American Journal of Political Science最新文献

In recent years, fully automated content analysis based on probabilistic topic models has become popular among social scientists because of their scalability. However, researchers find that these models often fail to measure specific concepts of substantive interest by inadvertently creating multiple topics with similar content and combining distinct themes into a single topic. In this article, we empirically demonstrate that providing a small number of keywords can substantially enhance the measurement performance of topic models. An important advantage of the proposed keyword-assisted topic model (keyATM) is that the specification of keywords requires researchers to label topics prior to fitting a model to the data. This contrasts with a widespread practice of post hoc topic interpretation and adjustments that compromises the objectivity of empirical findings. In our application, we find that keyATM provides more interpretable results, has better document classification performance, and is less sensitive to the number of topics.

Despite the centrality of promise keeping to representation, we know little about how it is affected by economic globalization, which is one of the modern world's defining characteristics. We argue that globalization reduces governing parties' ability to keep their campaign promises. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-n quantitative comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. The findings indicate that international economic integration exerts a large negative effect on the likelihood of pledge fulfillment in a broad range of contexts and that the hypothesized mechanisms are clearly observable in the detailed case study. These findings have important implications for democratic representation in a globalized world.

Research on women candidates in American elections uncovers four key facts: Women (i) are underrepresented among candidates, (ii) are underrepresented among office holders, (iii) perform better in office, and (iv) win open seats at equal rates to men. Scholars offer two types of explanations: Women are less willing to run than men, due to differential costs or a gap in self-perceived qualification, or voters discriminate at the ballot box. We formally model these mechanisms. Lower willingness to run predicts the first three facts but not the fourth. Voter discrimination at the ballot box predicts the first three facts and creates competing effects with respect to the fourth. Thus, the major stylized facts cannot be explained without voter discrimination, whether overt or more subtle. We explore whether a close-election regression discontinuity distinguishes the mechanisms; surprisingly, it does not.

Why and how parties continue contesting elections (“repeated entry”) is an underresearched question despite its essence for party survival and party-system stability. We study repeated entry in three decades of elections in 10 Central and Eastern European countries using a new dataset that records almost 1,000 entry decisions. Our findings underline the importance of separating between first- and second-league parties based on whether in the previous election a party could obtain representation alone. First-league parties (those that could gain representation alone) almost always contest the next election. Second-league parties (those that could not win representation alone) exit electoral competition quite frequently and adopt more diverse repeated-entry strategies. We find that second-league parties’ repeated entry depends on their closeness to the representation threshold, access to resources, and the number of competitors in their niche, but not on institutional constraints or voter dissatisfaction.

Public deliberation grows increasingly prevalent yet remains costly in terms of money and time. Accordingly, some suggest supplanting talk-based practices with individual, “deliberation within.” Yet we have little evidence either way on the additional benefits of public deliberation over its individual variant. We evaluate the benefits of public deliberation with a field experiment. With the cooperation of two sitting US Senators, we recruited several hundred of their constituents to deliberate on immigration reform. Participants were randomly assigned to either deliberate publicly in an online discussion, to deliberate individually, or to an information-only control. Across several measures, public deliberation yielded more benefits than individual deliberation. We find, moreover, little evidence to ground worries that differences in education, race, conflict avoidance, gender, or gender composition of deliberating groups will render public talk less valuable than individual deliberation.

Policy outcomes are determined not by the words in a statute but by the actions of private citizens. A policy's success or failure depends on how it shapes behavior and how that behavior shapes the future course of policy. To understand this process, we develop a model that combines the political and nonpolitical domains, focusing on competition policy and the regulation of markets. We show how the outcome of a policy change develops over time as firms respond in the market and interact with bureaucratic enforcement. We identify a critical threshold in market structure that determines whether a policy succeeds or fails, and discuss how the design of political institutions affects this level. The threshold represents a balancing of the path dependence of politics with the self-correcting nature of markets. It establishes when political forces dominate those in markets and, thus, when a policy change has lasting effects on society.

This article studies how politicians react to feedback from citizens on social media. We use a reinforcement-learning framework to model how politicians respond to citizens’ positive feedback by increasing attention to better received issues and allow feedback to vary depending on politicians’ gender. To test the model, we collect 1.5 million tweets published by Spanish MPs over 3 years, identify gender-issue tweets using a deep-learning algorithm (BERT) and measure feedback using retweets and likes. We find that citizens provide more positive feedback to female politicians for writing about gender, and that this contributes to their specialization in gender issues. The analysis of mechanisms suggests that female politicians receive more positive feedback because they are treated differently by citizens. To conclude, we discuss implications for representation, misperceptions, and polarization.

Protectionist measures often have target countries, and public support for such measures depends on who the targets are. We identify such target effects on protectionist sentiments and examine the effects of information in tempering protectionist sentiments in East Asia. Using an original survey experiment in China, Japan, and South Korea, we test how providing information about the costs of protectionism changes public attitudes toward targeted protectionist measures. We found that providing a target country identity increased public support for protectionism by 8.6%. Providing cost information, on the other hand, reduces support for protectionism by 10%. We also found that information and target effects persist in the presence of the other: Receiving cost information reduces support for both general and targeted protectionism but does not necessarily mute the target effect. Similarly, when reputation and retaliation costs are associated with protectionism, knowing a target country identity still increases public support for protectionism.

Most researchers assume legislators repay past favors to secure future rewards and avoid future punishments, but a growing literature shows that human beings are intrinsically motivated to reciprocate past favors. However, there is no systematic evidence as to whether legislators bring this preference for reciprocity to Congress. An original survey experiment, an observational study of end-of-career behavior, and a matching-based analysis of responses to committee assignments provide consistent evidence that legislators have a preference for reciprocity.

Why do party leaders constrain their own power and allow the use of primary elections? I develop a model of intraparty politics and electoral competition in which an ambitious office-seeker reevaluates their party affiliation after their party chooses a nomination rule. The model shows that in settings in which the linkages between politicians and parties are weak, party leaders adopt primaries in order to keep potential defectors from pursuing their individual ambitions outside of the party. The main theoretical result shows that only parties that are electorally strong ex ante can use primaries as a strategy to hold their parties together. Thus, in contrast to an extensive literature linking the use of primaries to electorally weak parties, this model posits the existence of a positive relationship between the use of primaries and a party's electoral strength. Analysis of legislative and gubernatorial nominations in Mexico provides strong support for the model's expectations.