In the voting behaviour literature, political organizations are often mentioned as playing an important role in mobilizing a deactivated electorate. Nevertheless, researchers have paid little attention to the relationship between organization strength and Black voter participation. In this study, a direct test of the organizational strength hypothesis is examined by utilizing official voter tur…
Whereas extant work on issue ownership treats voters’ issue ownership perceptions as independent variables to explain electoral choice or party behaviour, this article examines whether parties can, by communicating on an issue, turn voters' perceptions of issue ownership to their advantage. In contrast to most previous studies that have focused on competence ownership – measured as a party's ca…
This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999?2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and t…
Electorates appear to be adrift. Across Western Europe electoral volatility is increasing. But are volatile voters whimsical? Do they behave randomly, like drift sand, or are they emancipated, not committed to a single political party but loyal to their own preferences? To answer these questions this study focuses on the Dutch electorate, which has become the most volatile in Western Europe. We…
European radical left parties (RLPs) are gradually receiving greater attention. Yet, to date, what has received insufficient focus is why such parties have maintained residues of electoral support after the collapse of the USSR and why this support varies so widely. This article is the first to subject RLPs to large-n quantitative analysis, focusing on 39 parties in 34 European countries from 1…
Attention in the study of leader effects in parliamentary elections has shifted from the question of whether party leaders do indeed have an electoral impact to that of the conditions under which their impact is greater or lesser in magnitude. Criticizing existing scholarship in this area for its assumption that the traditional notion of party identification captures the full range of electoral…
The role of members of political parties is ambiguous because it entails both benefits and costs. In order to shed light on the question of whether members are an asset or a liability for parties, I examine whether parties use their ideology on a left–right dimension as a collective incentive for the appeal to actual and potential party members. A quantitative analysis of the effects of changes…
This article offers a spatial theory to explain how a centrist third party gains votes via the ideological depolarization of its two main competitors towards the centre ground. Using the cases of British elections in 2001, 2005 and 2010, during which the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, were ideologically similar, the article reveals how perceived similarities between these parti…
This article estimates policy positions of mainstream parties and radical right parties in seven countries in Western Europe over the past two decades. The assumption that mainstream parties have moved rightwards under pressure from the electoral success of radical right parties is assessed in close-up. A fine-grained analysis has been used to measure party distances in this specific policy fie…
Violent crime is known to be concentrated in the same urban neighborhoods as poverty and other forms of disadvantage. While U.S. violent crime has declined at an unprecedented rate over the past two decades, little is known about the spatial distribution of this decline within cities. Using longitudinal neighborhood crime data from six U.S. cities during the national crime decline, this article…
This article considers whites’ entry into black neighborhoods. The historical review in the first part of the article shows such entry to have been exceedingly rare during the twentieth century. Our analysis of trends in white entry into black neighborhoods for the period 1980–2010 documents a substantial increase in white entry for the 2000–10 decade. We speculate that the increase in white en…
This study uses a field experiment to study bias against living with Arab American women, a group whose position in the U.S. race system remains uncertain. We developed fictitious female white and Arab American identities and used the audit method to respond to 560 roommate-wanted advertisements in four metro areas: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and Houston. To focus on social—rather than pur…
We argue that the relative persistence of racial segregation is due, at least in part, to the process of residential search and the perceptions upon which those searches are based—a critical but often-ignored component of the residential sorting process. We examine where Chicago-area residents would “seriously consider” and “never consider” living, finding that community attraction and avoidanc…
This article contrasts traditional modeling approaches and discrete-choice models as methods to analyze locational attainment—how individual and household characteristics (such as race, socioeconomic status, age) influence the characteristics of neighborhoods of residence (such as racial composition and median income). Traditional models analyze attributes of a neighborhood as a function of the…
This study describes the spatial and racial variations in housing foreclosure during the recent housing crisis. Using data on the 9.5 million visible foreclosures (public auctions and bank repossessions) occurring between 2005 and 2012, we show that the timing and depth of the foreclosure crisis differed considerably across regions and metropolitan areas, with those located in the Mountain and …
Immigrant-origin populations, once overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of receiving gateways, have dispersed in recent decades to scores of new destinations throughout the United States. This pattern and its implications for immigrant incorporation have received a great deal of attention, but the vast majority of research has focused on Hispanics. This article examines the relationship bet…
In this article, we propose that metropolitan areas represent differential “risk contexts” to the people who live within them and argue that growing insecurity in U.S. metropolitan areas arises out of cross-cutting economic weaknesses that are too often seen in isolation. The housing crisis that led up to the Great Recession was a moment in which the underlying vulnerabilities in our markets an…
This article focuses on stability and change in “mixed middle-income” neighborhoods. We first analyze variation across nearly two decades for all neighborhoods in the United States and in the Chicago area, particularly. We then analyze a new longitudinal study of almost 700 Chicago adolescents over an 18-year span, including the extent to which they are exposed to different neighborhood income …
At the center of Chicago’s large-scale public housing transformation is a stated emphasis on economic integration. Based on interviews, field observations, and documentary research in three new, mixed-income communities that were built on the footprint of former public housing developments in Chicago, this article examines how design choices and regulatory regimes militate against the effective…
A number of place-based policies attempt to deconcentrate poverty, yet not enough is known about how the socioeconomic mix of low-income neighborhoods evolves nor the role of residential mobility in this evolution. This study focuses on changes in low-income neighborhoods as they transpire at the micro level of housing unit turnover. Using a unique panel survey of low-income neighborhoods, the …