Browsing by Subject "Political Behavior"

This dissertation addresses the effect of informality on three key dimensions: social policy

preferences, partisan attachments, and citizen-politician linkages. Many Latin American

labor markets have large informal sectors where workers are not covered by formal labor

arrangements and earn meager wages, as well as truncated social security systems that

target benefits to the well-off at the expense of the poor.

I first analyze how economic informality conditions voters preferences regarding the redistributive role of the state (Chapter 3). I examine the effect of labor informality on individual preferences over contribution-based programs (such as social security and public health insurance) and means-tested programs (such as CCTs). The analysis of micro-level data for both Latin America and Mexico suggests that, counterintuitively, voters in the informal sector are no more likely to support increased spending in social security and welfare institutions. On the contrary, labor market outsiders tend to favor only social programs with no eligibility requirements.

In the second part of the project, I study patterns of party identication among citizens

in the informal sector (Chapter 4). I argue that the low utility derived from social policies

and the obstacles to class identity formation contribute to depress partisan attachments.

The findings indicate that economic informality weakens ideological attachments between

voters and political parties. Results also show that outsiders trust less in political parties.

Finally, I analyze how economic informality conditions linkages between citizens and

politicians (Chapter 5). I theorize that given the characteristics of the members in the

informal sector, political parties will have incentives to approach them using

clientelistic offers and vote-buying strategies. I find that voters in the informal sector are particularly sensitive to some types of clientelistic offers. Furthermore, labor market outsiders seem to be more likely to switch their vote toward candidates offering private benefits.

Issue voting, where citizens select candidates based on their own policy preferences, exists as an ideal form of candidate selection in a representative democracy, with politicians being elected because they match the policy preferences of their constituencies. But, in practice, how much of voter decision-making is driven by political issue information? Much of the literature on this topic has narrowly debated whether the mass public uses issues at all, with influential work concluding that citizens seem largely unable or unwilling to do so. If true, this has important implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and the design of institutions. In this dissertation, I argue the debate of how voters decide is a false dichotomy and that pitting issue voting against non-issue voting has limited our understanding of political decision-making. Through a series of original survey experiments and analysis of multiple panel datasets, I show that voters, hindered by the same cognitive and motivational constraints used by critics to argue against the existence of issue voting, can and do use policy information to inform their vote choice. The results of this dissertation imply that the American voter falls between the ideal issue voter from classical theories of voting and the non-issue voter of recent work in political psychology, promoting guarded optimism toward the public’s ability to maintain ideal democratic principles.

The Global South, and particularly Latin America, experienced a remarkable expansion in conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in the last fifteen years. Although a large literature examines the effects of CCTs on human development, the political behavioral consequences remain underexplored. In the dissertation, I address this gap by analyzing the effects of CCTs on political participation and policy. I also explore the implications of these effects for human development.

My central argument is that CCTs increase political participation among beneficiaries, and both program transfers and conditionalities contribute to these positive effects. More specifically, CCTs provide beneficiaries with politically relevant resources, including civic skills and access to state officials and community leaders. These resources reduce the costs of political participation and facilitate more involvement in political activities, particularly in more demanding forms of participation. In addition, I argue that CCTs increase the private provision of local services and influence the outcomes of some non-national elections.

To test this argument, I use four main sources of data: (1) existing survey data from Latin America in 2012; (2) original survey data from Mexico in 2014; (3) experimental data from Mexico in 1998-2000; and (4) in-depth interviews and focus groups from Mexico in 2012. Multilevel models and linear regression models are used to estimate the effects of CCTs on political behavior and service provision. The in-depth interviews and focus groups help to unravel more of the causal mechanism that connects CCTs to political participation.

The evidence largely supports my argument. I find that CCTs increase participation in a wide variety of political activities, including electoral and non-electoral activities. In addition, the pathways to increased participation include improved civic skills and increased access to state officials and local leaders. Moreover, CCTs increase the private provision of sewerage services.

I conclude that CCTs have both desirable and undesirable consequences. On the one hand, CCTs increase democratic political participation, improve civic skills, reduce the distance between beneficiaries and government officials, and increase access to local services. The increased access to sewerage services creates an indirect pathway to improved human development outcomes. On the other hand, CCTs reduce the pressure on local officials to provide local services, and in some contexts contribute to electoral rewards for undeserving incumbent parties.

Power derived from personal relationships especially based on school ties and local ties has become accepted as a source of human capital, and has been shown since the 1960s to be an effective tool for attaining upward social mobility in South Korea. Many researchers have largely focused on public behavior or the role of political elites, not individual members in the National Assembly. Since social network analysis is an effective research tool for examining influence of relational attributes, it has the potential to be very helpful in understanding the behavior of members in the National Assembly. This study maps relationships among members of the leading opposition party in South Korea to determine whether they affected political events occurring in early 2016—specifically the split of the leading opposition party, NPAD, into two parties, MPK and PP. Mapping a network could be helpful to find a new way to analyze actions of political leaders in a certain political event as well. I used personal information about members of the opposition parties, including their hometowns, educational institutions attended, and previous achievements to map their social networks extant at the time of the split. I used values of centralities to determine who was the hub of the network and what relationships exist between and among its members. Examining the network connecting members of the opposition parties shows that, contrary to expectations, Chun Jung-bae was the hub not Ahn Chul-soo or Moon Jae-in unlike many expectations. Determining the relationships based on school ties and local ties between members can provide researchers with new perspectives on their research into political events in South Korea.

This manuscript is comprised of three papers that examine the far-reaching and often invisible political outcomes of gender role socialization in the United States. These papers focus primarily on two areas: political confidence amongst girls and women, and the effects of gender on survey measurement and data quality.

Chapter one focuses on political confidence, and the likelihood that women will run for political office. Women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of political leadership, and their lack of political ambition, relative to men, has been identified as a primary cause. In this paper, I explore the relationship between an individual's masculinity and femininity and her development of political ambition. Using original survey data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), I first empirically demonstrate that gender (masculinity/femininity) and sex (male/female) are unique elements of identity and, moreover, are both independently related to political ambition. I then explore the relevance of gender for the study of candidate emergence, testing whether and how masculinity and femininity might be related to political ambition are supported empirically. While the results suggest that masculinity is positively associated with the development of political ambition, the relationship between femininity and candidate emergence seems to be more complicated and not what prevailing stereotypes might lead us to expect. Moreover, while the relationship between masculinity and political ambition is the same for men and women, the relationship between femininity and political ambition is very different for women than it is for men. This study suggests that gender role socialization is highly related with both men's and women's desire to seek positions of political leadership.

Chapter two continues this exploration of gendered differences in the development of political ambition, this time exploring how social attractiveness and gendered perceptions of political leadership impact the desire to hold political office.Women are persistently underrepresented as candidates for public office and remain underrepresented at all levels of government in the United States. Previous literature suggests that the gendered ambition gap, gender socialization, insufficient recruitment, media scrutiny, family responsibilities, modern campaign strategies, and political opportunity structures all contribute to the gender imbalance in pools of officeholders and candidates. To explain women's reticence to run, scholars have offered explanations addressing structural, institutional, and individual-level factors that deter women from becoming candidates, especially for high positions in the U.S. government. This paper examines a previously unexplored factor: how dating and socialized norms of sexual attraction affect political ambition. This study investigates whether young, single, and heterosexual women's desire for male attention and fear of being perceived as unattractive or "too ambitious" present obstacles to running for office. The results of these experiments suggest that social expectations about gender, attraction and sexuality, and political office-holding may contribute to women's reticence to pursue political leadership. Chapter two is a co-authored work and represents the joint efforts of Laura Lazarus Frankel, Shauna Shames, and Nadia Farjood.

Chapter 3 bridges survey methodology and gender socialization, focusing on how interviewer sex affects survey measurement and data quality. Specifically, this paper examines whether and how matching interviewer and respondent sex affects panel attrition--respondents dropping out of the study after participating in the first wave. While the majority of research on interviewer effects suggests that matching interviewer and respondent characteristics (homophily) yields higher quality data, little work has examined whether this pattern holds true in the area of panel attrition. Using paradata from the General Social Survey (GSS), I explore this question. My analysis reveals that, despite its broader positive effects on data quality, matching interviewer and respondent sex increases likelihood to attrit. Interestingly, this phenomenon only emerges amongst male respondents. However, while assigning female interviewers to male respondents decreases their propensity to attrit, it also increases the likelihood of biased responses on gender related items. These conflicting outcomes represent a tradeoff for scholars and survey researchers, requiring careful consideration of mode, content, and study goals when designing surveys and/or analyzing survey data. The implications of these patterns and areas for further research are discussed.

Together, these papers illustrate two ways that gender norms are related to political outcomes: they contribute to patterns of candidate emergence and affect the measurement of political attitudes and behaviors.

For students of color, how do school experiences early in life affect adult political participation later on? Political scientists have long understood that race plays a critical role in political behavior; however, scholars rarely investigate the features of American society that drive racial inequalities in outcomes like voting, volunteering for campaigns, and other forms of political participation. This study explores an important and underexamined source of long-term differences in political behavior: childhood experiences in schools. Using observational analysis of longitudinal datasets, I examine the relationship between public schools and political participation among students of color. My research highlights the important fact that public schools can influence both the resources students of color have later in life and the feelings they have toward government and politics—sometimes in opposing ways that ultimately leave students of color better-resourced but less confident in government and less likely to participate.