This paper explores how factional competition shapes local media's coverage of negative political news. Employing news reports that appeared in Chinese national and local newspapers (2000–2014) coupled with data on the networks of elites, we find that local bureaucrats connected to strong national leaders tend to criticize members of weaker factions in politically damaging news reports. These adverse reports indeed harm the promotion prospects of the province leaders reported on in the articles, weakening the already weak factions and expanding the relative power of the strong factions. Our findings suggest that the loyalty-based competitive behaviors of political elites further tilt an already uneven playing field across political factions and facilitate power concentration in China.
{"title":"Do winners spread more words? Factional competition and local media reports on corruption investigation in China","authors":"J. Hong, Leo Y. Yang","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.35","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper explores how factional competition shapes local media's coverage of negative political news. Employing news reports that appeared in Chinese national and local newspapers (2000–2014) coupled with data on the networks of elites, we find that local bureaucrats connected to strong national leaders tend to criticize members of weaker factions in politically damaging news reports. These adverse reports indeed harm the promotion prospects of the province leaders reported on in the articles, weakening the already weak factions and expanding the relative power of the strong factions. Our findings suggest that the loyalty-based competitive behaviors of political elites further tilt an already uneven playing field across political factions and facilitate power concentration in China.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41416331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elected representatives have more means of public-facing communication at their disposal than ever before. Several studies examine how representatives use individual mediums, but we lack a baseline understanding of legislators’ relative use patterns across platforms. Using a novel data set of the four most widely used forms of written, constituent-facing communication (press releases, e-newsletters, Facebook posts, and Twitter tweets) by members of the US House of Representatives in the 114th (2015–2017), 115th (2017–2019), and 116th (2019–2021) Congresses, we generate a baseline understanding of how representatives communicate across mediums. Our analyses show that institutional, legislator, and district characteristics correspond with differential use of mediums. These findings underscore why medium choice matters, clarifying how a researcher's choice of mediums might amplify the voices of certain legislators and dampen those of others. In addition, they provide guidance to other researchers on how to select the medium(s) that best correspond with different research aims.
{"title":"Conditional Congressional communication: how elite speech varies across medium","authors":"Rachel M. Blum, Lindsey Cormack, Kelsey Shoub","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.28","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Elected representatives have more means of public-facing communication at their disposal than ever before. Several studies examine how representatives use individual mediums, but we lack a baseline understanding of legislators’ relative use patterns across platforms. Using a novel data set of the four most widely used forms of written, constituent-facing communication (press releases, e-newsletters, Facebook posts, and Twitter tweets) by members of the US House of Representatives in the 114th (2015–2017), 115th (2017–2019), and 116th (2019–2021) Congresses, we generate a baseline understanding of how representatives communicate across mediums. Our analyses show that institutional, legislator, and district characteristics correspond with differential use of mediums. These findings underscore why medium choice matters, clarifying how a researcher's choice of mediums might amplify the voices of certain legislators and dampen those of others. In addition, they provide guidance to other researchers on how to select the medium(s) that best correspond with different research aims.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45279830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach causal inference. This may account for conflicting findings in published research. Here, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design situated in Romania, where students who pass a national baccalaureate exam are uniquely qualified to enter university. We find that university attendance causes more liberal party preferences along the cultural dimension of party politics—though not along the economic or left-right dimensions of party conflict.
{"title":"The impact of university attendance on partisanship","authors":"B. Apfeld, E. Coman, J. Gerring, S. Jessee","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.33","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Survey research shows that those with university degrees are more left-liberal along a number of dimensions than their peers without higher education. There is even some evidence to suggest a growing social and political cleavage centered on educational attainment. Yet, claims about the liberalizing effect of universities on political ideology and partisan identification rest on observational evidence where many assumptions are required to reach causal inference. This may account for conflicting findings in published research.\u0000 Here, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design situated in Romania, where students who pass a national baccalaureate exam are uniquely qualified to enter university. We find that university attendance causes more liberal party preferences along the cultural dimension of party politics—though not along the economic or left-right dimensions of party conflict.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48886008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We study the problem of how citizens should punish or reward a leader's choices during international crises. Audiences should impose costs rooted in citizens’ preferences over policy outcomes, but that need not mean that these costs directly reflect the citizens’ preferences over actions. Instead, rewards and punishments are valued for their equilibrium consequences. To understand how citizens’ policy preferences shape electoral accountability, we characterize the retention strategies that maximize citizen welfare. In the optimal strategy, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. This is a robust finding, and true even though the citizens have no intrinsic preferences for policy consistency. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. Importantly, these strategies of rewarding and punishing leaders need not have any immediate connection to voter's ex ante preferences over war and peace, even if preferences over policy outcomes ultimately motivate citizen behavior. This has important implications for interpreting empirical and experimental results related to audience costs.
{"title":"The accountability of politicians in international crises and the nature of audience cost","authors":"Scott Ashworth, Kristopher W. Ramsay","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.34","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We study the problem of how citizens should punish or reward a leader's choices during international crises. Audiences should impose costs rooted in citizens’ preferences over policy outcomes, but that need not mean that these costs directly reflect the citizens’ preferences over actions. Instead, rewards and punishments are valued for their equilibrium consequences. To understand how citizens’ policy preferences shape electoral accountability, we characterize the retention strategies that maximize citizen welfare. In the optimal strategy, citizens always punish leaders who initiate crises and then back down. This is a robust finding, and true even though the citizens have no intrinsic preferences for policy consistency. Whether they punish leaders for backing down rather than going to war, on the other hand, depends on the status quo and on the costs of war. Importantly, these strategies of rewarding and punishing leaders need not have any immediate connection to voter's ex ante preferences over war and peace, even if preferences over policy outcomes ultimately motivate citizen behavior. This has important implications for interpreting empirical and experimental results related to audience costs.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45615600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Moving past the conventional focus on ministerial portfolios, this paper investigates how coalition governments allocate and share ministerial responsibility for individual policy issues. Sharing responsibility induces coalescing parties to collaborate on policy issues, which addresses the problem of ministerial autonomy. Consequently, I argue that incumbent parties in coalition governments share ministerial responsibility for contentious and salient policy issues. This claim is corroborated based on a newly elicited dataset of over 30,000 ministerial policy responsibilities from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The findings have important implications for scholarship on coalition governments, as they demonstrate that incumbent parties can use the design of ministerial portfolios itself to insulate a coalition compromise from partisan deviations.
{"title":"Keeping tabs through collaboration? Sharing ministerial responsibility in coalition governments","authors":"K. J. Klüser","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.31","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Moving past the conventional focus on ministerial portfolios, this paper investigates how coalition governments allocate and share ministerial responsibility for individual policy issues. Sharing responsibility induces coalescing parties to collaborate on policy issues, which addresses the problem of ministerial autonomy. Consequently, I argue that incumbent parties in coalition governments share ministerial responsibility for contentious and salient policy issues. This claim is corroborated based on a newly elicited dataset of over 30,000 ministerial policy responsibilities from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The findings have important implications for scholarship on coalition governments, as they demonstrate that incumbent parties can use the design of ministerial portfolios itself to insulate a coalition compromise from partisan deviations.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47794965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kyle Endres, D. S. Hillygus, Matthew DeBell, S. Iyengar
Rising costs and challenges of in-person interviewing have prompted major surveys to consider moving online and conducting live web-based video interviews. In this paper, we evaluate video mode effects using a two-wave experimental design in which respondents were randomized to either an interviewer-administered video or interviewer-administered in-person survey wave after completing a self-administered online survey wave. This design permits testing of both within- and between-subject differences across survey modes. Our findings suggest that video interviewing is more comparable to in-person interviewing than online interviewing across multiple measures of satisficing, social desirability, and respondent satisfaction.
{"title":"A randomized experiment evaluating survey mode effects for video interviewing","authors":"Kyle Endres, D. S. Hillygus, Matthew DeBell, S. Iyengar","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.30","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Rising costs and challenges of in-person interviewing have prompted major surveys to consider moving online and conducting live web-based video interviews. In this paper, we evaluate video mode effects using a two-wave experimental design in which respondents were randomized to either an interviewer-administered video or interviewer-administered in-person survey wave after completing a self-administered online survey wave. This design permits testing of both within- and between-subject differences across survey modes. Our findings suggest that video interviewing is more comparable to in-person interviewing than online interviewing across multiple measures of satisficing, social desirability, and respondent satisfaction.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43806044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A successful democratic transition requires citizens to embrace a new set of political institutions. Citizens’ support is vital for these institutions to uphold the burgeoning constitutional and legal order. Courts, for example, often rely on citizens’ support and threat of electoral punishment against the government to enforce their rulings. In this article, I consider whether education under democracy can engender this support. Using regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and difference-in-difference-in-differences designs, I find an additional year of schooling after the fall of the Berlin Wall has similar positive downstream effects on East Germans’ support across institutions. Since schooling similarly affects public support for judicial, legislative, and executive institutions, citizens are not necessarily inclined to electorally punish the other branches when they ignore a court's ruling. This potential inability of courts to constrain unlawful government behavior threatens the foundation of the separation of powers and the survival of democracy.
{"title":"Education, public support for institutions, and the separation of powers","authors":"Sivaram Cheruvu","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.29","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A successful democratic transition requires citizens to embrace a new set of political institutions. Citizens’ support is vital for these institutions to uphold the burgeoning constitutional and legal order. Courts, for example, often rely on citizens’ support and threat of electoral punishment against the government to enforce their rulings. In this article, I consider whether education under democracy can engender this support. Using regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and difference-in-difference-in-differences designs, I find an additional year of schooling after the fall of the Berlin Wall has similar positive downstream effects on East Germans’ support across institutions. Since schooling similarly affects public support for judicial, legislative, and executive institutions, citizens are not necessarily inclined to electorally punish the other branches when they ignore a court's ruling. This potential inability of courts to constrain unlawful government behavior threatens the foundation of the separation of powers and the survival of democracy.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44068993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Wilson, Juraj Medzihorský, Seraphine F. Maerz, P. Lindenfors, Amanda B. Edgell, V. Boese, Staffan I. Lindberg
This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.
{"title":"Episodes of liberalization in autocracies: a new approach to quantitatively studying democratization","authors":"M. Wilson, Juraj Medzihorský, Seraphine F. Maerz, P. Lindenfors, Amanda B. Edgell, V. Boese, Staffan I. Lindberg","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46356267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RAM volume 10 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.23","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":"10 1","pages":"f1 - f2"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45578578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RAM volume 10 issue 3 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/psrm.2022.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.24","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47311,"journal":{"name":"Political Science Research and Methods","volume":"10 1","pages":"b1 - b3"},"PeriodicalIF":3.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47010009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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