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With recent experimental studies of voting contagion and the usefulness of social pressure, there has been growing attention to the role peer-mobilization plays in turning out the vote. Despite this surge of interest in peer-mobilization and decades of study of party-mobilization, political science has still devoted little study of the role of social network structure in mediating these efforts. In an effort to help close this gap in the literature, this paper examines two questions. First, how do network characteristics shape the probability that actors within that network receive mobilizing appeals? Second, how do network characteristics influence individuals’ probability of turning out to vote when they receive such an appeal? Through the use of social network survey data, this paper examines how real-world networks shape political mobilization, with implications both for scholars of voting behavior and practitioners of GOTV organizing. Moreover, as it examines the political consequences of network characteristics studied more frequently in other fields including local clustering, multiplicity, and foci, this paper seeks to add to the political science toolbox as well as to the literature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many scholars have recently conducted quantitative and qualitative investigations of the structure and content of “A-list” politically-oriented weblogs, few have focused on the civic involvement of their authors which are often defined as “opinion leaders”. Based on data collected through a Web-based survey conducted in April 2008, this paper proposes a detailed socio-political portrait of 56 “A-list” members of the Quebec political blogosphere. The Internet-savvy population of the Canadian province of Quebec, which is characterized by its linguistic, political and cultural specificity, constitutes a well-defined research environment enabling the production of highly-representative results. The description of Quebec-based bloggers’ involvement in content dispersion and social Web-based networks as well as their participation in offline political activities will help to produce a detailed socio-political behavioral portrayal of the influential players within the Quebec political blogosphere. Additionally, this paper draws sharp contrasts with previous studies of Canadian and U.S.-based bloggers and argues for the production of more detailed analysis considering the specificities of North American political bloggers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three types of political participation could currently be distinguished, representative, consumer, and direct participation, and it has been argued that there is considerable variation in the levels of these different forms of participation in different countries. Within this paper, it is aimed to (partly) explain variance in levels of different forms of participation through one institutional character of a system: public administration. The past decades, a wave of administrative reforms has occurred which was aimed to increase access, accountability and transparency through representation or direct participation in administrative affairs. This aim would lead to the expectation that (certain forms of) participation has increased. These administrative reforms, or New Public Management (NPM), imply generally a liberalization of the public sphere. However, these reforms have been implemented to different degrees in different countries. The questions that guide this paper are: Does more liberalization of the public sector lead to higher levels of political participation, and, if so, which form of participation is affected most? Cases that will be included are established democracies, and the analyses are at the country-level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the effect of 'linking institutions'-- political parties, unions, churches and non-governmental organizations-on political participation. Using a unique set of contextual data that measure organizational density by state and/or county, and that links these data to the geocoded responses in the 2006 Latino National Survey, the paper will contribute to our understanding on the link between organizations and individual electoral and non-electoral participation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reevaluates socioeconomic neighborhood effects on political participation taking account for the effects from sorting. Past literature of political science has identified that poverty and socioeconomic homogeneity are the two major neighborhood-level inhibitors of political participation. Those studies, however, ignore the effects of sorting either theoretically or statistically. Given the magnitude of sorting having occurred after WWII, there is enough room to suspect that neighborhood effects simply represent the difference in the dispositions of residents between neighborhoods. Moreover, randomized social experiment is not necessarily the best method in this case because it tends to pick up the applicants who have high level of voice. Using Social Capital Benchmark Survey matched with tract level census and methodologically relying on the generalization of propensity score by Imai and van Dyk(2004), this paper attempts to elucidate the heterogeneity of neighborhood effects. The results show that consideration of the propensity score makes most statistically significant neighborhood effects under parametric model disappear. Breakdown coefficients also suggest that sorting is not necessarily the inhibitor of political participation, but mismatched residency is. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the presence of gender quotas makes political parties likely to ask their female members to run for elective office. Based on an original mail survey of over 1000 local party leaders in Germany, this paper finds that female members in German parties are no less likely than male members to have been asked by their parties to run for elective office. Furthermore, this result is also observed in political parties without gender quotas and in and places where state and local electoral systems are not compatible with the use of quotas, indicating that, in this case, quotas have a contagion effect. They have created a normative expectation that parties nominate female candidates even in instances when there is no official quota in place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project in which I investigate what I call the cultivation of responsiveness. In the larger project I ask: How can individuals come to acknowledge practically meaningful connections between their everyday activities and the suffering of distant others? I call such acknowledgement responsiveness. Every day, sweatshop workers labor in anonymous obscurity under fundamentally exploitative and often violent conditions, producing consumer goods for purchase around the world. These workers are often in distant countries, out of sight and (frequently) out of mind. Many scholars and activists claim that we contribute to their suffering when we buy sweatshop merchandise, and that we therefore have a responsibility to do something about such suffering: Protest sweatshops, for example, and take our business elsewhere. And yet many of us continue to buy the merchandise, and the suffering continues unabated. Why is it sometimes so difficult to acknowledge our implication in the suffering of others? Distance alone cannot be the answer; media technologies offer more than enough access to evidence of the suffering of sweatshop workers and others too. In this paper I show how the phenomenon of bad faith impedes the cultivation of responsiveness, and what it might mean to overcome that phenomenon. What emerges is that bad faith and its opposite are sustained by the narratives that structure our apprehension of our condition. These can be diagnostic narratives that uncover instances of bad faith; or they can be self-deceiving narratives, which reinforce bad faith. Attention to the narrative structure of bad faith, and its opposite, calls for more systematic attention to the ways in which narratives structure our experiences of social and political life. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first tests whether voters punish incumbent state supreme court judges who are ideologically distant from the state’s citizens. The paper then examines whether ideologically distant incumbent judges are more likely to be punished when facing politically involved citizens. The empirical results show that ideologically distant incumbent judges are more likely to lose an election, but that this effect is conditional on the citizenry’s level of political participation. While this effect appears to be disproportionately stronger in partisan elections, the relationship between incumbent defeat and ideological distance also appears to be present in non-partisan elections. These results have two main implications. First, it provides additional evidence that ideological accountability is a feature in some judicial elections. Second, the results show that judicial elections are very similar to non-judicial elections, in that politically interested voters cast more sophisticated votes. These findings lessen two concerns about judicial elections: that judicial elections are fundamentally different from non-judicial elections and that voters are unable to hold elected judges accountable. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of religious belief and communal religious involvement on political participation among men and women in Africa. The central questions this paper addresses include the following: (1) Do religious belief and practice encourage or discourage political participation by women? (2) Do religious belief and practice have a greater impact on the likelihood that women will be politically engaged than on the likelihood that men will be politically engaged? (3) To what extent does the impact of religious belief and communal practice on women's political participation depend on the type of religion in question or the particular denomination? These questions are addressed using the results of a mass survey of Christians and Muslims conducted in Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda during 2006 and 2007. First, we find that, although Christianity and Islam are more encouraging of men's political participation than women's political participation, neither Christianity nor Islam depresses women's political participation. Second, and to our surprise, the results indicate that religious belief has a more positive impact on political participation than communal religious practice and that this is especially true for women. Third, religious belief has a more powerful and positive effect on political participation among Muslim women than among Christian women. Among other things, the findings suggest that further study should be devoted to discerning which types of religious beliefs are most powerful predictors of political participation and why. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transformation, and transformative capacity of Islamic movements under the proper democratic rules. Debates about the lack of democratic rule in Muslim countries are dominated by the primordialist approaches. This paper, however, follows a newly emerging process and actor oriented approach. Instead of focusing on the essential differences, it claims the transformative effects of the process of proper democratic rules even on the most radical movements. According to this logic, any radical movement, put under the proper democratic rules, if it desires to apply its political agenda, has to transform itself into a more moderate form. This theoretical framework is applied to the Justice and Development Party (JDP) case in Turkey. By a vertical comparison between the declarations of the party leaders in their early careers and the ones in their last period a strong support for transformation was found. Moreover, a horizontal comparison between the JDP (current governing party) and Felicity Party (the marginal Islamic party) also illustrated the transformation process of Islamic movement in Turkey. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines stability and change in the content of nonwhite political appeals during key congressional elections in New York City from the 1940s until the present time. This chapter focuses on the 15th Congressional District, the 11th Congressional District, and 16th Congressional District, areas with high native black, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican populations. This paper explores how local political institutions, specifically party organizations, and shifting socioeconomic conditions influence the claims native black, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican politicians make on government. This paper finds that the content of nonwhite elite political appeals grew more diverse of over timeâ€"less racially oriented and more economically oriented, less racial and more ethnic. These shifts follow socioeconomic changes and are facilitated by endogenous party structures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of individuals' perceptions of social inequality on their political engagement in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Using new survey data in 13 CEE countries, the preliminary findings suggest that individuals who see excessive amounts of social inequality exhibit lower levels of social activity including opportunities to build social capital and a deeper community life (including perceptions of their own political efficacy) than those who do not. However, this high perceptions group also displays a consistent and distinct pattern of political engagement in the form of interest, knowledge, and political participation. More interestingly, in contrast to the overall corrosive effect of income inequality on political engagement, especially for lower income individuals, the mixed effect of social inequality only weakly and sporadically mediated by individuals' income levels despite initial evidence that income moderates perceptions of social inequality. Thus, overall, we find evidence that social inequality is not only theoretically separate from income inequality but also exerts an independent influence on individuals' engagement with democratic politics in post-communist states.This paper analyzes the effects of individuals' perceptions of social inequality on their political engagement in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Using new survey data in 13 CEE countries, the preliminary findings suggest that individuals who see excessive amounts of social inequality exhibit lower levels of social activity including opportunities to build social capital and a deeper community life (including perceptions of their own political efficacy) than those who do not. However, this high perceptions group also displays a consistent and distinct pattern of political engagement in the form of interest, knowledge, and political participation. More interestingly, in contrast to the overall corrosive effect of income inequality on political engagement, especially for lower income individuals, the mixed effect of social inequality only weakly and sporadically mediated by individuals' income levels despite initial evidence that income moderates perceptions of social inequality. Thus, overall, we find evidence that social inequality is not only theoretically separate from income inequality but also exerts an independent influence on individuals' engagement with democratic politics in post-communist states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses survey data from 2004 from eight democracies in Central America, Mexico and Colombia from the Latin American Public Opinion Project to explore political legitimacy and its links to political participation. Theory argues that political legitimacy is multidimensional; this proves empirically correct, producing six legitimacy dimensions. Six modes of political participation are also identified empirically. Prior research on Costa Rica had suggested that some legitimacy-participation functions are U-shaped, such that citizens with very high and very low legitimacy norms would take part in politics more than those with intermediate legitimacy norms. This paper employs OLS regression analysis to test for the effects of legitimacy upon participation, modeling the effect of both linear and quadratic forms of political legitimacy to test for the curvilinear relationships, as well as the influence of multiple intervening and control variables. By far the predominant form of relationship revealed is indeed U-shaped. The paper explores the implications of this finding for both the legitimacy research and for the potential stability of democracies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beginning of the 90s was a time of reform for the world of central banking. The period saw an important increase in the independence of central banks [Maxfield, 1997]. But what have the central banks done with this independence? When we are willing to infer interest-based behavior for all actors (governments, voters and interest groups), why do we make the assumption that the central banks are purely technocratic institutions maximizing the welfare of the state? To answer these questions this paper looks at the role of the Argentinean Central Bank between 1991 and 2007. It presents a combination of periods within a comparative approach, and explains at what point the members of the Argentinean Central Bank acted against the government and why. To do so this paper uses the methodology of Event History Analysis, implementing a model of game theory which is an adaptation of that used by Cho (1987). An intertemporal conflict of interest is the explanation for the Central Bank's behavior. The results of this analysis indicates that the ending of presidential mandates, as well as transitions in the economy minister's post, have the largest influence on changes in Central Bank policy. As means of a control this research accounts for the presence of economic crisis, which reflects the Central Bank's bureaucratic role. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of elite cues rarely consider the effect of emotion on how persuasive cues are to citizens. This paper explores how emotions influence the acceptance of elite cues, focusing on foreign policy. To test how emotion affects the acceptance of foreign policy cues, I ran an experiment through Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences that manipulated the type of foreign policy cue, the cue giver's partisanship, and the emotional power of the cue. By examining how emotional appeals influence the acceptance of elite cues, I test an alternative mechanism by which elites influence the public. The findings show that fear increases the persuasiveness of cues only when the cue-giver and cue-recipient come from the same political party. However, fear may also lead citizens to adopt opinions contrary to elites’ arguments. This paper reveals that fear is most effective when communicated by a trusted elite who shares citizens’ partisanship, even if the foreign policy cue is incongruent with the party’s usual stance. By considering how fear interacts with the type of foreign policy argument as well as the political identity of cue-givers, this paper complicates our understanding of when elites can persuade citizens on foreign policy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the sweeping (re) introduction of multiparty systems in the early 1990s almost all sub-Saharan countries have introduced legal provisions to ban ethnic or other identity-based particularistic parties. Altogether 11 countries have actually banned political parties on these grounds. Given widespread fears that identity-based party politics increase the risk of inter-communal conflict, these bans may work for peace. However, up to now this link has remained almost ignored by research, and this paper engages in a first systematic analysis whether or not ethnic and other identity-related party bans do facilitate peace and how they influence the development of democracy. The paper draws on data from various sources as well as on our own survey, a unique inventory on ethnic party bans in Africa, and uses both quantitative and macro-qualitative methodologies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political and managerial leadership change has been shown to have a relationship with the subsequent performance of public organisations. Research also suggests that prior performance is related to leadership change, with poor performance leading to changes at the top. However, hardly any work has brought these relationships together in an unbroken chain of events, in part because of the difficulties of obtaining suitable data. In this paper we estimate such a chain, using the opportunity created by a balanced and compact panel data set of 142 English local governments that includes political and managerial changes and a comprehensive set of performance measures. We develop a recursive set of equations to analyse the relationships between initial performance and leadership change and leadership change and subsequent performance. Our findings provide some evidence in accordance with a 'virtuous cycle' for the more broadly-based of the two performance measures we use: Low performance increases the likelihood of political change and raises the rate of managerial change, and the consequence of this increase in the rate of managerial turnover is performance improvement. Overall, this paper shows how panel data allow a set of interconnected question to be answered in a recursive set of equations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents, once again, have been given a high-profile role in the 2008 electoral campaign by both the parties and the media. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s status as a working mother seems to have reinvigorated the parties’ attempts to appeal to parents and portray themselves as the true champions of the American family. Reflecting the environment of the 2008 election, the ‘Soccer Moms’, ‘NASCAR Dads’, and ‘Security Moms’ have given way to ‘Mortgage Moms’ and ‘Hockey Moms’. In this paper, we will employ content and contextual analysis to examine the use of parent and family themes by the parties, their presidential nominees, and the media in the 2008 election. We will place the results in historical perspective by comparing them to our prior research in which we analyzed platforms, nomination speeches, and print election coverage, from 1952 through 2004â€"and revealed a dramatic politicization of parenthood over time. This paper will explore whether the politicization of parenthood reaches new heights in 2008 and whether elite rhetoric about mothers, fathers, and families represents change or continuity from previous elections. It will also provide insights into the theoretical issues of party and issue evolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In People’s Republic of China (hereafter China), many mega-sized plans and projects with significant impacts on the environment are launched in the “black box” of a government controlled by the Communist Party. The public has almost no access to get involved in the environmental decision making process. However, this situation has markedly changed over the past 10 years with the accelerating development of democracy in China. The public is now playing an increasingly important role in environmental policymaking. This paper examines the development of public participation in environmental projects in China, using a case study methodology. It is based on a comprehensive analysis of three highly significant cases in which concerned citizens involved themselves in an effort to shape decisions for major public works projects. The analysis bases itself on a review of public documents, news sources, and blogs maintained by leading actors in the public participation movement in China. The paper develops a description of characteristics that support public involvement in governance in China. It also identifies existing problems in public participation and explores options for enhanced participation within the Chinese context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do party strength and activity affect women's political representation? In this paper, I use data from a new nationwide survey of county political party chairpersons to investigate this question. I first present an outline of existing literature on local parties and women's political representation. Then, I introduce the data used in this paper, including an original survey of county party elites across the U.S. and a new database containing demographic and political information for over 16,000 county candidates. Next, I evaluate competing claims about party strength and women's representation. Scholars have proposed many reasons why strong parties might increase or hinder women's emergence as political candidates. I evaluate the relationship between local party strength and women's representation as local candidates and officeholders, and examine particular components of party strength in greater detail in order to determine how specific party recruitment practices, campaign activities, interactions with community and interest groups, and other factors affect women's representation as political candidates at the county level. I find that party strength is positively related to women's political representation at the local level for Democratic party organizations. My results also suggest that party recruitment increases women's political representation, conditional on party leader beliefs about women's electability. Party gatekeeping is detrimental to women's political representation, while increased contact between Republican party organizations and community and interest groups is positively related to women's representation. In all, county political party characteristics and activities have a significant influence on who runs for county office. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cuban-origin Latinos have traditionally been represented as the anomaly in any investigation of Latino political behavior. Historically, Latinos have been strongly supportive of the Democratic Party, with Cuban-origin Latinos being the Republican-leaning exception. With this known distinction, we must ask ourselves what defines Cuban partisanship and how does it differ from other Latinos? In this paper I investigate the factors that influence Cuban partisanship compared to non-Cuban Latinos. Secondly, I explore the possible future trajectory of Cuban partisanship and evaluate the possibility of a Democratic conversion, specifically among native-born Cubans. Traditionally, Cuban immigrants have displayed a high level of unanimity and ideological congruence, but it is questionable whether that can be maintained among second generation Cubans. Will the children of this exile population maintain a similar political behavior to that of their parents? The evidence presented in this paper indicates that native-born Cubans are demonstrating declining levels of support for the Republican Party with the Democratic Party becoming a highly competitive alternative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important line of research focusing on major federal social programs shows that recipients’ experience with such programs shapes their propensity for political engagement even net the effects of education and similar factors, with means-tested programs dampening political participation and universal programs enhancing it (Mettler, 2002; Soss, 1999; Campbell, 2003). That work provides support for state-centered theory, which emphasizes the impact of government on civil society, especially via the messages that public programs send to recipients about their value to the polity. But state-centered theory has not been applied to local governments. The proposed paper tests whether state-centered theory’s explanations of political involvement apply to county governments’ spending on social programs. Drawing upon survey data for respondents in 28 core metro area counties in2000 and Census of Governments data on expenditures for 1997, the paper tests for the hypothesized net-dampening effect on local political participation of county governments’ spending on means-tested programs and the hypothesized net participation-enhancing effects on local participation of county governments’ spending on non-means-tested social programs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the journey of political parties in Nigeria so far through the murky and turbulent waters of politics. In doing this,the paper seeks to examine the impact of the party system,as practised in Nigeria, on the current political engineering taking place in the country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a conceptual understanding of the political potentials of 'the public', predicated upon the phantom character of the public that Lippman, Dewey, and Habermas cast as a problem, whereas I argue it is at the heart of an opportunity.This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the public's political character. It argues that this must be understood in three steps. First, one must look at the historically specific invitation to agency extended to the public. This invitation is found sedimented in law, institutions and culture. Secondly, it is necessary to accept that this invitation does not have a precise addressee in the sense of a 'true' public. It invites a disembodied public to act. The combination of these two aspects of the political public then conditions the third step that has to be analyzed to understand specific political consequences of the public. This concerns the ways in which the public is enacted. Conceptually, such enactments take the form rhetoric calls synecdoche, a part expressing a whole, and are characterized by five traits. Enactments of the public are (1) dependent on external recognition, (2) always contestable, (3) mutually constitutive of the part and the whole - the public - it attempts to enact, (4) either bringing the public to bear as an actual presence or a virtual shadow, and (5) necessarily normative operations predicated upon the substitution of an 'is' - that the public is disembodied - by an 'ought' - that someone should nonetheless be allowed to enact it 'as if' it was not. The argument thus rejects a notion common to the work of Habermas, Dewey, and Lippmann, that the public should be understood in terms of a true embodiment with specifiable normative consequences. Instead, the paper lay out a model of the political public that provides the possibility of analyzing the prospects of the public of today, and its contribution to social cohesion and social change, and not only lament its failures in the light of what it could potentially be in the future. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staff turnover refers to the rate that staffers are replaced from election to election. This paper examines staff turnover in the 105th and 106th Congresses using primary data from CQ Politics in America. Specifically, the paper asks, do increased levels of partisanship in the House of Representatives lead to increased staff turnover, i.e. shorter staff careers? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislators exit from the legislature due to death, retirement or electoral defeat. This paper demonstrates what factors affect these risks. I argue that seniority system brings about decreasing electoral risk and professinalization of the legislature results in constant retirement risk. Also, I hypothesize that, when they expect to be defeated at the next election, legislators strategically retire so as to avoid cost of electoral campaign and losing face. In order to test these hypotheses, I propose a systematically dependent competing risks model of survival analysis and also consider non-random censoring and ordered risks structure. Using a Japanese Diet members' dataset from 1947 to 1990, this paper confirms my hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic voting has been one of the enduring themes of political science for several decades (Dorussen et al. 2002: xxiii). A lot of literature on economic voting has examined how macroeconomic conditions shape election outcomes in western democracies and evinces that incumbents are rewarded or punished for their economic performance. (Jacobson, 1991: 33). Surprisingly, however, very few studies have examined if electorates of new democracies also assign the responsibility of economic performance to incumbents. One reason for the limited scope of the research is related to a conventional belief that electorates in the Third World are not “highly informed, policy-oriented economic voters” (Dorussen et al. 2002: 2). This paper is one of very few cross-national macro level studies on economic voting in the Third World. Even though there have been a couple of case studies based on survey data, cross-national studies analyzing elections in new democracies are very rare. This paper analyzes 70 legislative elections and 50 presidential elections in 35 new democracies. Using Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs) estimation method, this paper tests three controversial hypotheses: first, that economic conditions shape election results in new democracies (the economic voting hypothesis); second, that the economic impact on the vote share of incumbent parties is constrained by the level of institutional clarity that affect electorates’ perception of incumbents’ responsibility for economic performance (the clarity hypothesis); third, the economic impact also depends on other economic and socio-political conditions that affect the relative importance of economic issues in elections of new democracies (the relative importance hypothesis). The expansion of the research on economic voting to new democracies provides us important clues to the features of transitional societies because “economic voting as a mechanism of democratic accountability” is a useful indicator of democratic consolidation (Dorussen et al. 2002: 2). As Richard Rose (1999) argued, a fully democratic regime “must be accountable to the electorate” (p. 35). Therefore, research on the conditions under which electorates realize democratic accountability through economic voting may improve our understanding of the democratization processes in the Third World. Analyzing an original dataset, this study shows that the economic voting function is not consistent in new democracies and is strongly constrained by economic and socio-political conditions. Except for some poor countries, voters did respond to economic performance of incumbents in presidential elections. Furthermore, this paper shows that political contexts, which influence voters’ perceptions of incumbents’ responsibility for economic performance, were also important determinants of the economic voting function in new democracies; the bicameral system and the proportional electoral system reduce economic voting function. Lastly, the relative importance of economic issues determined by the level of economic development, ethnic fractionalization and the level of democracy also affected the economic voting function. However, the effect of economic conditions on the voting share of incumbent parties in legislative elections was very limited. No robust evidence that corroborates economic voting theory was found in the analysis of legislative elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is paper for panel #31033 on National Identity organized by Zachary Elkins This paper builds on the “being-to-doing” model of Miller and Rahn (2002) in the context of national identity. In this model, we argue that the psychological centrality of public identities affects public action through both normative conceptions about what it means to be a “good x,” the so-called “logic of appropriateness” and the emotional arousal that accompanies the extension of the self in processes of identification. In this paper, I present evidence from several different survey sources that public mood, “a diffuse affective state… that citizens experience because of their membership in a particular political community” (Rahn, Kroeger and Kite 1996), is a distinct emotional concomitant of American national identity that has direct and indirect motivational consequences for certain forms of political action that are as important, if not more important, than skills, resources, and mobilization, the typical levers of participation studied in the political science literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Hispanics now account for a greater proportion of the population than African Americans. What are the implications of this population shift to African Americans and Hispanics? The purpose of this paper is to examine the political relationship between African Americans and Hispanics in the United States. While African Americans have been politically active in America for over 50 years, Hispanics have only recently begun to make significant political strides. Two distinct issues have historically constrained their political impact. First of all, a sizable portion of the Hispanic population lack citizenship and therefore cannot participate in the political process. The second major constraint has been due to the multi-culture backgrounds of Hispanics. Since Hispanics come from many different counties and differ from one another in a number of ways, it has been difficult for them to build a broad-based political coalition in the way that African Americans have. This paper is explores three primary issues in order to determine the impact of the population shift on both groups and the country. First, the discussion begins with a brief history of both groups in the U.S. and how their experiences have shaped their political ideologies. Second, it analyzes grassroots movements and national organizations that specifically promote the African American and Hispanic agenda. Finally, there is an examination of the issues that unify and the conflicts that separate the two groups. The analysis seeks to examine whether the two groups will become the proverbial crabs in a barrel fighting to keep the other from rising to the top or whether they will forge a collaborative and supportive relationship. Recommendations are provided to increase the opportunity for the two groups to emerge as political allies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the nature of citizens’ perceptions of political parties, focusing on those who consider themselves political independents, or unaffiliated with the two major parties. I will attend to the following outstanding questions in the literature: (1) Is there a temporal component to this self definition (Blais et al. 2001; Timpone and Neely 1997)? (2) Is this disposition largely cognitive or affective (Burden and Klofstad 2003)? (3) To what degree do independents form a sense of belonging to that group (Greene 2002; Weisberg and Greene forthcoming; Neely 1997)? (4) To what extent is political party independence gendered (Norrander 1997)? (5) Are most independent identifiers merely closet partisans (Keith et al. 1992)? In addition, I examine the dimensions of an independent identification: autonomy, anti-partyism, variability, and neutrality (Dennis 1988). The research on party affiliation has relied largely on quantitative data from secondary survey sources and more recently from experimental designs. I make a modest first step at complementing those studies with a qualitative approach. I ran six focus groups in the spring of 2003 in order to gather data on this topic. Those participants were grouped by gender (men, women) and party disposition (true independent, Republican leaners, Democratic leaners). This paper will report the focus group results focusing on the above points of inquiry. This is the first stage of a larger project in which I hope to employ survey and experimental methods on the same topic. Therefore, this paper will also provide some comment on future empirical designs, both quantitative and qualitative, that may shed more light on the nature of political independents. I hope this work contributes to the academic literature by (1) extending and developing a theory of party affiliation and identity, and (2) testing hypotheses related to the points of inquiry above. Practically speaking, parties of all types stand to benefit from the application of this research. Understanding the orientations of political independents is a prerequisite for appealing to that group, and it informs the strategic deployment of party resources. If some independents are perennially pushed away from the concept of a party, then it is not apparent why parties would court them. On the other hand, if some independents find the current party choices lacking, identifying the missing ingredients could benefit both major and minor parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters acquire preferences for particular parties and candidates? What causes a citizen or political actor to prefer one policy proposal over another? These questions, of central concern in contemporary political science, are variations on the more general question of Where do preferences come from? that has propelled much theorizing and research in the social sciences (Druckman and Lupia 2000). Within political science, three competing theoretical approaches – rational-choice, contextual/institutional, and cultural – offer different accounts of the formation of preferences. All three approaches have contributed to the accumulated knowledge of preference formation, but there have been few attempts to objectively assess and compare the validity of explanations derived from each approach. This paper will test hypotheses drawn from the three approaches with data gathered by the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, which has conducted surveys of representative samples of the Russian population from 1991 to the present. The political preferences of Russians the ideal data for the study because a natural experiment in preference formation has taken place in their nation over the last decade. With the collapse of communism in 1991, Russian citizens acquired civil liberties and for the first time in their lives they were able to make genuine choices in competitive elections, to openly support or disagree with government policy, and even to consider what type of political order post-communist Russia should have. After ten years of making such choices, most citizens now possess a more or less stable political party preference, if not a firm party identification (Remington 1999). By exploring how individuals acquired their party preferences in the critical Russian case, the paper intends to establish the foundation for an empirically grounded model of political preference formation with considerable explanatory and predictive power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of America’s increasing diversity, research into the impact of community heterogeneity on civic and political participation has burgeoned in recent years. To date, the literature on the subject has revealed an intriguing inconsistency about the participatory consequences of heterogeneity In his recent book Democracy in Suburbia, Oliver finds that people who live in communities with greater economic diversity have higher levels of engagement in localized political action, like voting in local elections and contacting local elected officials. Likewise, a forthcoming book by Gimpel et al argues that heterogeneity leads to greater political engagement. In contrast, a number of economists have found that economic, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity all lead to a decrease in participation. However, in a recent review essay surveying this literature, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn note that fifteen recent papers by economists on the subject of community heterogeneity all conclude that heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. While at first glance the economic and political science literatures appear to be empirically incompatible, a closer look reveals that they are actually theoretically consistent with one another. It is important to note that these apparently divergent studies have examined different forms of participation. Mistakenly, the literature on participation often indiscriminately groups disparate activities together, notwithstanding considerable evidence that various forms of participation are qualitatively different from one another. Recently, Scott Keeter and his colleagues have conducted a massive study of participation in the United States, and upon analyzing an array of different activitiesconcluded that there are essentially three participatory dimensions (Jenkins et al. 2003). “Civic” activity, by which they mean non-political efforts like volunteering in the community, is a different dimension of participation than activity that communicates political preferences. This paper reconciles the seeming contradiction regarding the effect of heterogeneity on participation. It shows that civic activity, like volunteering, is facilitated in homogeneous places, while people are more likely to express political voice in communities that are heterogeneous. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most theoretically coherent and analytically consistent type of heterogeneity is not racial or economic (the focus of the current literature). Instead, it is ideological heterogeneity. The analysis employs the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which consists of representative samples drawn in 40 communities across the U.S. Because of the study’s hierarchical design, it is possible to construct aggregate measures of heterogeneity for each community in the sample, including the dispersion of political ideology (operationalized simply as the standard deviation of political ideology within the community). These data, however, also require attention to the statistical complexities of hierarchical data, and are thus modeled using hierarchical linear modeling. This method of estimation simultaneously accounts for individual- and contextual-level variables, ensuring that each of the model’s parameters is measured with the appropriate standard errors. In sum, this paper offers a theoretically-grounded explanation for an apparent contradiction in the literature on community heterogeneity and participation, thus helping to illuminate the impact of diversity on America’s civic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a population of a billion people, a rich diversity of religious, linguistic and caste identities and a federal system with 28 states, India represents only one case or observation point in cross-national research yet one that is full of potential for within-case variation analysis. As Kohli (1987) describes it, India is a virtual laboratory for a comparative political scientist. My paper exploits this variation to explore the important and interesting question of if and how political regime type is connected to economic growth. The paper is divided into three broad parts. In the first part, I review the literature on political regimes and develop a typology of democratic regimes that is both theoretically grounded and empirically driven. More specifically, I use statistical cluster-analysis techniques to analyze electoral data from state assembly elections from 1967 to 1996. For each state in each election year we have data on four dimensions: party fractionalization by votes, political participation, representation of underprivileged groups and women. Since each state had an average of 6 elections during this period, the analysis is based on approximately 110 observations. One noteworthy feature that emerges from the classification of 15 major Indian states into types of democratic regimes along these four dimensions is that most of the states stay in the same regime type during the 30 year period examined. The analysis in this part of the paper thus suggests that not only is there something intrinsically different between groups of Indian states in terms of their democratic functioning but also that these differences have persisted over a long period In the second part, I establish that state political regime type is strongly correlated with economic growth and will then go on to examine the ways in which differences in various aspects of regime types affect economic growth. In the third part, I will discuss the implications of my findings for both cross-national studies of growth and political regimes as well as those that focus on particular areas of the world, thus situating my research within the broader literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two decades, far right parties have made increasing gains in electoral support at the national level in the member-states of the European Union. Previous research has looked at the state level conditions (e.g. the "effective" number of parties, immigration, unemployment) that have given rise to these parties. Prior findings and conclusions have been inconsistent on all of these conditions except immigration. The literature has also overlooked another possible condition in the rise of far right parties: crime rates. Thus far, crime rates have not been statistically analyzed despite the prominence of law and order planks in far right party platforms. I argue in this paper that high crime rates have helped far right parties gain electoral support. This paper examines the impact of crime rates (controlling for additional factors) on electoral support for far right parties in fifteen member-states of the European Union, between 1980-2002. Other models introduced in this paper will look at the interactions betweens these variables and their effect on far right party support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are federalism and decentralization similar phenomena? Do they necessarily correlate? Do they have an “elective affinity”? Or can they work in opposition to one another? Specifically, does decentralization to any level of subnational government favor all levels of subnational government, or do municipalities differ from higher levels of subnational government (usually “federal” entities such as states or provinces) in meaningful ways? In this paper, I argue that central governments often use the rhetoric and practice of municipal decentralization as a way to weaken federal units at the intermediate level of government. In a “three-level game”, central governments decentralize to the local level in order to strengthen the center’s position in negotiations with the states/regions/provinces. I demonstrate this by examining three case studies: Brazil, South Africa, and Peru. The causes of such occurrences are eminently political: increases in the electoral strength of opposition parties at the intermediate level are the triggers for municipalization. The paper focuses on an important political point too often overlooked in the literature on intergovernmental relations: most countries of interest have not two, but three interacting levels of government. The salience of each of the three levels of government – central, local, and an intermediate tier alternately called state, provincial, or regional – varies from country to country. Most academic studies of intergovernmental relations, federalism, and decentralization focus on dynamics between two layers of government, a dyadic set of political interactions. These approaches, however much they may simplify certain issues and make certain questions more tractable, often miss out on the crucial ways in which the three levels of government can interact. In particular, scholars have a tendency to lump local governments together with other subnational governments. Implicit assumptions are that what is good for one level of subnational government is good for the other. In fact, however, the preferences of municipalities may conflict with those of intermediate levels of government. Central governments, in many circumstances, find allies in the form of local governments. Decentralization to municipalities may actually run counter to some of the central principles of federalism. This paper will examine this possibility, using three quite different polities as case studies. In examining federal Brazil, quasi-federal South Africa, and unitary Peru, I will show that center-local political links can lead to an “hourglass” structure of government with a missing middle (as argued by Junaid Ahmad), reinforcing the center and localities at the expense of the intermediate layer of government. This case selection demonstrates that the strategic choices made by the center can have effects that are robust across different points on the federal-unitary spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causes of election boycotts, based on a new dataset covering all multi-party elections worldwide since 1990. My data reveal that, since 1990, political parties in fifty-three countries have boycotted a total of seventy-one national-level elections. In all of these cases, the parties involved announced explicitly and publicly that they were not participating in the election in question, urging voters to follow their lead. What explains why some countries have frequent boycotts while other, seemingly similar, countries have few or none? This paper is the first to model an election boycott as a strategic decision that political parties make, in light of both the possible benefits associated with a boycott and, perhaps more importantly, the potential costs. I focus in particular on whether the provision of public finance for political parties affects the decision to boycott. The central question I address is: Does the potential loss of state finance, typically awarded on the basis of vote shares garnered in the previous election, deter election boycotts? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of research have demonstrated that race helps to determine socioeconomic outcomes. Recently, sociologists have gone a step further to show that skin color,along with race, also affects socioeconomic outcomes; lighter blacks and Latinos have higher incomes and more education, and (in some studies) lower rates of incarceration and unemployment, than do their darker-skinned counterparts. The effect of race on political participation is somewhat less certain, but most studies show that in recent years blacks are less likely to vote than Anglos of a similar status. We do not know, however, whether skin color shapes political behavior as much as it affects SES. Our question for this paper, in short, is: What is the effect of skin color on African Americans’ political activity? To our knowledge, no one has systematically studied the role of skin color in electoral participation. Therefore we initially hypothesize that political participation follows the same pattern as income and education – that is, that light-skinned blacks engage in more, and more effective, political activity than do dark-skinned blacks. This could occur for several reasons: 1) Light-skinned blacks have more social capital (education, contacts with people outside their family, higher status jobs) and real capital (incomes) than do dark-skinned blacks, which they convert into political capital 2) Light-skinned blacks are more available to be mobilized by political parties and activists because they belong to more organizations, have deeper social networks, attend church more frequently, and so on. 3) Light-skinned blacks feel more efficacious, optimistic, connected with their locality or nation, or otherwise persuaded that politics matters and that their participation in politics can make a positive difference. Alternatively, the positive relationship posited in the paragraph above has changed over time, in accord with Hochschild’s argument in Facing Up to the American Dream. If that is correct, we will find that the positive relationship between light skin/high SES and political participation in the 1960s disappeared by the 1990s, mainly because well-off (light-skinned) blacks lost faith in the American dream and therefore stopped engaging in politics. As a final alternative, we may find that political activity does not and never did track SES; that is, the reasons that light-skinned blacks do better in the schools, labor market, and society do not carry over into the political realm. We will use five sets of survey data. All have a large sample of blacks, and all have an interviewer-determined measure of skin tone. They are: 1) the Negro Political Participation Study of 1962; 2) the 15-City (Kerner Commission) Study of 1968; 3) the National Survey of Black Americans (NSBA) of 1980; 4) the 2nd wave of the NSBA of 1988; and 5) the Multi-city Survey of Urban Inequality of 1994. None is ideal, but together they offer the breadth and depth needed to open up this new field of inquiry. This paper will enable us to compare the social, economic, and political consequences of different skin tones among African Americans. Regardless of exactly how the analyses turn out, the paper will make it clear that political scientists need to take skin color, not just race, into account in making sense of the American racial hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Buenos Aires, a television show is being used to select a candidate for Argentine legislature. The competition, the highest rated show on Sunday night airs on the America channel, will determine the people’s candidate who will head a slate of candidates from Buenos Aires in national legislative elections scheduled for December 2003. At the end of the series, the TV production executives, sponsored by the government, will sign up the people’s candidate with the electoral authorities as president of the people’s party to run in the legislative elections. A similar show is on the drawing board for selecting a candidate for the parliament in Great Britain and the Fox Entertainment Channel has been working on a presidential nominating gameshow, mirroring the style of its highly successful series, American Idol. One common feature across all of these examples is that a large field of candidates is considered and they are eliminated one at a time according to the votes cast by the television audience. The other common feature of these examples is that the existing literature in political science has almost no relevance whatsoever. The findings about political participation and voting in the ordinary sort of election can offer us some hints about what to expect, but they are by no means definitive. Similarly, the findings that exist about social choice and political institutions might provide some help, but they are not entirely relevant. So far as we know, there is not much (any!) careful empirical research on participation in television show nomination contests. Neither is there a catalogue of theoretical results on the likely implications of a nomination process that eliminates one candidate at a time from consideration (according to whatever method). This paper investigates the theoretical implications of that new nomination system. Compared to the primary election system used for most governmental offices in the US, for example, there are major differences. First, there is a sequence of television shows and candidates are eliminated according to the outcome of votes. Second, the viewers of the show are presumably offering according to a different logic than the members of a political party. Whereas a party primary election is presumed to bring out the most dedicated and ardent supporters of the party ideal, the television show approach will collect viewers on the basis of its entertainment content and then any viewer is able to call and register an opinion. In the television show framework, one might expect that voters will choose to participate according to their attraction to an individual candidate, rather than their devotion to a particular political party label. This paper presents an agent-based model that represents the TV show nomination process. It employs several fundamental concepts from the spatial model of elections, but then it uses the simulation methodology to investigate what might happen under various conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project is motivated by two relatively straight forward historical observations about the institutional development of Congress from 1890-2000. The first is that the organizational structure in the House of Representatives throughout this period, like a pendulum, has swung back-and-forth between the strong party/strong Speakership model and the weak party/strong committee model. The second is that this transition toward either centralization or decentralization in organizational form has proceeded throughout the century within both the Democratic and Republican parties at the same time. That is, both the Democrats and Republicans, whether in the majority or minority, have both pushed party organization and chamber practices in the same direction. Far from considering the trajectory of institutional development outlined above as an accident of history, this paper will argue that this is precisely the pattern of institutional change one should expect in Congress both in the past and future. For a number of reasons, current theories on Congress cannot explain these observations. Although this paper considers current congressional theories inadequate to explain the pattern above, it by no means disregards the theoretical insights of pervious work. In fact, the theory of dynamic equilibrium in the House of Representatives builds off the foundations of both rational choice models of static equilibrium in congressional structure--distributive benefits (Shepsle and Weingast 1987), informational (Krehbiel 1987, 1991), and party cartel (Cox and McCubbins 1990, 1993)--as well as theories of institutional change in Congress--conditional party government (Rhode 1991, Aldrich 1995, Binder 1997), modernization(Polsby 1968, Polsby, et. al 1969), and mix models of institutional change(Schickler 2001, Fenno 1978, 2000). There are several critical differences between the theory being proposed by this paper and the above mentioned literature. For example, while the rational choice models each offer important insight into a particular mode of congressional organization the descriptions that each offer’s are static. That is, they do not assume as part of their theories that institutional change is a regular, even predictable, part of life in the House of Representatives. The theory offered in this paper takes seriously the notion of equilibrium in congressional organization, but it does not assume that there is only one equilibrium point or that these points are fixed. Additionally, unlike current models of institutional change, the theory of dynamic equilibrium does not assume that development in Congress is either unidirectional (like in the modernization theory), responds only to the short-term interests of members inside of party coalitions (like in conditional party government theory), or can only be made intelligible through a reliance on ad hoc explanation for each episode of structural adjustment (like in the mixed models of institutional change). Since David Mayhew published his seminal work in 1974 almost every author writing on Congress (including many of those listed above) has taken as their foundational assumption that members of Congress are motivated in their behavior by exogenously generated, electoral preference. In attempting to explain long-term institutional change, the theory of dynamic equilibrium does not begin from this starting point. Rather, the theory offered in this paper proceeds from the assumption that exogenously generated preferences interact in a reciprocal manner with endogenous congressional structures. In fact, in all but a few predicable instances it is assumed that member preferences will conform to an endogenous logic of congressional change. It is the interaction of these two forces over an extended period of time coupled with a new theory of equilibrium points in congressional organization that combine to offer an explanation of institutional development that can take into account the historical observations made at the onset of this proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an application of conditional logit models for individual voting behavior at national elections in Denmark 1998-2001 including the effects of party sympathy, issue vot-ing and party identification. Although party sympathies explain a lot of individual variation in voting behavior they seem not to fully express the utility of the parties since they cannot predict the election results. The paper shows that there is no difference in the fit of a proximity model and a directional model for issue voting if they both include party intercepts. However, in the directional model the intercepts seem to clearly indicate the general popularity of each party, while this is not the case with the proximity model. Including the effect of party identi-fication enhances the fit of the model for issue voting and gives a clearer picture of the floating voters, but as less clear estimate of the general popularity of the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of 2000 was not only one of the closest and most controversial elections in American history, it revealed major geographic and demographic fractures in the American electorate. The famous Red-Blue Map of the counties won by Bush and Gore has produced diverse and in some instances interpretations. Some, like Barone and Brooks, see the map as evidence of a growing Republican majority, with fastest growing parts of the country also the most Republican. Brooks argues that fast growing sprinkler cities reflect the beau ideal of Republican selfhood, and are becoming the new base-- the brains, guts, and soul of the emerging Republican Party. The rising prominence of these places heralds a new style of suburb vs. suburb politics with the explosively growing Republican suburbs vying with the slower growing and increasingly Democratic suburbs for control of the center of American political gravity. Others, like Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, argue almost the opposite. They suggest that the most dynamic areas of the country-- high tech areas they call ideopolises-- are becoming more Democratic. The proposed paper reports the results of an ongoing research project, which seeks to untangle the arguments about the the political consequences of population change and match them against available data. The paper begins with a very brief overview of the dimensions of population migration and growth in the last several decades. It then offers a review of the literature about the new political geography and uses county level data about elections and campaign finance to add better empirical evidence to the debate about the future of the American electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting point for an empirical estimation of spatial voting models in mass elections is the construction of a party/candidate competition space. For more than thirty years researchers often have used the feeling thermometer scores among the other variables for this purpose. A basic assumption is thereby that the feeling thermometer scores deliver informations not only on the distance between the party and the respondent, but also on the (ideological) distance between parties. This assumption, however, has got neither theoretical nor empirical support which this paper aims to deliver. After approaching to historical and theoretical background of use of the feeling thermometer scores in survey, this paper delivers empirical evidence of the assumption above from USA, Germany and Japan. This paper assumes, like Enelow and Hinich (1984), that the feeling thermometer scores include not only the ideological distance, but also more components. one of the most important additional components should be the party competence. Differently from Enelow and Hinich, this paper assumes the heterogenity of the competence among voters. A preliminary empirical analysis supports these basic assumptions. This paper provides an important basis to a wide range of electoral studies, because the feeling thermometer scores have been used in various areas since its first appearance in the 60’s. As an implication the paper also proposes a new method for the estimation of a party competition space which is compatible with the assumption supported by the empirical evidences above. It finds a stable and reasonable solution of the party and the voter ideal points configuration. Reference Enelow, James and Hinich, Melvin J. The Spatial Theory of Voting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1984. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes data from the Bay Area News Media Survey (2002), which posed questions about media use, language capability, ethnic and panethnic community, political participation, and other characteristics of 1,662 immigrants and native-born whites, Latinos, Chinese and Chinese Americans, and African Americans in the 7-county San Francisco Bay Area. The analysis examines relationships between media use for news—ethnic vs. general-market media—and political participation and attitudes. A central naïve assumption about the non-English ethnic media is that they tend to keep immigrants separate in their own language communities. Respected journalists have written that parts of the ethnic media constitute a “news ghetto,” even that the ethnic media as a whole constitute a “Tower of Babel” that erodes a “community of discussion” and thus undermines an assumption of democracy by preventing discussion between groups separated by language and language-based media use. Analysis of the survey data does not support these claims. The ethnic media do not constitute a “news ghetto” for most users. Most consumers of ethnic media also use the general-market (“mainstream”) media, so if there is a “community of discussion” that is accessible through the general-market media, they are not isolated from it. The central question of this paper is whether use of ethnic or general-market media is associated with more or with less political participation and with the attitudes and knowledge that support participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors lead to the occurrence of party switching in state legislatures? While the study of party switching at the congressional level is a burgeoning field, the topic has rarely been examined at other levels of government. This paper offers a systematic aggregate analysis of party switching among incumbent state legislators in the South from 1980 to 2003. The results show that the incidence of party switching rises with increases in environmental stress associated with political, institutional, and economic shocks. Findings from this paper will be of interest to students of state politics, parties, and elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of democratization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has led to a proliferation of political parties, many of which are historically seen in Western Europe and in other advanced democracies. While on the whole this is seen as a step in the right direction, some parties may have a destabilizing influence on the political system. This paper will focus on one family of parties, far right reactionary parties (FRRP), and what factors lead to their popularity or disfavor among the voting population. Theory indicates that factors regarding immigration, national security and the economy are integral pieces of the FRRP philosophy. If voters feel that there are problems associated with immigration, national security and the economy, FRRP should receive more votes. FRRP should lose votes if the voters feel that the above factors are not problematic. As the literature on FRRP in Eastern Europe is almost non-existant, this paper borrows heavily from work done on FRRP in Western Europe for its theory As the two regions are politically distinct, the theories from Western Europe may not apply to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The researcher treats this paper as a first step in formulating a theory of the reactionary right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of public funding in party competition is currently debated in the literature that focuses on more established democracies the debate is rarely extended to new democracies, theoretically or empirically. The argument developed in this paper is that public funding limits new party entry, which in turn limits voter options with the effect of stabilizing relationships between parties and voters. The paper then tests this argument on a sample of all contemporary democracies and a sub-sample of established democracies. Contrary to Kitshelt’s proposition (2000) that public effect has little effect on party competition, I find strong support for the argument that public funding for political parties limits new party entry everywhere. Where party systems have stabilized prior to the advent of funding, public monies do not significantly affect the relationship between parties and voters. In new democracies, however, public funding strengthens the ties between parties and voters. Both findings run contrary to implications of the Cartel Party argument about party and voter relationships advanced by Katz and Mair (1995). Moreover, both findings have significant policy implications. If public funding stabilizes new party systems it can be used to mediate some of the expected political turbulence associated with transition to democracy. Furthermore, if funding does not affect the relationship between voters and parties in established democracies the idea of equality of opportunity as a reason for funding may need reconsideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of conducting ethnographic analysis alongside comparative casework. The paper describes the formulation of an ?ethnographic space? and compares its scholarly products with substantive findings from casework. The ethnographic space illumines the activities of ?light, decaffeinated? feminists in Spain and details how such feminists 1) have ?hidden? political goals 2) challenge notions of mainstream feminism and 3) alter the concepts of political allies, movement frames, and state-society relations. I argue that the intersection of diverse women?s activists and the triangulation of methods are useful. Although not without fault, triangulation provides for the elucidation of a new sector of women?s civil society and suggests a refashioning of concepts from the political process model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political participation is a key ingredient for a solid democratic system. Politicians respond consistently to their constituencies, thus it is important to understand who votes in order to assess the responsiveness of a particular democratic system. The analysis of the socio-economic composition of the electorate can help us elucidate the mechanics of prevailing political biases in societies. Scholars studying consolidated democracies in the industrialized world have long concluded that there exists a significant bias in favor of the more privileged citizens. In those democracies, higher electoral turnout is positively correlated with higher socio-economic status. Patterns of electoral participation in the United States and Western Europe have extensively been examined, but they appear to be less understood in emerging democracies such as Mexico. The aim of this paper is to show that, in Mexico, as electoral competition became more acute, the poorest groups in society started voting more in comparison to other socioeconomic groups. Since the late seventies, opposition parties in Mexico started gaining power at the local and national level. The climax of such liberalization process came in the 2000 presidential election when the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) lead by Vicente Fox, defeated for the first time after seven decades, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). The profile of the electorate drastically changed during the nineties. For instance, in the 2000 election, the electoral participation fell at the national level and in particular for the richer municipalities. Yet, the electoral participation of the poorest municipalities increased substantially. The relationship between higher socio-economic status and electoral turnout at the municipality level seems quite clear for the 1994 election. Interestingly, once electoral competition increased, this pattern changed. In the 2000 election, the turnout of the richest municipalities decreased while the poorest municipalities registered the highest level of electoral participation. On average, participation fell more than 10 percent in 39 percent of the municipalities when comparing the 2000 presidential election to the previous one. Yet participation fell more than 10 percent in almost 60 percent of the richest municipalities while only 29 percent of the poorest municipalities experienced such a drop. Similarly, turnout increased by more than 10 percent in 27 percent of the poorest municipalities while only 8 percent of the richest municipalities experienced an increase in turnout of this magnitude. These results clearly reveal that between 1994 and 2000, the socioeconomic composition of the Mexican electorate experienced a drastic change. The findings of this paper challenge the common idea that poor constituencies are less active in electoral terms than rich constituencies. A detailed analysis of the socioeconomic composition of the Mexican electorate in the two past presidential elections clearly reveals that marginalized municipalities are increasingly decisive. This change will have a profound implication on the representative nature of the democratic system in Mexico, by creating a bias in favor of the unprivileged groups. This paper will contribute to our understanding of the public policy implications of this electoral dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central question of this paper is: does decentralization increase women’s descriptive and substantive representation, in the area of health care policy? Previous research at the national level has demonstrated an interactive effect between i) a critical mass of women in the legislature, ii) women leaders in bureaucracy, and iii) strong feminist organizations, which together produce substantive feminist policy gains. Decentralization, or a downward shift in policy authority and implementation to regional governments, should likewise encourage women’s political participation in local legislatures, interest groups and bureaucracy, in turn making policy more responsive to women’s interests. Why would decentralization encourage more women to participate in government? Women already constitute significantly higher proportions of elected officials at the local level than the national level. Participation in local government is easier for women to balance with the double burden of paid employment and household responsibilities. Moreover, issues decided at the local level such as social service provision and education are an unthreatening extension of women’s traditional role as the nurturer. The lower status of local political office as compared to national office makes party leadership more likely to recruit and support female candidates, and female candidates more confident about emerging from the masses to run for office. This paper employs a controlled comparison of Polish regional governments before and after 1998 administrative and health decentralization to examine whether the increased the number of women in elective offices and was associated with more generous health services for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After years of accepting the pronouncement that campaigns have “minimal effects,” scholars now acknowledge that campaigns can and do matter. But when they say that campaigns matter, to what part of the campaign are they referring? In this paper, I examine the relative impacts of several components of the campaign information environment—including political advertising, candidate visits and news coverage—on voter learning about the candidates and favorability toward them. In political science, comprehensive treatments of the campaign information environment are uncommon. Rarely do scholars tap the contours of the campaign with more than a single measure. Yet a finding, for example, that news coverage of a candidate has an impact on voters, does not illuminate its true impact unless the influence of advertising and candidate visits—both likely correlated with news coverage—are included in the analysis as well. Shaw (1999) is one of few to consider both candidate visits and political advertising as essential components of the campaign information environment, yet the effects he finds are small. This is likely because he examines presidential general election campaigns, the situations in which one is least likely to identify campaign effects. The focus of my analysis is the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. U.S. presidential nominations present almost an ideal context in which to search for campaign effects. In a typical year, presidential primary voters have more than a half dozen candidates from which to choose, and initial knowledge of those candidates is often low. Thus, there is much that voters can learn from the campaign. Second, primary voters lack the partisan anchor that removes the potential for much instability in general election campaigns. Finally, primary voters often are exposed to unbalanced flows of communication across candidates. It is this circumstance that offers the most opportunity for persuasion (Zaller 1992, 1996). I measure the campaign information environment using several sources. I rely on advertising tracking data obtained from the Campaign Media Analysis Group to monitor political advertising in each of the country’s 100 largest media markets. Information on campaign visits to each state comes from the Hotline, and a count of New York Times mentions of each candidate provides a measure of the national news flow. To measure citizen knowledge and favorability toward the candidates, I use a series of national polls conducted by Harris and CBS News. By focusing on several components of the campaign information environment, this paper begins to unpack the question of how campaigns matter, not just whether they matter. It makes direct comparisons between the effects of candidate visits, political advertising and exposure to news on citizen learning about the candidates. And in doing so, it gives insights into the dynamics of the 2004 nomination campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]