People who visit online news and political sites are more politically extreme. Well, duh.
No serious observer of American politics would be surprised if you made two basic claims: (1) Small-circulation media outlets (websites, cable channels, independent newspapers) can be far more ideologically extreme than large-circulation outlets (network news) that need to appeal to a large audience to remain profitable, and (2) people prefer media sources that confirm their existing biases.
In the most recent issue of AJPS, Nie and his colleagues have an article that makes those two claims. The claims seem perfectly plausible. And they present well-executed research backing them up. Their findings are consistent with a string of previous work making the same argument and coming to the same conclusion (they list several such studies along the way). The main difference: Previous studies have operationalized “small-circulation outlets” as talk radio or cable television, but Nie et al look at internet news sites. They find that more ideologically extreme folks are more likely to visit online news sites. Read More »
Thad Kousser: Ask anybody here what a “good” state legislature should look like. Can anybody actually answer that? Seth Masket: Campaigns can matter. In districts that Colorado’s wealthy Democrats targeted via 527s, Democratic candidates for state legislature did 4% better than in previous elections. Apparently, a team of four extremely wealthy Democratic donors singlehandedly swung the legislature to the Democrats. Adam Brown: Self-financed spending is not strategic. Candidates spend if they have it, regardless of their likelihood of victory. (Yes, that was a shameless self-promotion.)
David Konisky and Neal Woods: Smart state governments should encourage their biggest polluters to locate along state boundaries. That way, the state can reap the benefits of industry, but let all the pollution drift into neighboring states. Great theoretical story. Awesome maps showing locations of all polluters in each state. Trouble is, the presentation ended with Konisky saying that all the empirical tests produced null results. There’s no evidence that states are actually doing this. As far as the “gotcha” goes, what a letdown. But I suppose we should be glad about these null findings. Emily Huston: HAVA set minimal standards for voter identification, but allowed states to impose stricter standards. Why did some states impose strict standards but others did not? Emily threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, but none of it stuck. The question remains unanswered. That’s two “null results” papers in one panel.
Chris Mooney: The coolest guy in state politics. Received several well-deserved honors, including a giant red pen to commemorate his work as founding editor of State Politics and Policy Quarterly.
Dan Smith and Michael McDonald apparently make a LOT of money as expert witnesses in lawsuits. And Bob Erikson looks surprisingly like the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
Boris Shor will release his common-space scores of legislators’ ideal points later this summer after a publication in LSQ comes out. Woot! (See an example of what you can do with his data.) Jim Battista and Megan Gall are assembling demographic data for all 7,380 legislative districts by matching census tracts to districts. Sounds painstaking. No word yet on whether they’ll release the data publicly so that we can all freeride. Battista/Gall’s data combined with Shor’s could be awesome.
This is a review ofPartisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections (2010) by David R. Jones. American Journal of Political Science 54 (April): 323-337. You can find the original in Google Scholar.
It may have been true 20, 30, or 40 years ago that members of Congress could evade accountability for Congress’s overall activities, but rising polarization has enabled voters to punish or reward Representatives for Congress’s collective performance.
For years, political scientists have explained this seeming paradox by pointing out that members of Congress can win reelection by running against Congress. A representative can urge his voters to send him back time after time so that he can keep working to fix the broken system. As Fenno wrote in Home Style, “It is easy for each Congressman to explain to his own supporters why he cannot be blamed for the performance of the collectivity . . . because the internal diversity and decentralization of the institution provide such a wide variety of collegial villains to flay before one’s supporters at home” (1978, 167).2
In his textbook on Congressional elections, Gary Jacobson sums up the dominant view among political scientists: “Members are not held individually responsible for their collective performance in governing.” (2004, 227).
David Jones has a recent article in AJPS that challenges this long held view. Jones looks back 60 years to a report commissioned in 1950 by the American Political Science Association Toward a More Responsive Two-Party System. That report urged “greater party cohesion in Congress,” suggesting that the presence of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats makes it more difficult for individual voters to hold their representative accountable for Congress’s collective activities.
Jones argues that the APSA report was correct: If the two parties become more distinct (i.e. polarized), then it should be easier for voters to blame members of the majority party for Congress’s collectively bad (or good) performance. And, as it happens, there’s been quite a bit of research in recent years showing that Congress has, in fact, become more polarized.
If Jones is right, then we’re in a new era. It may have been true 20, 30, or 40 years ago that members of Congress could evade accountability for Congress’s overall activities, but rising polarization has enabled voters to punish or reward Representatives for Congress’s collective performance. Read More »
This is a review ofThe Declining Talent Pool of Government (2010) by Torun Dewan and David P. Myatt. American Journal of Political Science 54 (April): 267-286. You can find the original in Google Scholar.
The “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench.
Imagine you’re a soccer coach. You’ve got 14 players on your roster, 11 of whom are on the field at any given time. How do you motivate your players to give it their best? In part, their personal ambitions drive them to play hard. But what “sticks” as a coach do you have to punish slacking off? You’ve got only one punishment: Taking a player off the field and substituting a player off the bench.
This creates what we might call “the declining talent pool of soccer,” or more simply, the “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench. Thus, one of these situations may result: Your 11 best players might give less than a full effort (knowing that their imperfect effort is still better than a benchwarmer’s full effort), or your inferior benchwarming players might be the ones you put on the field.
The same problem arises when choosing government officials. The result is inferior governance. Read More »
This is a review ofBroad Bills of Particularistic Policy? Historical Patterns in American State Legislatures (2010) by Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser. American Political Science Review 104 (February): 151-170. You can find the original in Google Scholar.
If you want your legislators to pass general policies that benefit the state as a whole, pay them less, make districts bigger, and strive for partisan balance. If you want your legislators to pass pork and other district-focused bills, pay them more, make districts smaller, and promote one-party government.
When will state legislators take on broad revisions to state policy, and when will they focus instead on particularistic bills (that is, bills that benefit only their home district)?
Broad bills ensure that general state policies remain current and fair, but legislators might avoid them for two reasons. First, they are technically complicated; if you wish to revise the state highway code, for example, you will need expert advice and probably a few studies. Second, they are politically difficult to pass; since they influence the entire state, you’ve got to work to bring a coalition of legislators on board with your proposal. By contrast, “district” bills are technically less complicated; the process of campaigning generally gives legislators all the information they need about some pressing local problem. District bills are also politically easier to pass; since they don’t have any impact outside of a small geographical area, other legislators have no reason to oppose most district bills.
By examining every bill introduced in 13 states in 1881, 1901, 1921, 1941, 1961, 1981, and 1997–that’s over 165,000 bills–Gamm and Kousser try to explain why some states produce so many more district bills than others. In Alabama, only 53% of bills had statewide impact; in Nebraska, 77% did. In general, Gamm and Kousser find that states pass more district bills when legislators have incentives to build up their reelection constituency or to make themselves stand out as an individual, but they pass more statewide bills when legislators have incentives to develop their influence and power within the state legislature. There’s more to it than that, though. Read More »
Conservatives are hard-working, organized, closed-minded, and emotionally stable. Liberals are lazy, disorganized, open-minded, and neurotic. Let’s see how the punditocracy spins that one.
Yesterday I wrote about Mondak et al.’s recent APSR article about personality and political participation. On the very next page of the same issue of APSR, you’ll find a closely related article by Gerber et al. Where Mondak et al. used the “Big Five” personality traits to predict participation in politics, Gerber et al. use the same “Big Five” traits to predict ideology.
Together, these two articles are a must-read. They help explain why genes and other biological factors might influence our political leanings. Biological factors (especially genetics) are the dominant cause of these Big Five personality traits, which then remain stable throughout life. In turn, these Big Five traits influence our political leanings (Gerber et al.) and our political activity (Mondak et al.).
The Big Five personality traits
Both articles adopt the “Big Five” approach that, they claim, has become widely accepted among psychologists. Quoting two psychologists, Gerber et al. sum up these big five traits as follows: Read More »
We cannot understand the effects of personality without accounting for the environment, and we cannot understand the effects of the environment without accounting for personality.
Political scientists pay very little attention to personality when they study political behavior. Instead, they prefer to look at environmental variables (campaign spending, personal income, personal education, candidate quality, electoral competitiveness, electoral system, etc.).
A few years ago, Alford, Funk, and Hibbing challenged that environmental approach by showing that political orientations are genetically transmitted. Later work by Fowler and his colleagues has confirmed that our political leanings are genetically influenced. But although this genetic research has drawn our attention toward biological influences, it has not produced a theory that can explain why biology matters.
The goal of Mondak et al.’s recent APSR article is to develop a theory that can link these genetic studies with the more widespread environmental studies. The figure below (from the article) summarizes the theory. Note that they expect neither environmental factors nor personality traits to have much of a direct effect on political behavior. Instead, most of the effect is interactive. For example, if a person has an extroverted personality type, and if a form of political participation is social (e.g. a caucus as opposed to donating to a candidate via internet), then you will expect that person to participate. Here’s the figure: Read More »
This is a review ofUsing Experiments to Estimate the Effects of Education on Voter Turnout (2010) by Rachel Milstein Sondheimer and Donald P. Green. American Journal of Political Science 54 (January): 174-189. You can find the original in Google Scholar.
Education does, indeed, have a robust causal effect on voter turnout.
Suppose you’re in a room full of people and you want to know which of them are most likely to be active voters, but you’re not allowed to ask them about their political activity. The best question you can ask them: How many years of schooling they have. We’ve known for many years that education is among the best predictors of voting (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980).
But what hasn’t been clear until know is whether education caused voting, or whether it was merely correlated with voting. After all, education is caused by family background (parents’ education level, family wealth) and personal characteristics (intelligence). Does education cause voting, or do the things that cause education also cause voting? A major knock against the “education as cause” theory came when Brody (1978) pointed out that education levels have risen dramatically since the 1960s, but turnout has not.
So how can we figure out whether education causes turnout? Well, shoot, what if we did an experiment that randomly caused one group of kids to get more education than a control group of their peers? Then we could just see whether those who were randomly induced to get more education also ended up voting at higher rates.
Genius. In the current issue of AJPS, Sondheimer and Green have an article that does exactly that. Read More »
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My name is Adam Brown. I am an assistant professor of political science. (
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