American Journal of Political Science最新文献

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.

Consensus from the debate over lagged dependent variables in dynamic linear regression models advises that including enough lags of the dependent and independent variables will fully model autocorrelation in the error term. But this approach fails to account for a long-neglected source of autocorrelation in the error term—moving averages—which cannot be represented with a finite number of lags. Approximating moving averages results in either inconsistent or inefficient estimates of relevant quantities of interest, a claim demonstrated here via Monte Carlo simulations and three empirical demonstrations. Ultimately, we argue that moving averages should be a standard part of dynamic analysis and offer guidance for incorporating them into various modeling strategies.

Aristotle's analysis in the Rhetoric of the intelligibility of passionately angry political speech is an urgently needed addition to the ongoing scholarly reassessment of his relevance to democratic practices. Aristotle shows his readers—both orators and their auditors, citizens who might both rule and be ruled—that anger is prone to exaggeration and distortion and is therefore liable to be amplified into hatred. He shows further though that if instead of simply being exaggerated, anger is taken “seriously,” then a more sober and measured politics can ensue, one less destructive of a good legal order.

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.