Partisanship and Political Parties
Insiders, Outsiders, and Voters in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
Melvin Hinich, Daron Shaw & Taofang Huang
Presidential Studies Quarterly, June 2010, Pages 264-285
Abstract:
In 2008, both Barack Obama and John McCain repeatedly talked about "reform" and "change" on the campaign trail, presumably believing that voters would respond to a president who could challenge the established way of doing business. The authors gauge the significance of "reform" politics in 2008 through two analyses. First, they estimate a two-dimensional issue space, paying particular attention to the possibility of a reform/establishment dimension. Second, they consider whether voters (1) preferred reform candidates, and (2) saw Obama or McCain as credible reform candidates. The data indicate the existence of a reform-establishment dimension. However, neither Obama nor McCain effectively convinced voters that they were reformers.
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Did Bush Voters Cause Obama's Victory?
Arthur Lupia
PS: Political Science & Politics, April 2010, Pages 239-241
Abstract:
In the 2008 election, Barack Obama's campaign brought many new voters to the polls. Were these new voters necessary for Obama's victory? In this study, I find that they were not. The basis of this finding is an examination of decisions made by people who voted for George W. Bush in 2004. I show that Bush voters' decisions not to vote or to support Obama were a sufficient condition for Obama's victory.
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Steven Stanton, Kevin LaBar, Ekjyot Saini, Cynthia Kuhn & Jacinta Beehner
Psychoneuroendocrinology, June 2010, Pages 768-774
Abstract:
Social subordination can be biologically stressful; when mammals lose dominance contests they have acute increases in the stress hormone cortisol. However, human studies of the effect of dominance contest outcomes on cortisol changes have had inconsistent results. Moreover, human studies have been limited to face-to-face competitions and have heretofore never examined cortisol responses to shifts in political dominance hierarchies. The present study investigated voters' cortisol responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants at two research sites (Michigan and North Carolina) provided saliva samples at several time points before and after the announcement of the winner on Election Night. Radioimmunoassay was used to measure levels of cortisol in the saliva samples. In North Carolina, John McCain voters (losers) had increases in post-outcome cortisol levels, whereas Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome cortisol levels. The present research provides novel evidence that societal shifts in political dominance can impact biological stress responses in voters whose political party becomes socio-politically subordinate.
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Ideological externalities, social pressures, and political parties
Amihai Glazer
Public Choice, July 2010, Pages 53-62
Abstract:
Members of political parties may influence each other. For example, a liberal in a party of moderates may moderate his views. At the same time, the moderates in the party may become more liberal. Voters in a district who favor such effects may care about the ideology of officeholders in other districts. They may therefore prefer a candidate who affiliates with a party over an independent with the same position.
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Primary Politics: Race, Gender, and Age in the 2008 Democratic Primary
Simon Jackman & Lynn Vavreck
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, May 2010, Pages 153-186
Abstract:
Despite Barack Obama's momentum in the early phase of the Democratic nomination, the process of selecting a nominee took longer than usual. Obama's momentum, it seems, got stuck, and the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination was an unusually drawn out affair. Even when it appeared Barack Obama would win the nomination, many Clinton supporters said they would support John McCain in the general election. Why were some Democrats unwilling to join the Obama bandwagon once he emerged as a viable front-runner - and ultimately the Democratic nominee? In this paper we bring a unique set of panel data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) to bear on questions about primary vote choice, examining the evolution of preferences over the unusually long and intense 2008 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. Attitudes about race predict vote choice in partisan contests; here we show that (conditional on the presence of a black candidate) these attitudes help explain the dynamics of candidate support over the prolonged intra-party contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
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Partisanship and the effectiveness of oversight
Justin Fox & Richard Van Weelden
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine the welfare effects of partisanship in a model of checks and balances. An executive makes a policy proposal and an overseer then decides whether or not to veto the executive's proposal. Both the executive and the overseer have private information as to the correct policy to pursue, and both are motivated by the desire to appear competent. A partisan overseer is one who, in addition to seeking to promote her own reputation, cares how her decision will impact the executive's reputation. Our main result is that partisanship can improve the efficacy of an oversight regime, as the distortions caused by a partisan overseer's desire to affect the executive's reputation can offset the distortions caused by her desire to enhance her own. Our results provide a new rationale for divided government, as partisan considerations are often necessary to prevent the overseer from rubber stamping all executive proposals.
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Gregory Wawro & Eric Schickler
Annual Review of Political Science, 2010, Pages 297-319
Abstract:
We review debates concerning the evolution and impact of parliamentary obstruction in the U.S. Senate, focusing on path dependency versus remote majoritarian perspectives. We consider the viability of circumventing supermajority requirements for rules changes by using rulings from the chair to establish precedents. Because the viability of this approach depends, at least in part, on the anticipated reaction of the public, we conduct a preliminary analysis of public opinion data from the 1940s through the 1960s and from the showdown over the obstruction of judicial nominees in 2005. We contend that the balance of the evidence favors the position that senators have generally supported the maintenance of the filibuster and have been able to make procedural adjustments when obstruction threatened a committed majority's top priorities, although we offer some important refinements required in comparing the historical operation of obstruction to its impact in today's Senate.
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Jamal Greene, Stephen Ansolabehere & Nathaniel Persily
Columbia University Working Paper, April 2010
Abstract:
Originalism is a common subject of both legal and political discourse. It is frequently invoked not just in law reviews but during election campaigns, at confirmation hearings, and interstitially on cable news, in print media, and on talk radio. This Article presents the first empirical study of public attitudes towards originalism. Our study uses original survey data and multiple regression analysis to better understand the demographic characteristics, legal views, political orientation, and cultural profile of those who self-identify as originalist. We conclude that the most significant predictors of an individual preference for originalism are the respondent's view on the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, her level of formal education, and her relative level of moral traditionalism. Our analysis suggests that originalism has currency not only as a legal proposition about constitutional interpretation but also, and no less significantly, as a political commodity and as a culturally expressive idiom. This conclusion carries consequences for debates about the role of the public in shaping constitutional meaning and in influencing judicial decisionmaking.
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Disobeying an Illegitimate Request in a Democratic or Authoritarian System
Stefano Passini & Davide Morselli
Political Psychology, June 2010, Pages 341-355
Abstract:
Crimes of obedience in the form of illegal or immoral acts committed in response to orders from authority occur in many contexts. In particular, under some circumstances of threats, people can easily accept restrictions upon democratic procedures. Recent studies have underlined the role of legitimacy in understanding the authority relationship and the importance of evaluating the legitimacy of the request rather than the legitimacy of the authority in preventing the rise of authoritarianism. The purpose of this study was to verify if people respond differently when an illegitimate request is put forward by a democratic or an authoritarian authority. The results on 224 subjects confirmed that people tend to be more obedient when they perceive authorities as democratic, notwithstanding the legitimacy of their requests.
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The First Genome-Wide Linkage on Conservative-Liberal Ideologies
Peter Hatemi
University of Iowa Working Paper, January 2010
Abstract:
The assumption that the transmission of social behaviors and political preferences is purely cultural has been challenged repeatedly over the last forty years by the combined evidence of large studies of adult twins and their relatives, adoption studies and twins reared apart. Variance components and path modeling analyses using data from extended families quantified the overall genetic influence on political attitudes, but few studies have attempted to localize the parts of the genome which accounted for the heritability estimates found for political preferences. Here, we present the first genome-wide analysis of Conservative-Liberal attitudes from a sample of 13,000 respondents whose DNA was collected in conjunction with a 50 item socio-political attitude questionnaire. Several significant linkage peaks were identified and potential candidate genes discussed.
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Militant Intolerant People: A Challenge to John Rawls' Political Liberalism
Vicente Medina
Political Studies, June 2010, Pages 556-571
Abstract:
In this article, it is argued that a significant internal tension exists in John Rawls' political liberalism. He holds the following positions that might plausibly be considered incongruous: (1) a commitment to tolerating a broad right of freedom of political speech, including a right of subversive advocacy; (2) a commitment to restricting this broad right if it is intended to incite and likely to bring about imminent violence; and (3) a commitment to curbing this broad right only if there is a constitutional crisis. By supporting a broad right of freedom of political speech in Political Liberalism, he allows militant intolerant people such as Jihadists, White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis to advocate publicly their dangerously intolerant beliefs. Public advocacy of dangerously intolerant beliefs can be construed as subversive advocacy. As demonstrated by the historical examples of the Weimar Republic and the Second Spanish Republic, militant intolerant groups could use a right of subversive advocacy to threaten the stability of liberal democracies. Hence, by allowing them to exercise a broad right of freedom of political speech, Rawls could jeopardize that which he intends to defend, namely the actual political stability of a liberal democratic order. Lastly, Rawls' conception of ideal constitutional interpretation, which privileges a broad right of freedom of political speech, might be insufficient to deal effectively with the threat posed by militant intolerant groups. Yet a tradition of American constitutional interpretation that balances freedom of speech with other important constitutional and/or political values has overcome a civil war, two world wars, the Cold War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks without abandoning democracy or permanently renouncing those values. Still, Rawls' ideal approach to constitutional interpretation might, in hindsight, help us to understand some of the excesses and deficiencies of American jurisprudence in times of emergency.
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Authoritarianism, Conservatism, Racial Diversity Threat, and the State Distribution of Hate Groups
Stewart McCann
Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, January-February 2010, Pages 37-60
Abstract:
On the basis of K. Stenner's (2005) authoritarian dynamic theory, the author hypothesized that there is an interaction between U.S. state conservatism-liberalism and state racial heterogeneity threat, such that greater diversity threat tends to be associated with more hate groups in more conservative states and fewer hate groups in more liberal states. State aggregates of the conservative-liberal ideological preferences of 141,798 participants from 122 CBS News/New York Times national telephone polls conducted between 1976 and 1988 (R. S. Erikson, G. C. Wright, & J. P. McIver, 1993) served as proxies for authoritarian-nonauthoritarian dispositions. For the 47 states with complete data, the hypothesized interaction was tested for 2000, 2005, and 2006 with hierarchical multiple regression strategies and supported. The author's hypothesis was also affirmed with SES and the interaction of SES and diversity threat controlled for. In contrast, SES entirely accounted for simple relationships between threat and hate group frequency.