Browsing by Author "Aldrich, John H"

Examining the full set of leaders and their spouses in both China and the U.S. during the last quarter century, this paper explores how the first lady of China has become a more important position, why she has become a more public figure, how this compares with the American first lady, and why her position in China is similar to, but different from that in the U.S., in determining whether the recent change in Chinese First Ladyship is due to systematic development or just the relationship between Mrs. Xi and her husband. After investigating the current relationship in China, furthermore, this paper also intends to discuss what we can expect with the new First Ladyship in the future.

In this dissertation, I challenge the unitary-actor assumption of contemporary theoretical models of American politics and re-conceptualize party competition as an evolutionary process. I begin by discussing the assumptions of Darwin's theory and their applicability to American party competition. Building on these assumptions, I then develop a formal evolutionary model of party competition that I test against empirical data regarding the two parties' shifting stances on abortion policy from 1972-2010.

Chapter 2 presents several single-party models that focus on explaining the conditions that must hold for parties to emerge as populations in an evolutionary sense. I show that only when candidates experience common selection pressures will population dynamics arise.

Chapter 3 extends this model to two-party competition wherein population dynamics are sustained by inter-party competition for votes and intra-party competition for activist resources. Two-party competition provides the necessary selection pressures needed to foster the emergence of coherent and distinct party populations. However, this will only be the case when: (1) party resources are valuable for winning elections, (2) the distribution of party resources are biased towards ideologically extreme candidates, and (3) parties have sufficient resources.

In Chapter 4, I extend the model to a multi-dimensional setting. Previous theoretical work on multi-dimensional party dynamics has been divided between (1) analytical models that provide stable equilibria results and (2) qualitative theories that seek to explain the dynamic process of party change. In this chapter, I present a formalized model that makes precise predictions regarding both the environmental conditions that lead to locally stable policy positions and the dynamic process that occurs as the parties drift from one stable configuration to another in response to changing environmental conditions.

Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply my model to the case of abortion policy in the United States from 1972-2010. Using data from public opinion surveys and Congressional roll-call votes, I show that party polarization on abortion was driven by changing activist preferences and that this shift occurred almost entirely as the result of incumbent replacement. These results support my ecological party model and demonstrate its ability to account for the kinds of gradual party movements -- driven by incumbent replacement -- that characterize many important historical shifts in party platforms.

Environmental attitudes have interested scholars for decades, but researchers have insufficiently appreciated the low salience of the environment, and the enormous complexity of this issue area. In this dissertation, I investigate how these features influence the way ordinary citizens think about the environment.

Research into the dynamics of public opinion has found a generic relationship between policy change and public demands for activist government. Yet, less is known about the relationship between policy and attitudes in individual issue areas. In the first chapter, I investigate the influence of a variety of factors on public opinion in a particularly complex policy area---the environment. To study the short-run and long term dynamics of environmental public opinion, I generate an annual metric of environmental attitudes running from 1974 to 2011. Consistent with prior research, I find the economy and major environmental disasters play an important role in aggregate environmental opinion. However, actual policy innovations are found to play only a limited role in attitude formation. Instead, the party label of the president appears to affect demand for environmental activism, when other factors are held constant.

Scholarly research has found a weak and inconsistent role for self-interest in public opinion, and mixed evidence for a relationship between local pollution risks and support for environmental protection. In the second chapter, I argue that focusing events can induce self-interested responses from people living in communities whose economies are implicated by the event. I leverage a unique 12-wave panel survey administered between 2008 and 2010 to analyze public opinion toward offshore oil drilling before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I find that residence in counties highly dependent upon the offshore drilling industry was predictive of pro-drilling attitudes following the spill, though not prior to the spill. In addition, there is no significant evidence that residence in a county afflicted by the spill influenced opinion. This chapter concludes that local support for drilling often arises only after focusing events make the issue salient.

Previous research into place effects has provided mixed evidence about the effect of geography on public opinion. Much of the work finding a relationship is susceptible to methodological criticisms of spuriouness or endogeneity. In the third chapter, I leverage a unique research design to examine the influence of residential setting on environmental attitudes regarding water use. The findings indicate that local drought conditions increase individuals' level of concern about the nation's water supply. In addition, drought conditions are related to public attitudes towards water use regulation, with those living in drought-afflicted counties more likely to support government regulation. This chapter provides a firm foundation for research attempting to demonstrate that local conditions have a causal effect on public opinion.

In this dissertation, I examine three sources of heterogeneity in voter choice that fit into two typologies. The first of these is inter-individual heterogeneity, or the idea that different types of individuals use unique models in evaluating candidates. I examine voters’ levels of moral conviction and voters’ partisanship as sources of this type of determinacy of decision criteria. My results indicate that the morally convicted differ in the shape of their utility function for candidate assessment. Instead of having a linear function representing the relationship between the candidate’s distance from their ideal points and how much they like the candidate, the morally convicted have a convex curve. I also find that the criteria on which individuals rate candidates differs based on whether they are partisan or moderate voters. I use the method of eye tracking to find that moderates tend to weigh candidates’ policy stances much less than partisans do.

The second type of heterogeneity explored is intra-individual heterogeneity, or the idea that the same individual uses different models depending on the context she is in. In an experiment, I find this type of heterogeneity is present: it is possible to prime people to use directional or proximity theory based on whether the issue is presented through a proximity-based framework or a directional-based structure.

This dissertation contributes to the literature on heterogeneity by providing a theoretical framework within which to think of different types of heterogeneity. It also provides something new in each chapter: Chapters 2 and 4 offer the first examination of these sources of heterogeneity while Chapter 3 uses a new method in political science.

The ability for the citizens of a nation to determine their own representation has long been regarded as one of the most critical objectives of any electoral system. Without having the assurance of equality in representation, the fundamental nature and operation of the political system is severely undermined. Given the centuries of institutional reforms and population changes in the American system, Congressional Redistricting stands as an institution whereby this promise of effective representation can either be fulfilled or denied. The broad set of processes that encapsulate Congres- sional Redistricting have been discussed, experimented, and modified to achieve clear objectives and have long been understood to be important. Questions remain about how the dynamics which link all of these processes operate and what impact the real- ities of Congressional Redistricting hold for representation in the American system. This dissertation examines three aspects of how Congressional Redistricting in the Untied States operates in accordance with the principle of “One Person, One Vote.” By utilizing data and data analysis techniques of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this dissertation seeks to address how Congressional Redistricting impacts the principle of one person, one vote from the standpoint of legislator accountability, redistricting institutions, and the promise of effective minority representation.

Based on Berry's (1987) framework on acculturation and ethnic identity interaction, this study examined the link from this interaction among Asian Americans to their political participation. Using the 2008 National Asian American Survey (Study 1) and a self-initiated survey among Chinese students in Fall 2014 (Study 2), this thesis presents a model from which to consider some of the important determinants of Asian Americans' political participation, whether and how acculturation level interacts with (pan)ethnic group resource in predicting their participation. Most findings from these two studies supported the hypotheses. First, all the five traditional models of political participation have significant share in predicting Asian Americans' political participation. Second, the interaction between acculturation and ethnic identity does increase the model fit of Asian Americans' participation, but with varying strengths based on different forms of participation and target populations. Finally, after creating four groups based on acculturation and ethnic identity, I find that the integrated group is generally the most actively engaged in politics, followed by the assimilated group, the separated group and the marginalized group.

I develop and justify a measure of polarization based on pairwise differences between and within groups, which improves on previous approaches in its ability to account for multiple dimensions and an arbitrary number of partitions. I apply this measure to a roll-call based ideological mapping of U.S. legislators to show that while the contemporary Congress is polarized relative to mid-century levels, the current state is not historically unprecedented.

I then estimate the ideology of public opinion using survey respondent thermometer evaluations of political elites and population subgroups. I find that party affiliation is polarizing in this space, but that alternate partitions of the electorate, along racial, educational, and other socio-demographic lines, are de-polarized.

Finally, I estimate a two-dimensional latent space based on social identity trait co-occurrence. I show that positions in this space are predictive of survey respondent ideology, partisanship, and voting behavior. Further, I show that when conceived in this way, we do observe a polarization of the social space over the last half-century of American politics.

What are the effects of political information on public opinion, political participation, and electoral outcomes? In this dissertation, I address these questions and investigate the ways that people acquire and incorporate information based on their levels of political knowledge and attentiveness. I examine the effects of political information among three groups whom we would expect to learn differently: those people with little knowledge or interest in politics; the potentially interested who possess some, but not much, knowledge; and the attentive experts.

In my first chapter, I look at the effects of information on people with little or no knowledge of politics by asking, "Do candidate visits affect voting decisions and candidate evaluations?" I link survey data with the location and topics of all speeches given by George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004 to empirically test the conventional wisdom that candidate appearances change electoral outcomes. I find that candidate visits do provide information to voters and that those effects are conditioned on consumption of local media. In my second chapter, I look at people with some knowledge of politics: college students. I ask, "How does the information that students 'incidentally' encounter in electronic social networks like Facebook.com shape their knowledge of current political events and their participation?" To answer these questions, I conducted a survey with an embedded experiment. I find that students do learn from Facebook, though the effects are small and vary across groups. My third chapter investigates the ways that the politically attentive incorporate information by asking, "What campaign information matters? Which campaign events are actually informative?" I develop a new measure of information flow using data from a political prediction market and a Bayesian estimation technique that adapts models from the economics literature. This measure offers a reliable way to describe the importance of campaign events that does not suffer from either post hoc judgments or reports from the principals involved in the campaign. Together, these projects address the consequences of political information in contemporary politics.

Geographic clustering has been linked to contemporary political polarization by jour- nalists and other researchers in recent years, most recently and notably by Bishop and Cushing (2008). In these accounts, clustering is motivated, in part, by shared tastes for combinations of place attributes that attract individuals with interrelated values and similar characteristics or skillsets. In order to test whether political pref- erences aligns with location choice, this paper proposes a sorting model based on the composition of migrants' political preferences.

Sorting is defined as the increase in the variation of a parameter of preference distributions of different location, in the absence of individual preference change. The model estimates the separate prob- abilities of party identification in U.S. congressional districts among migrants and non-migrants.

Based on an empirical application using the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Elec- tion Study, I find that a significant number of district satisfy the sorting condition. Aa multinomial logit model predicts that individual ideology is significant explana- tory variable in the partisanship of destination districts among migrants, even after controlling for the partisanship of originating districts.

The final chapter evaluates sorting and polarization in U.S. congressional districts based on intra-decade changes to population size. I show that overall polarization in high growth districts exceeds sorting, and suggest this results from an increase in electoral bias that could result from heavy migration into districts that begin the decade as very homogenous.

Over the last fews years, anyone tuning into the nightly news would likely assume that bipartisan compromise in Congress is a thing of the past. It often seems as if politicians are more concerned with tearing down or stalling the other party's policy goals than providing real solutions for the American citizenry. Although scholars, politicians, and political commentators alike frequently cite a desire to see more compromise on the floor of Congress (and in the state houses), research on bipartisanship - why it occurs, how it occurs, and when - remains limited. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by asking two questions: (1) How can we predict when legislators will cross the partisan aisle to engage in partisan compromise? (2) Does a legislator's gender condition his or her ability to engage in compromise? Through individual level analyses of sponsorship and vote choice, an aggregate level analysis of policy diffusion, and two original survey experiments, this dissertation develops a theory of ``partisan bridging" that aims to help scholars better understand when and why compromise might occur. The results suggest that personal preferences can lead legislators to view the benefits of crossing the aisle as greater than the potential costs, particularly preferences grounded in a sense of group membership. However, the results also (unexpectedly) suggest that women legislators may face greater costs when engaging in compromise on ``woman-owned" issues. Thus, women legislators may face the highest costs for engaging in compromise in exactly those areas they may feel most compelled to compromise on.

Questions of party power and legislative outcomes are central to our understanding of Congress. And yet, our knowledge of these concepts has many gaps. We know little about exactly how parties negotiate legislative deals with their members—and hold them to their deals—or about how parties exert agenda control before bills reach the floor. We also have limited knowledge of how predictably the outcomes of bills are, particularly from their content. These questions remain unanswered largely because political scientists have traditionally not had data or methods at their disposal to answer them. In my dissertation, I provide some answers to these questions via a focus on text analysis.

In chapter one, I examine how parties make deals with recalcitrant members on landmark legislation, and more importantly, how members are held to their deals. Particularly, I argue that public statements are a tool wielded by the party, and when members are convinced to vote for a bill they are provided incentive to make a statement in support of the bill to lock them into their vote. Using a novel data set of all public statements made by members of Congress, and two pieces of landmark healthcare legislation (the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010 and the American Health Care Act in 2017) I show that members of Congress do make public statements after they make deals to vote with the party, and that these statements are likely for the purpose of precommitting to vote with the party.

In chapter two, I seek to quantify the level of agenda control exerted by the majority party on bills that never reach a final passage vote. To do this, I present the first systematic estimates of how members would have voted on bills based on a characterization of bill content from bills’ text, would they have come to a final passage vote. I find that the majority party not only exercises negative agenda control, but also considerable positive agenda control. I also find that the minority party in the House is systematically and consistently shut out of the agenda process.

In chapter three, I investigate how predictable the outcome of bills is and whether bill content has a part to play in the predictability of bill outcomes. I find that I am able to predict where bills end up in the US House of Representatives with high accuracy, and that knowledge about the content of a bill has a sizable effect on how well I am able to predict bill outcomes.

This thesis explains the role universal values play in several aspects of American political life.

This dissertation proposes that party identification, as a social identity, fundamentally alters individual processing of and reactions to political information and events. I present a party identity linkage theory in which I argue party identity can lead to heightened, specific emotional responses to threatening political competition and biased, polarized perceptions of politicalized objects if the link between self and party is sufficiently strong. Because people are strongly motivated to protect the positive perceptions they have of themselves, they should be motivated to maintain and protect their positive perceptions of groups that are linked to their self-concept through social identities. Furthermore, because people tend to engage in self-serving biases that result in a degree of positive illusions about themselves, especially when the positive self-view is threatened, evaluations of closely linked groups should also be subject to a degree of positive bias, especially when the positive image of the group is threatened. Drawing on both experimental and survey data, I provide evidence that strong partisans are fundamentally different from weak partisans and independents in the degree a party is included in their self-concepts, in their responses to candidates' changed party status, and in their responses to threatening inter-party competition.

In two-party, majoritarian systems like the United States, partisan voters are between a proverbial “rock and a hard place” when they find themselves dissatisfied with the “handling” of an issue, and by extension, find themselves dissatisfied with their own party. How then, can partisan voters signal dissatisfaction with their party, particularly considering the nationalized state of US politics? One possible answer lies with social movements. Social movements are collectivities, typically of substantial size, that engage in sustained conventional and non-conventional activity against elites and elite institutions to effect shared goals for change, usually in policy or society broadly (Opp 2009; Tarrow 1998; Klandermans 1997; Katz 1971). Social movements afford dissatisfied individuals a means of collectivizing to express their grievances, and, with some small probability, an opportunity to obtain substantive change. Thus, social movements, through their varied modes of action, are a means of exerting pressure on elite political actors to address issues that are not being adequately handled or are being handled in a manner that does satisfy a critical mass of the public (Rohlinger & Gentile 2017; Smelser 1962). Movements will sometimes utilize sanctioning repertoires such as electoral mobilization, most clearly observable through the primarying of members of the party that should be or is perceived to be aligned with their interests. To explore this relationship between movement-candidate emergence and voter support for social movements, I focus on the Tea Party during the 2010 midterm election. The legislative landscape of the House of Representatives experienced a massive shift in 2010; 63 seats changed hands from the Democrat to Republican party. In a time where the public was displeased with the state of the nation, the grassroots Tea Party movement caught fire. The Tea Party supported a conservative social agenda and economic policies focused on cutting programs. As the movement gained national attention, many political hopefuls began to associate themselves with the Tea Party. Is this an example of a movement succeeding in the difficult-to-penetrate American electoral system? Despite the very visible splash made by the Tea Party, I argue that Tea Party affiliation provided challengers no greater probability of defeating the incumbent in general or Republican primary elections, and instead seek to demonstrate that prior political experience is the trait critical to electoral success. The long-standing literature on incumbency advantage and their relationship to quality challengers would suggest that the institutional barriers are simply too high for a social movement to surmount, particularly in this instance where movement-candidates couched themselves within the Republican party and thus lacked any Tea Party identifying information on the ballot. In examining an original, comprehensive dataset, I look first to the general election, where I find support for my expectations. In the primary, my findings are more mixed; I find that Tea Party candidates – but only those who are also quality candidates – are able to significantly reduce incumbent vote share, but not enough to affect the overall probability of reelection. Given that this most visible recent movement was unable to significantly alter outcomes in the electoral sphere, the next “insurgent group” I investigate is women. The 2018 midterm elections were lauded as the “year of the woman”. While no single social movement emerges to rally female candidates to the ballot (though the presence of Women’s March organizations remain throughout this period), we observe an outsized increase in the number of women candidates, with many individual women citing the political climate and the policy choices of then-president Donald Trump as the catalyst for their run. The midterms of 2018 also offer another example of a moment in time where the public was deeply dissatisfied with the state of American political affairs and a sizable number of citizens decided to do something about it. With my coauthors, we assess how women candidates fared in 2018 using the literature of supply- and demand-effects to investigate the extent to which these women were successful in using their grievances to attain office. We find that women candidates approached supply-side parity, and that the factors predicting the emergence of such candidates were consistent with those in the literature. However, we find that this healthy supply of candidates did not translate into winning elections at rates we would expect, suggesting demand-side explanations for candidate underrepresentation greatly affected the 2018 elections, particularly among Republicans. We close with a discussion of the implications of our findings for the study of female candidates in congressional elections. Finally, in an effort to extrapolate from these findings, I draw on theories of both social identity and social movements to develop a theory of social movement identity and outline expectations about the relationship between the strength of politically salient identities and electoral participation. Using two original surveys and an adaptation of the Huddy et al. (2015) identity instrument, I demonstrate the reliability and internal consistency of the instrument, find clear support for the existence of a social movement identity, and evidence for a relationship between identity strength and political participation. With this project, I’ve taken the first steps in exploring the demand for social movement candidates amongst a sample of the American public.

What role do state party organizations play in twenty-first century American politics? What is the nature of the relationship between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections? These questions frame the three studies presented in this dissertation. More specifically, I examine the organizational development of the state party organizations and the strategic interactions and connections between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections.

In the first empirical chapter, I argue that the Internet Age represents a significant transitional period for state party organizations. Using data collected from surveys of state party leaders, this chapter reevaluates and updates existing theories of party organizational strength and demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party organizational development in the early twenty-first century. In the second chapter, I ask whether the national parties utilize different strategies in deciding how to allocate resources to state parties through fund transfers and through the 50-state-strategy party-building programs that both the Democratic and Republican National Committees advertised during the 2010 elections. Analyzing data collected from my 2011 state party survey and party-fund-transfer data collected from the Federal Election Commission, I find that the national parties considered a combination of state and national electoral concerns in directing assistance to the state parties through their 50-state strategies, as opposed to the strict battleground-state strategy that explains party fund transfers. In my last chapter, I examine the relationships between platforms issued by Democratic and Republican state and national parties and the strategic considerations that explain why state platforms vary in their degree of similarity to the national platform. I analyze an extensive platform dataset, using cluster analysis and document similarity measures to compare platform content across the 1952 to 2014 period. The analysis shows that, as a group, Democratic and Republican state platforms exhibit greater intra-party homogeneity and inter-party heterogeneity starting in the early 1990s, and state-national platform similarity is higher in states that are key players in presidential elections, among other factors. Together, these three studies demonstrate the significance of the state party organizations and the state-national party partnership in contemporary politics.

In this dissertation, I take a new approach to presidential scandal, which is frequently attributed to evidence of misbehavior. I argue instead that scandal is a socially constructed perception of misbehavior which opposition elites help create. I formalize this argument by developing a model of presidential scandal, which predicts that allegations of scandal by opposition legislators can influence the occurrence of scandal within some intermediate range of allegation scandalousness and credibility. I derive two comparative statics showing that the incidence of scandal should increase as the transaction costs of allegations decrease and as the critical mass of opposition legislators required to create a scandal decreases.

I then test the predictions of the model using monthly data from elite news reports for 1977–2006. I operationalized the critical mass comparative static using presidential approval among opposition party identifiers—a useful index of a polarized political climate. I find that the president is more vulnerable to the onset of scandal when his levels of opposition approval are relatively low. Conversely, when the president is relatively popular with opposition identifiers (during “honeymoons,” foreign policy crises, and wars), scandals occur much less frequently. In addition, scandals appear to have become more common over time, which could be the result of increased party polarization. Finally, I show that the underlying hazard of scandal was greater for second-term presidents than for first-term presidents.

Clearly, however, scandals vary widely in their size and significance. As such, I also create a dependent variable measuring the total quarterly volume of presidential scandal coverage in the Washington Post, which should capture the aggregate severity of scandals in a given time period. I show that lagged presidential approval among opposition identifiers is negatively associated with this measure. By contrast, more scandal coverage is published during presidents' second term in office and during election years.

Journalists and scholars frequently assert that divided government leads to a greater incidence of presidential scandal, but little systematic evidence exists to support these claims. An investigation reveals that divided government suffers from several important inferential problems, including a lack of comparable counterfactual data.. After addressing these issues, I estimate treatment effects for divided government and opposition control of Congress on both high-profile investigations of the president and scandal coverage, but none reach conventional levels of statistical significance.

Next, I explore the factors predicting when individual members of Congress will make scandal allegations against the president and the executive branch. Specifically, I test hypotheses developed from my formal model on a new dataset of scandal allegations against the president in the Congressional Record between 1985 and 2006. Results from multilevel event count models indicate that scandal allegations decline as state- and district-level presidential vote increases among members of the opposition party in both the House and the Senate. Members of the Senate are also more likely to make allegations as they gain seniority within the chamber. Finally, members who are up for re-election in the Senate make fewer allegations than those who are not.

Finally, I analyze the allegation data as a series of social networks. I present a new approach to analyze clustering in these data, which helps us to characterize patterns in allegations and member behavior. My analysis indicates that clustering among members—which suggests a convergence in scandal targets—is positively associated with increased scandal coverage at the Congress level. By contrast, I find that highly clustered allegations (i.e. those made by members who also made other allegations together) tend to receive less coverage than those that attract support from a broader coalition of members who would otherwise not be connected.

This dissertation examines the tools residents have at their disposal to facilitate democratic accountability for carceral state actors more broadly, and municipal police, more narrowly. First, I evaluate an increasingly common institutional reform in municipal governance – civilian oversight boards. This research demonstrates that oversight boards are systematically underpowered and unable to improve police behavior. Second, I examine civilian coproduction of accountability, through complaint reporting and meeting attendance. Across two survey based experiments, I show that residents are more willing to engage in coproduction when oversight agencies have strong sanctioning powers and direct democratic influence. Finally, I display how proximal carceral exposure shapes voter turnout when residents are given direct electoral influence over policymaking. Here, I use voter files from California to show that residents of the most high carceral exposure neighborhoods are mobilized to polls in order to support a ballot measure that reduces the reach of the carceral state.

This dissertation examines the political representation of non<&ndash>citizen Latinos in the U.S. states. Specifically, it investigates why lawmakers, seen as primarily driven by the goal of reelection, would be compelled to vote for or sponsor legislation to favor this non<&ndash>citizen, non<&ndash>voting population.

Using newly collected data on bill sponsorship and roll call voting, combined with data collected from an original survey of current state lawmakers, I test a more nuanced version of David Mayhew<&rsquo>s reelection theory. I examine the short<&ndash>term and long<&ndash>term reelection goals of lawmakers finding that both current and potential future voting populations in a district (including non<&ndash>citizens) have significant effects on voting and sponsorship decisions. In addition, I find evidence to suggest that personal characteristics of a lawmaker, most notably ethnic identity, also affect legislative behavior. In line with an alternative <&ldquo>good public policy theory,<&rdquo> my results demonstrate that even when electoral pressures are low, Latino lawmakers remain significantly more likely to support non<&ndash>citizen interests when compared to all other lawmakers. The broader implication of this finding is that descriptive representation matters and the identity link between Latino legislators and non<&ndash>citizen Latinos in society encourages behavior that is not fully explained by standard reelection theories.