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General political knowledge is a central variable in American politics research. Individuals with high political knowledge exhibit behaviors that are consequential to a well-functioning democracy, including holding more stable political opinions, exhibiting greater ideological constraint, knowing more about political candidates, and being more likely to vote correctly. In this paper, we examine whether the internet revolution, enabling citizens to look up anything at any time, has changed the relative importance of political knowledge in American politics. We show that important generational differences exist between Americans raised during the broadcast era and Americans raised with the presence and accessibility of the internet. Internet access can be a substitute for political knowledge stored in long-term memory, particularly among this younger generation, who may be relying on the internet to store knowledge for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a graphical model to explain the relationship between majority voting and government growth in the U.S. Total government expenditure and GNP from 1929 to 1982; Assumption that government sets agendas to maximize expenditure; Numerical example of migration between two jurisdictions.

Should people discuss their vote choices with others? On one hand, many people argue that openly deliberating with others can lead to better decision-making. On the other hand, institutions like the secret ballot imply that keeping these choices secret has value, perhaps as a means of insulating people from unwanted social pressures. This paper examines public attitudes about whether it is best to discuss one’s choices with others or to treat them as personal matters. We find that the American public is evenly divided on this issue. We also find that those who are least confident in their political capabilities—those who arguably could benefit most from deliberating about their vote choices—are most likely to say that choices should be treated as personal matters. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of political deliberation in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One mystery of U.S. politics is why the president's party regularly loses congressional seats at midterm. Although presidential coattails and their withdrawal provide a partial explanation, coattails cannot account for the fact that the presidential party typically performs worse than normal at midterm. This paper addresses the midterm vote separate from the presidential year vote, with evidence from generic congressional polls conducted during midterm election years. Polls early in the midterm year project a normal vote result in November. But as the campaign progresses, vote preferences almost always move toward the out party. This shift is not a negative referendum on the president, as midterms do not show a pattern of declining presidential popularity or increasing salience of presidential performance. The shift accords with ''balance'' theory, where the midterm campaign motivates some to vote against the party of the president in order to achieve policy moderation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents and investigates a prominent but little discussed pattern in U.S. politics, which is the decline of third-party electoral support over the past century. We find evidence consistent with the claim that electoral support for third parties—mainly left-wing third parties—declined because the Democratic Party co-opted the left-wing policy position beginning with the passage of the New Deal agenda. We note first that most of the third-party voting in the pre-New-Deal era was for left-wing third parties and that this declined sharply during the 1930s and 1940s. We then show that after the New Deal the Democratic Party's electoral support was higher in areas that had traditionally supported left-wing third parties. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we find little support for the hypothesis that the decline of third-party voting was immediately due to electoral reforms such as the introduction of direct primaries and the Australian ballot, except possibly in the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probes the national effort to boost voter turnout in the U.S. during the 1920s period. Extent of Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) campaigns; Misrepresentation of nonvoters in the GOTV campaigns; Emergence of the political culture; Views of GOTV supporters on problems with nonvoting; Factors compounding the concerns over nonvoting; Reasons behind the drop in voter turnout during the period.

The article discusses urbanization, social diversity, voter turnout, and political competition in U.S. elections. The argument forwarded in the paper is that as voter turnout increases in sheer numbers alone so do the number and degree of political differences within the electorate simply because more people are voting. This makes it more difficult for one candidate or party to be appealing to all voters which, in turn, should make the election more competitive. However, while some studies report a positive association between turnout and competition, other studies have reported no relationship or an indeterminate one. Moreover, these previous studies on the turnout-competition hypothesis have many of the same limitations and comparability problems as those for studies testing the urbanization-competition hypothesis. This paper also tested the hypothesis that greater social diversity within congressional districts would have a positive relationship with greater competition independently of the urbanization level of districts.

This paper examines the so-called "perquisites/constituency service" hypothesis that purports to explain incumbents' electoral margins in congressional elections. First, it reviews the individual-level and aggregate-level studies, pointing out serious problems in measurements and methodology and concluding that existing literature does not and cannot support the thesis Second, using 1984 CPS/NES data, the paper models the voting decisions in 1984, finding that respondents' decisions were affected by shared partisanship with the incumbent, ideological compatibility, challenger spending, assessments of President Reagan, and (a dubiously measured) recollection of the incumbent's having done something for the district. Individual casework experience did not affect the voting decision. Third, with data gathered from over 200 House offices, the percentage of the vote won by incumbents in the 1982 election is modeled as a function of 1982 casework loads, staff allocation, mailings, and several baseline variables. The findings are that casework loads, trips home, and mailings did not affect the vote, but that district partisanship and ideology, redistricting, national electoral tides, and occasionally district education levels did. We conclude that, based on existing evidence, the perquisites and casework hypotheses have not been demonstrated and that to explore the theses further panel data are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Geraldine Ferraro was selected to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate, questions were raised about why she was chosen. Was her selection an outcome of affirmative action in the political arena? The research reported in this paper investigates whether the effect of Ferraro's candidacy on voting inclinations and behavior among college students was mediated by conceptions of the procedure of affirmative action. As predicted, conceptions of affirmative action (the difference between actual and threshold ratios) influenced changes in inclination to vote Democratic in response to the Ferraro candidacy. In turn, those inclinations affected voting behavior in the 1984 presidential election. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical importance of perceived procedural fairness in the political arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the status of a study being undertaken by Clinton E. Jencks of San Diego, California related to politics, government and industrial relations in the U.S., as of October 1984. Jencks is investigating whether the jury commissioner use of voter registration lists in drawing jury panels systematically prejudices against poor people stratified according to employment, family income and education. Census tapes of the Current Population Surveys is employed in the study.

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability of reelection. Comparing to a benchmark case of a certain reelection, we demonstrate that the incumbent’s optimal policy features both a more polarized allocation between the alternative public goods and a debt bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This county-level study examines factors associated with the rate of voided presidential ballots in the 1996 elections. Evidence indicates that voided ballots are significantly more prevalent in counties with higher percentages of African Americans and Hispanics. The relationship between voided ballots and African Americans disappears, however, in counties using voting equipment that can be programmed to eliminate overvoting. The rate of voided ballots is lower in larger counties and in counties with a higher percentage of high school graduates. The rate of voided ballots declines as the number of presidential candidates on the ballot increases, but only up to a point, and then rises with further increases. Lever machines generate the lowest rates of voided ballots among types of voting equipment, with punch card systems generating the highest rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Answers David Lublin's critique of a paper on majority-minority voting district in the United States. Debate over race and redistricting; Latino voters and minority representation; Substantive representation; Equal opportunity and the election of minorities; State-level analysis; current black equal opportunity.

This paper develops a model of the political economy of tax-setting in a multijurisdictional world, where voters' chokes and incumbent behavior are determined simultaneously. Voters are assumed to make comparisons between jurisdictions to overcome political agency problems. This forces incumbents into a (yardstick) competition in which they care about what other incumbents are doing. We provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence using U.S. state data from 1960 to 1988. The results are encouraging to the view that vote-seeking and tax-setting are tied together through the nexus of yardstick competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 23 American states, citizens can initiate and approve laws by popular vote; in the other 27 states, laws can be proposed only by elected representatives. This paper compares the fiscal behavior of state and local governments over the last 30 years under these two institutional arrangements. The main finding is that spending is significantly lower, on the order of 4 percent, in states with voter initiatives than in pure representative states. It is also found that local spending is higher and state spending is lower in initiative states. On the revenue side, initiative states rely less on broad-based taxes and more on charges tied to services. Taken together, the evidence indicates that the initiative leads to a reduction in the overall size of the government sector and suggests that it causes a decline in the level of redistributional activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research considers whether there is evidence of legislators' issue avoidance, or un- willingness to reveal one's position. It links, for the first time, two important areas of inquiry: legislative decision making and issue avoidance. The data describe senatorial behavior over eighteen years, involving approximately 200,000 individual voting decisions. During that time, senators were polled by CQ after each missed roll call, and asked to indicate their positions. Issue avoidance is a subset of the nonresponses to that poll. A conceptual model of voting and position taking is presented, incorporating both behaviors and intentions. It defines two kinds of issue avoidance: "proactive," deliberate avoidance at the time of the roll call, and "reactive," avoidance decided on after votes missed inadvertently. Application of the model permits inferences about intent. Proactive avoidance accounts for 12% of nonvoting during the terms' first five years. It also represents 40% of failures to reveal positions. As much as another 19% of nonvoting results in reactive avoidance. A sixth-year increase in issue avoidance is indicated, although not conclusively. The findings strongly suggest that models of legislative voting should he amended to account for both proactive and reactive avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a history of the direct primary and an outline of the jurisprudence regarding primary elections. Topics discussed include the history of suffrage in the U.S., the jurisprudence regarding voting, the Supreme Court's test for evaluating voting regulations, the conflicting jurisprudence for determining when a voter may, or may not, be excluded from a primary election and the evolving electorate and political landscape in the U.S.

This article examines the political implications of the changing demographics of the Cuban American community. Over the past decade, pundits have predicted a massive shift in Cuban American voting behavior owing to demographic changes in the community. The authors find evidence that the attitudes of Cuban Americans have undergone significant changes, driven largely by the increased number of post-Mariel (1980) immigrants. The authors also find, however, that these dramatic changes have not yet been reflected at the ballot box, nor are they likely to be soon, owing to the slow process of immigrant political incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates two issues unexplored in studies of the relationship between panel composition and voting on three-judge panels of the Courts of Appeals: how often will panel composition influence case outcomes, and how has the relationship between panel composition and panel voting changed over time? The author shows that while long stretches of single-party control of the presidency in the first half of the twentieth century often produced a high rate of panels with three judges from the same party, frequent turnover of White House control in the past half century has helped ensure that a majority of panels are composed of at least one judge from each party. The author also presents the first systematic longitudinal analysis of panel composition and judicial behavior, showing that the relationship between the two is a relatively recent phenomenon. These findings have important implications for understanding collegial behavior on the Courts of Appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature portrays the congressional voter of the 1950s through the early 1970s as having been unwilling or unable to hold Congress electorally accountable for its collective legislative performance. In contrast, recent literature has demonstrated that in elections from 1974 onward, voters have regularly used congressional performance evaluations as part of their voting decisions. Specifically, poor evaluations of Congress lower support for candidates from the ruling majority party, all else being equal. This research note hypothesizes that Americans in the earlier era were willing and able to hold Congress electorally accountable for its collective performance in the same partisan fashion as today’s voters are, but that this behavior was obscured from previous researchers because they lacked access to appropriate empirical data. Using survey data largely unavailable to scholars of the earlier era, I find evidence supporting this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective. This article uses a data set of California State legislators to determine the effect of tobacco contributions on legislative behavior. Methods. Although many previous studies have analyzed the effect of campaign contributions on legislative behavior, this study makes a number of improvements to previous studies, including the use of panel data and improved instruments. Results. I find that contrary to prior research on tobacco industry contributions, campaign contributions from the tobacco industry do not influence legislative support for the tobacco industry. Conclusion. This suggests that the tobacco industry is not an exception to the literature on the influence of campaign contributions, which has shown that campaign contributions generally do not influence legislative voting and other behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate achievable and unachievable hierarchies in weighted voting systems where the quota is a proportion of the total weight. This extends work of Bean et al. (Theory Dec 65:285–302, 2007) where simple majority achievable hierarchies were characterized. In particular we resolve the question of which hierarchies are possible with common quota rules other than simple majority, such as 2/3-majority or 3/4-majority, and offer a conjecture about proportional quota achievable hierarchies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors propose a reexamination of the conditioning effect of political sophistication on economic voting in U.S. presidential elections. Replicating Gomez and Wilson's (2001) analysis with survey data from the past five American presidential elections (1988–2004), they show that low sophisticates strictly rely on sociotropic economic judgments in their intention to support the incumbent party's candidate. For their part, high sophisticates appear to use both sociotropic and pocketbook evaluations in their voting intention, but only in elections where the sitting incumbent is running for reelection (1992, 1996, and 2004). Most of these findings do not hold, however, once the postelectoral reported vote is used as the dependent variable. Indeed, the authors find that pocketbook evaluations do not have a significant impact on high sophisticates' reported vote choice, and they also find important variance in economic voting effects among low sophisticates. The results indicate that high sophisticates continue to use sociotropic evaluations in their voting decision, but only in incumbent elections. Overall, the analysis raises doubts about some of the previous studies' conclusions and underlines the importance of considering the moderating role of contextual factors such as incumbency and political campaigns in economic voting studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors reply here to Godbout and Bélanger's critique of their work on political sophistication and economic voting. Principally, the authors stress the importance of using contemporaneous economic assessment and candidate preference measures in assessing their relationship. They also emphasize the empirical support for their key contentions that less sophisticated citizens tend not to credit/blame government for their own economic circumstances, and that more sophisticated citizens tend to focus on actors other than the president when attributing responsibility for the national economy. Finally, the authors stress the variety of contexts, both outside the United States and outside the domain of economic voting, in which their theory has found support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of local elections in the United States, political scientists have little knowledge of what shapes vote choice in most municipalities and special districts, particularly in the suburbs where a majority of Americans live. This article develops and tests models of local voting behavior using unique survey data of over 1,400 voters in 30 different suburban communities. Suburban electoral politics are dominated by a nonrepresentative group of ‘stakeholders,’ who are highly informed and interested in local affairs. Because of this, vote choice in suburban elections ends up sharing many characteristics with larger contests (i.e., issue salience, partisanship, and candidate likeability), although their impact varies with the size and diversity of the particular community (e.g., in smaller suburbs, voters are more engaged in local politics, more likely to know candidates personally, and more likely to vote against incumbents). These findings suggest the importance of developing new theories about voting behavior in micro-electoral contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of publications, Verba and Nie and their coauthors argued that participatory acts vary along a number of dimensions, and that acts having similar dimensional profiles would constitute distinct modes of participation (Verba and Nie 1972; Verba, Nie, and Kim 1971, 1978; Verba, et al., 1973). In the realm of electoral participation, these investigators postulated two modes, voting and campaigning. Campaigning was thought to encompass a variety of behaviors, including working for a candidate or party, trying to persuade someone how to vote, and making a campaign contribution. A new dimensional typology, presented here, predicts that working in a campaign and contributing to political actors constitute separate modes of participation. We confirm these predictions by performing confirmatory factor analyses of participation items from the 1980–2004 American National Election Studies. We also find that vote persuasion is best modeled as a measure of political discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military service has the capacity to inculcate members with politically relevant traits that influence political participation later in life. Results from three decades of pooled national cross-sectional data among males indicate that previous experience with the military, the most controlling and least democratic facet of American democracy, has a largely positive effect on turnout propensity For WWII, Korean War, and post-conscription era veterans, previous military service positively influences turnout when compared to contemporaries without military service, while Vietnam-era veterans exhibited lower turnout rates than nonveteran peers. Evidence suggests that socialization effects rival self-selection bias in explaining increased veteran turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a large six-city exit poll from 2000, we examine popular judgments of what constitutes "political corruption" in the United States. We find two distinct evaluative dimensions: corruption understood as lawbreaking, and corruption as favoritism. These judgments are heavily conditioned by the voter's socioeconomic background and are politically consequential. Subjective understandings of "corruption" shape perceptions of how much corruption actually exists in government. Furthermore, and more importantly, these normative assessments play a significant part in voting decisions. Individuals who judged illegal activities such as bribe-taking to be "corrupt" were more inclined to back one of the major party candidates in 2000; those who believed that favoritism in politics was "corrupt" (e.g., an official recommending an unemployed friend for a government job) were more likely to vote for Al Gore or Ralph Nader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the link between presidential approval and congressional election outcomes is long established, scholars have generally ignored the role of a member's own voting record in mediating these effects. If voters truly use the congressional ballot to express support or opposition toward the President, then they should not reward or punish all of his fellow partisans equally. Instead, the degree of reward or punishment meted out by voters ought to depend on the member's level of support for the president's legislative initiatives. Using data from the 1993, 1994, and 1996 National Election Studies, we demonstrate two key points: that representatives’actual levels of support for the president are the single greatest predictor of their perceived levels of presidential support, and that perceived levels of presidential support interact powerfully with citizen presidential approval to shape attitudes toward congressional incumbents. These effects dwarf simple partisan heuristics in explaining congressional vote choice, suggesting that citizens are much more discriminating than is typically assumed in using the congressional vote as a referendum on presidential policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates the roles of ideology, constituency, and political party for roll-call voting in the U.S. Senate on a broad set of environmental issues. The study estimates a model of political support using voting scores from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) for the period 1988–1998, including observations on 91 senators for 130 roll-call votes. The study decomposes the scale-adjusted scores into relative weights due to the general electorate, the senator's support constituency, party leadership, and ideology. The main findings are that a senator's ideology is by far the most important consideration for voting profiles on environmental issues, and that party affiliation and regional loyalty explain about 74% of measured ideology. Hence, "green" voting tends to be highly partisan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the relationship between incumbents' electoral performance and roll-call support in the context of American politics. Factors affecting political support; Accountability of legislators for legislative voting; Recognition of electoral determinants.

Presents lessons from the presidential election outcome in Florida in November 2000. Arguments for better voting machines; Role of manual recounts in an election; Adoption of objective standards in advance to constrain human decision making; Involvement of partisan politics in election decisions.

Provides information on a study which tested the conditional party government thesis in the United States. Likelihood of party members to participate in a roll call vote when the question has been identified as important to the party; How party leadership signals affected member turnout levels; Evidence of cohesive partisan behavior in the Senate.

The article discusses the evolution of gender gap in the U.S., specifically in politics. To better understand the long-term evolution of gender gap, there are two factors that need to be considered. First, changes in partisan preferences have been greater in the South and than the rest of the nation. Second, men have greater tendency than women to profess an independent identification. An independence gap, in which men are more likely to consider themselves political independents, and women are more likely to claim a partisan identity, is evident in 70 percent of the American National Election Surveys (ANES) from 1952 to 1996 and in 65 percent of the General Social Surveys (GSS) from 1972 to 1994. Because of the independence gap, a gender gap measured solely on differences between Democratic and Republican adherents underestimate the partisan preferences of men versus women. The southern gender gap arose mainly from the dramatic movement of men away from the Democratic party into the Republican party. The gender gap in the North arose from the greater movement in partisan preferences among males than females. The source of the gender gap is the same in the North as in the South. Difference between the two regions is in the amount of partisan change and whether the decline in Democratic identification is coupled with an equal growth in Republican supporters.

The marginal abstention hypothesis is that once at the polls, individuals are more likely to vote in the closer races on the ballot and to abstain from voting in the safer races. This hypothesis is a straightforward extension of the rational voting model. In previous empirical applications of the rational voter theory, voter turnout and voting in a given election are treated as one in the same. These studies have produced mixed results. When applied to the problem of explaining marginal voting behavior, the theory works well. Data on a recent sample of U.S. House and Senate elections is used to test the marginal abstention hypothesis. In the average Congressional District, about three percent more people vote in the Senate race than in the House race. This difference varies in a fashion predictable by the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on research regarding the interaction between money and voting in U.S. politics. Regulation of campaign financial practices; Use of ordinary least squares regression analyses in providing empirical evidence that supports the hypothesis that money affects elections; Analysis of data from U.S. House of Representatives campaigns.

This article offers a macro-level approach to a core concept in the study of electoral behavior, the normal vote. The approach uses interrupted time-series analysis and focuses upon electorally homogeneous political regions within states. After developing the approach used to generate normal vote estimates, analyses using those estimates are compared with (I parallel analyses using survey-based research, and (2) across levels of analysis (national, regional). The comparison with survey-based analyses show that the macro-level measure follows the actual vote more closely and is more sensitive to short- term influences. Comparisons across levels of analysis demonstrate that national level analyses obscure a volatile, dynamic electorate that exists at the regional level. These findings suggest that the creative use of the macro-level measure at the regional level has the potential to contribute new and important insights into the role of citizens in American politics, and the forces that drive the behavior of the electorate. Its particular strengths lie in the study of electoral change and its ability to contribute toward a developmental perspective on American democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from a national survey conducted in 1984 form the basis for a new analysis of anticandidate voting in presidential elections, i.e., voting focused more on a candidate one opposes than on a candidate one prefers. Anticandidate voting is viewed as the end product of a process whereby voters attempt to reduce discomfort that cross-pressures generate within their decision frameworks. In 1984, nearly a third of all likely voters said they were primarily motivated by a desire to vote against one of the two presidential candidates, a rate of anticandidate voting similar to that observed in the Johnson- Goldwater election of 1964 but well below that of the 1980 Reagan-Carter election. However, factors related to anticandidate voting in the past were not consistently linked to anticandidate voting in 1984. We conclude that the presence of Ronald Reagan exerted such a strong influence on the 1984 campaign that processes that would normally be observable, such as anticandidate voting, were overridden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The well-noted decline in the participation of Americans in presidential elections since the early sixties reversed in the 1984 election, although only slightly. An improved "national mood" appears to have contributed little to increasing turnout. However, the gap in participation between the wealthier and poorer widened, while that between men and women narrowed and reversed direction, and belonging to a group associated with an identity affected participation more powerfully. Taken together, these findings indicate shifts in patterns of turnout corresponding to shifts in the lines of politicized interests. Analysis of the participation of blacks finds little evidence for electoral mobilization by the Rainbow Coalition in 1984. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard McKelvey predicts that candidates will converge to an equilibrium if candidates and voters maximize their utility and voters' preferences conform to stringent assumptions. Although there are discrepancies between electoral data and the requirements of the theory, an analysis of 1972 and 1976 survey data lends support to basic components of the theory. First, most voters did choose the candidate who provided the greater utility. Second, voter distribution was not asymmetrical enough to allow a candidate to win by moving away from the median toward a concentration of voters. Third, the winning strategy for a candidate was to locate at or near the median. While formal theories' pre- dictions will not hold in their precisely stated form, the assumptions can be robust enough to offer an explanation of electoral choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]