Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

For more than two decades political scientists have discussed rising elite polarization in the United States, but the study of mass polarization did not receive comparable attention until fairly recently. This article surveys the literature on mass polarization. It begins with a discussion of the concept of polarization, then moves to a critical consideration of different kinds of evidence that have been used to study polarization, concluding that much of the evidence presents problems of inference that render conclusions problematic. The most direct evidence—citizens' positions on public policy issues—shows little or no indication of increased mass polarization over the past two to three decades. Party sorting—an increased correlation between policy views and partisan identification—clearly has occurred, although the extent has sometimes been exaggerated. Geographic polarization—the hypothesized tendency of like-minded people to cluster together—remains an open question. To date, there is no conclusive e...

/pdf/political-polarization-in-the-american-public-3avwz0vhxe.pdf

Political Polarization in the American Public

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/elecdem/pdfs/florence/Van_Ham_Smets_The_Embarrassment_of_Riches.pdf

The embarrassment of riches?: A meta-analysis of individual-level research on voter turnout

The symbolic importance of Barack Obama's election is without question. But beyond symbolism, does the election of African-American politicians matter? Grose argues that it does and presents a unified theory of representation. Electing African-American legislators yields more federal dollars and congressional attention directed toward African-American voters. However, race and affirmative action gerrymandering have no impact on public policy passed in Congress. Grose is the first to examine a natural experiment and exceptional moment in history in which black legislators – especially in the U.S. South – represented districts with a majority of white constituents. This is the first systematic examination of the effect of a legislator's race above and beyond the effect of constituency racial characteristics. Grose offers policy prescriptions, including the suggestion that voting rights advocates, the courts, and redistricters draw 'black decisive districts', electorally competitive districts that are likely to elect African Americans.

Congress in Black and White: Race and Representation in Washington and at Home

The article examines the relationship between corruption and voting behavior by defining two distinct channels: pocketbook corruption voting, i.e. how personal experiences with corruption affect voting behavior; and sociotropic corruption voting, i.e. how perceptions of corruption in society do so. Individual and aggregate data from Slovakia fail to support hypotheses that corruption is an undifferentiated valence issue, that it depends on the presence of a viable anti-corruption party, or that voters tolerate (or even prefer) corruption, and support the hypothesis that the importance of each channel depends on the salience of each source of corruption and that pocketbook corruption voting prevails unless a credible anti-corruption party shifts media coverage of corruption and activates sociotropic corruption voting. Previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of corruption voting by not accounting for both channels.

/pdf/pocketbook-vs-sociotropic-corruption-voting-uu1j9c72f9.pdf

Pocketbook vs. Sociotropic Corruption Voting

The notion that issues and ideology can move partisanship remains controversial. The authors explore the stronger claim that issues can lead people to switch political parties and whether the effect of abortion attitudes is asymmetrical (i.e., abortion attitudes may influence party switching in only one direction). They show that in several short-term National Election Studies panels, pro-life Democrats were significantly more likely than other Democrats to become Republicans, but pro-choice Republicans were not likely to become Democrats. However, using panel data over a long time frame, 1982 to 1997, the authors also demonstrate that the cumulative effect of abortion attitudes led pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans to switch parties.

Do Abortion Attitudes Lead to Party Switching

Institutions whose members fail to reflect the diversity of the population are often taken to be unrepresentative of citizens' policy preferences and potentially undemocratic (Mansbridge 1999; Pitkin 1978). For the courts to be viewed as legitimate, they must be at least marginally representative of the racial composition of the public. The symbolic representation of minority judges "has a positive and legitimizing effect on the functioning of a democracy" (Walker and Barrow 1985, 597). Institutional legitimacy is particularly essential for the judiciary because it "has no influence over either the sword or the purse" (Hamilton 1788). Furthermore, if minority judges decide cases differently (Scherer 2004-05; Welch, Combs, and Gruhl 1988), it is especially imperative to understand what drives minority nominations to circuit courts. Even though extensive work has been done on minority representation in Congress (e.g., Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran 1996; Canon, Schousen, and Sellers 1996; Lublin 1997a, 1999), minority representation on circuit courts remains relatively unexamined outside of qualitative studies (e.g., Goldman 1997). The primary value of this research article is that it demonstrates that some of the potential influences believed to affect presidents' nomination decisions have little impact, whereas others have surprisingly large effects. When presidents and their advisors are deciding whom to nominate to openings on the U.S. courts of appeals, to what extent do they take into consideration or even give priority to signals from other political actors? Senators, especially home-state senators, immediately come to mind as a potential influence on these decisions. Various characteristics of a state (e.g., the size of the minority population, minority economic influence, and minority representation in the congressional delegation) may also generate pressure on presidents to nominate minority judges and on senators to approve them (Gryski, Zuk, and Barrow 1994). A reading of Goldman's (1997) work on how various presidents have gone about nominating federal judges can take researchers down a variety of paths with respect to a particular combination of influences because of the lack of clear guideposts as to what affects presidents making this decision, Some quantitative studies indicate which factors might affect presidential decision making on the diversification of circuit courts. For example, Bratton and Spill (2002) show that gender diversification of state supreme courts is responsive to a variety of conditions, such as the method of appointment in a state. However, relatively little is known about how minority nominations are generated for appointments to the U.S. courts of appeals--a gap that is especially surprising given that the U.S. courts of appeals, which lie immediately below the Supreme Court in the judicial hierarchy, are effectively courts of last resort for each party in nearly every federal case (Carp and Stidham 1998). In fact, the Supreme Court usually reviews less than 1 percent of the cases that are appealed to it each year from the U.S. courts of appeals (Songer, Sheehan, and Haire 2000). (1) Because circuit courts play such a prominent role in the federal judicial system, knowing what determines who is on the circuit courts is imperative to better understanding American politics. In analyzing minority nominations to the U.S. courts of appeals, I employ a strategic model of presidential decision making. That is, I account for how presidents combine their own preferences with information about the preferences of other potentially influential individuals and institutions to arrive at a particular nomination. Strategic models have been used to show that presidents are strategic in deciding whether to issue an executive order (Deering and Maltzman 1999), in nominating Supreme Court justices (Moraski and Shipan 1999), and in determining whether to go public (Canes-Wrone 2001). …

Presidential Decision Making and Minority Nominations to the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Do citizens turnout to vote because of changes in their personal financial situation or are they influenced by the nation’s economic performance? Previous research on this question is far from united. We attempt to unify the disparate literature on the effects of pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations on voter turnout in midterm and presidential elections. Our analysis of ANES data from 1978 to 2004, based on a reference-dependent model of voter turnout, indicates that both pocketbook and sociotropic considerations affect individuals’ decision of whether to vote in midterm elections. Those who perceive that over the last year their own financial situation has improved relative to the economy are less likely to vote than those who view the economy as outperforming their own financial situation.

Keeping Up with the Joneses: The Interplay of Personal and Collective Evaluations in Voter Turnout

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Do Abortion Attitudes Lead to Party Switching

Presidential Decision Making and Minority Nominations to the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Keeping Up with the Joneses: The Interplay of Personal and Collective Evaluations in Voter Turnout