American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Partisan Americans like members of their own party more than members of the opposing party. Scholars often interpret this as evidence that party identity or loyalty influence interpersonal affect. First, we reassess previous studies and demonstrate that prior results are also consistent with what we would predict if people cared only about policy agreement. Next, we demonstrate the difficulty of manipulating perceptions of party identity without also manipulating beliefs about policy agreement and vice versa. Finally, we show that partisans care much more about policy agreement than they do about party loyalty when the two come into conflict. Our analyses suggest that partisan Americans care about policy agreement; we have little convincing evidence that they care about partisan identity or loyalty per se, and scholars will have to find new research designs if they want to convincingly estimate the effects of identity or loyalty independent of policy substance.

Political scientists have long been interested in the persistent effects of history on contemporary behavior and attitudes. To estimate legacy effects, studies often compare people living in places that were historically exposed to some event and those that were not. Using principal stratification, we provide a formal framework to analyze how migration limits our ability to learn about the persistent effects of history from observed differences between historically exposed and unexposed places. We state the necessary assumptions about movement behavior to causally identify legacy effects. We highlight that these assumptions are strong; therefore, we recommend that legacy studies circumvent bias by collecting data on people's place of residence at the exposure time. Reexamining a study on the persistent effects of U.S. civil rights protests, we show that observed attitudinal differences between residents and nonresidents of historic protest sites are more likely due to migration rather than attitudinal change.

Why do local and state governments in the United States compete to attract and retain corporations in their jurisdictions even by offering generous incentives, which can jeopardize public spending on other needs? This research shows that the answer can lie in the electoral effects of headquarters (HQ) relocation. Using an original data set of interstate HQ relocation cases covered in the news media from 1995 to 2015, this research finds that interstate business location decisions affect gubernatorial election outcomes. However, empirical analyses provide evidence that voters use different attribution processes when considering HQ relocation-in versus relocation-out cases: HQ relocation-out results in greater support for Republican candidates, whereas HQ relocation-in increases support for the incumbent party. Supplementary analyses suggest that the perceptual effects and symbolic value of HQ relocation, rather than its immediate local economic effects, drive electoral outcomes. The findings have implications for electoral accountability and the political economy of business–government relationships.

This article offers a feminist critique of Carl Schmitt, with a particular focus on Political Theology and The Concept of the Political. It addresses a pathos of masculinity that pervades Schmitt's rhetoric and helps to explain the hold that his ideas have on so many thinkers across the political spectrum. It argues as well for the surprising insights that feminists can draw from Schmitt's abstract political concepts. In decentering the infamous friend—enemy distinction and developing instead the existentialist claim about “the real possibility of physical killing,” we can see Schmitt's pathos more clearly, but we can also theorize the political in ways that Schmitt could not. Schmittian existentialism permits us to see the family as a primary political institution, sex and gender as forms of political power, and femicide as a real political problem. This article concludes with a discussion of Andrea Dworkin, in some ways more Schmittian than Schmitt himself, who pursues this principle of political existentialism—“the real possibility of physical killing”—in a radically feminist direction.

Transparency is expected to strengthen electoral accountability. Yet, initiatives disseminating politician performance information directly prior to elections have reported mixed results. We argue that to be effective, transparency needs to be sustained: The dissemination of politician performance information needs to occur early, regularly, and predictably throughout the term. Using a formal model of electoral accountability under nonprogrammatic and uneven party competition, we study how sustained transparency affects a string of decisions by various actors in advance of elections: incumbents' running choices, parties' nomination strategies, and potential challengers' entry decisions. We show how these effects shape the candidate slate and ultimately electoral outcomes, conditional on incumbent performance and the incumbent party's relative strength. We test our theory using a field experiment involving 354 subnational constituencies in Uganda, and find robust support for the idea that sustained transparency can improve electoral accountability even in weakly institutionalized electoral settings.

There is now a growing consensus among democratic theorists that we should incorporate both “democratic deliberation” and “aggregative voting” into our democratic processes. But how should the two democratic mechanisms of deliberation and voting interact? In this article, we introduce a new axiom, which we call “Nonnegative Response toward Successful Deliberation” (NNRD). The basic idea is that if some individuals change their preferences toward other individuals’ preferences through democratic deliberation, then the social choice rule should not make everybody who has successfully persuaded others through reasoned deliberation worse off than what they would have achieved without deliberation. We prove an impossibility theorem that shows that there exists no aggregation rule that can simultaneously satisfy NNRD along with other mild axioms that reflect deliberative democracy's core commitment to unanimous consensus and political equality. We offer potential escape routes; however, each escape route can succeed only by compromising some core value of deliberative democracy.

Generalized trust is essential for collective action, which is at the heart of many societal problems. Institutional quality has been proposed as a driver of generalized trust, but while the correlation between the two is strong and robust, the evidence on the causal link is scant. We show that this relationship is causal. We first experimentally expose individuals to institutions of different quality, operationalized as their ability to prevent corrupt behavior. We then measure generalized trust using a trust game. The results show that institutional quality drives generalized trust and that this effect is generated by the mere doubt that corrupt behaviors might succeed, even without knowledge of occurrence or success of such behaviors. Cross-country comparisons with novel data support our results. Our contributions are the first causal experimental evidence on the link between institutional quality and trust and a novel experimental design for modeling institutional quality in laboratory settings.

How do parties in multiethnic societies shape voter attitudes toward female candidates? We address this question, focusing on parties with ideologies that contain ethnonationalist gender norms—patriarchal norms applied to women from an ethnonationalist party's core ethnic constituency. We argue that, while these norms appeal to an ethnonationalist party's base, they also provide informational cues to the party's “non-core” voters that undermine their support for the party's “core” female candidates. Evidence from an original conjoint survey experiment in the Indian state of Bihar supports our argument; upper-caste female candidates suffer a support penalty when they are affiliated with the national ruling party, whose ideology prescribes ethnonationalist gender norms targeting its core Hindu upper-caste constituency. This penalty, we show, is driven by the party's non-core voters. Our results, which we further bolster using real-world electoral data, illuminate when and how ethnonationalist gender norms disadvantage elite female candidates.

This article introduces a framework for evaluating methods of combatting information search in online surveys. Three empirical studies based on the framework suggest that search is a serious but manageable problem. Search frequency varies substantially according to question content, ranging from 2% to 30% in batteries of general political knowledge questions. Deterrence works: a pledge not to cheat reduces search by half. Detection also works: web browser paradata identify 70% to 85% of search, while 60% to 85% of search on knowledge questions is undertaken by respondents who correctly answer “catch” questions about obscure Supreme Court cases. Detection and deterrence are complementary: deterrence reduces search ex ante, while detection quantifies success and provides ex post options for dealing with undeterred search. In combination, the three methods tested (pledge, paradata, and catch) deter or detect more than 90% of search, leaving search to affect about 0.5% of the remaining observations.

Prevalent counterinsurgency theories posit that small development aid projects can help stabilize regions in conflict. A widely assumed mechanism runs through citizen attitudes, often called “winning hearts and minds,” where aid brings economic benefits and sways public perceptions, leading to more cooperation and, eventually, less violence. Following a preregistered research design, we test this claim using difference-in-differences, leveraging original survey data, and new geocoded information about infrastructure projects in northern Afghanistan. We find that aid improves perceived economic conditions but erodes attitudes toward government and improves perceptions of insurgents. These attitudinal effects do not translate into changes in violence or territorial control. Testing mechanisms, we find projects with robust local consultation have fewer negative attitudinal effects, as do health and education projects. These findings challenge the “hearts and minds” theory but complement the wider literature on legitimacy, suggesting that foreign aid can improve human development but rarely meaningfully brings political stabilization.