects’ participation in a set of social networks that focus group discussions identified as the most important in their communities

  • Lab-in-the-field techniques used to measure norms of trust, trustworthiness, and willingness to contribute to public goods

• Program Assignment – random assignment in close consultation between CDF leadership and World Bank staff; 10 target localities in 4 different states chosen

  • 6 neediest villages in each locality then chosen by CDF

  • World Bank then chose 4 of the 6 randomly and left 2 as controls

  • Field work conducted between Oct-Nov 2011

    • Robustness of measures in Table 1

• Measurement – social capital components of networks and norms

  • Social network measurement: list of most important social networks assembled through focus groups with CCF social mobilizers and Sudanese villagers

    • Each person surveyed was then asked about these networks

    • Table 2 provides overview of questions, with answers categorized as:

      • (A) – basic social relations (family & friends)

      • (B) – favor-exchanging relationships (babysitting)

      • (C) – standard economic relationships (buying & selling)

      • (D) – voluntary groups (parent-teacher associations)

      • (E) – trust-based exchange relationships (revolving credit groups or labor-exchange relationships)

    • Data show large degree of connectedness through (A) but little else

  • Norm measurement: behavioral games used

Howard, Marc Morjé. 2003. The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. Cambridge University Press. Ch. Intro. & 5.

Bumper Sticker:

Prior regime type predicts civil society health!

Research Question:

Why does citizen participation in voluntary organizations lag behind in post-communist regimes? What elements of the communist experience explain this?

Hypothesis:

1. Civic participation lags in post-communist countries due to (1) mistrust of Communist organizations, (2) the persistence of friendship networks (private networks), and (3) post-Communist disappointment.

2. For societal change to occur and last, (1) new institutions must be authoritative and binding, (2) they should build upon existing traditions and culture, and (3) several decades and generations are needed to change people’s habits and acculturation.

Data:

• 1995-1997 World Values Survey and Post-Communist Organizational Membership Study (PCOMS) survey of 1999

Methods:

• Multivariate OLS regression analysis

Findings:

• Participation in voluntary organizations is much lower in post-communist countries in Eastern Europe than in the older democracies and post-authoritarian countries (with exception of labor unions).

Questions:

1. Looking closely at the descriptive data and the OLS results, do we see Eastern Germany more closely associated with Russia or with Western Germany? Why do you think this is? How well does this fit with Howard’s hypothesis?

2. Is this generalizable? (LOLOLOLOL)

3. Do you buy voluntary organization participation as a measure of civil societal health? Why or why not?

4. If you wanted to expand upon this study (or even replicate it), how would you design it differently?

General Note:

• This book explores how people adapt to a new democracy (looking at post-communist Europe)

  • Specifically focused on civil society as crucial part of public space between state and family, and embodied in voluntary organizations

  • Seeks to explain why post-communist civil society is weak

• Post-Communist Europe

  • Remarkably low rates of participation in voluntary organizations of civil society

  • Non-democratic countries not represented

  • 2 scholarly approaches:

    • Contemporary political and economic attributes and policies the most important factors explaining and predicting cross-national variation

    • Causal variables are legacies of communism – historical/cultural context

  • Societal similarities resistant to change even while political institutions have

• Case studies

  • Russia & East Germany

    • Economic levels high in East Germany but low in Russia

    • Political and legal institutions well developed in EG but Russian systems weak and underdeveloped

    • Both societies belong to different cultural and religious civilizations

    • Substantial variation provides maximal analytic leverage for explaining causes of similarly low levels of civic participation

• The Organization of the Book

  • Theory

  • Empirical results

  • Causal explanation using 2 different methodological approaches

    • “Experiential” approach to societal continuity and change = individuals are agents who make choices

    • For societal change to occur and last, 3 factors must take place:

1. New institutions must be authoritative and binding.

2. Institutions should build upon existing traditions and culture.

3. Several decades and generations are needed to change people’s habits and acculturation.

• Ch. 2: 3 main individual-level causal factors that guide empirical analysis:

1. Most post-communist citizens still strongly mistrust and avoid organizations, even now that participation is voluntary.

2. Many of the private and informal networks that developed under communism – because of the politicization and state control of the public sphere, as well as the shortage economy – still persist today in an altogether new institutional environment, and they serve as a disincentive for many people to join formal organizations.

3. Many post-communist citizens are extremely dissatisfied with the new political and economic system which hasn’t lived up to their hopes and ideals, and their disappointment has caused them to withdraw even further from public activities.

• Ch. 3: conceptual analysis of civil society

  • Linz & Stepan’s 5 “arenas” of democratization:

1. Civil society

2. Political society

3. Economic society

4. The rule of law

5. State bureaucracy

All of these overlap!

• Ch. 4: empirical findings that constitute “baseline” of comparison

  • Countries divided into 3 groups by prior regime type: “older democracies,” “post-authoritarian,” or “post-communist” using 1995-97 World Values Survey

  • Questions asked to respondents about membership in 9 orgs:

1. Church/religious org

2. Sports/recreational club

3. Educational, cultural, or artistic org

4. Labor union

5. Political party or movement

6. Environmental org

7. Professional association

8. Charity org

9. Other voluntary org

• Results show that participation in voluntary organizations is much lower in post-communist countries than in the older democracies and post-authoritarian countries (with exception of labor unions)

• Ch. 5-6: causal explanations

• Ch. 7: conclusion and wider implications

• Chapter 5 – Explaining Organizational Membership: An Evaluation of Alternative Hypotheses

  • Analysis of the Post-Communist Organizational Membership Study (PCOMS) survey of 1999 conducted in Russia, Eastern Germany, and Western Germany

  • Figure 5.1: divides each of the 3 samples into quintiles based on total household income, showing average number of organizational membership per person

    • People w/higher income levels tend to have higher levels of organizational membership in all 3 societies

  • Figure 5.2: different education levels within the 3 sampes

    • Country-specific education variables recoded to fit a continuum for low, medium, high, and very high

    • With 1 minor exception, increasing levels of education associated with higher levels of organizational membership in all 3 samples

  • Figure 5.3: results for organizational membership for all 3 samples when grouped by age

    • Under 25, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65 and over

    • West German sample shows membership at its highest for people 45-54; East German follows trend but differences in age-groups smaller; Russia life-cycle decline begins much sooner and 25-34 group that had little to no contact with communism has relatively high levels

  • Figure 5.4: gender!

    • Men belong to organizations at higher rates than women in all 3 samples

    • Differences in rates of membership smaller in Russia (women’s participation is 88% that of men), but average level of participation higher in Western Germany & Eastern Germany

  • Figure 5.5: results in terms of city size

    • 4 basic categories: under 10k residents, 10k-50k, 50k-500k, over 500k

    • Western Germany has steady decrease in levels of membership as city size increases; Eastern Germany and Russia have opposite trend

• Table 1: Regression analysis – OLS with 3 different models (combining the 3 countries)

  • 5 variables from figures

  • Prior communist experience operationalized in 2 ways:

1. Dummy for prior communist experience (Russia & East Germany 1)

2. Dummy for East Germans & for Russians

• Model A: combined results for all 3 pooled

• Model B: added prior communist experience dummy

• Model C: remove prior communist dummy and dummy out Eastern Germany & Russia separately

• Table 5.2: 3 country samples separately

• Post-Communist factors in Russia and Eastern Germany (see Figures 5.6-5.9)

  • Mistrust of Communist organizations

  • The persistence of friendship networks

  • Post-Communist disappointment

  • Table 5.3: regression results for pooled sample of Russian and East Germany respondents (R + EG) and separately for questions relating to 3 hypothesized explanatory variables

Varshney, Ashutosh. 2002. “Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond.” World Politics 53(3): 362-398.

Bumper Sticker:

Interethnic civic engagement (especially formal) reduces ethnic conflict!

IV:

Presence/forms of civic networks

DV:

Absence or presence of violent conflict

Research Question:

Does civic engagement between different ethnic communities also serve to contain ethnic conflict? Does interethnic engagement differ from intraethnic engagement from the perspective of ethnic conflict? What role do civic organizations play in times of ethnic tensions and why?

Hypothesis:

• Civil society organizations (both formal & informal) between ethnic communities reduce probability for ethnic violence.

Data:

All reported Hindu-Muslim riots in India 1950-1995 in 6 different cities

Methods:

• Qualitative analysis with process tracing

  • Paired cases where similar stimuli applied to each and different outcomes observed to argue for causality (controlled comparison)

Findings:

• Associational engagement deters ethnic conflict from devolving into ethnic violence between paired cities in study.

General Notes:

• There is an integral link between the structure of civil life in a multiethnic society, on the one hand, and the presence or absence of ethnic violence, on the other.

• Interethnic and intraethnic networks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflict.

  • Interethnic networks  are agents of peace b/c they build bridges and manage tensions

  • If communities are organized along only intraethnic lines and interconnections with other communities are very weak/nonexistent, then ethnic violence is quite likely

• Both intraethnic and interethnic civic networks can be further broken down into organized and quotidian types based on whether civic interaction is formal or informal

  • Associational forms of engagement = formal civic interaction; business associations, professional organizations, reading clubs, film clubs, sports clubs, NGOs, trade unions, and cadre-based political parties

  • Everyday forms of engagement = informal civic interaction; family visits, eating together regularly, joint participation in festivals, allowing children to play together

    • Both forms of engagement promote peace; their absence or weakness opens up space for ethnic violence

    • Associational forms more influential

• India as case study: much of India’s associational civic structure put into place in the 1920s as movement against the British with 2 goals:

  • Political independence from the British

  • Social transformation of India

• Ethnicity, ethnic conflict, and civil society 

  • Ethnicity = the set to which religion, race, language, and sect belong as subsets in a broad definition of ascriptive group identities

  • Ethnic conflict = disagreement between different ethnic groups over resources, identity, patronage, and policies; not necessarily violent

    • Ethnic peace = an absence of violence, not an absence of conflict

  • Civil society = formal and informal societal groups that engage citizens??

• The puzzle

  • Despite ethnic diversity, some places remain peaceful while others experience enduring patterns of violence. Why?

    • The importance of studying levels of variance in independent variables

    • For this project, all reported Hindu-Muslim riots in India 1950-1995 used

      • Unit of analysis = towns/cities (disproportionate share of communal violence)

      • 6 cities selected: 3-riot prone and 3 peaceful, then paired

        • Aligarh & Calicut – population percentage pairing

        • Hyderabad & Lucknow – 2 controls added; previous Muslim rule and “reasonable cultural similarities”

        • Ahmedabad & Surat – from same state of Gujarat sharing history, language, and culture but not violence (hard test)

• The arguments linking ethnic conflict and civil society (theory)

  • “The preexisting local networks of civic engagement between the two communities stand out as the single most important proximate explanation for the difference between peace and violence” (374).

  • 2 mechanisms connecting civil society and ethnic conflict:

    • Civic networks often make neighborhood-level peace possible by promoting communication between members of different religious communities

      • Sustained prior interaction or cordiality facilitated this

    • If vibrant formal organizations serving the economic, cultural, and social needs of the 2 communities exist, the support for communal peace tends to be strong and more solidly expressed

      • Paradox: rural India has far fewer formal associations and the least amount of violence

      • See Figure 1: relationship between size and civic links

        • N represents # of persons in a village/city

        • K represents # of links that must be made to connect everyone

        • For a given level of civic density (in this case, each person connected to everyone else), K rises faster than N

        • K = N(N-1)/2

        • Associations link individuals and communities

  • Organized civic networks that are intercommunal:

    • Better withstand exogenous shocks

    • Constrain local politicians acting strategically that might try to polarize communities for political gain

    • Are less violent

      • This argument is probabilistic

• Empirical evidence

  • Similar provocations, different responses:

    • Aligarh – riot-prone, Calicut – peaceful; both 36-38% Muslim

      • 1989-1992, Hindu nationalist agitation to destroy Baburi mosque led to violence across India but outcomes above were different

      • In Calicut, politicians of all parties promoted peace; city-level peace committees provided info and constructed forums for individuals to express anger

      • Hindu-Muslim civic integration runs deep in Calicut

      • Associational engagement ubiquitous in Calicut

      • Calicut has vibrant social & educational activities

• Causation and endogeneity

  • Did communal violence destroy civic networks?

    • City of Surat (in Gujarat) had a bad riot after destruction of Ayodhya mosque in 1992

      • Majority of violence confined to slums

      • In old city, peace committees quickly formed

  • A transformative ideological shift in national politics caused systematic organizational efforts

  • In short-to medium-run, organizational civic order became a constraint on behavior of politicians

Zhu, Yushu. 2022. “Interests driven or socially mobilized? Place attachment, social capital, and neighborhood participation in urban China.” Journal of Urban Affairs 44(8): 1136-1153.

Bumper Sticker:

Place attachment & social capital have interactive effects on neighborhood participation!

IV:

place attachment & social capital

DV:

neighborhood participation

Research Question:

What drives different forms of neighborhood participation?

Hypothesis:

1. Latent involvement in neighborhood participation is directly associated with neighborhood attachment rather than social capital.

2. Manifest engagement in neighborhood participation is directly associated with social capital rather than neighborhood attachment.

Data:

• Qualitative case study in Guangzhou, China w/interviews and survey in Guangzhou (both in 2012)

Methods:

• Mixed methods: 

  • Survey: stepwise logistic regression with clustered robust standard errors for latent involvement and manifest engagement

Findings:

• Latent involvement significantly associated with strong neighborhood attachment but not social capital.

• Manifest engagement significantly associated with community social capital, net of effects of neighborhood attachment and private social capital.

Questions:

1. Isn’t neighborhood participation a form of social capital? Endogeneity issue?

General Notes:

• Neighborhood attachment = place sentiment toward a neighborhood 

  • Neighborhood attachment is a prerequisite for any form of participation

  • Social capital needed for mobilization

  • Thus, neighborhood attachment + social capital = neighborhood participation

• Introduction

  • Citizen participation in neighborhoods important to improve environment, facilitating local services, maintaining social order, and enhancing community capacity

    • What are the driving forces behind different forms of participation?

      • Social capital = shared norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness

        • In-group social processes mobilize participation

      • Place attachment = a place becomes important because it is imbued with meanings and values that form a bond

        • “Place making” suggests that territory-based identity is also effective in mobilizing neighborhood collective actions

      • Do these forces work together???

  • China is a hard case; the state has provided housing and welfare historically, but dissolution of these protections has allowed for renewed neighborhood autonomy through grassroots organizations like HOAs and commodity housing estates (CHEs)

• Understanding neighborhood governance and participation in China

  • Since late 1980s, Chinese state has provided less and managed less in neighborhoods, leading to altered resident behavior

    • Housing privatization

    • Diversified neighborhoods (by home type) and intensified residential segregation (between rich & poor) in the urban space

    • CHEs built by private developers now the primary form of urban neighborhood; typically, gated communities w/communal spaces and facilities and mixed land use

      • New concept of “collectivity” based on shared properties and home ownership

  • Nationwide Community Building campaign launched in 1990s by central gov’t

    • CHEs have some autonomy over neighborhood affairs and are managed by HOAs and property management companies (PMCs)

      • Neighborhood watch

      • Amenity maintenance

      • Environment upkeep

        • Rise of HOAs not a project of democratization or a move toward an autonomous civil society in China, since they don’t have much power in community governance; however, “it is important to recognize that the nascent grassroots activities in these neighborhoods do seek to achieve the common good for the community, and sometimes even challenge local institutions” (1138-39).

• Driving forces of neighborhood participation: social capital vs. place attachment

  • Neighborhood participation = a form of civic engagement that stresses voluntary work and activities aiming to influence neighborhood affairs that are of relevance to a collectivity outside the circles of family and close friends

    • Include individual vs. collective, informal vs. formal, political vs. nonpolitical, and cooperative vs. confrontational

  • This study looks at 2 forms of civic engagement:

    • Latent involvement = less active involvement like informal information exchange or subjective involvement like taking an interest in or staying informed about political or societal issues (involved but not engaged)

    • Manifest engagement = actions intended to influence actual political outcomes by targeting relevant political or societal elites or organizations

  • Modern literature focuses either on the social capital framework or the place attachment framework

    • This study combines them!

    • Both are necessary to understand neighborhood participation in the Chinese context, but mechanisms vary across neighborhood contexts and demographics

      • Urban villages/traditional neighborhoods – less active in social participation and weaker sense of place attachment

      • Urban-rural divide in the literature but findings inconclusive

      • Other socio-demographics include age, gender, marital status, education, income, years of residence, and home ownership

• Data and methods

  • Mixed-method approach combining qualitative study and city-wide survey in Guangzhou

    • Qualitative study:

      • 3 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2012 including observations in open spaces and in-depth interviews

      • Interviewees selected from communal spaces and snowball sampling used

      • 25 interviews: 14 men, most homeowners, most have lived in neighborhood 5 years or more, age ranges from 30-60

    • Survey:

      • 2012 household survey in Guangzhou used multistage stratified random sampling

      • 1,809 households in 39 neighborhoods (see Table 1)

      • Blha

• Case study results:

  • Relationships among social capital, neighborhood attachment, and neibhorhood participation not straightforward

    • Participatory behaviors are contingent on the degree of community social capital (perceived mutual trust and reciprocity among residents) and neighborhood attachment (a sense of home to this neighborhood)

    • 4 scenarios derived from typology in Table 2:

      • Embeddedness = strong community social capital & strong neighborhood attachment

      • Anomie = low level of mutual trust among residents but strong attachment to the neighborhood

      • Individualism = both weak mutual trust and weak neighborhood attachment

      • Volunteerism = high level of community social capital but low neighborhood attachment

• Survey results:

  • Latent involvement significantly associated with strong neighborhood attachment but not social capital (Model 3, Tables 3 and 4)

  • Manifest engagement significantly associated with community social capital, net of effects of neighborhood attachment and private social capital (Model 6)

Week 12: Trust in Government/Support for Democracy

Anderson, Christopher J., and Christine A. Guillory. 1997. “Political Institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy: A Cross-National Analysis of Consensus and Majoritarian Systems.” American Political Science Review 91(1): 66-82.

Bailard, Catie Snow. 2012. “A Field Experiment on the Internet’s Effect in an African Election: Savvier Citizens, Disaffected Voters, or Both?” Journal of Communication 62(2): 330-344.

I like this one a lot.

Research Question:

Does the internet influence evaluations of the government and motivate people to organize politically?

Contributions to Literature:

1. This paper tests the internet’s effect at a more antecedent and foundational stage of political behavior. Past literature looks at the internet’s influence after people have already moved to act and organize. 

2. The second contribution is methodological. A field experiment can provide direct causal tests. This is a first for this body of research.

Theory:

Why would the internet have an effect on political organization?

“Mirror-Holding” - The internet enables more people to mirror hold. What does this mean? 

• The Internet holds up a mirror for users to better discern and reflect on how their government is actually performing. 

• The global nature of the Internet also opens more panoramic windows that better enable individuals to view how governments function in other countries, particularly the high-functioning democracies that tend to be most visible on the Internet. This provides users with a more realistic and globally consistent scale by which to make comparative evaluations about their own government’s performance. 

The internet provides more information to citizens, from a broader range of perspectives, than would otherwise be the case-thus improving the capacity of citizens to make more informed evaluations of their governments. 

• Reminds me a bit of Kevin Munger supply and demand perspective of youtube. 

By providing a venue to publicly document government’s failure or abuses, often coupled with pictures and videos, individuals more readily link their personal experiences to a much larger, pervasive, and entrenched national trend.

Hypothesis:

This the internet will provide a more robust and different set of information regarding the integrity of the Tanzania election compared to that provided by the traditional media.

Method:

Field Experiment:

• Focus: 2010 Tanzania elections 

  • Why?: 2010 elections were not deemed fully free and fair? 

    • Uchaguzi (an internet platform) allowed people to create a visual map of where election abuses were reported - allowing citizens to view and reflect on it. 

    Unit of analysis: Tanzanian individuals 

  Subjects were recruited in person at several congregation points in the community of Morogoro. Morgogoro is 120 miles away from the economic capital. 200k population. 200 names were collected. Using random assignment, 70 respondents were given the internet treatment and 70 respondents were given the no-internet control condition. 

  Subjects were asked to meet at internet cafes. Pre Surveys were given. Individuals then had access to the internet at the cafe for 2 months. Control group was not given internet time but would gain it after the experiment was over. No restrictions were put on how respondents used the internet. After 2 months, respondents were contacted again for a post survey.

Results:

• Treatment group had less faith in a fair election and believed the recount was less fair. 

• Users with facebook accounts were more likely to think the election was unfair.

• Treatment was also more likely to trust the police force.

• ***Internet users who became more aware of electoral abuses also may have become less likely to believe that their vote mattered as a consequence. While some protested, others simply stayed home. 

  • The internet may be a double edged sword. 

• The internet can alter the cost-benefit calculus of political behavior by expanding the range of information individuals have regarding their government’s actual performance.

• Members of the disaffected Internet group were less likely to vote. 

  • Showing internet is not the amazing positive force we thought it was 

    • This is obvious now but in 2010 not so much! 

Stone’s Thoughts:

I love this article! The theory section regarding how the internet influences political behavior is really intuitive. I think I have a good understanding for how the internet influenced all of us and how it culminated into Trump and the polarization across the world. Let me (attempt) to explain my perspective. 

• For the masses: The internet increased communication and information (duh). As Bailard points out, this changes the cost-benefit analysis for individuals to FORM political opinions. In essence, it becomes easier to engage in politics because it reduces the cost to do so. Information can be obtained so readily and easy that people can engage and it seems Bailard shows this to be the case. As a result, the SUPPLY of voters/individuals interested in politics, increases. 

• For elites: The internet provides a new platform for people to engage in politics. Prior to the internet, the barrier to become an elite was much more difficult. The internet democratized who can be an elite. Youtube, facebook, etc. provided a space for anyone to become an elite. This increased the SUPPLY of elites (look at Kevin Munger’s work). The greater supply of elites introduced greater VARIATION in ideology of the elite class (this is how you get polarization to increase as more and more people are expressing different viewpoints). The increased variation of ideology in the elite class spills over into the information and cues they provide to the masses. Because it is easier to be an elite and share information, the masses now have greater access to the variation in perspectives. In short, there used to be a strong barrier towards becoming an elite, perhaps gated by education, money, network, etc; however, the internet basically allows anyone to become an elite and provide cues to people. 

• There is a greater SUPPLY of informed voters, SUPPLY of elites, SUPPLY of information and that is what might be driving our polarized epoch. 

  • Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Mishler, William, and Richard Rose. 2001. “What are the origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-communist Societies.” Comparative Political Studies 34(1): 30-62.

Bumper Sticker:

“Micro-level institutional arrangements are the source of political trust.”

Research Question:

What is the source of political trust?

Purpose:

Understanding how trust begins is important for the consolidation of new democracies. There are competing explanations for the sources of political trust. Some hypotheses stress exogenous determinants  (these are considered cultural theories) while others stress endogenous determinants (these are considered institutional theories). Both can take micro- and macro-level forms. The authors set out to assess which determinants are stronger.

Summary/Theory/Argument:

1. (National Culture): Trust in political institutions varies between countries rather than among individuals according to historically rooted, national experiences embedded in interpersonal structure.

2. (Individual socialization): Trust in institutions varies within and across countries according to individuals’ trust in others as shaped by their places in the social structure.

3. (Government performance): Trust in institutions varies across rather than within countries in proportion to the success of government policies and the character of political institutions.

4. (Individual evaluations): Trust in institutions varies within and across countries in accordance with both individuals attitudes and values and the social and economic positions individuals occupy.

Findings:

• Strongly support the superiority of institutional explanations (endogenous) of the origins of political trust, especially microlevel explanations, while providing little support for either micro-cultural or macro-cultural explanations. 

• The effects of macro-political and economic performance on trust are indirect and mediated at the micro level by an individual’s value-laden perceptions

• Contrary to cultural theories, interpersonal trust varies widely within societies and has little appreciable effect on institutional trust at either the aggregate or individual levels

• micro-institutional hypothesis (Hypothesis 4) is confirmed, and the other hypotheses (Hypothesis 1 through Hypothesis 3) are rejected.

Building trust: (p. 56) Trust can be nurtured by improving the conduct and performance of political institutions. Governments can generate public trust the old-fashioned way: They can earn it by responding promptly and effectively to public priorities, rooting out corrupt practices, and protecting new freedoms (Hetherington, 1998, reaches similar conclusions). Political institutions also can earn trust through economic policies that promise and ultimately provide a better material future for the country as a whole.

Methods:

• Data - data from 10 post-Communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. 

  • Aggregate data on economic and political performance are combined with survey data on interpersonal and political trust, political socialization experiences, and individual evaluations of national performance. 

• Survey data (p. 40) analyzed here come from the fifth New Democracies Barometer (NDB V), organized by the Paul Lazarsfeld Society, Vienna, and the seventh New Russia Barometer (NRB VII), organized by the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde.

  • NDB interviews were conducted between January 1998 and May 1998 in seven Central and East European countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia—and in two successor states of the former Soviet Union, Belarus and Ukraine. 

  • Professional survey firms conducted face-to-face interviews using national probability samples of approximately 1,000 in each country. 

  • In addition, NRB interviews were conducted in Russia by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion in March 1998 and April 1998 using a multistage national probability sample that yielded 1,904 face-to-face interviews 

• To test the effects of both national context and individual differences

  • Pooled the survey data from the 10 countries in a single multinational file of 11,499 respondents.

  • Each country was weighted equally as having 1,000 cases, and a variety of macro-contextual and aggregate performance variables were added to the merged data set so that respondents could be analyzed in terms of both their individual attributes and their national contexts.

• Institutional trust was measured using the question “There are many different institutions in the country, for example, the government, courts, police, civil servants. Please show me on this 7-point scale, where 1 represents great distrust and 7 represents trust, how much is your personal trust in each of the following institutions?”

• Then were asked “how much do you trust most people you meet?”

• When testing micro theories

  • Five proxies for political socialization are included in the model: age, education, gender, town size, and church attendance.

  • Five political performance measures also are used, including the aggregate index of political corruption and micro-level perceptions of personal freedom, government fairness, political corruption, and government responsiveness to citizen influence.

Definitions:

• Cultural Theories - view trust as exogenous to political institutions and are a basic character trait learned early in life.

  • Micro-Theories - focus on differences in individual socialization experiences as sources of significant variation in political trust within as well as between societies.

  • Macro-Theories - emphasize the homogenizing tendencies of national traditions and make little allowance for variation in trust among individuals within societies

• Institutional Theories - view trust as endogenous and as a consequence of institutional performance.

  • Micro-Theories - emphasize the aggregate performance of institutions in such matters as promoting growth, governing effectively, and avoiding corruption.

    • The outputs of institutional trust are assumed to determine individual responses.

  • Macro-Theories - emphasize that individual evaluations of institutional performance are conditioned by individual tastes and experiences

    • Such as whether a person thinks that political integrity or economic growth is more important and whether that individual personally has experienced the effects of corruption or the benefits of economic growth. 

• Macro-Theories - emphasize that trust is a collective or group property broadly shared by all members of a society

• Micro-Theories - hold that trust varies among individuals within a society based on differences in socialization and social background, political and economic experiences, or individual perceptions and evaluations.

• Lifetime-Learning Model - A model that integrates early-life socialization and adult learning, thereby allowing direct empirical comparisons.

Abstract:

Popular trust in political institutions is vital to democracy, but in post-Communist countries, popular distrust for institutions is widespread, and prospects for generating increased political trust are uncertain given disagreements over its origins. Cultural theories emphasizing exogenous determinants of trust compete with institutional theories emphasizing endogenous influences, and both can be further differentiated into micro and macro variants. Competing hypotheses drawn from these theories are tested using data from 10 post-Communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Aggregate data on economic and political performance are combined with survey data on interpersonal and political trust, political socialization experiences, and individual evaluations of national performance. Results strongly support the superiority of institutional explanations of the origins of political trust, especially microlevel explanations, while providing little support for either micro-cultural or macro-cultural explanations. This encourages cautious optimism about the potential for nurturing popular trust in new democratic institutions.

Mutz, Diana C., and Byron Reeves. 2005. “The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust.” American Political Science Review 99 (1):1-15.

Bumper Sticker:

Rude TV debates depress political trust!

IV:

Incivility between political opponents on TV

DV:

Trust in government and politicians

Research Question:

Does televised political incivility harm levels of trust in government and politicians?

Hypothesis:

When political actors violate interpersonal social norms on television, viewers react as they would if they were witnessing the same interaction in real life; they react negatively to incivility.

Data:

• 3 survey experiments with pre-test, experiment, and post-test

Methods:

• Respondents put into 1 of 3 experimental groups and difference of means test conducted on pre- and post-test survey results after respondents watched fictional TV program of political debate with either civil or uncivil exchange:

  • Experiment 1 subjects randomly assigned to civil or uncivil conditions (n = 67)

  • Experiment 2 included a 3rd control condition where subjects didn’t watch any political TV (n = 155)

  • Experiment 3 used within-subjects design where all were assigned to both civil and uncivil conditions in random order to understand process of influence

• Political trust measured from National Election Studies under rubric of support for the political system

Findings:

• Hypotheses confirmed! Individuals are negatively impacted by uncivil exchanges on televised political discourse as evidenced by lower trust in government on surveys following exposure.

Questions:

1. Mutz and Reeves write that “when political actors engage in TV interactions that violate the norms for everyday, face-to-face discourse, they reaffirm viewers’ sense that politicians cannot be counted on to obey the same norms for social behavior by which ordinary citizens abide” (2). Does this work in the opposite direction? If politicians began treating each other respectfully on televised debates, would we expect to see an increase in political trust and that would translate into greater political participation?

2. Related to the question above – if we assume that academic literature is the dominant civil medium for research-backed discourse, and that this discourse is important for policy change, institutional stability, and informed public participation in politics, how do we amplify its reach?

3. If this study were repeated today, would the results hold? Do we agree that people expect political actors to act civilly toward each other? And if not, is this partly due to the dwindling approval ratings overall of our politicians and our political institutions?

General Notes:

• Television and political trust

  • Robinson popularized term “videomalaise” in 1975 to refer to attitudes that resulted from watching television news

  • Evidence supporting the causal claim that television is responsible for low levels of political trust has been limited

    • Claims have broadened into general critique of political journalism

  • Main emphasis of research has been on the extent to which televised politics heightens the importance of personality characteristics in general evaluations of candidates

    • Candidates’ personal qualities more important to voters who obtained political news from TV (Keeter 1987)

    • TV primes people to rely more on personality perceptions when evaluating candidates (Druckman 2003)

  • Social psychology theories of human-media interaction suggest that TV political disagreements would exacerbate the “intensification of feeling” Lippmann described in 1925

    • “When political actors engage in TV interactions that violate the norms for everyday, face-to-face discourse, they reaffirm viewers’ sense that politicians cannot be counted on to obey the same norms for social behavior by which ordinary citizens abide” (2)

    • Focus of this study is TV b/c it’s the dominant medium

• Theoretical basis for videomalaise

  • To trust = to assume that a person or institution will “observe the rules of the game” (Citrin and Muste 1999)

    • People expect political actors who appear on television to abide by the same social norms acknowledged by ordinary Americans

    • People react negatively to incivility (even if it’s on TV)

  • Experience of political conflict on TV substantially different from real life

    • Need for politeness is particularly great when expressing controversial views (Kingwell 1995)

    • Politeness and respect toward individuals involved in a legal conflict enhances their perceptions of fair treatment (Tyler 1990)

  • Television world provides uniquely intimate perspective on conflicts

    • When social norms for civility are violated on TV, viewers’ intimate perspective intensifies an already negative reaction to incivility

    • Reeves & Nass (1996) show that when motion appears on TV, physiological responses are the same as when motion occurs in the immediate environment – the human brain hasn’t evolved quickly enough to respond in rational ways to technologies such as TV

  • When encountering differences of opinion in person, people tend to downplay differences and maintain a polite, cordial atmosphere

    • In contrast, TV emphasizes conflict and strong differences of opinion to enhance dramatic value and attract viewers

    • TV is also a highly intimate medium

      • Central hypothesis: This violation of social norms should cause negative reactions toward politicians and government

        • People expect others to obey social norms and evaluate them less favorably when they don’t

        • Given that the normative expectation is one of civility, this influence should be primarily a function of negative reactions to incivility rather than positive reaction s to civility

        • Further hypothesize that TV viewers will respond negatively to incivility on TV due to largely gut-level, emotional reactions to violations of social norms rather than a cognitive awareness of excessive conflict

• Study Design

  • Problems with validity and reliability of self-reported media exposure (Price & Zaller 1993), so experimental design used

  • Central manipulation: the extent to which politicians exchanged political viewpoints in a manner that violates the typical norms governing face-to-face political conflict

    • Used adults and undergraduates

    • Exposed viewers to systematically different versions of 4 different political disagreements drawn from a larger pool

      • Manipulated extent of civility and politeness w/o altering political content

      • Expectation that when dissonant views were presented in an uncivil fashion, they would encourage more negative, distrustful attitudes toward politics and politicians

        • Professional actors hired to play roles of 2 congressional candidates with TV studio/political talk show mock program

        • Teleprompters used to hep actors adhere closely to a script

        • Candidates assigned opposing views on each issue and interaction was to be civl or uncivil

          • Experiment 1: free trade, mental health insurance, Internet privacy regulation, and NASA funding

          • Experiment 2: tobacco regulation, taxation of retail sales on the Internet, public service experience, and free trade

          • Experiment 3: tobacco regulation, Internet taxes, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and public service experience

            • Each edited to 5 min in length

        • 2 versions of each exchange taped

          • Candidates expressed exactly same position in same words in both versions, offered same arguments, but civil exchanges were VERY civil and uncivil exchanges took personal jabs, raised voices, and never apologized (as well as rude nonverbal reactions)

    • Figure 1 shows results: candidates in uncivil versions of issue exchanges consistently perceived as less polite, more quarrelsome, more emotional, agitated, and hostile

      • 2 null findings: no perceived ideological differences in a candidate’s stand in civil vs. uncivil condition

• Procedures

  • Participants sat alone in a room w/a comfy couch and overstuffed chair, coffee table, and 32-inch TV

    • After consent, they filled out a pretest questionnaire

    • Then viewed 20 min of TV program featuring same scripted disagreements on 4 different issues

    • Then filled out posttest questionnaire

      • Subjects in experiment #2 not told hypothesis in order to facilitate follow-up interviews by phone

  • Experiment 1 subjects randomly assigned to civil or uncivil conditions (n = 67)

  • Experiment 2 included a 3rd control condition where subjects didn’t watch any political TV (n = 155)

    • Control group included to determine whether differences between civil and uncivil condition swerve due to an elevation of political trust in the civil condition, a decrease in trust in the uncivil condition, or some combo

    • This control group filled out same pre- and posttest questionnaires but watched a non-political program

  • Experiment 3 used within-subjects design where all were assigned to both civil and uncivil conditions in random order to understand process of influence

  • Political trust measured from National Election Studies under rubric of support for the political system

• Results

  • Data analyzed by testing difference of mean levels of trust in 2 conditions in experiment 1; all 3 trust measures significantly influenced negatively by uncivil exchange (see Figure 2)

    • People differentiated between the importance of public conflict and the civility of that conflict

    • Uncivil versions perceived to be more entertaining than civil versions

Orhan, Yunus Emre. 2022. “The relationship between affective polarization and democratic backsliding: comparative evidence.” Democratization 29(4): 714-735.

Week 13: Information/Knowledge/Communication

Baptista, João Pedro, and Anabela Gradim. 2022. “Who Believes in Fake News? Identification of Political (A)Symmetries.” Social Sciences 11(10): 460.

Bumper Sticker:

Motivated reasoning trumps facts: Asymmetrical “effect of political identities on the belief and dissemination of fake news”

Research Question:

Is there consistent evidence that one political identity may be more vulnerable to fake news than others?

Type:

A systematic literature review in most similar countries of Europe and North America, using Scopus and Web of Science databases to examine cross references to ideological spectrum, analyzing the terms that included the term “fake news” related to “political ideology”, “partisanship”, “left-wing”, “right-wing”, “liberal”, and “conservative” in the article titles,

IV:

PID

DV:

Susceptibility to fake news

Mechanism:

Content creation might have a conservative bias (9). “Conservatism is not only associated with greater distrust in the media (van der Linden et al. 2020a), but also with fact- checking (Robertson et al. 2020; Lyons et al. 2020) and with more resistance to correct false beliefs” (9). “Conservatism is generally associated with prejudice, stigma, and intolerance (Jost et al. 2003) and is more sensitive to fear and major change (Fessler et al. 2017). In addition, conservative and right-wing people have also been associated with a more intuitive cognitive style in the way they process information (Deppe et al. 2015). This cognitive style is positively correlated with the belief and dissemination of fake news (Pennycook and Rand 2020; Sindermann et al. 2020)”(10).

Hypothesis:

• H1 “Because the political system is a friendlier place for people who identify with the governing party, we hypothesize that losers are less satisfied with the way democracy works than are winners”

• H2 On the consensual to majoritarian continuum (Lijphart – 1984, 1994) majoritarian form exacerbate the winning and losing effect on satisfaction

Outcome:

1) Greater vulnerability to fake news from conservatives and right-wing

2) Greater vulnerability to conspiracies from conservatives and right-wing

3) General predisposition to consume bias confirming news

Gordon, Stacy B., and Gary M. Segura. 1997. “Cross-national Variation in the Political Sophistication of Individuals: Capability or Choice?” Journal of Politics 59(1): 126-147.

Bumper Sticker:

Voter sophistication is a product of individual measures * country context & structures! 

IV:

institutional and contextual variables

DV:

individual measures of political sophistication

Research Question:

What if measures of political sophistication reflect performance rather than capability? What if our dismal assessments of the individual capabilities of citizens were based on measures driven, in part, by the reasonable decisions of those very same citizens, rather than on innate capabilities alone?

Hypothesis:

Citizen capability and choice are funneled through contextual and structural elements in a society to produce political sophistication.

Data:

• 1989 Cross-national Euro-Barometer survey data from 12 pre-1995 EU nations

Methods:

Ordinary Least Squares regression model

Findings:

• Considerable and significant differences in citizen political sophistication across nations due to contextual factors shaping availability, usefulness, and cost political info.

  • Citizen performance varies from country to country

  • Partisan and electoral systems that increase uncertainty of how election outcomes will be reflected in representative institutions or muddy the party-policy linkages in the minds of the voters act as strong disincentives for active accumulation and usage of accurate political info

General Notes:

• Literature on political sophistication offers 2 competing visions of the electorate:

  • Mass public is not well versed in matters of politics

  • Conclusions about voters not valid

    • Measurement strategies/instruments not good

    • Conclusions of first view overlook useful info voters do have and use

• Authors agree with 2nd view and seek to operationalize definition of sophistication

  • Individual levels of sophistication are the product of choices driven by a contextual incentive structure

• Classic view: Converse (1964) – voter opinions not ideologically constrained across time or issues; this is basically stating that voters don’t understand politics

  • Citizens can’t hold reps accountable if they don’t understand the system

• More generous view rejects this

  • Measures used to estimate level of info and integration crude and unreliable (Achen 1975; Erikson 1979; Luskin 1987)

  • Measures systematically underestimate levels of info and cognitive capacity among citizens (Nie & Andersen 1974)

  • Individuals may not be politically sophisticated but democracy is safe b/c sophistication is a “collective phenomenon” (Feld & Grofman 1988)

  • Collective public opinion measures stable and consistent (Page & Shapiro 1992; Stimson 1991)

  • Even in absence of high levels of info, voters may successfully use scant amounts of info to develop specific issue positions; they can take cues from

    • affective orientation toward relevant actors (Brady & Sniderman 1985)

    • Political environment (Zaller 1992)

    • General orientations toward politics or specific issue areas (Feldman 1988 & 1989; Peffley & Hurwitz 1993)

  • Individuals understand issues that are personally salient (Neuman 1986)

  • Recognized difference in stability and consistency between opinion on ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ issues (Carmines & Stimson 1989)

    • “While many citizens lack extensive political information, ‘assessing voters by civics exams misses the many things that voters do know, and the many ways they can do without the facts that the civics tradition assumes they should know’ (Popkin 1991, 20; emphasis in the original)” (128).

• Public’s performance on measures of sophistication not sufficient to illustrate political capabilities

  • Shortcomings may be the product of systems – and individual choices structured by those systems

  • Current 3 components to measure sophistication:

1. Means (cognitive capacity)

2. Motive (incentives toward collecting and using accurate political info)

3. Opportunity (availability of aforementioned info)

• How do we measure this accurately then?

  • Capabilities

    • Smart people can and do have more info and more accurate info

    • Individual-level characteristics have an effect on sophistication

      • Education

      • Income

      • Occupational status

      • Media usage

        • These variables may be the best proxies to control for different dimensions of individual capabilities

        • The more highly educated may have been indoctrinated into the standard belief system/dominant social ideology

        • Being at a higher ed or socioeconomic status may reduce costs of collecting political info

    • Choices

      • As opportunities to get info become more scarce, motivation to get it must increase; thus, several factors will structure these choices:

        • Party system

          • Individuals in multiparty system would be more motivated to collect info b/c opportunity to do so is greater

          • Downs’ (1957) median voter theorem tells us parties will try to differentiate themselves from each other to mobilize support – increasing available info

          • This effect declines as number of parties get significantly higher

        • Electoral system

          • Nationally competitive elections will increase political sophistication by increasing motivation

          • Parliamentary societies lower cost of political info b/c parties’ positions are stable

          • Compulsory voting increases turnout and may increase sophistication

• Data and Analysis

  • Sophistication: using 1989 Euro-Barometer postelection survey in 12 nations of pre-1995 EU by calculating absolute distances between respondent’s placement of each of his or her society’s political parties on a 10-point ideological scale and the mean placement of those parties by the remaining respondents from that society

    • Compute a mean across these distances that equals the inaccuracy of the respondent’s info using the society mean as the baseline

    • Low scores = high sophistication so they invert this measure

    • DV sophistication 0-9 w/9 representing extremely high level of sophistication

Iyengar, Shanto, et al. 2010. “Cross-National versus Individual-Level Differences in Political Information: A Media Systems Perspective.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. 20(3): 291-309.

Bumper Sticker:

The media have a significant impact on informing the electorate!

Research Question:

Does the structure, funding model, and political accountability of the news media in a country impact the knowledge of the electorate? Does this knowledge have varying cross-national effects?

IV:

News coverage & political interest

DV:

Political & news knowledge

Hypothesis:

• News media governed by supply and demand forces that have real-world implications:

  • When news coverage is informative and frequently encountered, even less attentive citizens become informed

  • When media environment is relatively barren of political content or when there is an abundance of entertainment programs that compete with news, acquisition of info becomes challenging and limited to individuals who self-select into the news audience

Data:

• Coded news media coverage in 2007 in 4 countries: US, UK, Denmark, & Finland

  • “Hard” vs “soft” news and “international” vs “domestic” news

• 28-question online survey to 1,000 representative respondents in each country about easy and difficult questions over hard, soft, international, and domestic news

Methods:

• Difference of mean scores and OLS variable effects

Findings:

• Countries with least regulated, market-oriented media provide least amount of “hard” news and their populations score lowest on surveys.

General Notes:

• Standard predictors of political knowledge have been political interest, media attentiveness, education and other equivalent measures of political motivation

  • The authors propose a context-dependent approach to the study of political info

    • Individual-level motivational factors vary across contexts

    • When news coverage is informative and frequently encountered, even less attentive citizens become informed

    • When media environment is relatively barren of political content or when there is an abundance of entertainment programs that compete with news, acquisition of info becomes challenging and limited to individuals who self-select into the news audience

      • Level of info affected jointly by demand and supply variables

• Research design

  • Content analysis of broadcast news sources and a survey measuring public awareness to investigate cross-national differences in 3 different knowledge gaps in the US, UK, Denmark, & Finland

    • Variation in media system type by the 4 countries selected:

      • Denmark & Finland closest to relatively pure public service model + subsidized “guardianship” model; expectation is that most regulated systems will have highest level of hard news content

      • US exemplifies pure market-based regime + social responsibility tradition; expectation is that ratio of hard to soft news will be significantly lower here

        • I feel attacked by the authors’ statement that “American media are overwhelmingly in private hands, its public television network (PBS) is under-funded and achieves a trivial audience share” [emphasis mine].

      • Britain represents a hybrid

  • Content Analysis

    • US: 2 highest-rated network newscasts (ABC & NBC News)

    • Britain: BBC1 and ITV

    • Denmark: DR1 and TV2

    • Finland: YLE1 and MTV3

    • Monitored for 4 weeks during March-April 2007

    • Stories classified by trained student or research assistant coders

      • Disaggregated content elements compromising hard/soft news distinctions and then coding the sequential categories:

1. Classify news reports in terms of topical area.

   1. Politics, public administration, the economy, and science = “hard”

   2. Celebrities, entertainment, and sport = “soft”

2. Classify mode of treatment.

   1. Public good or issues about public policy and administration = “hard”

   2. Human interest = “soft”

3. Classify either as domestic or overseas events & presence of international or regional organization (UN or EU)

• Survey Design

  • 28 multiple-choice questions to reflect citizens’ awareness of both hard and soft news and their familiarity with domestic vs. international subject matter

    • “Easy” and “difficult” questions

    • Administered online

    • Minimizes sampling bias through use of sample matching featuring dual samples – one strictly probabilistic and based on an offline populations, and a second non-probabilistic based on a large panel of online respondents

      • Each online respondent selected to provide mirror image of corresponding respondent selected by conventional Random Digital Dialling (RDD) methods

    • 1,000 respondents from each online panel, all over the age of 18

• Results

  • Cross-National Differences in News Content

    • Market-based system of US and UK’s mixed system offer lowest level of hard news coverage (Table 1)

    • No cross-national differences in domestic vs. international news

  • Cross-National Differences in Information

    • Means corresponding to average proportion of respondents in each country who provided correct answers to questions about domestic, international, hard, and soft news (Table 2)

      • Americans less informed about hard news

      • Americans slightly ahead of Britain of domestic knowledge, but both trail Scandinavian countries by a large margin

    • Measure of motivational or demand-side factors on hard and soft news knowledge and international and domestic knowledge (Table 3)

      • Motivation = index of political involvement

      • Coefficients for substantial cross-national differences unaffected by controls for interest, education, exposure to TV news, and gender

Mutz, Diana C. 2006. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 1&2.

Research Question:

What kind of relationships allow political conversation with those who do not share our viewpoint? Overarching Can deliberative and participatory democracy cohabitate?

Bumper Sticker:

Chap 2 Strong tie network, low deliberative possibility Overarching High participation, low deliberation/ High deliberation, low participation

Type:

Data from several national American survey sources on networks of political discussion: 1992 American component of the Cross National Election Project (CNEP) surbey, the 2000 ANES and a 1996 survey funded by the Spencer Foundation and gathered ny the University of Wisconsin-Madison Survey Research Center, supplemented with experimental evidence from the World Values Surveys and additional countries data in the CNEP.

DV:

Cross-cutting poltical conversations

IV:

The strength of network

Hypothesis:

The strength of a network affect the capacity of individuals within the network to engage in cross cutting deliberative democracy.

Findings:

1. Americans overwhelmingly sort themselves into homogenous political sphere, even in terms of context which should be an exogenous variable (contexts are structurally imposed, networks are individually constructed (Huckfelt and Sprague, 1995)

2. The one place that might provide heterogenous political conversation and the weaker ties is the workplace

3. More work should be done on workplace context

Winkler, Stephen. 2021. “Media’s Influence on LBGTQ Support Across Africa.” British Journal of Political Science 51(2): 807-826.

Bumper Sticker:

“The type of medium one uses to get information can impact attitudes towards LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Research Question:

Does media consumption explain individual support for homosexuality? If so, how?

Summary/Theory/Argument:

• Develops  a theory that accounts for the variety of ways in which pro- and anti- gay-rights actors engage with the media, which generates clear expectations about how different types of media create distinct effects on public opinion of LGBTQs.

• The author argues that increased overall media consumption enhances support for LGBTQs, but that this effect is driven by consumption of newspaper, internet and social media. This is because government censorship of queer content is often directed at television programs that contain positive representations of LGBTQs.

• The media impacts public opinion of the LGBTQ+ community through (1) exposing individuals to positive representation and (2) exposing individuals to new information in general

Findings:

1. Different types of media produce distinct effects on public opinions of LGBTQ+ people

   1. Radio and television have no significant effect on pro-gay attitudes

   2. Newspapers, internet, or social media have a positive effect on support

2. These effects are conditional on censorship of queer representation from certain mediums 

3. Show that governments proudly publicize their crackdowns on queer content in TV 

4. 78 %  of respondents report negative attitudes towards homosexuality.

   1. However, individuals who consume more media overall are 4–8 %t more likely to express pro-gay beliefs.

5. Through content analysis of radio, newspaper and the internet, provide preliminary evidence that the mechanisms driving these effects is increased access and exposure to positive LGBTQ representation.

Method:

• Looks at media consumption across thirty-three African countries. 

• multi-methods approach, which combines cross-sectional survey data with content analysis and descriptive data from across Africa

  • Cross-national survey data from Afrobarometer Round 6 conducted in 2014 and 2015.

• Estimates 6 binomial logits 

• Country fixed effects and district-clustered standard errors help to account for country and sub-national differences 

  • One to look at the impact of an individuals aggregate score across, and then one for each of the 5 mediums 

• Results hold when replicated using OLS and ordered-probit models 

IV:

• questions in the survey that ask how often the respondent gets their news from five different sources: radio, television, newspaper, internet and social media.

DV:

• primary dependent variable is a question in the survey that asks how the respondent would feel about having a ‘homosexual’ as a neighbor

Abstract:

Political leaders across Africa frequently accuse the media of promoting homosexuality, while activists often use the media to promote pro-LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) narratives. Despite extensive research on how the media affects public opinion, including studies that show how exposure to certain information can increase support of LGBTQs, there is virtually no research on how the media influences attitudes towards LGBTQs across Africa. This study develops a theory that accounts for actors’ mixed approach to the media and shows how different types of media create distinct effects on public opinion of LGBTQs. Specifically, the study finds that radio and television have no, or a negative, significant effect on pro-gay attitudes, whereas individuals who consume more newspapers, internet or social media are significantly more likely to support LGBTQs (by approximately 2 to 4 per cent). The author argues that these differential effects are conditional on censorship of queer representation from certain mediums. The analysis confirms that the results are not driven by selection effects, and that the relationship is unique to LGBTQ support but not other social attitudes. The results have important implications, especially given the growing politicization of same-sex relations and changing media consumption habits across Africa.

Week 14: Electoral Participation

Aguilar, Edwin Eloy, and Alexander Pacek. 2000. “Macroeconomic Conditions, Voter Turnout, and the Working Class/Economically Disadvantaged Party Vote in Developing Countries.” Comparative Political Studies 33(8): 995-1017.

Bumper Sticker:

The lower class mobilizes in developing countries during economic downturns!

Research Question:

To what extent and in what manner do fluctuations in voter turnout affect support for parties with working-class/lower status concerns in the developing world? In what manner does the macroeconomy play a mitigating role in this relationship?

IV:

economic downturn * voter turnout

DV:

party support (working-class/economically disadvantaged party vote)

Hypothesis:

• In developing countries, during economic downturns, more of the working class and disadvantaged class will turn out to vote.

• In those elections, political parties who are oriented towards these classes will increase their vote share compared to previous elections, all else equal.

Data:

• Pooled time-series data for 10 countries in Latin America, Caribbean, Africa, & Asia

Methods:

• Regression analysis

Findings:

• Both hypotheses confirmed!

General Notes:

• Authors seek to understand relationship between voter turnout, macroeconomic conditions, and support for political parties w/explicit appeals to working class/disadvantaged in developing democracies

  • WCED parties  = political parties for working class/economically disadvantaged

  • A number of does support idea that economy affects voter turnout in the developing world (Pacek & Radcliff, 1995b; Radcliff, 1992) 

• Turnout and party support

  • Higher levels of turnout benefit left parties electorally in advanced industrial nations (Crewe 1981)

  • Lower status/economically disadvantaged citizens who are the traditional left party constituents vote at lower and more variable rates tan their better-off counterparts

    • Lower status voters more marginal or “peripheral” b/c there’s a lower probability that they’ll vote – varies each election

      • Left parties should demonstrate varying support as turnout fluctuates

    • “Class bias” in voter turnout = ratio of lower-class to upper-class voters participating; considerable class bias exists in their sample of countries. “Few studies outside the United States have examined the extent to which this measure may vary across time and why. A simple correlation between class bias scores and voter turnout for the same years across a sample of developing countries produces a score of –.78; higher class bias scores, indicating a greater discrepancy between upper-class and lower-class voting, are associated with lower levels of turnout” (997-998, emphasis mine).

  • Cross-national studies on this concept have lagged

    • Pacek and Radcliff’s 1995c cross-national study of elections in 19 industrial democracies from 1950-1990 found that left parties’ share of the vote increased by almost one third of a percentage point for every percentage point increase in turnout

    • Alford Indices measure class voting from national surveys

      • “If [disadvantaged/working] classes tend to support the spectrum of parties with specific appeals toward them and generally vote less than those who are better off, then such parties should benefit from increases in turnout in a manner similar to the effect in advanced industrial societies” (999).

  • Selection criteria for WCED parties:

1. Examine class composition of political party specrum where survey data on party choice are available for an indication of which parties appeal primarily to the working and economically disadvantaged classes.

2. Examine the programmatic appeals and policy orientation of party types from various editions of Political Parties of the World and the Political Handbook of the World as well as individual website for political parties in countries where they focus.

• Analysis

  • Countries must meet the following criteria:

1. Country has held a series of relatively uninterrupted and competitive elections for which data are available.

2. Country has competing political parties with explicitly working- or lower-class appeals.

   1. Include each country’s initial postauthoritarian/postcolonial elections as they are also interested in transition

• They use 7 developing democracies, 1 recent redemocratized case, and 3 historical examples (Chile 1958-1973, Sri Lanka 1952-1977, and Uruguay 1954-1971)

• Regression of total percentage of vote for WCED parties on turnout in each election held in 10 developing countries

  • DV = parties’ combined percentage share of total vote from WCDE parties

  • Main IV = voter turnout (percentage of voting age population participating at election time)

  • Include autoregressive measure of previous party vote as control (moving average of WCED parties’ vote at times t – 1 and t – 2)

  • Dummy of election immediately following a boycott, postponement, or other irregularity

• Pooled time-series data for national elections in 10 countries 1951-1990

  • Dummy for each country excepting a reference category (fixed effects?)

• Turnout = % of eligible voters casting ballots at time t

• Lagged vote = expected party vote based on past voting patterns, calculated as the moving average of the WCED party vote at times t – 1 and t – 2

• Election follows irregularity as dummy

• countryn = dummy variables for each of the n – 1 countries in the study

  • Table 2 shows the model fits the data really well (R2 of 0.75?!!)

• The Macroeconomic Connection

  • Competing theories: Economic difficulties encourage people to seek political action to redress their grievances vs. Economic downturns may discourage voting (particularly the disadvantaged)

  • Economy-turnout effect contingent on region of the world being studied

    • Industrialized countries’ disadvantaged withdraw

    • Developing countries’ disadvantaged mobilize

      • Why? Different nature of social welfare programs; no safety net

  • Table 3: 

    • DV = % of population of voting age participating at time t 

    • Main IV = election year % change in real per capita GDP

  • Table 4: adds 

    • economy = the election year proportion change in real per capita national income

    • Lagged vote

    • Turnout

    • Economy* Party = interaction for election years when worker parties or coalitions are in power at the time of election X the state of the economy

    • Election follows irregularty

    • country

Aldrich, John H. 1993. “Rational Choice and Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 37(1): 246-278.

Context:

Rational choice is very popular within the voter turnout field. At the time, people were moving away from RCT, Aldrich argues that it is still useful and can’t help us get closer to explaining why some people vote and others do not. 

Goal:

Use rational choice to help us understand why some people vote and others do not. 

• We can find variables that increase or decrease the likelihood of turning out. But they never in an absolute sense tell us above. 

The Basic Model:

• Preferences determine behavior 

  • Rat choice is about HOW those preferences determine behavior

• A citizen’s preferences are realized in the outcome. We infer a voters preference through the action of who they vote for. 

  • Citizens’ preferences are transformed into utilities for outcomes when it matters how much the citizen prefers one outcome over another. 

• Conclusions of basic model: 

  • Never vote for the less preferred candidate

  • If costs of voting are high, always abstain

  • If costs of voting are zero, then vote for A because voting for A dominates abstaining 

  • If cost is between 0 and 5, the basic model is silent. Rational choice models of turnout differ over ways to handle these cases. See figure 1.

Rat Choice:

Rational choice theories are theories about the (expected) utility associated with outcomes generates or induces preferences for the particular actions at hand. 

• Fundamental is that rat choice argues that whichever outcome has a higher utility (1,0), the individual will choose actions to receive the higher utility outcome. 

• Actions are instruments to achieve outcomes

• The action of voting is an instrument to achieve the desired outcome. 

Cost of Voting:

• Voting is not a costless action. 

  • You have to obtain information, process it, decide what to do. 

  • You have to go to the polls. 

• Some people say that not voting is costless

  • Aldrich disagrees, rational abstainers must pay cost of deciding to vote or not. 

• Cost of voting is represented as, C

• C > 0 

• When costs are high -> voter turnout decreases

  • “When registration laws were passed, poll taxes were raised, or residency requirements were enacted, turnout fell.

Voters must still give some thought to what others might do. That factors into the voters choice to act. 

• If the voter thinks that their candidate will lose considerably, they probably will be less likely to vote. 

  • THE PROBLEM: voters do not know the situation they face.

The Calculus of Voting Model:

• Initially developed by Downs and extended by Riker. 

  • Controversial addition to the model. The term D

  • D represents the value of seeing democracy continue. If noe voted, Downs argued the political system would fail and thus some vote to ensure the continued vitality of democracy.

    • Riker continues this - change it to “citizens duty” 

• Adding a D term is the same as subtracting a C term. 

  • More of a sense of citizen duty can counter the cost of voting. 

  • D does not change anything unless D > C. 

• CRITICAL INNOVATION TO CALCULUS OF VOTING MODEL: 

  • Each person assigns a probability of the state of the world being true. 

    • The probability that one vote will make a difference.

• Can be summed up through the equation: 

  • R = PB + D - C

    • If R is positive, vote for candidate A (voters preferred candidate) if not, abstain.

    • R = Rewards 

    • P = Probability of one vote breaking a tie 

    • B = difference in utility for candidate A instead of B winning (diff in benefits) 

    • D = citizen duty

    • C = cost of voting 

  • Higher P = higher voter turnout 

  • C, D, and B are strong predictors of turnout.

• Problems with the Calculus of Voting model

  • D term is hotly debated 

    • If you vote because “you wanted to” then voting is not instrumental towards an outcome.

      • Rat choices are models of how one acts, given tastes. They are not models of where “taste” comes from. 

  • The P term is not realistic. It is not reasonable to assume your vote will break a tie. 

The Minimax Regret Model

• Developed by Ferejohn and Fiorina 

• Reject completing the basic model. 

  • They argue people’s ability to form probability assessments of the state of the world is basically too difficult and near impossible. 

    • If these probability assessments cannot be formed, they argue that the calculus of the voting model can not be used. 

• Instead of expected utility maximization, they propose a decision rule called minimax regret

  • Suppose a voter decided to abstain. Their preferred candidate loses by one vote. That voter would be regretful of their decision. 

    • Thus they measure the level of regret 

• Minimax regret refers to taking the action that yields the minimum of these maximum regrets. 

  • This model differs in what to do on the middle columns as seen in figure 1. 

• They argue their model is better than the calculus model and better predicts turnout more often.

• Problems with the Minimax Regret Model: 

  • P term is still an issue 

    • P at least exist but is small 

      • Honestly this was a bit over my head. See page 259 - was confused. 

  • Second issue is the wasted voting undermines the plausibility of minimax regret 

A Third Approach - Game Theoretic Accounts:

• Aldrich the other models have problems 

• Tho other models are based on decision theory

  • No one decision is assumed to affect the decisions of others. 

    • The decisions of others are highly aggregated 

• Game theory models do not make this mistake and assume that decisions are based on taking others’ decisions into explicit account. 

  • Wait but aldrich says that problems in the calculus model are still at least somewhat present in game theory models 

    • ????????????????????

The Rationality of Turnout:

• Turnout is cheap 

• Information gain is asymmetric 

• Elections differ in salience and impact.

• Turnout is still a collective action problem BUT not a good example. Collective action problems typically assume importance because they are high-cost, high benefit decisions, where small P terms mean that the high B terms are substantially discounted. Turnout is a low cost, low benefit decision and she’s little light on most important collective action problems. 

Strategic Politicians and Rational Choice Turnout:

A strategic politician explains why turnout is higher in close elections. 

• More investment into close contests and this will be reflected in increasing levels of turnout. 

• Strategic politicians inform voters of the wasted-vote argument and convince at least some voters that it is sensible to act ast strategic voters 

  • I forget the name but there is a new book out that discusses how and where candidates go to campaign (physically). He basically finds that campaign events don’t really do anything other than increase turnout. 

Blais, André. 2009. “Turnout in Elections.” OHPB. Ch. 33: 621-635.

Bumper Sticker:

Voter turnout variation in the aggregate and individually : not conclusive! 

Research Question:

What is the state of the literature on aggregate and individual causes for voter turnout and its variation?

Type:

Review of the extensive research program on voter turnout in political science. It moves from research at the aggregate level, including why there is country level variation in voter turnout and finishes on individual level research review and why people vote.

IV:

socio-econ environment, party system, level of development, electoral rules such as compulsory, institutional structure, importance of election/ Resource model, psychological model, mobilization model, rational choice theory/Generational replacement and lowering of age, fractionalization of party system, declining group mobilization 

DV:

What accounts for voter turnout variation in the aggregate/individually/why is there a decline starting in the 1990s 

Outcome:

1. Patterns and Trends: A total of 533 elections and 106 countries are included. All democratic legislative elections (1972-2004), mean turnout 75% and stable with variation in the 3 points range. Variation in country is around 5 points. No central tendency. Turnout decline over time of 8 to 9 points. Higher in established democracies (29 countries) and slightly higher in presidential elections. 

2. Explaining Turnout Variations across Countries: Three sets of factors have been identified: the socioeconomic environment, the institutional set-up, and the party system (Powell 1982; Blais and Dobrzynska 1998). Difference between poor and other countries (undistinguishable amongst the wealthy). Compulsory system affect turnout with a 10-15 points higher turnout (not sure if it is about the sanctions). PR and high magnitude, higher turnout /= in Latin America. Important elections and relative power of the seat at stake=higher turnout/ with a caveat (Blais 2000). Higher leverage of lower house predicts best higher turnout. Facility of voting does not produce measurable findings. Turnout appears to be higher when there are less parties in contention. “Closeness” of the results might have an effect. No real consensus on this.

3. Explaining the Recent Turnout Decline: three reasons for the 9 points decline since 1990 1) Generational replacement, Degree of competition of the election (Franklin). + voting age lowering is not a culprit , 2) Fractionalization in party system, 3)declining group mobilization (especially where union density has subsided). Not completely set

4. The Decision to Vote or not to Vote: age and education are the two most significant factors, followed by religiosity, income, and marital status (Blais 2000).

Franklin, Mark N. 2004. Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition. Cambridge Univ. Press. Ch. 4&5.

Chapter 4:

Research Question:

What are the forces that induce more people to vote in some elections than in others? 

• How the character of elections can affect the level of turnout.

Focus:

Case study of Malta, Switzerland, and the United States 

Previous research indicates that the greatest power to cause voter turnout variation are those factors that govern the likelihood that their vote will affect an election’s outcome in ways that are meaningful to them. 

Variable of focus: Executive responsiveness - the extent to which the political complexion of the executive is responsible for the choices made at the time of an election.

• Lol what the hell does this mean

Why focus on Malta and Switzerland?

• They exhibit a dramatic change in voter turnout over the past 40 years (written in 2000). 

Why low turnout in the US?

• Low executive responsiveness score 

  • Because of separation of powers 

• Debate over the frequency and registration 

  • But not that sufficient

• Turnout increases when races offer clear contrasts between the policy stances of different candidates. 

• SOP makes it harder to figure out who is responsible and assign blame/accountability 

  • Higher information cost 

  • Dilutes clear accountability 

• Test this by measuring changes over time in the linkage between voting and its results. The idea is that if separated powers are bad for turnout, then anything that accentuates this separation should reduce turnout still further. 

  • Divided government as a variable 

• Turnout in midterm elections is correlated with turnout in the following presidential election more than the association between the previous presidential election. 

• If an elections is felt to be a foregone conclusion, it makes sense less people will vote.

An inventory of variables affecting electoral competition 

• Executive responsiveness 

• Margin of victory 

• Size of electorate 

• Time since previous election 

Short term vs. long term effects

Chapter 5: Explaining Turnout Change in Twenty-Two Countries (more substantive chapter)

This chapter gets at the main question of: What causes turnout change? Further we can better understand the decline in turnout that has occurred in recent years.

Focus:

22 countries 1945 - 1999. ONLY look at lower house election data. Authors do not look at presidential elections or midterms.

Features that relate to the utility and costs of voting are the primary motivating forces that drive voter turnout. 

• Other variables include 

• Electoral type 

• Proportionality of electoral system 

• Extent of the franchise 

• Whether absentee ballots are permitted 

• Whether voting is compulsory 

• District magnitude 

• Election over weekend 

• Closeness of race 

• Intervals of election 

• Size of electorate 

• Size of largest party 

• Polarization 

• See page 121 for more.

Hypothesis:

1. We expect Signficnat effects from the following variables operationalized as short-term factors: time since the previous election, weekend voting majority status of the largest party, margin of victory of the largest party, mean margin of victory across the districts in majoritarian systems, polarization and cohesion of the party system, decisiveness of the election, and disproportionality of the electoral system 

2. We expect significant effects from the following variables operationalized as cumulative factors: compulsory voting, absentee voting, female empowerment, extension of the franchise to eighteen year olds, size of electorate, average district magnitude, and the responsiveness of the executive to the political complexion of the legislature 

3. We expect a significant effect of past turnout 

4. We do not expect any features of the character of elections that can vary over time to prove significant except when operationalized as a short-term or cumulative factor. 

H1 mainly involves electoral competitiveness, h2 mainly involves process of generational replacement, and h3 involves inertia. 

Findings:

• Absentee voting appears to be associated with falling turnout.

• “Character of election” causes significant results on turnout to vary.

• Female empowerment is signficant 

• Average district magnitude, disproportionality, weekend voting, decisiveness of the political system, polarization of party, proportion of the electorate made up of new voters, whether the government of the day was a coalition were not significant. Their role however maybe subsumed by other variables which may explain why they are not significant. 

• Four variables associated with electoral competition have short term effects 

  • Size of the largest party 

  • Margin of victory 

  • Mean margin of victory (for majoritatarian countries) 

  • Party cohesiveness

• Four variables having to do with instiutiional arrangements have cumulative effects: compulsory voting, female empowerment, young invitations, and executive responsiveness. And size of electorate 

• Time since last election has effects both on new and and on established cohorts 

Nickerson, David W. 2008. “Is Voting Contagious? Evidence from Two Field Experiments.” American Political Science Review 102(1): 49-57.

Bumper Sticker:

Interpersonal influence matters when it comes to voter turnout

Research Question:

How do we parse social influence in individuals’ political behavior without committing omitted or selection bias?

Research Design:

“This paper surmounts the problem of isolating and measuring interpersonal influence by analyzing two placebo-controlled experiments conducted in Denver, CO, and Minneapolis, MN, during the 2002 Congressional primaries” (49). Simultaneous canvassing to GOTV in two people household and sensibilization to recycling as a baseline. “The boost in turnout among uncontacted persons in households assigned to the GOTV condition is directly attributable to behavioral contagion, net sampling error” (49). External validity is a concern.

Literature:

Party ID fixed, interest in politics, density of network, type of network (pertaining to this study: the effect of spouse –Dasovic and Fitzgerald 2007 and voter turnout because of spouse influence- /Sparse study on spouse effect of 1 event. This is the GAP.

IV:

Contagious effect of interpersonal influence in a two-voters system

DV:

Voter turnout

Mechanism:

Social network effect on individual behaviors are difficult to measure in social science. The problem of atomism assumption: individuals establish preferences through interactions, not a vacuum. However, parsing where the influence is coming from in social network is a difficult task.

Hypothesis:

H1 The interpersonal influence from one GOTV treated person to the non-treated person in a two-voters system, will result in contagious effect on voter turnout.

Findings:

1. Canvassing for GOTV is an exogenous shock that works on treated individuals: +9.8% (for pooled Denver and Minneapolis) p-value< 0.01

2. Interpersonal influence is contagious for the second person not treated: +6% (for pooled Denver and Minneapolis) p-value < 0.1 (0.02)

Week 15: Radical Right Voting/Populism

Elçi, Ezgi. 2022. “Politics of nostalgia and populism: Evidence from Turkey.” British Journal of Political Science 52(2): 697-714.

Bumper Sticker:

Collective nostalgia has a positive relationship with populism

Research Question:

How is nostalgia used as a tool for populists?

Purpose:

Previous studies that attempted to assess the relationship between nostalgia and populism in a relatively narrow sense. The purpose of this article is to more appropriately assess the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism by situating collective nostalgia as a psychological factor that contributes to populism. 

Summary/Theory/Argument:

Following the ideational approach, this study claims that populists aim to facilitate the moralistic separation between the pure people (us) and the corrupt elite (them). While constituting the boundaries of us vs. them, populists create an in-group vs. out-group identity. To this end, one of the primary tools that populists utilize is collective nostalgia. Populists offer their constituencies a golden age – a heartland where corruption, disruptions and enemies do not exist. 

Elçi situates populism and collective nostalgia in the context of Turkey, where contemporary secularist and Islamic cleavages exist as a product of structures established under the Ottoman Empire. The cleavage exemplifies the ruling center (secularist elites) and the ruled periphery (the Islamic people).  The ruling center adopted Kemalist beliefs - pushing the country to modernize, become secular, and overall promote nationalism. This push was the result of the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, leaving a power vacuum in the region that was filled by the Kurds . In response to this, political Islam is aggrandizing the Ottoman past as a tool for the reconstruction of “the Great Turkey” today. In this way, they are experiencing Ottoman nostalgia - a desire to return to “the golden days” and become a leader of the Islamic world.  Ottoman nostalgia is much older than Kemalist nostalgia - which began to emerge in the 1990’s following increased pressure by the EU to privatize, as well as increased exposure to the IMF and World bank, which challenged the existing values of the Kemalists. This nostalgia is characterized by ‘the memory of a strong, independent, self-sufficient state and its secularist modernization politics which dominated the public sphere through the past century’.

Hypothesis:

1. The more nostalgic respondents are, the more populist attitudes they will express, because nostalgia creates a ‘pure people vs. corrupt elites’ duality.

2. Respondents in the nostalgia treatment groups should be more populist than those in the control group in the experimental setting.

3. The effect of the Ottoman nostalgia treatment on populist attitudes should be greater than the Kemalist nostalgia stimulus in the experimental setting.

Findings:

• Collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after control for various independent variables - such as religiosity, partisanship, satisfaction with life and Euroscepticism

• Ottoman nostalgia increases populist attitudes

• Kemalist nostalgia has a weak direct effect on attitude that disappears when party preference is controlled for

Method:

Uses a representative survey (n=1,954) and experimental datasets

• the  survey tests the link between individuals’ predisposition to nostalgia and populist attitudes (H1)

• DV:Populist beliefs

  •  constructed from four survey items from previous research that Elçi aggregated into an index ranging from 0 (least agreement) to 100 (most agreement)

• IV: Nostalgia

  • Constructed from four different survey items that seek to measure the importance of past values, past experiences, old tastes, and the country’s glorious past

• Controls: 

  • Three sets of IVs to control for the relationship between populism and nostalgia

    • support for EU membership, satisfaction with democracy, economic conditions, and life, and interpersonal trust questions

    • Alevi, Kurdish and religiosity, where the cross-cutting cleavages in Turkish society occur.

    • Partisanship, sex, age, education, income, urban residency. 

• Created 10 different models to control for the effect of nostalgia with party preference and satisfaction with life, democracy, and economic conditions.

Also performed an experimental analysis

• created a between-group experimental design in which two groups received different types of nostalgic messages

  • These were Ottoman and Kemalist

  • Also used a control group that DID NOT receive any stimulus

• Data was collected using convenience sampling - respondents were recruited through Facebook and Instagram ads using Qualtrics survey tool

• N = 911 

  • Were asked a series of warmup questions - such as satisfaction with democracy, lives, and economic conditions 

  • Randomly assigned them to groups

  • Introduced experimental vignettes 

    • Ottoman and Kemalist groups were presented with a message priming them to respond to texts about history of Turkey

    • Control group did not receive any message

• tested the effect of nostalgia treatments on populist attitudes by building a populism index with five items taken from Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove (2014).

• summed all items and built a scale between 0 and 100, where 100 indicates higher populist attitudes

Definitions:

• Populism

  • (Mudde, 2007) a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into to homogenous and antagonistic groups:

    • the pure people versus the corrupt elite

• Collective Nostalgia

  • (Wildschut et al. 2014) the nostalgic reverie that is contingent upon thinking of oneself in terms of a particular social identity or as a member of a particular group and concerns events or objects related to it

• Cleavages 

  • (Somer & McCoy, 2019) formative rifts that ’either emerged or could not be resolved during the formation of nation-states, or, sometimes during fundamental re-formulations of states such as during transitions from communism to capitalism, or authoritarian to democratic regime

General Notes:

• Turkey’s populist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) exploits nostalgic rhetoric to dominate the country’s politics.

  • emphasize the glorious days of the Ottoman and Seljukian empires

• Populists frequently emphasize that the elites hijacked the people’s will long ago, and they promise to return power to the people. 

  • According to this logic, back in the good old days corrupt elites were not powerful enough to abuse the authentic people.

• According to populists, the people’s will is the cornerstone of politics 

• Many scholars agree that populism appears as a backlash to a sense of severe crisis (Rooduijn 2014; Taggart 2004) or discontent (Spruyt, Keppens and Van Droogenbroeck 2016). 

  • This sense of extreme crisis paves the way for raising concerns about the present conditions, which is a breeding ground for populism (Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove 2014). 

  • Populists blame the establishment for the decline in the people’s economic, political and living standards (Rooduijn, van der Brug and de Lange 2017).

• Populism can also be generated by unsolved, long-lasting and cross-cutting political cleavages within a society. Somer and McCoy (2019, 8) define these cleavages as formative rifts that ’either emerged or could not be resolved during the formation of nation-states, or, sometimes during fundamental re-formulations of states such as during transitions from communism to capitalism, or authoritarian to democratic regime

• Nostalgia is a yearning for the past 

  • According to Strauth and Turner (1988) it has four component parts

    • First, ‘there is the view of history as decline and loss, being a departure from some golden age of “homefulness”’. 

    • Second,  is the problem that there exists ‘a sense of the loss of wholeness and moral certainty’. 

      • At this point, ‘history is seen to be a collapse of values which had once provided the unity of social relations and personal experience’. 

    • The third is related to ‘the loss of individual autonomy and the collapse of genuine social relationships’. 

    • Last but not least, nostalgia is ‘the sense of a loss of simplicity, spontaneity, and authenticity’

  • Nostalgia, or the way we remember our past, exacerbates in-group vs. out-group distinctions (Martinovic et al. 2018). 

  • Nostalgia also strengthens shared social identity and distinguishes the in-group from other groups (Brown and Humphreys 2002; Wildschut et al. 2014).

• The rise of populism is closely related to ‘acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age’.

• The golden age corresponds to the heartland in populist literature. 

  • Coined by Taggart (2004, 278), ‘the heartland is a construction of the good life derived retrospectively from a romanticized conception of life as it has been lived’. 

  • It involves returning to the pre-lapsarian world, a Golden age before a catastrophic lapse or fall: in the post-lapsarian era, individuals feel lacking, deficient or oppressed (Tannock 1995).

• In Turkey, secularists and Islamist cleavages exist

  • The secularists can be thought of as the elites and appear to be supported by the left

    • they have dominated Turkish politics and society as guardians of the Kemalist values

  •  The Islamist’s are the people, representing the ruled and appear to be supported by the right (Çarkoğlu 2012; Çarkoğlu and Hinich 2006).

• Expectations that impacted Control variable selection: 

  • The author expects that the more dissatisfied respondents are with their lives in general, subjective economic conditions and democracy, the more populist attitudes they will have.

  • Religiosity plays a pivotal role in explaining the party preferences of the Turkish constituency and is a key independent variable for explaining the center–periphery cleavage.

    • Therefore expects more religious respondents to display more populist attitudes.

  • Expect Alevi respondents to have less populist attitudes because they are more supportive of secularism.

  • Expects that Kurdish respondents will have more populist attitudes because they are more critical of the Kemalist establishment.

  • The Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), as a radical democratic pro-Kurdish party, should also display more populist attitudes

  • expect CHP and Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) voters to have less populist attitudes since they represent the status quo.

Fitzgerald, Jennifer. 2018. Close to Home: Local Ties and Voting Radical Right in Europe. Cambridge University Press. Chapters TBD.

Chapter 1:

Research Question:

Why do people vote for radical right parties? Why do certain people at certain times in certain places decide that a radical right party or candidate merits their electoral support? 

Focus:

Europe, North American, Oceania 

• Mainly Switzerland and France

Literature insights: 

• Originally, social group based voting was powerful and pervasive. The left had unions and the right had churches; these were stabilizing forces. 

  • However, as membership in unions and churches and their attendant social groups wanes, support for mainstream left and right parties becomes less socially rooted in a traditional sense and less habitual. 

    • Instead of approaching elections from particular social positions, people now make choices at the polls that are motivated by attitudes on specific policy issues and attraction to particular political leaders. 

Localist Theory of Radical Right Voting: an account of unconventional electoral behavior that is motivated by people’s feelings of attachment to their local communities 

Main Argument:

“I argue that those individuals with the strongest sense of belonging to their localities find the programs of radical right parties particularly appealing.” 

• All politics is local - Tip O’Neill

• Local attachments underpin and motivate radical right support

Localism: 

• Small scale communities can offer a sense of belonging and a sense of place; research in psychology bears this out. 

• Globalization has changed things. 

  • As globalism has increased, the importance of the local has grown in response. 

  • “Modern life has not erased the importance of place…It may have, instead, increased the need for people to draw boundaries, to more crisply define their geographic community…and to behave in ways that signal their place-related identities…People are often proud of where they are from, and they continue to want you to know it. (Cramer 2016: 240, fn. 12) 

  • Globalization pushes people to invest reflexively in their local areas, it also threatens to undermine what makes each locality special. Pg 6 

• Eric Hobsbawm: The impersonalizing forces of globalization push people to invent mental connections to social groups, thereby reinforcing the rise of identity politics. 

What is the typical right winger?

• MAN 

• Low socio-economic status 

• Typically holds negative view of modern developments 

  • Immigration, outsiders ruining “the way it was” 

    • Trad dudes. 

Interesting insights: 

• High Social Capital negates the typical right winger. 

• “Straddling the individual-aggregate divide are accounts informed by theorist of social capital; the argument is that individuals who invest in social capital (through the participation in civil society) and those communities rich in social capital will not find the radical right particularly appealing” (Coffe et al. 2007) 

***Social Capital v. Localism***

• So like if you have good thoughts about your communities you will vote far right but if you’re very involved with community you won’t

• Having very positive sentiment toward the locality and the people in it can make the radical right appealing. 

• In contrast, route engagement in community life wards off the appeals of these parties; when people invest their time and energy into participating in civil society and neighborhood life, the radical right is not so enticing an option. 

  • Moreover it is feelings of attachment not the actual routine social interaction that benefits radical right parties. 

• When people avoid routine social and organizational activity, but still feel very positively tied to their local communities, they are powerfully primed to consider radical right programs alluring. 

Findings: 

• I find that today’s passion for all things local and localities’ enhanced political salience have contributed to the growth of radical right parties. 

• Radical right does best when locality is politically salient. 

• Local tues are most politically relevant when and where the locality has significant authority and autonomy, when and where the locality has recently lost substantial power, and when and where local elections are temporally proximal to national elections.

Mudde, Cas, and Christóbol Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposition 48(2): 147-174.

This is not an empirical paper and it’s kind of like a case study (sort of).

Bumper Sticker:

Subtypes of populism have regional similarities; Latin American populism is generally inclusive in nature while European populism is generally exclusive.

Data:

Broad patterns of populism with more focused attention on France, Austria, Bolivia, and Venezuela

General Notes:

• Rise in interest in studying populism and its relationship with democracy

  • One key aspect: is populism exclusive, inclusive, or both?

    • Findings largely regionally determined; LA inclusive while Europe exclusive

    • Few cross-regional studies

• To overcome conceptual confusion and regional isolation, this article investigates whether populism is exclusive or inclusive (or both) cross-regionally and by consistently using one definition of populism

  • 4 case studies 1990-2010: Haider and Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Le Pen and French National Front (FN), Morales and Bolivian Movement for Socialism (MAS), and Chávez and United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)

  • 3 dimensions of inclusion/exclusion: material, symbolic, and political

    • 2 factors crucial to understanding regional patterns:

1. The way populist actors define who belongs to ‘the people’ vis-à-vis ‘the elite’

2. The ideological features attached to the particular populist ideology of the actors

   1. BOTH share a problematic relationship w/liberal democracy

• Populism defined:

  • Minimalist definition of populism: a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people.

  • Key elements of the concept:

    • Theoretical and empirical perspective

    • Thin-centered ideology =  a particular set of ideas that is limited in ambition and scope; highly context-dependent

    • 3 core concepts:

1. The pure people

2. The corrupt elite

3. The general will

• Carries idea that all individuals of a given community are able to unify their wills with the aim of proclaiming popular sovereignty as the only legitimate source of political power

• Advantages of the concept:

  • Good concept-building characterized by presenting a definition based on necessary and sufficient conditions and identifying its negative pole: elitism and pluralism

    • Elitism = the people are dishonest and vulgar while the elite are superior in cultural, intellectual, and moral terms

    • Pluralism = societies are composed of several social groups with different ideas and interests; favors many centers of powers and maintains that politics should reflect the preferences of as many groups as possible through compromise and consensus

  • Populism has a ‘chameleon character’ – it can be left-wing or right-wing, organized in top-down or bottom-up fashion, rely on strong leaders or even be leaderless

    • Thus, subtypes of populism should be the starting point for analysis

    • Since populism is an ideology rather than a political strategy, it is linked to both supply-side and demand-side factors

• Case selection

  • Relies on analysis of prototypical cases so they can offer tentative conclusions

  • European populism fairly new (? true?)

    • Features nativism, populism, and authoritarianism

    • “Marriage of convenience” with the radical right in Europe

  • Latin America has a rich tradition of populist leaders, movements, and parties

    • 3 ‘waves of populism’ in Latin America: 

      • Classic populism of 1940s and 1960s

      • Neoliberal populism during 1990s

      • Radical leftist populism since 2000s

  • Focus is on both leaders and parties

• Inclusion vs. Exclusion?

  • Framework comes from recent (2010) study of the political right in Israel 

    • The Material Dimension – distribution of state resources, both monetary and non-monetary, to specific groups in society

      • Exclusion – groups specifically excluded from access to state resources (jobs or welfare)

      • Inclusion – groups specifically targeted to receive (more) state resources, sometimes to overcome long-established discrimination

        • Latin America: Chávez and Morales have pushed policies to promote quality of life improvements for weak socioeconomic groups

          • Social missions (misiones sociales) 

          • Health care programs, expansion of primary education, distribution of subsidized food and housing provision services

          • Morales – cash transfer programs to school-aged children and improvement of old age pension

          • Financed by gas an oil and new political economy of development

          • Exclusion of economic establishment

        • Europe: richer than LA, therefore instead of establishing welfare state they are focused on protecting it from outside forces (notably immigrants); focus in on exclusion of outgroups

          • Welfare chauvinism – fairly generous welfare state generally supported for the ‘own people’ but not for ‘aliens’ (immigrants, refugees, or Roma)

          • Français d’abord (French first)

    • The Political Dimension – refers to political participation and public contestation

      • Exclusion – specific groups prevented from participating (fully) in the democratic system

      • Inclusion – specifically targets certain groups to increase their participation and representation

        • LA: radical democracy (or revolutionary or real); criticize elitist character of LA democracies and plead for broader political participation

          • Strengthening the ‘voice of the voiceless’

          • Venezuelan PSUV promotes formation of a protagonist and participatory democracy based on plebiscitary mechanisms and communal councils

          • Bolivarian Circles (’círculos bolivarianos) = groups of 8-10 people seeking to engage in consciousness raising and community projects at the grassroots level

          • Bolivian MAS supports new constitution aimed at political participation through direct democratic channels

          • Ideology of Americanismo is an important element in defense of the model of radical democracy and in the attack on ‘foreign’ forms of political rule

          • Political participation has increased but rules of public contestation have been undermined

        • Europe: want democracy to be more responsive to natives and promote exclusion of non-natives

          • Populist parties attract higher levels of blue-collar workers

          • More young and new reps

          • Vehemently oppose extending political rights to ‘aliens’

    • The Symbolic Dimension – least tangible; alludes to setting the boundaries of ‘the people’ and, ex negativo, ‘the elite’

      • “When populists define ‘the people,’ in their rhetoric and symbols without referring to (characteristics and values of) certain groups, the latter are symbolically excluded (for example, Roma in Eastern Europe)” (164).

      • When groups are linked to the elite they are explicitly excluded from ‘the people’

Off, Gefjon. 2023. “Gender equality salience, backlash and radical right voting in the gender-equal context of Sweden.” West European Politics 46(3): 451-476.

Bumper Sticker:

Issue salience does matter.

Research Question:

In an otherwise egalitarian society, under which conditions do gender values play a role in right-wing extremism vote?

Literature:

Gender values and cultural backlash (Norris and Inglehart, 2019 = generational change; Burns and Gallagher, 2010; Spierings, 2020), cultural backlash other issues: immigration + novelty of progressive gender values with anti-immigration (Lancaster, 2022) -> countering Muslim immigration. Issue salience = when does the backlash occurs (Adams, 1997; Dahlstrom and Esaiasson, 2013; Wojcieszak, 2018; Bishin, 2016; Belanger and Meguid, 2008; Dennison, 2020),

Research Design:

A first difference correlational (not causal) analysis of the 2014 and 2018 Sweden elections. Conditional argument placing issue salience, such as liberal gender values, and resulting backlash as a right-wing extremism vote predictor. Difference in exit poles concerning the issue, gender-related Google searches (with Google trends analysis). Using the SNES for survey questions on gender issues and voting preference.

Hypothesis:

1. Gender value gap increases between PRR voters and other voters when gender issues are salient = gender attitudes indicators (y) ~ voting for SD (X1) * year dummy (X2)

2. Conservative gender values are positively related to PRR voting when gender issues are salient = voting for SD (y) ~ on gender attitudes indicators (Xs)/Logistic regression

Mechanism:

Issue salience triggers a cultural backlash: provide more information for the individual on the issue and will provoke a certain type of vote.

Findings:

Having conservative attitudes towards gender issues predicted a 20% probability to vote for SD (more than doubling the prediction between 2014-2018)

1. SD voters hold consistently less progressive views on gender issues

2. This trend increase d between 2014 and 2018 (relating to salience)/ Other voters went the other direction and increased support for progressive measures

3. Gap increased more for power distribution than LGBTQ questions