{"title":"Stability and Change: The Time Varying Impact of Economic and Foreign Policy Evaluations on Presidential Approval","authors":"Gregory E. Mcavoy","doi":"10.1177/106591290605900107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290605900107","url":null,"abstract":"Most researchers studying presidential approval with time series analysis assume that foreign and economic policy have a time-invariant weight in citizens’ judgments of presidential performance. However, those studying presidential approval in cross-sectional analysis find that the weight of foreign and economic policy on job performance fluctuates as news about these issues changes. These competing views can be incorporated into a model of rational learning that makes it possible to test whether the public weighs foreign and economic policy differently over time in its evaluation of the president. The analysis presented here shows that foreign and economic policy exhibit different patterns in their relationship to overall approval—economic policy has a consistent impact over time, while foreign policy ebbs and flows.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127665555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Lubell, A. Vedlitz, S. Zahran, Letitia T. Alston
{"title":"Collective Action, Environmental Activism, and Air Quality Policy","authors":"M. Lubell, A. Vedlitz, S. Zahran, Letitia T. Alston","doi":"10.1177/106591290605900113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290605900113","url":null,"abstract":"This article attempts to respond to Ostrom’s call for a behavioral model of collective action by generalizing the collective interest model of mass political action to explain citizen policy support and personal behavioral intentions in the context of air quality policy. The collective action problems inherent in air quality policy provide a critical research setting for testing hypotheses of the collective interest model. Key elements of the collective interest model—perceived risk, trust in policy elites, knowledge of the policy problem, and efficacy—are found to be directly, and positively, related to support of government policies and intentions to engage in personal behaviors that might improve air quality. The article discusses the implications for using the collective interest model as general behavioral theory of collective action.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127200873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rights or Benefits? Explaining the Sexual Identity Gap in American Political Behavior","authors":"Brian F. Schaffner, Nenad Senić","doi":"10.1177/106591290605900111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290605900111","url":null,"abstract":"Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGBs) are far more likely than heterosexuals to support the Democratic Party and its candidates. But is this support due to the Democratic Party support for the civil rights agendas of historically disadvantaged groups, or is it based on other factors? In this article, we use the issue of same-sex marriage to attempt to explain the nature of the sexual identity gap. We demonstrate that a substantial portion of LGBs place a great deal of importance on winning healthcare and other employee benefits for their spouses, but that they are less concerned about having legally recognized marriages. Furthermore, we find that it is the goal of acquiring spousal benefits, not the right to marry, that influences the degree to which LGBs support the Democratic Party. We conclude that the sexual identity gap is generated more from LGB concerns about acquiring tangible economic benefits than from an interest in pursuing civil rights.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126505878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Relationship Between Political Parties and Interest Groups: Explaining Patterns of PAC Contributions to Candidates for Congress","authors":"Thomas L. Brunell","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800415","url":null,"abstract":"Interest groups are policy maximizers, while political parties are focused on maximizing the number of seats they win in Congress. These competing goals have important implications for the relationship between interest groups and parties. In this study I develop and test a theory concerning the patterns of hard money contributions from Political Action Committees (PACs) to candidates for the U.S. Congress. I argue that interest groups have preferences as to which party controls a majority of seats in Congress, which leads them to direct “sincere” and electorally useful money to this party (i.e., labor groups prefer Democrats, corporate groups prefer Republicans). When interest groups donate funds to the “other” party, the donations are designed to have as minimal electoral impact as possible. Interest groups accomplish this by giving “strategic” donations to this party in the following way: donate less money almost exclusively to incumbents (who typically do not need the money in order to be reelected). Thus, while many PACs do give money to both Democrats and Republicans, which indicates the importance of access, it is evident from the overall pattern of donations that these groups clearly favor either one party or the other.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128110042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Corporate Person and Democratic Politics","authors":"S. Gerencser","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800410","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the political rights of corporations, as vested in their claim to legal personhood, and the complications such rights present to theories of democracy. While corporate personhood has generated significant debate in the field of jurisprudence, it has gone largely unnoticed in democratic theory. This article first highlights significant features in the legal theory and standing of corporate personhood. It then critically considers how well one significant current approach to democratic theory, deliberative democracy, is situated to handle corporations as entities with political rights. The essay closes by arguing that the collision between legal practices that recognize political rights of persons that may not be human individuals and political theories that presume individual human beings as the primary political subjects reveals the need for a broader conception of agency in democratic theory. Such a conception of agency would, by freeing itself of simple assumptions of human subjectivity, be more attuned to various types of inequality of power that frustrate democratic decisionmaking.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121377865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Popular Vote","authors":"Juliet A. Williams","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800411","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past few years, voting has become a central dramatic element on a variety of shows in the highly successful reality TV genre. Treating the “voting drama” as a shadow realm to the political, one in which anxieties and tensions produced by the practice of democracy are given free play, this essay offers a critical consideration of some of the hidden aspects of the cultural and social significance of political voting.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125028987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Determinants of Economic Liberalization in Latin America","authors":"G. Biglaiser, David S. Brown","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800414","url":null,"abstract":"Previous work on political institutions and economic reform provides a number of testable hypotheses that are rarely examined in a multivariate framework. Divided government, political polarization, fragmented legislatures, ideology, external factors, the strength of the presidency, and democracy itself have all been forwarded as possible constraints that influence the depth and speed of economic reform. Using time-series cross-sectional data, this research note provides a multivariate test of the impact these institutions have on different components of structural reform. Our findings suggest that specific institutional arrangements are important for achieving some specific kinds of economic reform. However, our main finding implies the kind of institutional and ideological constraints prominent in the literature do not constrain politicians from enacting reform.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123849844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political Legitimacy and Participation in Costa Rica: Evidence of Arena Shopping","authors":"J. Booth, M. Seligson","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800402","url":null,"abstract":"Considerable research has failed to establish a link between political legitimacy and system breakdown. This does not mean, however, that researchers should abandon the concept of legitimacy altogether, since it may have other important effects that shape the character of the political system. We explore the impact, or lack thereof, of legitimacy on citizen behavior. Specifically, we test the proposition that legitimacy may have complex effects by differentially affecting a variety of modes of citizen participation. Empirical evidence from a 2002 national survey in Costa Rica, a consolidated Latin American democracy, reveals how legitimacy shapes citizens’ political participation and civil society activism. We find that legitimacy has no uniform relationship across diverse modes of political participation. Some legitimacy dimensions increase certain participation modes while they decrease others, but have yet no effect on other modes. Specifically, other factors held constant, greater belief in two dimensions of legitimacy, “political community” and “trust in local government,” increase voting and civil society activism. Low rather than high levels of “system support” increase party activism-instrumental contacting and communal activism, and low trust in regime institutions elevates civil society activism. Contradictory findings emerge on the impact of low legitimacy on protest participation. An important and novel finding is that two legitimacy-participation relationships are curvilinear. These findings suggest that prior research, based on a unidimensional notion of legitimacy and binary treatment of participation as conventional vs. unconventional may have been misleading. We discuss the implications of these patterns for political stability and legitimacy theory.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127668152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bias in Newspaper Photograph Selection","authors":"Andrew W. Barrett, Lowell W. Barrington","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800408","url":null,"abstract":"Previous research has shown that visual images of political candidates can influence voter perceptions. This study examines newspaper photographs of candidates to determine whether the favorableness of these pictures is related to the “political atmosphere” of individual newspapers. In particular, we examine 435 candidate photographs from several races covered by seven newspapers during the 1998 and 2002 general election seasons. Based on our analysis, we conclude that candidates endorsed by a particular newspaper—or whose political leanings match the political atmosphere of a given paper—generally have more favorable photographs of them published than their opponents.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114744584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sources of Variation in the Frequency of Statewide Initiatives: The Role of Interest Group Populations","authors":"F. Boehmke","doi":"10.1177/106591290505800404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/106591290505800404","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I study the factors that determine the number of initiatives that appear on statewide ballots, with an emphasis on the characteristics of state interest group populations. In particular, I test whether the size of state citizen or economic group populations influences the frequency of initiative use. The relationship between these two categories of groups and initiative use is important in light of recent claims that the initiative process no longer benefits citizen groups and is now dominated by economic interests. In addition, I consider the role of other factors, including initiative regulations, state political characteristics, state economic performance and state demographic characteristics. My results indicate that states with more citizen groups have more initiatives overall and in specific issue areas and that the number of economic groups has a negative or negligible effect.","PeriodicalId":394472,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly (formerly WPQ)","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128679881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}