Television has replaced the newspaper as the major source of news for most people, and thus has the potential to inform the public and influence attitudes. A growing literature has demonstrated the immediate effects of television viewing, but the ability of a particular program to have lasting effects is less clear. In this article, we report on two field experiments that provide a test of the …
Scale limitations, endogeneity problems, and observational equivalence in observational studies render many tests of the proximity and directional models inconclusive. Fortunately, the task of designing experimental tests has proven tractable and the small, but growing, body of experimental evidence sheds new light on directional and proximity motivated behavior. The experiment described in thi…
Despite the extensive literature on the effects of party and other information cues on citizens' attitudes and behaviors, there exists little evidence and theory on how individuals balance multiple sources of information, particularly in the domain of blame attribution. Furthermore, we have a limited understanding of what individual characteristics moderate the use of such information. We desig…
This article reports the results of a field experiment testing the effectiveness of different quality get-out-the-vote (GOTV) nonpartisan phone calls. During the week preceding the November 2004 election, we randomly assigned registered voters in North Carolina and Missouri to one of three live phone calls with varying length and content. The scripts are (1) standard GOTV, (2) interactive GOTV,…
Previous field experiments have found that indirect methods, particularly direct mail, are not effective in increasing voter turnout. Most of the mail used in these experiments provided procedural information regarding voting and a message encouraging the voter to turn out. Yet, in his review of efforts to increase voting, Berinsky (2005) concluded that it was the cognitive costs of voting—the …
This study utilizes the random assignment of judges to panels in the U.S. courts of appeals to measure how the partisanship of these judges affects whether or not the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case and subsequently overturns the decision of the lower panel. Results from the study provide evidence of partisan behavior in the Supreme Court review process in several politically salient issue …
There are few reliable estimates of the effect of grassroots lobbying on legislative behavior. The analysis in this article circumvents methodological problems that plague existing studies by randomly assigning legislators to be contacted by a grassroots e-mail lobbying campaign. The experiment was conducted in the context of a grassroots lobbying campaign through cooperation with a coalition o…
In choosing strategies of state capture (the extraction of private benefits by incumbent officeholders from the state), rulers choose whether to share rents with popular constituencies and whether to tolerate competition. These choices are conditioned by existing organizational endowments, the costs of buying support, and the trade-off between the cost and probability of exit from office. In tu…
This article asks whether religion undermines the negative relationship between income and left voting that is assumed in standard political economy models of democracy. Analysis of cross-country survey data reveals that this correlation disappears among religious individuals in countries that use proportional representation. This is the case in large part because there is a moral values …
Interdependence is ubiquitous and often central across comparative politics. Indeed, as the authors show first, theoretically, any situation involving externalities from one unit's actions on others' implies interdependence. Positive or negative externalities induce negative or positive interdependence, which spurs competitive races or free riding, with corresponding early or late-mover a…
Most tests of hypotheses about the effects of "ethnicity" on outcomes use data or measures that confuse or conflate what are termed ethnic structure and ethnic practice. This article presents a conceptualization of ethnicity that makes the distinction between these concepts clear; it demonstrates how confusion between structure and practice hampers the ability to test theories; and it presents…
In comparative research, analysts conceptualize causation in contrasting ways when they pursue explanation in particular cases (case-oriented research) versus large populations (population-oriented research). With case-oriented research, they understand causation in terms of necessary, sufficient, INUS, and SUIN causes. With population-oriented research, by contrast, they understand causa…
o survive in office, dictators need to establish power-sharing arrangements with their ruling coalitions, which are often not credible. If dictators cannot commit to not abusing their "loyal friends"—those who choose to invest in the existing autocratic institutions rather than in forming subversive coalitions— they will be in permanent danger of being overthrown, both by members of t…
The work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under-development suffers from several shortcomings. In this article, the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting. Using a new data set for the U.S. states spanning 73 years and case studies of Texas and Louisiana, the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature an…
The authors propose a synthesis of power resources theory and welfare production regime theory to explain differences in human capital formation across advanced democracies. Emphasizing the mutually reinforcing relationships between social insurance, skill formation, and spending on public education, they distinguish three distinct worlds of human capital formation: one characterized by r…
Recent years have seen increased attention to integrating what we know about individual citizens with what we know about macro-level contexts that vary across countries. This article discusses the growing literature on how people's interpretations, opinions, and actions are shaped by variable contextual parameters and provides a novel substantive application. Using surveys conducted in 20…
This article examines the role progressive ambition plays in the U.S. Senate. I analyze the effect ambition has on party loyalty in the upper chamber. The theoretical argument is that senators with ambition for higher office are more loyal to the party than their colleagues who never make a bid for higher office because of their need to appeal to the party base to secure the party's nomination.…
Previous large-N research suggests that globalization could have either positive or negative consequences for labor rights in developing nations. This article examines the ways in which domestic political institutions and interests conditions the effects of economic globalization. It develops several hypotheses regarding the impact of domestic factors on labor rights outcomes and uses the…
Presidents have a wide array of strategies to influence legislation. One area that has seen less emphasis in the literature is the executive's unilateral ability to issue signing statements and their role in shaping policy. We develop a spatial model illustrating how the president's bargaining power with Congress can be expanded when the veto threat is coordinated with signing statements. The a…
The desire to elect more women to public office is likely to affect a range of political behaviors and may explain the relatively low levels of women's descriptive representation overall. Yet, little is known about the public's view of the ideal gender composition of government. We find that the public expresses a preference for higher levels of women's representation than the country has exper…