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The divide between college graduates and non-college graduates is an increasingly important political cleavage. In this paper, I document the rise of the diploma divide on the micro and macro levels. First, I use ANES and CES data to assess the relationships between educational attainment, partisanship, and vote choice. I find that post-2000, educational attainment is an increasingly strong predictor of partisanship and, in turn, vote choice. I demonstrate that differences in racial and culture war attitudes between college graduates and non-graduates drive the diploma divide. I then show that the increasing salience of education at the individual level has reshaped the macro-level political alignment. Between 2000 and 2020, the percentage of a county's population with a BA is one of the strongest predictors of changes in vote share, with highly educated counties becoming more Democratic and less educated counties becoming more Republican. Finally, I demonstrate that county-level educational context conditions the effect of degree-holding on individual-level behavior. Having a college education is a stronger predictor of Democratic partisanship in counties where a larger proportion of the population holds a college degree. Overall, these results demonstrate the diploma divide is one of the dominant political cleavages in contemporary American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trend of increasing major party polarization in the United States has raised concerns about the quality of representation and governance. One potential corrective is third parties, as they can hold the major parties accountable and instigate positive change. We, however, highlight limits to their influence. Two factors dampened the electoral support for third party candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite favorable conditions. First, the cost of third party voting is higher in the current polarized era, since casting a vote for a third party can lead to their less-favored major party candidate winning. Voters today have especially negative feelings toward their less-favored major party. Second, Trump co-opted voters distrustful of the government, which is a group that tends to support third parties. Our analysis of American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1992 and 2016 shows support for both factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of women seeking congressional office in the United States has dramatically increased since 1980. Previous research on women candidates explores why women run, but new research on candidate emergence shows that women face different challenges and advantages based on their race and ethnicity. We investigate these differences by disaggregating data on women's candidate emergence by race and ethnicity to examine how these theories work when explicitly considering race and ethnicity. We focus our examination on women running in House primaries between 1980 and 2012. We argue that theories of candidate emergence are conditional to the racial and/or ethnic identification of the candidate. We employ a cross-sectional time series analysis with the intuition that examining congressional elections over time will allow us to make general comments about the participation of women in congressional elections. We find that many of the conditions thought necessary for women's emergence as candidates are contextual and temporally specific. Moreover, conditions that encourage women to run do not necessarily apply to women of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the Supreme Court can decide only so many cases per term, justices carefully target which cases they hear and which parties they supervise. We focus on their decisions to hear cases involving states as parties. We believe justices use the agenda power to target states with whom they disagree ideologically. Granting review allows justices to keep an eye on wayward states and to remind them of the ever-present threat of Supreme Court review. The results support our theory. Justices are significantly more likely to grant review to cases involving ideologically unfriendly states—and these results are exacerbated in salient cases. These findings suggest justices are more aggressive agenda setters than commonly believed. In addition, the findings suggest that even the so-called federalism revolution of the Rehnquist Court was driven by policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a novel theory on Supreme Court impact that makes several key contributions beyond existing accounts. We argue that policy-oriented justices are particularly attentive to the impact of their precedents within the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We provide a framework in which both Supreme Court and circuit-level influences drive U.S. Courts of Appeals responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. Principally, we argue that the Supreme Court’s use of its summary decisions, which explicitly reference its formally argued decisions, increase circuit court utility of the High Court’s precedents. We test our predictions using new data on appeals court responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. The empirical results support our account and shed new light on the hierarchical dynamic within the American federal judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The Home Box Office's series The Wire (2002-2008) provides an informed critique of the decline of the democratic American ideal of the 'city upon a hill'. From its inception as a police procedural, it expanded its interests across the dystopian city of Baltimore to consider the linkage between drug crimes, policing, the collapse of blue-collar life, social deprivation, institutional compromise, the public school system, media compliance and political self-interest. Therefore, this article will situate The Wire into the debates that have defined the US polity and will discuss how it employs the narrative conventions of a contemporary thriller to offer an alternative view of American democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011-2013 assault on public sector collective bargaining rights is unprecedented in its breadth and depth. Legislative proposals that would roll back bargaining, limit unions’ ability to negotiate security arrangements, stop payroll deduction of union dues, and constrain labor’s political activity have been introduced in a majority of states. This coordinated attack from the Republican right has spurred an aggressive, unified response from a broad cross section of unions. Through labor unity tables at the national and state levels, unions are demonstrating a rare level of solidarity in the fight back. This ongoing experiment in movement building is encouraging, but challenges remain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What explains the behavior of legislators on bills that restrict the rights of marginalized minorities? Studies of representation typically focus on factors like party or public opinion but seldom account for theories of minority representation like electoral capture or subconstituency politics. One reason for this is that data allowing for the comparison of these theories are seldom available for U.S. House districts. We overcome this hurdle by implementing multilevel regression with post-stratification to estimate opinion on gay marriage during the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act vote. We show that subconstituency politics explains legislators’ behavior better than electoral capture, party, or public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How are legislative outcomes shaped by multidimensional negotiations? Examining the legislative politics of U.S. immigration reforms, I show how alternating coalitions in multidimensional negotiations produce centrist legislative outcomes. In doing so, this article sheds light on a puzzling aspect of immigration policy—namely, the gap that exists between public opinion and legislative outcomes. My investigation of major immigration bills in 1986, 1996, and 2006 shows that the multidimensional nature of immigration debates contributed to the lack of dramatic reforms, by allowing legislative minorities to form alternating coalitions to block any dramatic changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have long bemoaned congressional disinterest in oversight. We explain varied congressional attention to oversight by advancing the contingent oversight theory. We show how the structure of congressional committees, partisan majorities, and theories of delegation together explain when, why, and for how long Congress investigated executive branch malfeasance between 1947 and 2004. Divided government, partisan committees, and committees characterized by broad statutory discretion generate more investigations, whereas distributive committees and unified government dampen Congress’ investigatory vigor. The conduct of oversight depends on more than a desire to produce good government or the incentive structures faced by individual members of Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A great deal of research focuses on contributions by political action committees (PACs) to candidates, but PACs are also institutional mechanisms for mobilizing contributions by individuals. Restrictions on the ability of PACs sponsored by businesses, trade associations, and labor unions to solicit contributions and the private benefits of contributing imply that these PACs are likely to mobilize donors who do not otherwise contribute to political campaigns. Analysis of itemized contributions to PACs during the 2004 election cycle confirms this. Moreover, the numbers of donors and dollars contributed to sponsored PACs aggregated by congressional district during 1996-2006 are relatively unaffected by electoral competition, presidential cycles, or changes in campaign finance regulations, and the effects of urbanization are less uniform than for nonconnected PACs. PACs sponsored by economic institutions therefore expand the pool of donors beyond the usual suspects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over British election cycles. How does party support converge on the eventual election outcome? Do preferences evolve in a patterned and understandable way? What role does the official election campaign period play? In this article, we begin to address these issues. We outline an empirical analysis relating poll results over the course of the election cycle and the final vote for the three main political parties. Then we examine the relationship relying on vote intention polls for the seventeen British general elections between 1950 and 2010. Predictably, polls become increasingly informative about the vote over the election cycle. More surprisingly, early polls contain substantial information about the final outcome, much more than we see in presidential and congressional elections in the US. The final outcome in Britain comes into focus over the long campaign and is to a large extent in place well before the official election campaign begins. The findings are understandable, we think, but raise other questions, which we begin to consider in a concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signing statements constitute a salient executive power that has recently captured scholarly and political attention. Prior literature suggests that presidents use signing statements to gain additional policy concessions from Congress. Evidence of policy motivations are, however, difficult to demonstrate and policy motives fail to explain a wide range of existing statements. The authors propose an additional incentive mechanism based on defending traditional presidential authority. Using original data on approximately 8,500 public laws and 1,250 signing statements, the authors investigate when and why signing statements occur. They find presidents are likely to issue constitutional signing statements on bills traditionally falling under the president’s purview. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1980s and 1990s, single-disease interest groups emerged as an influential force in U.S. politics. This article explores their effects on federal medical research priority-setting. Previous studies of advocacy organizations’ political effects focused narrowly on direct benefits for constituents. Using data on 53 diseases over 19 years, I find that in addition to securing direct benefits, advocacy organizations have aggregate effects and can systemically change the culture of policy arenas. Disease advocacy reshaped funding distributions, changed the perceived beneficiaries of policies, promoted metrics for commensuration, and made cultural categories of worth increasingly relevant to policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the influence of national government activity on the politics of embryonic stem cell research in the American states. Its analysis of bill introduction patterns between 1999 and 2008 suggests that President Bush’s nationally televised address on stem cell research and the debate over the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act increased the probability that officials in a state would introduce stem-cell-related legislation in a given year. National activity also seemed to increase the number of bills that legislators introduced. These results illustrate how political forces can increase the salience of public policies and thereby serve as diffusion mechanisms during the agenda-setting process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Observers of U.S. elections have reason to believe that third parties are not relevant political actors since they rarely win many votes or influence which major party wins an election. Researchers should use dependent variables besides vote choice and vote share to find third party effects that are a normal aspect of the American two-party system. A spatial model of elections motivates the hypothesis that a higher likelihood of third party entry induces greater major party candidate divergence. An empirical test that uses candidate positioning data in the 1996 U.S. House elections provides evidence of this third party effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The expansion of Indian gaming has produced significant financial gains for Indian nations across the United States. In response to this influx of revenue, tribes have expanded their political activity, particularly in those areas that are heavily resource dependent. In this article the authors argue that adopting an organized interests perspective enhances scholars’ understanding of tribal political activity. To demonstrate this, they study Indian gaming contributions received by senators from 1990 to 2004. The authors apply broadly utilized theories of contribution patterns based on the value of access for a group and the cost of access to a member, focusing on ideology, access, electoral security, and constituency characteristics. The results indicate that tribes respond to all of these factors in ways similar to more traditional organized interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lauded in its time, Model Cities dominated the final years of the War on Poverty only to be largely forgotten for nearly two decades. In 1966, new legislation led to the implementation of more than 150, five-year long, Model Cities experiments to develop new antipoverty programs and alternative forms of municipal government. Results included a renaissance of minority political leadership. Federal funds supported representatives of economically disadvantaged communities to become more involved in municipal politics; however, a change in the political climate just as these programs were beginning shifted the purpose of Model Cities to bricks and mortar housing and building projects, clouding subsequent analyses of the program. This article reviews related literature from early pieces on planning and implementation in the late 1960s, through a phase of misinterpretation and neglect in the 1980s and 1990s, to a re-emergent interest in Model Cities’ legacy and the phenomenon of citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

First adopted in 1993 at the federal level, the original purpose of Empowerment Zones was to encourage economic development strategies aimed at revitalizing distressed US urban neighborhoods. Such strategies across the country would include four broad goals: to generate economic opportunities for residents living in the empowerment zones; to create sustainable community development; to build broad participation among community-based partners; and to generate a strategic vision for change in the community. This paper examines Boston's Empowerment Zone between 1999 and 2009. The author concludes that this initiative was successful in that it helped to revitalize some of the poorest neighborhood areas in this city. While the rate of poverty was not reduced between 2000 and 2009 inside Boston's Empowerment Zone, there were some notable successes. These include the initiation and completion of major capital projects, including the first Black-owned hotel in New England over several decades; assisting small and neighborhood-based businesses, and helping to expand the capacity of local nonprofits in Boston's distressed areas. These accomplishments increased the level and quality of economic activity in a part of Boston that was essentially overlooked before the initiation of the Empowerment Zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we employ a unique set of data matching earmarks to their legislative sponsors to assess the leading explanations of distributive politics. We find that members of the majority party do considerably better than equally situated members of the minority. Moreover, party leaders target earmarks to those holding pivotal agenda-setting positions and to electorally vulnerable members. These findings have direct implications for both the extensive political science literature on distributive politics and the practical politics of earmarking reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors revisit the gender gap in campaign finance and find an advantage for women candidates in earning donations from individual donors due to the activities of female donor networks and the changing congressional donor pool. Women supported by these networks, especially Democratic women, receive a boost in campaign fundraising compared to their male counterparts, whereas women not supported by these networks receive significantly less. The ideological leanings of congressional donors also advantage Democratic women. Substantial partisan gender differences in this area of campaign finance persist, and this fund-raising gap may contribute to the growing partisan gender gap in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author began working in Eastern Europe in connection with his project to study the impact of U.S. constitutionalism following the U.S. constitutional bicentennial in 1987. This led him to organize a conference on constitutionalism in Eastern Europe in 1990 and to collaborate in projects on the progress of constitutionalism in the region since that time. The question the author addresses is whether the constitutional promise apparent in 1989 and following has been fulfilled two decades later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years after the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the region seems to have lost its sheen of moral appeal. What has happened to the dissidents, the heroes, the ethical lessons? Yet the Eastern Europe of today has become, in new and surprising ways, the test case of three of the largest questions of political morality in the early twentieth century: free elections, energy independence, and the divisiveness of national memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the prospects for meaningful reform of U.S. health care? To answer this question requires understanding why previous reform efforts (and in particular the 1993 Clinton health plan) failed—the combination of deep structural biases against large-scale public provision and the inherited constraints posed by the rise of employment-based insurance. Generally, the context is more favorable today than it was fifteen years ago. But the prospects for change hinge on learning the right lesson of history: Politics comes first. Putting politics first means avoiding the overarching mistake of the Clinton reformers: envisioning a grand policy compromise rather than hammering out a real political compromise. It also means addressing the inevitable fears of those who believe they are well protected by our eroding employment-based framework. And it means premising political strategies on the contemporary realities of hyperpolarized politics, rather than wistfully recalled images of the bipartisan politics of old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments in democratic systems are expected to respond to the issue preferences of citizens. Yet we have a limited understanding of the factors that cause levels of responsiveness to vary across time and between countries. In this article, the authors suggest that political contestation is the primary mechanism driving policy responsiveness and that this, in turn, is mediated by political institutions and government popularity. To test this proposition, the authors analyze the responsiveness of executive policy promises (speeches) and policy actions (public expenditure) in Britain, Denmark, and the United States in the period from 1970 to 2005. These time-series analyses show that higher levels of political contestation are associated with more responsive executives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although numerous studies have assessed the influence of the 1990s redistricting on U.S. House elections, without exception, these published studies rely on aggregate data (e.g., district-level data). Likewise, the author uses aggregate data, but he also departs from previous studies by using survey data to assess the influence of redistricting on vote choice in the 1992 and 1994 U.S. House elections. Unlike past studies, with the use of survey data, the author makes more definitive statements regarding the effects of redistricting on vote choice. The 1990s redistricting was an important factor contributing to the Republicans' House majority because voters drawn into districts with a different incumbent standing for reelection were much more likely to vote Republican. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author revisits his article "Crackpot Moralism, Neo-Realism, and U.S. Foreign Policy," which was published in the "World Policy Journal" in 1986. It is said that many of the issues discussed in the article were still relevant in 2008, as United States foreign policy was still torn between the conflicting pressures of idealism and realism. It is argued that realism is preferable, and idealistic concerns about morality should not dominate the foreign policy decisions of the United States. Realism is described as a position which focuses on the complexity of the world, and is unencumbered by judgments about whether people are good or bad.