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.

The political budget cycle theory has extensively documented how politicians manipulate policies during election years to gain an electoral advantage. This paper focuses on county sheriffs, crucial but often neglected local officials, and investigates their opportunistic political behavior during elections. Using a panel data set covering 57 California county governments over four election cycles, we find compelling evidence of traffic enforcement policy manipulation by county sheriffs during election years. Specifically, a county's per capita traffic fines revenue is 9% lower in the election than in nonelection years. The magnitude of the political cycle intensifies when an election is competitive. Our findings contribute to the political budget cycle theory and provide timely insights into the ongoing debate surrounding law enforcement reform and local governments’ increasing reliance on fines and fees revenue.

Despite record numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, we know little about the causal effects of intergroup contact between migrants and locals in active conflict settings. We conduct a randomized controlled trial of a vocational skills-training program implemented by Mercy Corps that enrolled 2597 locals and migrants in near equal numbers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where IDPs face daily prejudice and discrimination. Courses lasting up to 6 months emphasized collaborative learning and soft skills development. We surveyed participants at endline and followed up 8 months later. While the program provided the most sustained duration of intergroup contact (360–720 h) experimentally evaluated to date, we find no evidence of reported behavioral or attitudinal change by locals (N = 1276) toward migrants generally, regardless of classroom demographics or course duration. Our findings suggest that prolonged contact through vocational training programs is insufficient to improve relations in conflict settings.

When grievance shocks have heavy tails, large sudden increases in grievances coordinate behavior far more effectively into protests than a sequence of small grievance shocks that generate the same final distribution of grievances in society. That is, society as a whole behaves like the legendary boiling frog, even though each individual does not. An implication is a strong form of path-dependence in collective action. To assess a society's potential for protest, it is not enough to know the current distribution of antiregime sentiments; we also need to know how they came about: suddenly or gradually. The theory also provides a rationale for the classic J-curve theory of revolution. We provide a quantitative analysis of the relationship between grievance shocks and protests in Chile in 2014–2019. Consistent with the theory, results suggest that, even after controlling for grievance levels, large grievance shocks increased the number of protests.

An extensive literature links the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties to immigration. We argue that another demographic trend is also significant: emigration. The departure of citizens due to internal and international emigration is a major phenomenon affecting elections via two complementary mechanisms. Emigration alters the composition of electorates, but also changes the preferences of the left behind. Empirically, we establish a positive correlation between PRR vote shares and net-migration loss at the subnational level across Europe. A more fine-grained panel analysis of precincts in Sweden demonstrates that the departure of citizens raises PRR vote shares in places of emigration and that the Social Democrats are the principal losers from emigration. Elite interviews and newspaper analyses explore how emigration produces material and psychological grievances on which populists capitalize and that established parties do not effectively address. Emigration and the frustrations it generates emerge as important sources of populist success.

According to many, the US Congress desperately needs reform because its capacity to govern has declined. Congressional capacity cannot be understood without examining how the expertise available to members is fostered or discouraged. We present a theory of expertise acquisition and apply it to the problem of overseeing the Executive. We use this theory to organize a dataset of congressional staff employment merged with new records of invitations, applications, and attendance at training sessions produced by three nonprofit organizations in Washington, DC. We find that staffers are more likely to acquire expertise when their jobs are more secure and there are more opportunities to use their expertise in careers outside of Congress—most notably, when their party takes control of the presidency. Our analysis suggests that oversight expertise is generally not sufficiently valuable outside of Congress to entice many staffers to acquire it without subsidies.

Housing policy is one of the most important areas of local politics. Yet little is known about how local legislatures and executives make housing policy decisions and how their elections shape policy in this important realm. We leverage housing policy data and a new data source of 15,621 city council elections and 3,261 mayoral elections in large cities in the United States and a regression discontinuity design to examine partisan divides in housing policy among the mass public as well as the impact of local leaders’ partisanship on housing policy. We provide robust evidence that electing mayors from different political parties shapes cities’ housing stock. Electing a Democrat as mayor leads to increased multifamily housing production. These effects are concentrated in cities where councils have less power over land use changes. Overall, our article shows that politics influences local housing policy, and it contributes to a larger literature on local political economy.

Local governments play an important role in addressing the climate crisis. However, despite public support for climate action, local policy responses have been limited. We argue that (1) biased beliefs about voter preferences, (2) the time horizon for credit claiming, and (3) source credibility are barriers for legislators to learn and adopt new environmental policies. We test these arguments in a real policy-learning context. Representatives from six Western countries received customized invitations to a webinar on climate solutions for local governments. We find that constituency opinion on climate issues made local office-holders more responsive to public preferences. Invitations sent by a climate scientist and emphasizing shorter term policy effects increased interest in the webinar, but did not boost the likelihood of policy commitments. Only US officials responded negatively to climate scientists. The results reveal concrete steps to induce climate action and contribute to scholarship on policy learning.

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.

From the 1980s to the mid-2010s, nearly three-quarters of members newly elected to the US House of Representatives had previous elected experience; however, only half of the freshmen elected from 2016 to 2020 held prior office. In this article, we investigate emergence- and success-driven explanations for the declining proportion of experienced officeholders entering Congress. In our analyses, we find that the advantages traditionally afforded to experienced candidates are waning. First, we show that inexperienced candidates’ emergence patterns have changed; amateurs are increasingly apt to emerge in the same kinds of contests as their experienced counterparts. We then show that experienced candidates have lost their fundraising edge and that—for certain kinds of candidates—the value of elected experience itself has declined. Lastly, we identify other candidate characteristics as strong predictors for success in modern elections. We demonstrate that these electorally advantageous identities overwhelmingly belong to candidates who lack elected experience.