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This paper examines how individual-level partisanship and state-level factors affect perceptions of electoral integrity in the United States. We find that evaluations of the integrity of the 2020 US presidential election national outcome were only modestly conditioned by the quality of election administration in a person's state. Perceptions of electoral legitimacy were much more substantially conditioned by motivated reasoning associated with a person's partisanship, the partisan context Republicans resided in, and Republican partisans' residence in a swing-state where final results from 2020 were delayed due to late-counted ballots. Overall, estimated effects of the quality of election administration on confidence in elections are null or modest. Partisan factors associated with Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about the 2020 US presidential election were the strongest forces predicting lack of confidence in US elections and perceptions that election officials were altering results. These factors were not evident in 2016. We discuss how these findings may reflect a fundamental alteration of attitudes among Republican voters and elites about the legitimacy of democratic elections in the US, rather than reflecting cyclical variation in partisan confidence associated with which party won the past election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender differences in political knowledge are a well-known empirical finding in public opinion research. Scholars working in this area have proposed various explanations for this phenomenon, often focusing on issues regarding the format and content of factual knowledge batteries. Yet, there are surprisingly few works that focus on how scholars might diversify the content of political knowledge measures to develop items that are less biased toward male areas of expertise. In this paper, we propose an inductive framework to develop more gender-balanced knowledge batteries by including political issues that are of particular relevance to women and women's lives. Employing gender-balanced measures of political knowledge reveal instances where women and men demonstrate equivalent levels of political knowledge and higher levels of political interest and efficacy among women—engagement that is often masked by conventional measures of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the U.S. House and Senate differ in many significant ways, perhaps the most important is the ability of House leaders to control the legislative process through the usage of special rules, which establish the terms of debate on a bill and can limit the number and content of amendments allowed. House members of both the majority and minority party have complained about their recent increased usage. In contrast, the Senate lacks a comparable tool and scholars have reported sharp increases in the number of floor amendments being proposed. In this paper, we examine the increase in proposed floor amendments in the Senate; arguing that, in addition to an increased value from electoral position-taking, the procedures employed in the House influence the floor behavior of senators. Specifically, we find that senators are more likely to offer amendments to bills that were passed under a restrictive rule in the House. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using traits conventionally believed to lead to elevation from the Circuit Courts to the Supreme Court, this paper uses an item response theory model to estimate latent elevation estimates for each Circuit Court judge nominated and confirmed between 1901 and 2017. I validate this measure by showing that it predicts which Circuit Court judges are promoted to the Supreme Court and which end up on the president's Supreme Court shortlist. Furthermore, I investigate how the Senate strategically responds to the nomination of Circuit Court nominees with high elevation estimates. The Senate takes longer to confirm nominees with high elevation scores and is less likely to confirm them by voice vote, and these nominees receive a greater share of nay votes. This paper concludes by suggesting additional uses for the elevation estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the “state” and the “people” are antonyms of American political thought is a widely held assumption. This essay argues that it is a mistake—Americans early in their thinking about politics distinguished the state from government and defined the state as the people themselves. Building on a deep reservoir of political thought pioneered by seventeenth-century theorists, Americans believed that to raise questions about the state was to inquire about the legitimacy of governmental action. The essay has three parts. It begins by explicating Quentin Skinner’s recent research on the concept of the state, supplemented by the work of other scholars, to apply that research to the American context. The essay then turns to a discussion of the concept of “the people” in the American context to orient the final section of the paper. Finally, the paper explicates James Wilson and St. George Tucker’s influential and rival populist theories of the American state. The overall aim of the essay is to stretch our political imagination and thus help us begin to reimagine the concept of the democratic state in more fruitful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political interest is one of the strongest predictors of individual political engagement, but little is known about the origins of this political orientation. The goal of this paper is to clarify the role that biological and psychological factors play in the formation of political interest. A series of recent studies in genetics have illustrated that political interest is heritable, and a series of recent studies in political science and psychology have demonstrated that personality traits, many of which are heritable, are related to political interest. In this paper, we make a number of contributions to the literature: (1) we replicate previous analyses showing that political interest and personality traits are heritable, (2) we demonstrate that personality traits are related to interest, and (3) we estimate the extent to which genetic factors account for the correlation between personality traits and political interest. Using two datasets on twins, we find evidence that genetic factors account for a large amount of the correlation between political interest and personality traits. This study provides a more nuanced picture of the biological and psychological bases of political orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. apportions congressional districts both across states and within states based upon population. Scholars have long focused on the electoral implications of redistricting within states, but there has been less consideration of the electoral implications of apportionment across states. In this paper, I analyze congressional elections from 2002 to 2014 and theorize that the limited number of political opportunities in states with few congressional districts will lead to higher levels of quality candidate emergence and electoral competition in these states. I find support for this theory; specifically, as the number of political opportunities in a state increases, the number of quality candidates running for office decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elite rhetoric is an important aspect of democracy, and understanding why elites alter their rhetorical tone is vital to understanding the nature of public--elite interaction. In this paper, we identify the conditions under which insulated elites respond to public opinion by changing the amount of disagreeable rhetoric they emphasize. We examine Supreme Court opinions and theorize that the majority limits the use of disagreeable rhetoric--language with harsh, unpleasant, or negative connotations--in salient cases with the intention of dulling public opposition to rulings. We test our expectations on two levels, the first using a broad measure of public mood on a large sample of cases and the second using a small sample with issue-specific public opinion measures. We find that as public opinion diverges from the Court, the majority tones down its disagreeable rhetoric, but only in salient cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on media in the post-broadcast age of politics focuses on how media affect the public, not on the interinstitutional relationships between the presidency and news media. This study tackles this important topic by studying news coverage of and presidential attention to the issue of income inequality. We use web scraping and text analysis software to build a dataset of weekly news coverage from 1999 through 2013, across traditional and nontraditional media, including newspapers, broadcast and cable television transcripts, and online news websites. The data show that presidential attention to income inequality influences the income inequality news agenda across all sources except network television and affects the tone of newspaper coverage. Presidential influence of tone is especially pronounced on income inequality issues that have an international focus. The implications of this paper are significant not only for understanding how media and the presidency interact in the post-broadcast age but also for the prospects for federal policies that may combat income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latino-majority congressional districts are far more likely to elect Latino representatives to Congress than majority-white districts. However, not all majority-Latino districts do so. This paper addresses this question, and it investigates how the level of influence of political parties and interest groups in majority-Latino districts substantially shapes Latino representation to the US House of Representatives. I rely on five case studies and a dataset of candidates to open congressional races with a Latino population plurality from 2004 to 2014. The evidence indicates that groups and political networks are critical for Latina/o candidate recruitment, the organization of resources in a congressional district, the deployment of campaign resources on behalf of certain candidates, and the eventual success of Latina/o candidates. The findings suggest that Latino descriptive and substantive representation are shaped by the wielding influence of political parties and interest groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores public perceptions of congressional partisanship in an era of polarized parties. We use data from a module on the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) that asks respondents about the voting behavior of their legislators. Our results show that individuals underestimate the extent to which legislators from their own party vote the party line—even when primed with information about high levels of party-line voting in Congress—while fairly accurately perceiving levels of unity in the opposing party. We also find evidence that this perceptual gap endures, and at times widens, at higher levels of political knowledge and in the presence of elections. Finally, in a separate experiment, we explore how voters respond to differential levels of party-line voting by a hypothetical legislator. The combined results from the experiment and CCES module suggest voters’ perceptions often align with what allows them to have the most favorable impression of their party’s senators or unfavorable impression of the other party’s senators. The results suggest that biases in how voters process information about levels of partisanship in Congress may limit accountability in meaningful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current US undocumented population is large and settled. As a result, millions of US-born citizens are growing up with undocumented parents or siblings. In this paper, we use original survey data to study the politics of the US-citizen offspring of undocumented migrants. We test theories of parental political socialization, which imply that having undocumented parents may have chilling effects on political engagement. We also test theories of social activism, which predict that the offspring of the undocumented may be motivated to make use of their rights as US citizens by protesting on behalf of their parents. We find no evidence of lower political engagement among those with undocumented parents. Instead, we find that the offspring of the undocumented are more likely to protest on immigration issues, and more optimistic that popular protest can induce political change. We use an instrumental variables design to test whether these differences warrant a causal interpretation, and find tentative evidence that having undocumented parents does indeed have mobilizing political effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding public preferences for governing processes is an understudied area of research. In this paper, I evaluate a set of critical assumptions relating to process preferences that the literature has thus far not addressed. I specifically address the claims made by John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse in their seminal book, Stealth Democracy, which suggests that people prefer political decisions to be made via expert-based governing arrangements to promote a level of efficiency and effectiveness within the government that elected officials cannot provide. Using original questions from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, I find concurring evidence that citizens are not strongly attached to standard participatory processes found in democracy. However, upon using more precise measurements and placing expert processes into contemporary context, preferences weaken and appear to be shallow in nature. In an era where process preferences are receiving more attention as trust in government wanes, it is important to understand the depth of these preferences and their potential to change politics. These results suggest it is imperative for future scholars to approach the study of process preferences with care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of economic downturns for states’ redistributive politics. We track state policies from 1980 through 2010 and illustrate how economic downturns led states to adopt budget-balancing policies by suppressing both the increased spending on programs benefiting the poor otherwise expected under Democratic Party control and the tax cuts for the wealthy otherwise expected under Republican Party control. We also undertake a natural experiment case study—comparing the forty Democratic and Republican governors in office right before (2007–2008) and after (2009–2010) the onset of the Great Recession. We find that Republican governors were less likely to propose spending and increased calls for spending cuts; yet, no similar shift in tax proposals was evident with continued calls for tax cuts to the wealthy. Democratic governors exhibited a similar pattern, but were less responsive and more likely to maintain their earlier policy proposals even after a significant downturn in the national economy. Together, these findings highlight how economic and political conditions interact with one another to shape “who gets what, when, and how from government,” as well as clarify that we must ask and answer these questions separately for taxing and spending to capture the complex politics of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Super-majorities have occurred frequently in Congress but have escaped scholarly attention. This paper employs new measures of positive agenda control and a unique data set of 3,407 nontrivial bills from 1981 to 2008 to answer two questions: how did legislative leaders construct veto-proof coalitions, and what did presidents do with them? Legislative leaders, we argue, deployed procedures to expand and sustain veto-proof coalitions, despite increasing polarization. The resulting history, which signaled members' commitment to a bill, provided information to the president that reduced uncertainty about possibilities for interbranch bargaining and the likely success of a veto. We find that positive agenda control increased the probability of vote tallies of two-thirds or more, especially after the 1994 election. In addition, we demonstrate that presidents concentrated veto activity on bills with outcomes of less than two-thirds, rejected some veto-proof bills for reputational gains, and deployed signing statements strategically. The analysis suggests that congressional leaders paradoxically gained capacity for nurturing large, bipartisan alliances as the institution became more polarized. Moreover, it demonstrates that strategic activity by legislative leaders is critical to explaining variation in presidential options for veto bargaining and signing statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her various roles as First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has long maintained that the subjugation of women poses a national security threat to the United States. Clinton's proposition has come to be termed the "Hillary Doctrine." Yet does this principle receive support from the empirical record? In this paper, we offer a test of the Hillary Doctrine by analyzing if more anti-American terrorism emanates from countries that restrict women's rights than from countries that are not gender restrictive. Using a time series, cross-national analysis of 156 countries from the period 1981 to 2005, our negative binomial models offer strong support for the Hillary Doctrine and suggest that the promotion of women's rights may well enhance the national security of the United States with respect to terrorism. These results are robust to a wide range of changes to the empirical research design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last three election cycles suggest that we may be experiencing a surge in black political ambition. Barack Obama's historic election is sandwiched between the failed efforts of people such as Denise Majette, Harold Ford Jr., Artur Davis, and Kendrick Meek. Combined with Cory Booker's senatorial run, scholars have argued that there is a need for a reevaluation of black political ambition and a new classification for black politics itself. If we are experiencing a genuine emergence of a new ambitious breed of black politicians, then the paradox of ambition--that black electoral success is detrimental to black agenda setting--would suggest that we may also be experiencing a major abandonment of black politics. This paper begins to investigate this possibility in terms of individual bill sponsorship for black members of Congress from 1947 to 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial stereotyping has been found to handicap African American and Latino candidates in negative ways. It is less clear how racial stereotypes may change the fortunes of Asian candidates. This paper explores the candidacies of Asian Americans with an experiment run through Amazon Mechanical Turk as well as real-world evaluations of Asian American candidates using the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study. In my experiments, I find that Asian candidates do significantly better than white candidates across different biographical scenarios (conservative, liberal, and foreign). I find that, contrary to expectations, Asian candidates are not significantly disadvantaged from being immigrant and foreign born. My experimental results mirror my observational results, which show that Asian Democrats are significantly advantaged even when compared with whites. These results indicate that Asian candidates in America face a set of racial-political stereotypes that are unique to their racial subgroup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship is the “unmoved mover” in the minds of American voters. Revisionist theories hold that party updating is conditional on individual/contextual factors. By delimiting the scope conditions of the Michigan model, revisionist models do not fundamentally challenge the classic view. This paper proffers an unconditional model of party revision. We theorize that beliefs about government activism—operational ideology—are widely available and heuristically efficacious, and easily map onto party labels. Hence, operational ideology should drive party updating. Using data from seven panel studies covering 1990–2012, we demonstrate that (1) party shapes operational ideology, (2) operational ideology shapes party, (3) the ideology-to-party effects are as large as the party-to-ideology effects, and (4) neither sophistication nor education or elite polarization condition these relationships. These results push the revisionist model of party farther than it has gone before and suggest that operational ideology is a core predisposition in mass belief systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the vast majority of American states, governors have unrestricted authority to fill Senate vacancies, and in an average decade, one-third of all Americans have been represented by an appointed senator. Despite the importance of Senate appointments both theoretically and substantively, no published study has investigated the dynamics of gubernatorial selection. In this paper, we compile an original data set of Senate appointees as well as the list of the candidates the governor considered but did not select. We model the governor’s selection and discover that despite having no formal constraints on their appointment power, governors behave as constrained actors. In particular, we find that governors eschew the potential appointees who are closest to their policy views and instead appoint the candidate who is closest to the ideological position of the voters in their state. This effect is particularly pronounced when the governor is eligible for reelection within two years. These findings have both theoretical and normative implications for understanding Senate appointments, gubernatorial decision making, and the implicit power of the electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of biases in economic information on partisans’ economic perceptions. In survey experiments, I manipulate the presence of partisan cues and the direction of proattitudinal information in news stories about the American economy. Results demonstrate that although proattitudinal tone in factual economic news stories most strongly affects partisans’ economic perceptions, inclusion of partisan cues alongside proattitudinal information results in weaker shifts in economic sentiment relative to stories lacking partisan content. These findings suggest that the relatively subtle process of agenda setting in economic news may be the most effective tool used by partisan news outlets to drive polarization in citizens’ factual economic perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use redistricting to examine the relationship between representatives and a unique group of the public: individual campaign contributors. Our primary objective is to determine what happens to the contribution behavior of representatives and donors after district boundaries shift and the geographic ties between members and donors are undone. At the member level, we use a continuous measure of district change and examine twenty years of congressional elections. We find that as the geographic constituency changes, members receive larger shares of contributions from outside their districts. At the individual donor level, we match donors and contributions to districts before and after the 2012 round of redistricting. Here, we find donors who are drawn out of districts are less likely to support their “old” representative while contributors drawn into districts are more likely to give. At both levels, we find different results for Democrats and Republicans. Our findings suggest that representation can extend beyond Fenno’s geographic constituency and speak to issues related to democratic accountability in a geographic based system of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why donors give money to legislative candidates is vital for assessing how money influences politics. In this paper, I test theories of why political action committees (PACs) and individuals, the two largest sources of campaign money, contribute to legislative candidates. Using a variety of data at the state and federal level, I show dramatic differences between individual and PAC contribution patterns. An original survey of donors in the 2012 election cycle shows that individuals consistently rank ideological concerns as highly important when deciding where to give. Finally, using two different within-legislator designs, I show a causal relationship between incumbency, ideology, and contributions. These results provide the most direct and comprehensive test of contributor motivations to date.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does Congress repeal laws enacted by prior generations? Although the substantial body of work on policy creation provides tentative explanations, we believe repeals represent an alternative way of examining the effects of congressional organization on legislative behavior. In this paper, we develop hypotheses based on both the conditional nature of party power and the location of pivot points, and test these hypotheses with a new data set of repeals from 1877 to 2012. We find that the largest effects on Congress’s capacity to repeal legislation are variation in the majority’s positive agenda control and shifts in the gridlock interval. We also find that when the majority claims control of both chambers after a long stretch in the minority, there is an increased likelihood of repeal beyond what is predicted by conditional party government alone. Because the partisan factors in our model have the largest substantive effects, and because repeals do not occur automatically in productive Congresses, we characterize repeals as long-term contests between two great “teams” over the location of the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how financial deregulation and the partisan underpinnings of deregulation shaped the path of income inequality in the United States. Using time-series data from 1914 to 2010, we assess the effect of partisan politics on financial deregulation and, in turn, the effect of deregulation on income inequality. We find that financial deregulation has generally declined when Democrats attain more power in Washington and that deregulation has contributed to rising inequality. We also learn that the partisan effect on deregulation has diminished since the early 1980s, suggesting that one way partisan politics has contributed to the recent rise in inequality is related to convergence on matters of financial deregulation. We explore several potential explanations for this post–1980 partisan convergence, finding evidence supporting the idea that globalization, the increasing availability of credit, and shifts in campaign finance were contributing factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the direct, short-term effect of presidential communications on policy preferences. Using panel studies and post-speech surveys, I demonstrate that following a speech, public opinion changes in the direction of the president. This effect is strongest among people who watch the president. While the number of people who tune to the president may be small, indeed getting smaller over time, it is composed of people who participate in the political process, are more likely to affect it, and therefore are of interest to opinion leaders. The findings reveal that presidents are effective leaders of public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Judicial behavior is contingent on case salience. Unfortunately, existing measures of case salience have met with some skepticism. After discussing the characteristics of an ideal measure of salience, the authors construct a new measure of case salience. This new measure expands on prior studies by examining coverage in four diverse newspapers and includes coverage anywhere in the paper, instead of concentrating on front-page coverage only. By developing this new measure, the authors uncover patterns about national media coverage of the Court and provide a potentially more useful measure of case salience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the staples of American politics is the theory that party competition is a function of constituency diversity. In Federalist #10 (see Rae and Taylor 1970: 7; Fiorina 1974: 89-119; Sullivan 1973) Madison emphasizes that increased constituency diversity facilitates factional dispute. As diversity increases, it weakens the ability of any single faction to represent the multifarious demands of people in a geographic area (The Federalist Papers 1961: 77-83). Despite this relatively simple and normatively pleasing explanatory perspective, and despite this theory's broad acceptance in political science, the study of the relationship between constituency diversity and party competition has been one of the more elusive and sometimes contradictory research topics of the past 30 years. This article analyzes county level data from the 1970s and 1980s—the period that forms the basis of much of this literature to assess the theoretical and empirical purchase of three of the dominant operational definitions for constituency diversity and then compares these county level findings with parallel state level analyses. I find that reformulated Lieberson/Sullivan social diversity indexes and Koetzle's political diversity index produce similar results at the state and county levels of analysis. Moreover, these results are consistent with the theory that constituency diversity has a strong influence on the level of party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a Shambaugh conference at the University of Iowa in 2008 concerning the 2008 U.S. Presidential election is presented. Topics include an examination of white voting patterns in the 2008 elections, macro voting patterns using political psychology and individual-level survey data, and the effect descriptive representation has on minority voting in state legislatures.

The article announces meeting, awards, nominations and call for papers for the Western Political Science Association (WPSA) in the U.S. The March 2008 meeting of the WPSA will be held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego, California. Several awards were presented by the association at the 2007 Annual Meeting held in Las Vegas, Nevada. The WPSA Committee on Nominations requests that nominations be submitted for various WPSA officer positions. Meanwhile, the deadline for the submission of paper proposals/program participation forms for the 2008 WPSA Convention is on September 10, 2007.