American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Is public policy responsive to demographically and ideologically unrepresentative comments given at public meetings? I investigate this possibility using a novel data set of over 40,000 comments made at the San Francisco Planning Commission between 1998 and 2021, matched to information about proposed developments discussed in hearings and administrative data on commenters. I document four stylized facts: First, commenters at public meetings are unrepresentative of the public along racial, gender, age, and homeownership lines; second, distance to the proposed development predicts commenting behavior, but only among those in opposition; third, commission votes are correlated with commenters’ preferences; finally, the alignment of White commenters (vs. other racial groups) and neighborhood group representatives and the general public (vs. other interest groups) better predict project approvals.

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.

With some recent exceptions, demands for global reparations have largely been ignored by former colonial countries. While the past two decades has seen renewed interest in colonial reparations in normative political theory and philosophy, this work has focused on determining responsibility for redress. By contrast, relatively little has been said on the further question of how redress might be sought in face of persistent colonial amnesia and apologia. This paper defends expropriation—unilateral public takeovers of ownership and/or control of foreign assets—as a justified response to overdue colonial reparations. In making this case, the paper (1) moves our focus beyond questions of responsibility for reparative justice to consider what victims of past injustice (and/or their descendants) are justified in doing to obtain their due and (2) explores distinctive issues that arise for political resistance at the global level.

How do rulers soften resistance by local powerholders to state-building efforts? This paper highlights a strategy of compensation, where elites receive government offices in exchange for relinquishing their localist interests, and become uprooted and integrated into the national political system as stakeholders. We explore this strategy in the context of the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (386–534 CE) that terminated an era of state weakness during which aristocrats exercised local autonomy through strongholds. Exploiting a comprehensive state-building reform in the late fifth century, we find that aristocrats from previously autonomous localities were disproportionately recruited into the bureaucracy as compensation for accepting stronger state presence. Three mechanisms of bureaucratic compensation facilitated state-building. Offices received by those aristocrats: (1) carried direct benefits, (2) realigned their interests toward the ruler, and (3) mitigated credible commitment problems. Our findings shed light on the “First Great Divergence” between Late Antiquity Europe and Medieval China.

How do political parties share power internally? We study the internal organization of political parties as the solution of a moral hazard problem between a party conference and its factions. Factions' mobilization efforts benefit the party electorally, but can only be imperfectly monitored. In contrast with the logic of Michel's Iron Law, we provide a functionalist rationale for intraparty power sharing: We show that internal power sharing can enhance a party's electoral performance. This effect is stronger in settings that award more resources to election winners: Low interparty power sharing produces high intraparty power sharing. We also show that intraparty power sharing should be more frequent within smaller parties, when monitoring of factional effort is more precise (e.g., preferential voting systems), and when factions' ideological disagreements span multiple dimensions.

Are corruption trials that involve the highest ranks in the public sphere and large private companies biased against some groups? Existing research predominantly focuses on corruption prosecutions of politicians, leaving unresolved the extent to which judges apply differential treatment when convicting and sentencing the political class compared to other defendants, including those in the private sector. To address this gap, we investigate judicial bias within Brazil's famous “Operação Lava Jato,” the largest corruption investigation carried out in history. Leveraging an original database that traces the trajectory of the universe of the 3154 cases of Lava Jato, we show that judges' sentencing decisions were not governed by a partisan logic. Instead, judges were more inclined to impose longer prison times and higher fines to elected politicians when compared to all other defendants, particularly those from the private sector. We interpret these findings as evidence of antipolitical class bias.

While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using natural language processing tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008–2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: Outlets may highlight meaningful social identities—race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship—to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.

We use doubly robust difference-in-differences models to estimate the causal effect of successful coups on national incomes. We find that real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) decreases by 10%–12% 5 years after a coup and the effect has not begun to diminish at that point. When we investigate the economic and political mechanisms behind this outcome, we find that our result is mostly driven by a fall in investment and in the rule of law, along with an increase in repression. Given the size of the effect, preventing coups can be seen as a significant development issue, and though the international community has taken steps to discourage coups, further consideration of anticoup policies seems well-warranted.

How do dominant-group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between minorities' political power gains and dominant-group animosity, we identify natives' hostile reactions with a regression discontinuity design that leverages close election results between immigrant-origin ethnic minority and dominant-group candidates. We find that minority victories increase hate crimes by 67%, exclusionary attitudes by 66%, and negative media coverage of immigrant groups by 110%. Consistent with power threat and social identity theories, these findings demonstrate a strong and widespread negative reaction—encompassing a violence-prone fringe and the mass public—against ethnic minority immigrants' integration into majority settings.

We know little about the extent to which racial minorities are symbolically represented by members of Congress. This stands in contrast to a wealth of research analyzing the extent to which minorities are substantively and descriptively represented. This article provides the most comprehensive analysis of symbolic representation to date. Using data on legislators’ speech from 105,875 newsletters and 620,838 floor speeches, I find that White legislators of both parties are more likely to symbolically represent Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians if those groups are more populous in their constituency. However, these effects only hold cross-sectionally; using a difference-in-differences setup from redistricting shocks, I find that there is little within-legislator variation in speech patterns as their constituencies change. Lastly, I show that, unlike on the symbolic dimension, legislators’ substantive representation is not influenced by group size. I conclude that White legislators are symbolically responsive to their constituents’ identities in their speech patterns.