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Urban–rural differences in partisan political loyalty are as familiar in the United States as they are in other countries. In this paper, we examine Gallup survey data from the early-2000s through 2018 to understand the urban–rural fissure that has been so noticeable in recent elections. We consider the potential mechanisms of an urban–rural political divide. We suggest that urban and rural dwellers oppose each other because they reside in far apart locations without much interaction and support different political parties because population size structures opinion quite differently in small towns compared with large cities. In particular, we consider the extent to which the compositional characteristics (i.e., race, income, education, etc.) of the individuals living in these locales drives the divide. We find that sizable urban–rural differences persist even after accounting for an array of individual-level characteristics that typically distinguish them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I introduce the concept of political attachment as a fundamental problem for political foundings. Political attachments refer to the loyalty, identity, and commitment between an individual and their government. I argue that founders of democratic or republican regimes are often faced with the task of constructing political attachments to ensure that their citizenry will properly support and obey the new government once it is created. I utilize the example of the American founding to identify and describe three distinct theories of how attachments can be purposefully constructed. I then briefly identify how each of these theories was utilized by statesmen in the nineteenth century, and I conclude with analysis of the relative success and failure of each approach, both for the American example and for the construction of regimes more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) asserts that anxiety reduces the effect of party identification on candidate preferences (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000), but recent studies have raised doubts about this causal claim. Rather than functioning as a moderator of party identification, perhaps anxiety has a direct effect on preferences, or perhaps the relationship is reversed and preferences drive emotions (Ladd and Lenz 2008). Alternatively, Marcus et al.'s measure of anxiety may simply be capturing partisan ambivalence, so the posited relationship is spurious (Lavine, Johnston, and Steenbergen 2012). This paper addresses each of these questions by examining the effect of experimentally induced emotions on the types of considerations that came to mind when a national sample of adult Americans was asked what they liked and disliked about Barack Obama. By directly manipulating anxiety, this experiment avoids the causal ambiguity plaguing this debate and ascertains the true nature of the relationship between anxiety and ambivalence. Consistent with AIT, anxiety led respondents to recall more contemporary considerations, whereas enthusiasm brought to mind more long-standing considerations. Because the political context at the time of the study (fall 2013) was a very tumultuous time for the Obama administration, the increased accessibility of contemporary considerations led Democratic participants to experience more ambivalence in the anxiety condition. This effect was concentrated among those Democrats who were exposed to the most newspaper coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To secure his reelection, President Richard Nixon tried to dismantle the New Deal coalition and form a new Republican majority; to do so, he attacked the monopoly Democrats had on racial and ethnic votes. Nixon's racial and ethnic politicking represented a rupture with past Republican ignorance of minorities; it was going to be one of his key legacies to his party. This article shows that, driven by consecutively defined electoral goals, his administration systematically favored group-specific measures over universalistic policies addressing common ethnic claims, and that these measures were accompanied by a divisive rhetoric and implemented in an antagonistic fashion. It argues that Nixon broke his promise to reunite the country, and used racial and ethnic politics as an instrument of electoral engineering rather than as a way to correct legacies of past discriminations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of personal loyalty during the American Revolution in the 18th century. According to the author, men and women living under military rule maintained vague and ambiguous allegiances to survive under the British occupation. He argues that the people developed their own language of loyalism intended to persuade civilians to return their allegiance to King George III of Great Britain.

The article presents a paper that proposes a new way of measuring naturalization, which takes into account both emigration and death. For account, naturalization is the final stage of immigration to the United States. It represents the acquisition of a permanent legal status equal to that of native-born Americans. The basic requirement for obtaining the U.S. citizenship, except in certain cases, is legal residence in the country for at least five years. Allegiance, knowledge of the U.S. political system, and some proficiency in English are also required. However, the researcher argues that the system of naturalization is not totally efficient. He supports his argument with an alternative method that corrects for underestimation and thus provides a more accurate measure of the concept. Using data from six groups of the 1973 immigrant cohort and multiple-decrement life table techniques, the researcher estimated and compared naturalization measures derived from new and old methods. The results show that failure to control for emigration has a significant effect on the measurement of naturalization, particularly if an immigrant group has relatively high rate of emigration.

Based on data from Denmark from the end of the 1970s and 1980s the paper analyzes the development of feminist attitudes during a period characterized, on the one hand, by a high, and still growing, integration of women into the labour market and political life, and on the other, by an organizational decline of the women's movement and a decline in the politicization of women's issues. At the end of the 1970s, feminist attitudes, especially among women, were unidimensionally structured and closely related to other political factors. The most feminist were the young, the well-educated, the politically interested, and left-wing women. At the end of the 1980s, feminist attitudes were at the same level as ten years before, but different dimensions had emerged, a social and political dispersion of feminist attitudes had taken place, and feminism no longer influenced political behaviour. In many respects, the experience of the United States in the 1970s was reversed in Denmark in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses how Japanese artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi tried to prove his U.S. allegiance by aiding the U.S. propaganda during World War II in a variety of ways. These included his creation of more than a dozen designs for anti-Japan posters for the Office of War Information (OWI). In this crucial project, he tried to express both his abhorrence of Japan's militarism and his own Americanness to distinguish émigré Japanese like himself from the wartime enemy.

The article focuses on political loyalties in the U.S. economy. In the political-business cycle, the influence of economic events on voting is tested without paying attention to voters' turnout. To avoid this loss of information, in this paper a device for disaggregating abstention into its party components has been given and applied to the U.S. Presidential elections. The impact of economic events on Democratic and Republican actual/potential vote ratios has been given. The findings support the view that voters react in a partisan way to the economic cycle. In the standard analysis of the political-business cycle, votes are often seen as every time engaged in re-deciding their political alignment. However, few people feel themselves born-again voters at regular intervals. Traditional links, previous searches, past experiences, and such others are all elements that imply an investment in a political choice not cheaply disposed of by rational voters, and staying home might be the only rational option available.

Studies in presidential appointments, particularly principal‐agent models, posit that presidents employ a top‐down strategy to control the bureaucracy, one that promotes loyalty over competence. However, many studies have two critical limitations: (1) treating loyalty and competence as binary constructs and (2) focusing only on presidential nomination and Senate confirmation (PAS) appointments. In this article, the authors construct a continuous measure of loyalty and competence to determine how much loyalty or competence an appointee offers a president and examine other appointment tools—Senior Executive Service (SES), Schedule C, and presidential appointments—that allow presidents to influence different levels of the bureaucracy. Findings show that presidents are more likely to reward competence with their PAS and SES appointments. In addition, few appointees score high on both loyalty and competence, explaining why presidents generally must make a trade‐off between loyalty and competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political liberalism of American Jews is puzzling because it contradicts the assumption that economic self-interest drives political behavior. Attempts to solve this puzzle with “Judaic” explanations compound the problem by offering theories that are static and universal while American Jewish political behavior is dynamic and situational. Using both historical and behavioral data, I argue that the solution to these puzzles is found in the overriding concern of American Jews with maintaining their equal citizenship in a society with a classic liberal regime of religion and state. This situational model also helps integrate work on Jewish political studies with theories and concepts commonly used by political scientists to explain mass political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presidents have the power to nominate the top ranks of the executive branch and they use it toward their own goals. Presidents need a mixture of experienced and loyal officers to promote bureaucratic competence and responsiveness, and advance their policies within the executive branch, but scholars’ focus has often been senatorial obstructionism rather than when presidents prefer loyal nominees and experienced nominees. This study uses a sample of 573 subcabinet nominations between 1961 and 2006, and relates presidents’ nominee choices to their policy priorities and departmental jurisdictions. It finds that presidents nominate significantly more loyalists and fewer experienced officers to higher priority departments, indicating the importance of responsiveness, as well as their suspicion of experienced officers. Presidents select more experienced nominees for lower priority departments to assure competence where they are least concerned with responsiveness. Furthermore, it finds that increased Senate ideological opposition has no significant effect on presidents’ selections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

People who feel comfortable defending their views-defensively confident-may also eventually change those views and corresponding behaviors. National Election Studies surveys showed that defensive confidence predicted defection in the 2006 U.S. House elections, above and beyond the impact of various demographic and political variables. Moreover, defensive confidence was also associated with political knowledge and attention to politics and government affairs, but not attention to the news. Finally, males, more educated citizens, ethnic minorities, and older respondents had higher reported defensive confidence than did females, less educated citizens, European Americans, and younger respondents. Defensive confidence may be a crucial factor for a deeper understanding of political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author attempts to distinguish when patriotism is a virtue and when it is not. He also examines the politics of the first inaugural speech of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and its appeal to patriotism. The author argues that Lincoln's patriotism does well under moral scrutiny even though it accommodates slavery. Lincoln's patriotism is referred to frequently as "dirty hands" because it came about in a situation in which political reasons compelled people to be complicit in the evil of slavery in order to achieve a greater good and to forestall a bigger evil.

Luther P. Jackson was a key supporter of the Association for the study of Negro Life and History and a leading historian of the African American experience. As a leader in the voting rights movement in Virginia as well a prominent activist within region-wide civil rights organizations, Jackson crafted a message of black citizenship that balanced rights and civic duties. His emphasis on political engagement and civic consciousness transcended the specific issues that occupied civil rights activists of the 1940s. This philosophy of political commitment tied the black freedom struggle to the fulfillment of the democratic promise enshrined in the founding documents of the American republic. It also connected the movement for racial justice to the working-class movement for union organization and economic democracy. His effort to place citizenship front-and-center in the civil rights movement echoed the universal ideals of the American crusade to free the world of fascism. It also resonated with the egalitarian aspirations of the Reconstruction era. By linking black equality to political engagement, Jackson set out the only terms under which full equality could be achieved. As much as his message of justice through citizenship challenged the racial orthodoxies of his day, it challenges our contemporary society, transfixed as it is by the illusions of consumerism and marketplace privatization. As Carter G. Woodson and Luther Jackson both understood, racial justice required more than historical consciousness; it required political awareness grounded in a sense of civic responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author considers the plausibility of granting a "right to place" (RTP) as an entitlement of citizenship in a nation such as the United States. Such a right would afford people the capacity to live in the places (or place communities) they choose. To explore whether granting such a right is plausible, the author identifies and examines the salient barriers now preventing Americans from choosing their place communities. The final section suggests that these myriad barriers, while formidable, are not insurmountable---a conclusion that, in turn, suggests that an RTP could be plausibly granted to Americans in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the fans of four sports teams reacted when their favorite team relocated to another city: the Houston Oilers to Nashville, the Quebec Nordiques to Denver, the Hartford Whalers to Raleigh, and the Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix. Drawing on conversations among fans of these teams on Web sites, it was found that, despite the differences in sports, teams, and cities across these four franchises, the people studied expressed similar feelings about the importance of the teams in their lives and of their desire for the franchises to return. In addition, differences were found among fans as to what aspect of the team they were expressing continued allegiance to. Some fans pledged to continue to fight for a team for their city, whereas another group pledged allegiance to the team name and logo. The article concludes with a discussion suggesting some future directions for research on fan allegiance to sports teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreement between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution hinged largely on empirical expectations regarding the ability of the proposed system of government to promote civic allegiance. I examine the views of allegiance offered by major Anti-Federalists and the political psychology on which they are based. I conclude, first, that Anti-Federalist political psychology is flawed, leaving the Constitution's opponents vulnerable to charges made by the authors of The Federalist, among others, that sound functioning and durability of government, rather than size, are sufficient to generate civic allegiance. Second, the Anti-Federalists' positions on allegiance are grounded in liberal first principles of government. The arguments offered are not those one would expect if the Anti-Federalists adhered strongly to the tenets of civic humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the political and economic determinants of county government wage in the U.S. Need for a model of public sector wage determination; Assumption regarding the political loyalty of persons; Constraints bearing on a chief executive elected official's maximum of voter support.

The defining properties of party identification long established for the United States fail with some frequency to be replicated in electoral systems abroad. A number of plausible suggestions have been made to account for this system-level variability: Most of these have some face merit, but none taken alone is adequate to provide a full cross-system explanation. Variation in party system size or fractionalization has recently been discussed as another source of differential dynamics of party loyalties. Unfortunately, the conventional means of assessing party identification properties are subject to rather severe artifacts, typically ignored, when comparisons are made across systems of very different party size. The conceptual stakes underlying key methods options for such comparisons—most notably, between continuous and discrete statistical tools—are examined. The use of continuous statistics for systems of very multiple parties rests on an assumption that voters do in some degree regard these party systems as imbedded in a continuous space. A simple test for this assumption is mounted in four systems and unsurprisingly it shows very clear support. Analysis of residuals beyond this obvious result add several points of less obvious information about the distribution of party affect in such systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]