American Journal of Political Science最新文献

The author thanks Hu, Tai, and Solt (2022) for identifying these errors.

These errors have been corrected, democratic support re-estimated, and the analyses employed in the Claassen (2020) rerun. The corrected Tables 1 and 2 and Figures 1 and 3 are provided below. The corrected replication data set is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HWLW0J, as is a document with corrected supplementary information and analyses.

The corrected results are similar to those reported in the original article. For example, in model 1.1., Claassen (2020) originally reported an effect of support on democracy of 0.267 with a standard error of 0.094. In the corrected results, the corresponding coefficient and standard error are 0.273 and 0.094. As such, the corrected analyses confirm the conclusions drawn in Claassen (2020).

In the article titled “The Well-Ordered Society Under Crisis: A Formal Analysis of Public Reason vs. Convergence Discourse,” which was published in January 2020 in Volume 64, Issue 1 of the American Journal of Political Science, an error has been identified in the payoffs attributed to the game tree presented in Figure 4, labeled as “The Well-Ordered Society under Crisis with Public Reason” (Chung 2020: 89). The corrected Figure 4, containing the corrected payoffs, is provided below:

The statement of Proposition 2 and Proposition 3 (Chung 2020: 90) along with their corresponding proofs (Chung 2020: 98) were all established on the basis of the correct payoffs delineated in the corrected Figure 4 provided above. Consequently, no revisions are required for the textual content or the formal analyses presented within the original paper.

Presidents occupy a unique role as both the head of the executive branch and a de facto party leader. They nationalize politics and polarize lawmaking. Members of Congress know this, and they leverage the president's symbolic power to heighten political conflict. I argue that lawmakers, particularly those in the nonpresidential party, invoke the president to nationalize legislative debate and polarize constituent opinion. Using the text of House and Senate floor speeches between 1973 and 2016 and a within-member panel design, I find that legislators reference the president more frequently in the out-party and increasingly so as a district's media environment becomes more nationalized. Presidential references are also moderated by constituency partisanship. I support the behavioral implications with a vignette experiment: when a Republican Senator invokes President Biden in a policy speech, Republican respondents increase approval of that Senator and oppose political compromise. This research highlights the institutional consequences of nationalization and negative partisanship.

Depression can affect individuals’ attitudes by enhancing cognitive biases and altering perceptions of control. We investigate the relationship between depressive symptoms and Americans’ attitudes regarding domestic extremist violence. We develop a theory that suggests the association between depression and support for political violence depends on conspiracy beliefs, participatory inclinations, and their combination. We test our theory using a two-wave national survey panel from November 2020 and January 2021. We find that among those who hold conspiracy beliefs and/or have participatory inclinations, depression is positively associated with support for election violence and the January 6 Capitol riots. The participatory inclination dynamic is particularly strong for men. Our findings reveal how the intersection of two concerning features of American society—poor mental health and conspiratorial beliefs—strongly relate to another feature: support for political violence. The results also make clear that interventions aimed at addressing depression can potentially have substantial political consequences.

Contemporary American politics has been largely characterized by hyperpartisanship and polarization, with partisan-motivated reasoning a thematic concern. Theories of emotions in politics suggest that anxiety might interrupt partisan heuristics and encourage citizens to reason more evenhandedly—but in what domains and to what extent? We use original panel data to assess how anxiety about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19 interacted with partisan attachments to shape political judgment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The structure of our data allows us to assess large-scale implications of politically relevant emotions in ways that so far have not been possible. We find large effects on policy attitudes: Republicans who were afraid of getting sick rejected signals from copartisan leaders by supporting mask mandates and the like. Effects on vote choice for Republicans were muted in comparison, but fear's large effect on independents may have been pivotal.

Presidents select from a range of instruments when creating new policies through executive action. We study strategic substitution in this context and argue that presidents use less visible means of unilateral instruments when Congress is likely to scrutinize presidential action. Using data on unilateral orders issued between 1946 and 2020, we report two main findings. First, analyzing presidents’ choice of instruments, we show that presidents are more likely to substitute memoranda and other less visible instruments for executive orders and proclamations during periods of divided government. Second, after accounting for the substitution of executive orders with other instruments, we find that presidents issue greater numbers of directives during divided government than during unified government. These findings provide new evidence about the limitations of the separation of powers as a constraint on presidential unilateralism and highlight the importance of accounting for the variety of instruments through which presidents create unilateral policies.

Three key characteristics of effective electoral mobilizers have been identified in the literature: reputation, embeddedness in the local community, and the ability to reward and sanction voters. Religious leaders may possess all these characteristics. Can they favor their preferred candidates? Using a novel data set of connections between politicians and Italian Catholic bishops throughout the twentieth century, I conduct the first quantitative assessment of the electoral returns of personal connections to a religious leader. Leveraging the timing of bishops’ nominations within a difference-in-differences strategy, I estimate that bishops born in the electoral district yield a 27% increase in the individual preference votes for their connected candidate. Additional analyses point to the provision of campaign opportunities as the main mechanism driving the effect. These findings suggest that religious authorities can use their local embeddedness to mobilize voters, eventually influencing the selection of representatives in democratic systems.

With increasing interest in the role of emotions in politics across the discipline, we review theoretical and methodological approaches utilized by political psychologists. Although theorists have been highlighting the role of emotions in politics for thousands of years, modern political psychologists primarily employ Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen's (2000) affective intelligence theory to grapple with the consequences of emotions for political attitudes and behavior. We present results from a formal meta-analytic assessment exploring the strength of the empirical evidence for the relationship between emotions and political information search and decision strategies. Overall, we find weak but statistically reliable evidence linking anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm to information search when search is self-reported, but when information search is objectively measured, we find no link between it and anxiety or enthusiasm. Surprisingly, we also find little reliable evidence linking emotions to differential reliance on heuristics or more evidence-based criteria in voter decision-making.

Bilateral conflict involves an attacker with several alternative attack methods and a defender who can take various actions to better respond to different types of attack. These situations have wide applicability to political, legal, and economic disputes, but they are particularly challenging to study empirically because the payoffs are unknown. Moreover, each party has an incentive to behave unpredictably, so theoretical predictions are stochastic. This article reports results of an experiment where the details of the environment are tightly controlled. The results sharply contradict the Nash equilibrium predictions about how the two parties’ choice frequencies change in response to the relative effectiveness of alternative attack strategies. In contrast, nonparametric quantal response equilibrium predictions match the observed treatment effects. Estimation of the experimentally controlled payoff parameters across treatments accurately recovers the true values of those parameters with the logit quantal response equilibrium model but not with the Nash equilibrium model.