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When interpersonally supplied, political information triggers not only different modes of information processing but also the related mechanisms that influence the attitudes and behavior toward its source, the informant. Using a unique data set from an online survey experiment, this article first investigates the conditions under which different modes of processing occur when political information is provided by another human being. The results show that positive affect helps Bayesian updating whereas negative affect makes motivated reasoning more likely. Second, the article addresses the consequences of interpersonal supply of political information for the informant, and for whom we talk about politics. Repetitive receipt of incongruent information from an informant with dissimilar party affiliation makes political discussion with the informant less likely. On the other hand, similarity of party affiliation allows people to contact incongruent political information providers for discussion, both contributing to and setting limits on the diversity of information circulating in political discussion networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental exit and voice play a critical role both in models espoused by school voucher proponents and in predictions of the voucher skeptics. Both camps agree that increased competition in a school voucher system would generate more exit from failing schools. In a longitudinal study of Santiago primary school parents we have found no evidence of increased propensity to exit the school or complain to school authorities about low school performance as competition increases. Instead we find that the sector of the school, not the level of competition in the school environment, affects parental attitudes and exit the most. Private voucher school parents voice disproportionately more discontent, and public school parents are far more likely to change their schools compared to parents in the other sectors.The results indicate that the different types of school organizations that a deregulated education marketplace gives birth to structure parental exercise of exit and voice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One promise of school voucher reform is that parents can move outside their school districts without relocating their homes. It has been argued that given patterns of neighborhood segregation and overlapping school districts, the possibility of such mobility makes voucher reform highly desirable. However, we do not know whether parents living in disadvantaged neighborhoods would or could leave the closest school option for better schools in different neighborhoods or not if they were in a universal school voucher system. This paper investigates the effects of neighborhood and parental characteristics on parents’ decision to become mobile. Because of the limited nature of voucher experiments in the US, the paper uses the Chilean universal school voucher system, the structure of which closely parallels the Milton Friedman’s (1958) original proposal of school vouchers. The data come from a panel of K-12 parents in Santiago, Chile. The paper uses survey items on the schools parents considered before the enrollment decision, and objective data on the academic indicators of these schools, their neighborhood characteristics, as well as the parents’ neighborhood and the academic indicators of their neighborhood schools. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaction in social networks might help citizens overcome their decisional weaknesses. Research on how citizens evaluate policies and candidates has shown that evaluations can be swayed by many factors such as mood, emotions, and affect. The resulting volatility in citizens’ evaluations has been a reason for worry from a deliberative democracy perspective. Social networks might bridge the gap between easily “swayed” citizens and the requirements of deliberative democracy. In this paper we investigate the effect of social network quality on the thought processes of citizens making policy evaluations. We investigate the effect of network coherence, extent, and sophistication on the likelihood of citizens to engage in coherent thinking about policies and their depth of reasoning in environments where affect laden stimuli are present. To that end, we first investigate the extent to which affective subliminal stimuli change the thought processes in an experiment where subjects evaluate policies, and then examine the effect of the social network quality on the extent to which subjects become susceptible to subliminal effects in their reasoning about specific policy areas such as energy or immigration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military regime in Chile initiated a large scale privatization in K-12 education in the early 1980s, which created a universal school choice system. As a result, privately-run but publiclyfunded voucher schools have become the dominant school sector in urban areas.This paper investigates the parents' accumulation of social capital in public and voucher schools under a system of universal school choice.The paper focuses both on the patterns of social capital accumulation acrossdifferent socio-economic status parents and on whether voucher schools make a difference in social capital accumulation. The study uses a four-wave panel of primary school parents in Santiago, Chile whereschool choice has existed for almost a quarter century. Moreover, the Chilean school choice policy was modeled after the original school voucherdesign proposed by Milton Friedman (1962, 1980) making it a good case fortesting hypotheses related to the potential societal impacts of school choice policies when carried to their logical conclusions.An important objective of the study is to disentangle social capital accumulation in a universal choice environment from the sorting effectsof school choice along socio-economic lines. The study also investigateshow parents from different socio-economic groups develop positive ornegative attitudes towards other parents and whether their attitudes are paralledby participation in shool affairs, which has been considered animportant indicator of social capital. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choice systems are believed to increase satisfaction with public services by giving citizens the chance to choose the provider. This paper tests the basic assumption of citizen mobility in the context of the Chilean school choice system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the nature of school competition and the effect of the competitive environment on social stratification through a study of the marketing activities of schools in Santiago, Chile. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a game theoretic model of institutional change, which confirms the political theory of endogenous institutional change outlined in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a political theory of endogeneous institutional change that emphasizes associational relations within families of institutions and the interactive properties of a given institutional mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]