For the first time since the fall of Pinochet, the Chilean right has come to power via free elections. The long-ruling center-left coalition leaves behind many achievements, but also disturbing signs of a weakened party system.
A new look at the World Values Survey data reveals how the Muslim world’s religious context affects individual Muslims attitudes toward democracy.
A Tribute to Haclav Havel, Chech playwright and former dissident, who became not only president but the symbol of the “velvet revolutions.”
Despite its historic 2006 elections, the Democratic Republicof Chongo still lacks competent governance, leaving its democratic promise unfulfilled.
Why do election monitors sometimes issue contradictory statements or endorse flawed elections? The answers are not always straightforward: in some case, the monitors good intentions may undermine their credibility.
We examine why a significant proportion of the policy issues passed in either the U.S. House or Senate often fail to pass in the other chamber. We hypothesize that much of this failure of the House and Senate to coordinate their agendas occurs because committee jurisdictions are not parallel across chambers. To compare House and Senate agendas, we develop a comprehensive issue-level data set co…
What are the primary factions within the Democratic and Republican parties, and to what extent do rival factions cooperate? We address these questions using a unique data set of information sharing between party organizations, media outlets, 527s, and interest groups. Using social network methods, we identify two major information-sharing clusters, or expanded party networks; these networks cor…
Considerable research indicates that personal contact from political campaigns can mobilize people to vote, but little attention has been given to whether the tone of the message matters. Studies of message tone have mostly been confined to mass media campaigns and ignored the growing role grassroots techniques play in contemporary political campaigns. Two randomized field experiments were cond…
Despite 35 years of empirical research, the question of how electoral structure influences Latino representation continues to be debated. Motivated by the uncertainty surrounding electoral systems, in this article, I argue that the inconsistent and inconclusive results of previous research stem from two limitations—one theoretical and the other methodological—of commonly used models. In the fol…
This article examines why Latinos are more trusting of the federal government than Anglos and Blacks. We address this puzzle by turning to previous research on racial politics and political trust. Consistent with previous research, discrimination and generational status are important predictors of Latinos’ political trust, with first-generation Latinos more trusting than later-generation Latino…
This article demonstrates that candidate positions on the ballot measure to ban gay marriage had an effect on gubernatorial voting. With exit poll data from three states in 2006, we find that the effect of support for the ban is at least twice as large when the candidates adopted divergent positions. Support for the ban has a smaller but significant effect on vote choice when the candidate posi…
Because Republican and Democratic elites have polarized in recent decades, American voters increasingly face choices between candidates who hold divergent policy positions. Such a development has potential implications for the way voters process information during campaigns and choose between candidates on election day. Drawing on research in political psychology and using a nationally represen…
Although classic Downsian theory predicts that candidates should converge to the ideological position of the median voter in the electorate, American elections generally feature major party candidates who offer divergent policy positions. Employing a survey and statistical estimation technique that allows for the estimation of the ideological position of candidates on the same scale as the dist…
As with the other presidential elections from this decade, the 2008 election was followed by considerable speculation as to how new efforts to mobilize voters affected the eventual outcome. Although the conventional wisdom implies that “Democrats benefit from higher turnout,” previous research in political science demonstrates that such a conclusion applies to actual election results inconsiste…
The 2008 Democratic primary was marked by divisiveness as notable as its historic candidates. And while Barack Obama won the general election,political scientists would be remiss in studying divisive primary effects only when they are electorally decisive. Accordingly, we examine this largely forgotten storyline, searching for these effects throughout different segments of the electorate. Our a…
In this article, we examine the role that in-migration played in contributing to the 2008 Democratic presidential victory in North Carolina. Prior to Barack Obama, the last time the Tar Heel State was carried by a Democrat was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Since the late 1980s, North Carolina has undergone tremendous demographic change. In addition to a growing Hispanic population that is primarily com…
The 2008 presidential election was historic in many respects. The campaign included the first African American major-party candidate, and neither candidate was an incumbent president or vice president. In addition, one candidate took public funding and the other candidate did not. This latter disparity resulted in an imbalance of resources across the two campaigns, especially in the purchase of…
To what extent do vice presidential candidates affect individual-level vote choice for president? The accepted wisdom is that vice presidential candidates are of minor importance to most voters. Yet much energy was spent discussing the potential impact of Biden and Palin as vice presidential candidates. Here, the impact that attitudes toward Palin and Biden had on vote choice in the 2008 electi…
During the 2008 presidential election, the authors submitted letters to the editor at 100 major U.S. newspapers as part of a field experiment to test whether interest in the letter depended on which candidate the letter supported. The authors find, contrary to what charges of a liberal media bias would suggest, that newspapers expressed more interest in pro-McCain letters than pro-Obama letters…
Using a question-order experiment, half the respondents in a national RDD (random digit dial) likely voter survey taken just prior to the 2008 Presidential Primary election were primed to think about President Bush and the war in Iraq before making their candidate choice. Results show that the priming had a significant effect on their candidate choice, and that priming individuals to think abou…