Inside Politics
Jody Baumgartner, Jonathan Morris & Natasha Walth
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2012, Pages 95-104
Abstract:
Using panel data of young adults, we find evidence that exposure to Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin's performance in the 2008 vice-presidential debate on Saturday Night Live is associated with changes in attitudes toward her selection as VP candidate and presidential vote intentions. These effects are most pronounced among self-identified Independents and Republicans.
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No Country for Honest Men: Political Philosophers and Real Politics
Robert Jubb & Faik Kurtulmus
Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
There are limits on the duty to tell the truth. Sometimes, because of the undesirable consequences of honesty, we are morally required not to reveal certain truths and can even be required to lie. In this article, we explore the implications of this uncontroversial claim for the practice of political philosophers. We argue that, given the consequences of misunderstandings and misrepresentations that might occur, political philosophers will sometimes be under a moral duty not to disseminate their research and, in highly exceptional cases, have a moral duty to lie outright.
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News Coverage of New Presidents in The New York Times, 1981-2009
Stephen Farnsworth & Robert Lichter
Politics & Policy, February 2012, Pages 69-91
Abstract:
Content analysis of front-page The New York Times stories during the first year of the Barack Obama presidency revealed news coverage that was far more positive in tone than that received during the first year of the Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush presidencies. Overall, the Obama findings reveal a media honeymoon in that influential newspaper, a sharp contrast from first-year coverage of other presidents during the modern era of a more combative press. The positive policy coverage Obama received in the Times was also significantly more positive than on evening newscasts of network television and on Fox News' Special Report.
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Warmth and competence: A content analysis of photographs depicting American presidents
Eric Hehman et al.
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, January 2012, Pages 46-52
Abstract:
The current research examines whether images presented alongside online articles might systematically vary in how political targets are presented. We focus our analyses on how presidents who either share or do not share political orientations with Internet media outlets are portrayed along the dimensions of warmth and competence, qualities highly prized in leadership and effectively conveyed in facial images. Four hundred twenty-two images from five online media outlets were coded for warmth and competence. Media outlets sharing political orientations with a target portrayed them as more warm and competent than targets of another orientation. The viability of this effect as a potential mechanism to influence readers of online articles is discussed.
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Vote Trading With and Without Party Leaders
Alessandra Casella, Thomas Palfrey & Sébastien Turban
NBER Working Paper, February 2012
Abstract:
Two groups of voters of known sizes disagree over a single binary decision to be taken by simple majority. Individuals have different, privately observed intensities of preferences and before voting can buy or sell votes among themselves for money. We study the implication of such trading for outcomes and welfare when trades are coordinated by the two group leaders and when they take place anonymously in a competitive market. The theory has strong predictions. In both cases, trading falls short of full efficiency, but for opposite reasons: with group leaders, the minority wins too rarely; with market trades, the minority wins too often. As a result, with group leaders, vote trading improves over no-trade; with market trades, vote trading can be welfare reducing. All predictions are strongly supported by experimental results.
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Confidence in Banks, Financial Institutions, and Wall Street, 1971-2011
Lindsay Owens
Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 2012, Pages 142-162
Abstract:
Animosity toward banks, financial institutions, and Wall Street has been an important part of the public discourse since the bank bailouts of 2008. Indeed, Americans' confidence in all three institutions has plummeted accordingly in the years since. This article places these declines in confidence in historical perspective. I examine trends in confidence in commercial banks, local banks, savings and loan associations, Wall Street, and Wall Street executives over the past 40 years, as well as perceptions of the moral and ethical practices of bankers and stockbrokers. I pay particular attention to how confidence shifts in response to both economic contractions and major scandals. My findings suggest that while changes in the business cycle have an effect on public opinion in this domain, it is the economic contractions that correspond to major scandals in the financial sector that motivate the largest shifts in confidence and provoke the most public outrage.
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Which long coalition? The creation of the anti-slavery coalition
Hans Noel
Party Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How are party coalitions shaped and reshaped? Elected officials choose coalitions to win elections, but they must work to maintain those coalitions. Non-elected political actors, advancing an ideology at odds with the party coalition, can undermine the party. This article explores this possibility in the case of partisan change on slavery in the Antebellum United States. Intellectuals in 1850 divided into two camps over slavery and the other major issues of the day at a time when slavery cross-cut the two parties in Congress. The ideological division matches one that develops in Congress a decade later, suggesting that the parties responded not just to electoral incentives, but also to this elite division.
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Small Donors, Big Democracy: New York City's Matching Funds as a Model for the Nation and States
Michael Malbin, Peter Brusoe & Brendan Glavin
Election Law Journal, March 2012, Pages 3-20
Abstract:
Restrictions on speech will not be accepted by the Supreme Court in the name of equality, but this does not rule out equality and participation as legitimate policy goals. It is both constitutional and appropriate to promote these goals without new constraints on speech by using incentives to increase the number and importance of low-dollar donors. The constitutional theory is straightforward. The empirical question is whether this could work. There are few examples of current policies with this specific purpose. One run by the City of New York gives participating candidates six dollars in matching funds for each of the first $175 that a city resident donates. This article asks whether a similar approach could become a model for others. The argument has three parts. The first is an empirical analysis of New York City's campaign finance records since 1997, showing that (a) multiple matching funds do increase the proportional role of small donors; (b) they have also increased the number of small donors; and (c) they help shift the demographic and class profile of those who give. The second part applies a modeling method to the states to show these results could readily be obtained elsewhere. The third section presents broad theoretical, constitutional, and policy themes. After arguing the futility of using public financing to reduce spending, it urges participation-based public financing to broaden the base. In making this case, the article also presents reasons for preferring matching funds to flat grants or other forms of public financing.
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Political Connections and the Cost of Equity Capital
Narjess Boubakri et al.
Journal of Corporate Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Motivated by recent research on the costs and benefits of political connection, we examine the cost of equity capital of politically connected firms. Using propensity score matching models, we find that politically connected firms enjoy a lower cost of equity capital than their non-connected peers. We find further that political connections are more valuable for firms with stronger ties to political power. In additional analyses, we find that the effect of political connection on firms' equity financing costs is influenced by the prevailing country-level institutional and political environment, and by firm characteristics. Taken together, our findings provide strong evidence that investors require a lower cost of capital for politically connected firms, which suggests that politically connected firms are generally considered less risky than non-connected firms.
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Edward Alan Miller & David Blanding
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 58-74
Abstract:
To access funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, state governors had to formally certify their intent to do so within 45 days of the law's enactment. All governors eventually certified, but with considerable variation in celerity. This study employs event history techniques to model the probability of certifying the ARRA. It argues that the statute's design combined with economic distress within the states rendered manifest rejection of the law politically infeasible but, for state officials with certain partisan commitments, left open the possibility of symbolic resistance or support in the form of time to certification. State leaders relied on party identification to guide their decisions, resulting in markedly different propensities toward certification for Republican and Democratic governors. Results lend credence to this thesis: States with Republican governors were nearly 60% less likely to certify the ARRA on a given day than states with Democratic governors. This finding suggests that when economic constraints and policy design foreclose actual rejection of a federal law, state policymakers may rely on party labels to register their approbation or disapprobation through other means, including the amount of time taken to accept federal funding.
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Which Party Elites Choose to Lead the Nomination Process?
Christopher Anderson
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Even though political parties maintain control of presidential nominations, little is known about what leads individual party members to participate in the process. Party elites have a collective incentive to nominate an electorally viable and ideologically unifying candidate, and they also have personal, strategic incentives that may foster or prevent their participation in the nominating process. Using endorsement data on a subset of party elites - members of the U.S. House of Representatives - this article finds that individual members of the extended party are strategic with their decision to participate in or abstain from the nomination process.
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Business in the Bulls-Eye? Target Corp. and the Limits of Campaign Finance Disclosure
Taren Kingser & Patrick Schmidt
Election Law Journal, March 2012, Pages 21-35
Abstract:
The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United has generated a storm of debate about the role of corporations and unions in American elections. Since organizations may not be barred from participating directly in elections, the political agenda turned to whether disclosure of corporate and union involvement can serve as a check or tool of accountability. In this article we argue that disclosure provides a very limited check, grounding this conclusion on the highest profile case study to emerge in the 2010 midterm election cycle, that of the Target Corporation's contribution supporting a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota. We argue that this case should have provided extremely fertile ground for opponents of direct corporate political contributions, but that even with disclosure and targeted mobilization, the effect appears to have been sharply limited.
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David Lowery et al.
Social Science Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 21-41
Objective: We examine the effects of interest community density on generalist interest organizations. A core element of population ecology theory is competitive exclusion, which suggests two hypotheses. First, through niche partitioning of the issue space among similar organizations and the comparative advantages of specialist organizations, generalists in heavily populated systems struggle to secure members more than their counterparts in less densely populated ones. Second, surviving generalists narrow the scope of their lobbying activities to fewer issues on which they hold comparative advantage.
Methods: We test both hypotheses through regression analysis of data on the mobilization and lobbying focus of U.S. state Chambers of Commerce.
Results: Both participation in state Chambers and the number of bills that Chambers track decline as the business interest community becomes more densely populated.
Conclusions: We conclude that even state Chambers - the old bulls of the lobbying pasture - are powerfully influenced by competition among business interest organizations.
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Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: The rationality of selection to office by lot
George Tridimas
Constitutional Political Economy, March 2012, Pages 1-21
Abstract:
Contrary to modern democracies ancient Athens appointed large numbers of government officers by lot. After describing the Athenian arrangements, the paper reviews the literature on the choice between election and lot focusing on representativeness of the population, distributive justice, minimization of conflicts, quality of appointees and administrative economy. It then examines why in drawing up the constitution a self-interested citizen may give up voting for government officials and appoint them by lot. It is shown that appointment by lot is preferred when the effort required to choose candidates is less than the benefit expected from their actions as government officials. It is also found that, given the choice, office motivated candidates may unanimously agree to selection by lot but not to election.
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Democracy, Populism, and (Un)bounded Rationality
Johannes Binswanger & Jens Prüfer
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we aim to understand how bounded rationality affects performance of democratic institutions. We consider policy choice in a representative democracy when voters do not fully anticipate a politician's strategic behavior to manipulate his reelection chances. We find that this limited strategic sophistication affects policy choice in a fundamental way. Under perfect sophistication, a politician does not make any use of his private information but completely panders to voters' opinions. In contrast, under limited sophistication, a politician makes some use of private information and panders only partially. Limited sophistication crucially determines how welfare under representative democracy compares to welfare under alternative political institutions such as direct democracy or governance by experts. We find that, under limited strategic sophistication, representative democracy is preferable to the other institutions from an ex ante perspective.
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The interest group effect on citizen contact with Congress
Thomas Holyoke
Party Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
To what extent is citizen political participation, such as electronic or personal contact with members of Congress, stimulated by membership in organized interest groups? I use data from a nationwide survey conducted by Zogby in 2007 to assess the extent to which Americans contact congressional offices, and whether membership in more activist-oriented groups, such as citizen groups, stimulates greater rates of contact than membership in professional associations or no group membership at all. I also examine whether this group ‘effect' on participation breaks down by the method used, low-effort electronic contact (mail, email, web-based contact pages, on-line petitions) versus high-effort contact such as personal meetings with lawmakers. I find that the role played by interest groups in facilitating communication can be substantial. In the case of members from lower socio-economic backgrounds in particular, membership in a citizen group helps compensate for lack of knowledge and resources regarding how to contact Congress.
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Connecting to Constituents: The Diffusion of Representation Practices among Congressional Websites
Kevin Esterling, David Lazer & Michael Neblo
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Legislative websites are increasingly important in the practice of representation. Since adapting old practices to new technology entails uncertainty, the authors expect legislative offices to learn website representation practices from each other. Using data from the 2006 and 2007 official home pages of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, the authors find that web design practices regarding the content of legislative websites diffuse within state delegations, that is, among members hailing from the same state, but the underlying website technologies do not. These results suggest the continued importance, even in the online world, of state delegations in congressional representation.
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Issue-Specific Political Uncertainty and Policy Insulation in US Federal Agencies
Stéphane Lavertu
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Policymakers may take a number of measures to keep their preferred policies intact in the face of political threats. Scholars have explored this phenomenon extensively, formulating and testing models of delegation and insulation. But existing models have conflicting and nuanced empirical implications. I contend that the general and coherent implications of delegation and insulation theories can be realized by focusing on the politics of particular issue areas and by reconsidering a recent formalization of Terry Moe's theory of policy insulation. I examine this argument empirically using augmented versions of prominent data sets on statutory delegation and agency design in the United States. The analysis yields results consistent with the proposition that issue-specific political uncertainty leads to policy insulation. The explanatory power of measures of issue-specific policy volatility and conflict (proxies for political uncertainty) rivals that of the interbranch conflict measures that existing research tends to emphasize.
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The World of Regulatory Influence
Jeffrey Macher & John Mayo
Journal of Regulatory Economics, February 2012, Pages 59-79
Abstract:
Models of firms' influence over the regulatory agencies that oversee them have traditionally been constrained by several factors, including a lack of direct measures of "influence," an inability to account for variations in the institutional environment within which firms operate, and a nearly singular focus on industry-level measures of interest group strengths. In this paper, we employ a global database and novel measures to provide a fresh look at the determinants of firms' influence over regulatory agencies. We find that in addition to traditional industry-level determinants, important country-level institutional and firm-level determinants affect firms' regulatory agency influence. We also find that regulatory process variations affect firms' influence over regulators. With these empirical estimates in hand, we generate a Regulatory Influence Index that ranks influence levels of typical firms that operate in each sample country in the dataset, and then discuss the substantial country-level variation in regulatory agency influence that obtains.