American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Pardos-Prado, S. and C. Xena. 2019. Skill specificity and attitudes toward immigration. American Journal of Political Science, 63(2): 286–304. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12406

The number of countries reported in Table 1 in the original publication of Pardos-Prado and Xena (2019) has been found to be incorrect. We are very grateful to Professor Michelle Dion for bringing this issue to our attention.

The error was due to logging GDP and unemployment spending after centering all variables. This inadvertently dropped from the analysis a significant number of observations coded as 0. The loss of country sample size after introducing logged variables was difficult to spot since the software we use to run cross-classified hierarchical models does not report the number of countries.

Reassuringly, the substantive results remain unchanged if GDP and unemployment spending are not logged, and therefore if the full sample is retrieved (13 countries across five waves). A corrected version of Table 1 can be found below. The coefficients of interest (skill specificity and occupational unemployment) remain highly significant across the four model specifications: p = 0.009 in the second model, and p = 0.000 in all other models. In fact, the coefficient of skill specificity is now more precisely estimated (narrower CIs). The sign remains consistently positive, meaning that higher values of skill specificity or occupational unemployment increase anti-immigrant attitudes. Our theory does not involve any country-specific feature, so it probably makes sense that the results are not overly sensitive to changes in the country sample.

Local newspapers convey extensive subnational political information but have dwindling audiences. In a nationalized and polarized information environment, can online interventions increase state/local news consumption and with what effects? We explore this question via a preregistered experiment randomizing Pennsylvania residents (n = 5059) to staggered interventions encouraging news consumption from leading state newspapers. A total of 2529 individuals were offered free online subscriptions, but only 44 subscribed; we find little evidence of treatment effects on knowledge, engagement, or attitudes. We then administered a second treatment element—promoting subnational news directly via Facebook feeds—with a higher application rate but similarly limited impacts. Observational analyses of these respondents and separate national samples show that Democratic political partisanship has come to predict local newspaper subscriptions. Contemporary local newspapers may face a demand-side dilemma: The engaged citizens who formerly read them now prefer national, partisan content.

Higher education has massively expanded around the world, yet we know little about the political consequences of this expansion. Students generally have overly optimistic expectations about the returns to educational investment, and the effects of unmet expectations on graduates’ political behavior have been overlooked. I study this phenomenon in Chile with observational and experimental methods, using unique panel survey data collected from new graduates covering 72% of higher education enrollment. The survey tracks students before and after they enter the labor market and includes an experiment that induces variation in their expectations. The panel data reveals that 65% of students have unmet expectations, and both methods indicate that this induces a shift toward progovernment/proequality ideology. Overall, this study shows that the gap between aspirations and reality upon graduation can be an important driver of political attitudes.

Extant research has established that displeasure with a Supreme Court ruling typically has negligible consequences for institutional support, largely because, as legitimacy theory's positivity bias explains, judicial decisions are invariably delivered with the accoutrements of legitimizing symbols. The Court's ruling in Dobbs, abrogating a federal constitutional right to abortion services, may challenge legitimacy theory because displeasure with the ruling seems so widespread and intense. This research aims to determine whether the ruling lessened the Court's legitimacy. The general conclusion is that Dobbs produced a sizeable dent in institutional support, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, in part because abortion attitudes for many are infused with moral content and in part owing to the Court's substantial tilt to the right since 2020. Indeed, the Court's legitimacy may be at greater risk today than at any time since Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930s attack on the institution.

Political elites must know and rely faithfully on the public will to be democratically responsive. Recent work on elite perceptions of public opinion shows that reelection-motivated politicians systematically misperceive the opinions of their constituents to be more conservative than they are. We extend this work to a larger and broader set of unelected political elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like, and report alternative empirical findings. These unelected elites hold similarly inaccurate perceptions about public opinion, though not in a single ideological direction. We find this elite population exhibits egocentrism bias, rather than partisan confirmation bias, as their perceptions about others' opinions systematically correspond to their own policy preferences. Thus, we document a remarkably consistent false consensus effect among unelected political elites, which holds across subsamples by party, occupation, professional relevance of party affiliation, and trust in party-aligned information sources.

Tragic events such as terrorist attacks have been shown to influence voters’ policy preferences, but less is known about whether such events also affect actual immigration policy. In this study, I bring new evidence to this question by examining whether migrant shipwrecks and terrorist attacks affected asylum decisions in France during the refugee crisis of 2015–16. I find that asylum officers were more likely to approve an individual's refugee application if a shipwreck has recently been in the news than they are otherwise. Yet they were less likely to grant refugee status to asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq after a terrorist attack. Together, these findings suggest that tragic events can affect immigration policy through their influence on asylum officers.

How do populations facing external aggression view the costs and benefits of self-defense? In Western countries, war support has been shown to follow cost–benefit calculations, resembling the moral principle of proportionality. A categorical position, in contrast, means supporting self-defense regardless of the costs. To evaluate which moral principle populations facing external aggression follow, we conducted a conjoint experiment with 1,160 Ukrainians in July 2022. We examine support for different strategies Ukraine could pursue against Russia, which vary regarding the political autonomy and territorial integrity they afford and three costs: civilian and military fatalities, and nuclear risk. We find that Ukrainians do not trade off autonomy or territory against these costs. A new method to rank conjoint-attributes, computing “nested” marginal means, shows that respondents categorically reject political or territorial concessions, regardless of costs. This provides first experimental evidence that populations resisting external aggression do not subject war outcomes to cost–benefit calculations.