Dominik Hangartner, L. Schmid, Dalston G. Ward, S. Boes
Research on education's effect on participation is split between those who argue that education is a ``universal solvent'' that causally increases participation and those who hold that education merely proxies for pre-adult differences, with no independent effects. We incorporate a calculus of participation into the education-participation nexus to predict education’s effects for political activities that vary in their costs and benefits. We test these predictions with quasi-random variation in education caused by entry exams into upper-level secondary schools in Switzerland and participation measures from an original survey of former students conducted 40 years later. Comparing former students who narrowly passed or failed their exam, we find that an additional year of education increases electoral and low-cost non-electoral participation. We find no effects on high-cost non-electoral participation, however. These findings suggest that, rather than being a universal solvent or a mere proxy, education's effect depends on the characteristics of political activities.
{"title":"Which Political Activities Are Caused by Education? Evidence from School Entry Exams","authors":"Dominik Hangartner, L. Schmid, Dalston G. Ward, S. Boes","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3707982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3707982","url":null,"abstract":"Research on education's effect on participation is split between those who argue that education is a ``universal solvent'' that causally increases participation and those who hold that education merely proxies for pre-adult differences, with no independent effects. We incorporate a calculus of participation into the education-participation nexus to predict education’s effects for political activities that vary in their costs and benefits. We test these predictions with quasi-random variation in education caused by entry exams into upper-level secondary schools in Switzerland and participation measures from an original survey of former students conducted 40 years later. Comparing former students who narrowly passed or failed their exam, we find that an additional year of education increases electoral and low-cost non-electoral participation. We find no effects on high-cost non-electoral participation, however. These findings suggest that, rather than being a universal solvent or a mere proxy, education's effect depends on the characteristics of political activities.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134256012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When making political and economic decisions (e.g. voting, donating money to a cause), individuals consider the expectations of groups with which they identify. These expectations are injunctive norms, shared beliefs about appropriate behavior for identity group members, and individuals’ choices reflect trade-offs between adherence to these norms and other preferences. We show that when those who identify moderately/strongly with the group pay a cost as a consequence of avoiding a norm violation, they subsequently view the norms as stronger than those that paid no cost. This is evident in their greater willingness to pay an additional cost to punish/reward other group members for violating/complying with the norm. They also view other norms associated with the identity as stronger. In this way, costly norm compliance may be self-reinforcing.
{"title":"Identity and the Self-Reinforcing Effects of Norm Compliance","authors":"Mark Pickup, Erik O. Kimbrough, Eline A. de Rooij","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3183931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3183931","url":null,"abstract":"When making political and economic decisions (e.g. voting, donating money to a cause), individuals consider the expectations of groups with which they identify. These expectations are injunctive norms, shared beliefs about appropriate behavior for identity group members, and individuals’ choices reflect trade-offs between adherence to these norms and other preferences. We show that when those who identify moderately/strongly with the group pay a cost as a consequence of avoiding a norm violation, they subsequently view the norms as stronger than those that paid no cost. This is evident in their greater willingness to pay an additional cost to punish/reward other group members for violating/complying with the norm. They also view other norms associated with the identity as stronger. In this way, costly norm compliance may be self-reinforcing.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114988128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Political values are a central motivation for political behavior, prompting significant research programs in political science and public opinion research, but rigorous efforts to compare any two such research programs are rare, which creates barriers to developing theory and improved explanations. Accordingly, we investigate whether two cultural theories incorporating political values – the cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others and the cultural cognition theory (CCT) developed by Dan Kahan and colleagues – explain variation in political behavior beyond ideology and partisanship and if so which of these cultural theories explains more. We find that while ideology and partisanship explain significant variation in political behavior (here attitudes called risk perceptions regarding abortion, gun control, and the environment, including climate change), cultural political values explain still more, with CT measures explaining more than CCT. We discuss these findings and offer guidance on the further use of these cultural theories in studying political behavior.
{"title":"The Value-Added by Cultural Theories of Political Values: Comparing Ideology, Partisanship, and Two Cultural Value Explanations","authors":"B. Swedlow, B. Johnson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3426221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3426221","url":null,"abstract":"Political values are a central motivation for political behavior, prompting significant research programs in political science and public opinion research, but rigorous efforts to compare any two such research programs are rare, which creates barriers to developing theory and improved explanations. Accordingly, we investigate whether two cultural theories incorporating political values – the cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others and the cultural cognition theory (CCT) developed by Dan Kahan and colleagues – explain variation in political behavior beyond ideology and partisanship and if so which of these cultural theories explains more. We find that while ideology and partisanship explain significant variation in political behavior (here attitudes called risk perceptions regarding abortion, gun control, and the environment, including climate change), cultural political values explain still more, with CT measures explaining more than CCT. We discuss these findings and offer guidance on the further use of these cultural theories in studying political behavior.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116974851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael M. Bechtel, A. Jensen, Jordan H. McAllister, Kenneth F. Scheve
Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems with costs and benefits realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate risk and time attitudes and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies.
{"title":"Measuring Time Preferences in Large Surveys","authors":"Michael M. Bechtel, A. Jensen, Jordan H. McAllister, Kenneth F. Scheve","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3422697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3422697","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems with costs and benefits realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate risk and time attitudes and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122205868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anti-immigrant sentiment has become central to politics in Western Democracies yet researchers disagree about its causes. Experimental studies claim to disprove the labor market competition (LMC) hypothesis of anti-immigrant attitudes because high-skilled workers should prefer low-skilled immigrants who do not compete with them, but actually prefer high-skilled immigrants. However, these studies do not account for high-skilled natives' skill specificity which protects them from immigrant competition unlike low-skilled natives. I present a survey experiment with an equal LMC treatment for all skill levels: respondents' actual occupations. The results support the LMC hypothesis: high-skilled natives are 0.27 less favorable towards immigrants in their occupation than other high-skilled immigrants (on a 1-7 scale), comparable to their preference against low-skilled immigrants (0.3 lower). I find low-skilled natives perceive all low-skilled immigration as threatening whereas high-skilled natives only feel threatened by immigration in their occupation, showing LMC contributes to anti-immigrant sentiment.
{"title":"Experimental Evidence for a Link between Labor Market Competition and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes","authors":"Jonathan Mellon","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2997321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2997321","url":null,"abstract":"Anti-immigrant sentiment has become central to politics in Western Democracies yet researchers disagree about its causes. Experimental studies claim to disprove the labor market competition (LMC) hypothesis of anti-immigrant attitudes because high-skilled workers should prefer low-skilled immigrants who do not compete with them, but actually prefer high-skilled immigrants. However, these studies do not account for high-skilled natives' skill specificity which protects them from immigrant competition unlike low-skilled natives. I present a survey experiment with an equal LMC treatment for all skill levels: respondents' actual occupations. The results support the LMC hypothesis: high-skilled natives are 0.27 less favorable towards immigrants in their occupation than other high-skilled immigrants (on a 1-7 scale), comparable to their preference against low-skilled immigrants (0.3 lower). I find low-skilled natives perceive all low-skilled immigration as threatening whereas high-skilled natives only feel threatened by immigration in their occupation, showing LMC contributes to anti-immigrant sentiment.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"205 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122618361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The ideology of average Americans has changed little since the 1970s. Then as now around 30 percent identify liberal or conservative and 40 percent are moderates. In contrast to this stable “purple” distribution political parties have become more polarized into “red” and “blue” ideological camps with much less overlap than in the past. This paper contributes to the literature that seeks to reconcile these divergent trends by examining changes in the policy preferences within ideological categories. I analyze answers to a stable set of questions in the General Social Survey. The key finding is that liberals and conservatives have mainly moved further apart on a wide variety of policy issues. The divergence is substantial quantitatively and in its plausible political impact: intra party moderation has become increasingly unlikely.
{"title":"Polarizing Currents within Purple America","authors":"S. Peltzman","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3235867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3235867","url":null,"abstract":"The ideology of average Americans has changed little since the 1970s. Then as now around 30 percent identify liberal or conservative and 40 percent are moderates. In contrast to this stable “purple” distribution political parties have become more polarized into “red” and “blue” ideological camps with much less overlap than in the past. This paper contributes to the literature that seeks to reconcile these divergent trends by examining changes in the policy preferences within ideological categories. I analyze answers to a stable set of questions in the General Social Survey. The key finding is that liberals and conservatives have mainly moved further apart on a wide variety of policy issues. The divergence is substantial quantitatively and in its plausible political impact: intra party moderation has become increasingly unlikely.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133414668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Stegmueller, Michael Becher, Konstantin Käppner
Recent research has documented that lawmakers are more responsive to the views of the affluent than to the less well-off. This raises the important question of whether there are institutions that can limit unequal representation. We argue that labor unions play this role and we provide evidence from the contemporary U.S. House of Representatives. Our extensive dataset combines a novel measure of district-level union strength, drawn from 350,000 administrative records, with income-specific measures of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondents matched to 27 roll-call votes. Exploiting within-district variation in preference polarization, within-state variation in union strength and rich data on confounds, our analysis rules out a host of alternative explanations. In contrast to the view that unions have become too weak or fragmented to matter, they significantly dampen unequal responsiveness: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislative responsiveness towards the poor by about 9 percentage points.
{"title":"Labor Unions and Unequal Representation","authors":"Daniel Stegmueller, Michael Becher, Konstantin Käppner","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3220032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3220032","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research has documented that lawmakers are more responsive to the views of the affluent than to the less well-off. This raises the important question of whether there are institutions that can limit unequal representation. We argue that labor unions play this role and we provide evidence from the contemporary U.S. House of Representatives. Our extensive dataset combines a novel measure of district-level union strength, drawn from 350,000 administrative records, with income-specific measures of constituency preferences based on 223,000 survey respondents matched to 27 roll-call votes. Exploiting within-district variation in preference polarization, within-state variation in union strength and rich data on confounds, our analysis rules out a host of alternative explanations. In contrast to the view that unions have become too weak or fragmented to matter, they significantly dampen unequal responsiveness: a standard deviation increase in union membership increases legislative responsiveness towards the poor by about 9 percentage points.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121055036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At least 2 in 5 U.S. citizens live in high financial insecurity, leaving them vulnerable to economic shocks and stress. This paper identifies a mechanism linking poverty to turnout, showing that financial stress influences political behavior by influencing cognition and decision-making. I provide foundational evidence for a Good Intention Gap in political participation: Poor people want to take political action, but, consistent with the broader psychological effects of stress, financial anxiety taxes the brain’s cognitive resources. Taxed mental bandwidth and short-sighted decision-making reduce one’s capacity to follow through on intentions to participate.I show that experimentally-induced financial anxiety decreases long-term strategic thinking in ways that are increasingly at odds with policy preferences. When political action is easy and immediate, financial anxiety increases participation due to increased issue salience; however, when action is delayed, financial anxiety mediates decreased turnout, especially among the poor. Nationally representative data show that financial stress correlates with the Good Intention Gap via a mechanism of forgetting, while competing explanations for lower participation among the poor find little support.
{"title":"The Good Intention Gap: Poverty, Anxiety, and Implications for Political Action","authors":"Elaine K. Denny","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2839926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2839926","url":null,"abstract":"At least 2 in 5 U.S. citizens live in high financial insecurity, leaving them vulnerable to economic shocks and stress. This paper identifies a mechanism linking poverty to turnout, showing that financial stress influences political behavior by influencing cognition and decision-making. I provide foundational evidence for a Good Intention Gap in political participation: Poor people want to take political action, but, consistent with the broader psychological effects of stress, financial anxiety taxes the brain’s cognitive resources. Taxed mental bandwidth and short-sighted decision-making reduce one’s capacity to follow through on intentions to participate.I show that experimentally-induced financial anxiety decreases long-term strategic thinking in ways that are increasingly at odds with policy preferences. When political action is easy and immediate, financial anxiety increases participation due to increased issue salience; however, when action is delayed, financial anxiety mediates decreased turnout, especially among the poor. Nationally representative data show that financial stress correlates with the Good Intention Gap via a mechanism of forgetting, while competing explanations for lower participation among the poor find little support.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125556853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual’s political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person’s abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue. We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual’s initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person’s political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997. These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997. As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.
{"title":"Party Hacks and True Believers: The Effect of Party Affiliation on Political Preferences","authors":"Eric D. Gould, Esteban F. Klor","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2595108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2595108","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual’s political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person’s abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue. We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual’s initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person’s political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997. These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997. As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115286602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nowadays the security of nation is at the high alarming position. The security includes the internal security and external security of Nations. No one is ready to realize the sense of insecurity and destruction of civilized structure of the society. The terrorism, naxalizum, political consumerism leads the society toward the sense of insecurity. No doubt the burden to protect the individual’s life’s automatically shifted toward the military, police and other significant intelligence agencies attain great attention with new challenges. In the present research paper the researcher mostly focus on the role of these above agencies in detecting, investigating and dealing with the criminality and impediments in the way thereof. Generally it is speaking that, every problem rooted in to the causes of that problem . So in order to curb the problem of internal and external security of Nation the researcher has tried to reach to the problem and accordingly end with certain suggestions.
{"title":"Military, Intelligence, Police Law and Order Inside Security and Security of Border - An Indian Scenario","authors":"Assist. Prof. Pankaj Umbarkar","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2230835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2230835","url":null,"abstract":"Nowadays the security of nation is at the high alarming position. The security includes the internal security and external security of Nations. No one is ready to realize the sense of insecurity and destruction of civilized structure of the society. The terrorism, naxalizum, political consumerism leads the society toward the sense of insecurity. No doubt the burden to protect the individual’s life’s automatically shifted toward the military, police and other significant intelligence agencies attain great attention with new challenges. In the present research paper the researcher mostly focus on the role of these above agencies in detecting, investigating and dealing with the criminality and impediments in the way thereof. Generally it is speaking that, every problem rooted in to the causes of that problem . So in order to curb the problem of internal and external security of Nation the researcher has tried to reach to the problem and accordingly end with certain suggestions.","PeriodicalId":328296,"journal":{"name":"PSN: Other Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion (Topic)","volume":"333 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115877562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}