Pub Date : 2023-04-11DOI: 10.1177/10659129231166040
Conventional accounts of the U.S. constitution laud its checks and balances for diffusing power across many venues, limiting the potential for government oppression, and protecting political minorities. I refer to this as constitutional folk wisdom and contrast it with an American political economy approach of veto exceptionalism to better understand how the U.S. constitution shapes, and is shaped, by power relations. This analysis illustrates the volume and scope of veto exceptionalism and its implication for democratic participation and accountability, contrasts it with the virtues championed by the folk wisdom, and suggests how veto exceptionalism can help explain political outcomes and processes in American politics. I argue that the folk wisdom is not only inaccurate as a description of how power functions in the American “checks and balances” system; it is cultivated and utilized most frequently by powerful economic and racial actors that benefit from the anti-democratic and elitist features of the U.S. constitutional system.
{"title":"Checks and Balances, Veto Exceptionalism, and Constitutional Folk Wisdom: Class and Race Power in American Politics","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/10659129231166040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231166040","url":null,"abstract":"Conventional accounts of the U.S. constitution laud its checks and balances for diffusing power across many venues, limiting the potential for government oppression, and protecting political minorities. I refer to this as constitutional folk wisdom and contrast it with an American political economy approach of veto exceptionalism to better understand how the U.S. constitution shapes, and is shaped, by power relations. This analysis illustrates the volume and scope of veto exceptionalism and its implication for democratic participation and accountability, contrasts it with the virtues championed by the folk wisdom, and suggests how veto exceptionalism can help explain political outcomes and processes in American politics. I argue that the folk wisdom is not only inaccurate as a description of how power functions in the American “checks and balances” system; it is cultivated and utilized most frequently by powerful economic and racial actors that benefit from the anti-democratic and elitist features of the U.S. constitutional system.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48669398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-27DOI: 10.1177/10659129231160148
I. Jurado, Alexander Kuo
Do negative economic shocks change fiscal policy preferences? We examine this question via the large COVID-19 shock, as the virus and ensuing lockdowns caused one of the largest acute economic contractions in recent history. While previous evidence that recessions meaningfully change fiscal preferences is limited, we hypothesize that the health pandemic should have had distinct effects. We argue that this is due to the large breadth, uncertainty, and socio-tropic basis of the economic contraction, and that worse economic evaluations and reduced economic optimism should correspond with greater support for fiscal interventions to address the crisis. To test these hypotheses, we use new panel evidence from Spain, a hard-hit country, surveying individuals prior to the pandemic and the same individuals during the pandemic. We find that individuals became more economically pessimistic across many measures. However, there is little evidence that this translates into support for more expansive fiscal policies. Second, we find through a framing experiment that this could be because individuals believe that the government’s fiscal policies would disproportionately benefit lower-income individuals. The findings indicate the theoretical importance of recessions for changing individual and socio-tropic economic expectations, but do not support the claim that large economic shocks can significantly change fiscal preferences.
{"title":"Economic Shocks and Fiscal Policy Preferences: Evidence From COVID-19 in Spain","authors":"I. Jurado, Alexander Kuo","doi":"10.1177/10659129231160148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231160148","url":null,"abstract":"Do negative economic shocks change fiscal policy preferences? We examine this question via the large COVID-19 shock, as the virus and ensuing lockdowns caused one of the largest acute economic contractions in recent history. While previous evidence that recessions meaningfully change fiscal preferences is limited, we hypothesize that the health pandemic should have had distinct effects. We argue that this is due to the large breadth, uncertainty, and socio-tropic basis of the economic contraction, and that worse economic evaluations and reduced economic optimism should correspond with greater support for fiscal interventions to address the crisis. To test these hypotheses, we use new panel evidence from Spain, a hard-hit country, surveying individuals prior to the pandemic and the same individuals during the pandemic. We find that individuals became more economically pessimistic across many measures. However, there is little evidence that this translates into support for more expansive fiscal policies. Second, we find through a framing experiment that this could be because individuals believe that the government’s fiscal policies would disproportionately benefit lower-income individuals. The findings indicate the theoretical importance of recessions for changing individual and socio-tropic economic expectations, but do not support the claim that large economic shocks can significantly change fiscal preferences.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47843749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-17DOI: 10.1177/10659129231164604
M. W. Sorenson
Supreme Court oral arguments are often characterized as the Court rapidly firing questions at attorneys who struggle to keep up; however, nearly half of the Court’s utterances come not as questions but as statements. I ask whether patterns of questioning and commenting behavior during oral arguments can predict case outcomes and justice votes. To answer this question, I develop a theory of strategic communication that accounts for the differential ways justices—and other strategic actors—use queries and comments during arguments. Using transcripts from 1981 to 2019, I code for use of questions and statements, finding the two theoretically and empirically distinct: where questions increase a party’s chances of winning, statements increase their chance of losing.
{"title":"Asking Versus Telling: The Supreme Court’s Strategic Use of Questions and Statements During Oral Arguments","authors":"M. W. Sorenson","doi":"10.1177/10659129231164604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231164604","url":null,"abstract":"Supreme Court oral arguments are often characterized as the Court rapidly firing questions at attorneys who struggle to keep up; however, nearly half of the Court’s utterances come not as questions but as statements. I ask whether patterns of questioning and commenting behavior during oral arguments can predict case outcomes and justice votes. To answer this question, I develop a theory of strategic communication that accounts for the differential ways justices—and other strategic actors—use queries and comments during arguments. Using transcripts from 1981 to 2019, I code for use of questions and statements, finding the two theoretically and empirically distinct: where questions increase a party’s chances of winning, statements increase their chance of losing.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48310112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-06DOI: 10.1177/10659129231161286
Jason Gainous, Mayra Vélez Serrano, Kevin M. Wagner
Communication research has extensively addressed the influence of social media on protest. We seek to add to this body of research by examining how sentiment contained in Twitter communication about protest can condition the public reach of this communication. Specifically, we are interested in whether Twitter communication couched in negative sentiments like anger, disgust, and fear will drive this reach more than communication couched in positive sentiment such as trust, joy, and surprise. We rely on sentiment analysis to examine roughly 30,000 tweets surrounding the summer of 2019 Protests in Puerto Rico. These protests centered on a scandal involving former Governor Ricardo Rossello that ultimately led to his resignation. The analysis required adapting an English language sentiment dictionary to Spanish. Our results suggest that protesters frequently tweeted with both positive and negative sentiment when calling for the governor’s resignation, but ultimately, those tweets couched in negative sentiment, when compared to those with positive sentiment, had the most reach. That said, those tweets including either positive or negative sentiment had more reach than those absent sentiment.
{"title":"Protesting With Feeling in Puerto Rico: Twitter and El Verano Del 19","authors":"Jason Gainous, Mayra Vélez Serrano, Kevin M. Wagner","doi":"10.1177/10659129231161286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231161286","url":null,"abstract":"Communication research has extensively addressed the influence of social media on protest. We seek to add to this body of research by examining how sentiment contained in Twitter communication about protest can condition the public reach of this communication. Specifically, we are interested in whether Twitter communication couched in negative sentiments like anger, disgust, and fear will drive this reach more than communication couched in positive sentiment such as trust, joy, and surprise. We rely on sentiment analysis to examine roughly 30,000 tweets surrounding the summer of 2019 Protests in Puerto Rico. These protests centered on a scandal involving former Governor Ricardo Rossello that ultimately led to his resignation. The analysis required adapting an English language sentiment dictionary to Spanish. Our results suggest that protesters frequently tweeted with both positive and negative sentiment when calling for the governor’s resignation, but ultimately, those tweets couched in negative sentiment, when compared to those with positive sentiment, had the most reach. That said, those tweets including either positive or negative sentiment had more reach than those absent sentiment.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"465 - 480"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46736150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-09DOI: 10.1177/10659129231156388
Troy Saghaug Broderstad
The literature that examines cross-national satisfaction with democracy seeks to discover a set of predictors that are associated with evaluations of regime performance. The most common way of examining the determinants of satisfaction with democracy is null hypothesis significance testing. While this approach has merit, this paper argues that the literature, as it stands, can be complemented to gain additional insights. To date, little research has focused on what variables best predict satisfaction. This is important because it helps guide researchers when determining which features to give attention to when devising theories about what causes (changes) in satisfaction. In this paper, I use machine learning algorithms to determine and evaluate the predictive power of variables identified as important in literature. Drawing on the sixth round of the European Social Survey, I find satisfaction with the economy, procedural fairness and responsiveness to be the most important predictors of satisfaction with democracy. These findings justify a stronger focus on the latter two topics in future studies of satisfaction with democracy, which has received little attention in the scholarly literature.
研究跨国民主满意度的文献试图发现一组与政权绩效评估相关的预测因子。检验民主满意度决定因素的最常见方法是零假设显著性检验。虽然这种方法有优点，但本文认为，就目前而言，文献可以得到补充，以获得额外的见解。迄今为止，很少有研究关注哪些变量最能预测满意度。这很重要，因为它有助于指导研究人员在设计导致满意度(变化)的理论时，确定应该关注哪些特征。在本文中，我使用机器学习算法来确定和评估在文献中确定为重要变量的预测能力。根据第六轮欧洲社会调查(European Social Survey)，我发现对经济、程序公平和回应的满意度是对民主满意度的最重要预测因素。这些发现证明了在未来对民主满意度的研究中更关注后两个主题，这在学术文献中很少受到关注。
{"title":"An Empirical Evaluation of Explanations for Political System Support","authors":"Troy Saghaug Broderstad","doi":"10.1177/10659129231156388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231156388","url":null,"abstract":"The literature that examines cross-national satisfaction with democracy seeks to discover a set of predictors that are associated with evaluations of regime performance. The most common way of examining the determinants of satisfaction with democracy is null hypothesis significance testing. While this approach has merit, this paper argues that the literature, as it stands, can be complemented to gain additional insights. To date, little research has focused on what variables best predict satisfaction. This is important because it helps guide researchers when determining which features to give attention to when devising theories about what causes (changes) in satisfaction. In this paper, I use machine learning algorithms to determine and evaluate the predictive power of variables identified as important in literature. Drawing on the sixth round of the European Social Survey, I find satisfaction with the economy, procedural fairness and responsiveness to be the most important predictors of satisfaction with democracy. These findings justify a stronger focus on the latter two topics in future studies of satisfaction with democracy, which has received little attention in the scholarly literature.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"1542 - 1554"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41329367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-02DOI: 10.1177/10659129231155136
Á. Corral
Why does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conduct worksite raids when employers are rarely ever charged with hiring undocumented immigrant workers? This article shows how exploitative labor conditions and ICE worksite enforcement raids exist in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that (re)produces precarity for undocumented workers. Analysis of interviews from the Immigrant Workers Project (IWP) Survey of 2018, a community-based participatory action research project in Northeast Ohio, reveals that individuals directly and indirectly impacted by ICE worksite raids understand and experience these operations within the broader context of anti-immigrant labor discrimination and worker exploitation. Although previous scholarship has theorized the role of “spectacle” in various aspects of immigration enforcement a critical analysis of media coverage, public records, and government documents shows how government agencies and the media choreograph worksite raids for maximum public spectacle. The underlying logics of this immigration enforcement tactic highlight how undocumented immigrant workers exist simultaneously as individuals whose labor is deregulated but whose presence is hyper-regulated.
{"title":"Raids at Work: Latinx Immigrant Labor Precarity and the Spectacle of ICE Worksite Enforcement Raids","authors":"Á. Corral","doi":"10.1177/10659129231155136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231155136","url":null,"abstract":"Why does Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conduct worksite raids when employers are rarely ever charged with hiring undocumented immigrant workers? This article shows how exploitative labor conditions and ICE worksite enforcement raids exist in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop that (re)produces precarity for undocumented workers. Analysis of interviews from the Immigrant Workers Project (IWP) Survey of 2018, a community-based participatory action research project in Northeast Ohio, reveals that individuals directly and indirectly impacted by ICE worksite raids understand and experience these operations within the broader context of anti-immigrant labor discrimination and worker exploitation. Although previous scholarship has theorized the role of “spectacle” in various aspects of immigration enforcement a critical analysis of media coverage, public records, and government documents shows how government agencies and the media choreograph worksite raids for maximum public spectacle. The underlying logics of this immigration enforcement tactic highlight how undocumented immigrant workers exist simultaneously as individuals whose labor is deregulated but whose presence is hyper-regulated.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"1529 - 1541"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43975066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-31DOI: 10.1177/10659129231154914
Sarah A. Treul, Eric R. Hansen
How do working class candidates perform in primary elections? Working class candidates rarely emerge, but existing evidence suggests workers perform as well as white-collar candidates once on the ballot. However, this evidence comes from studies of general elections. It is unknown whether these findings extend to other types of elections like primaries, where candidates compete without the political and financial backing of a party. We collect and analyze novel data describing the occupational background of all candidates who competed in U.S. House primaries between 2008 and 2016. The results show that working class candidates received an average vote share 24 percentage points lower than nonworkers and are 31 percentage points less likely to win their primaries. Controlling for other candidate, contest, and district characteristics helps to attenuate the performance gap. We find mixed evidence that fundraising and prior officeholding experience moderates workers' performance, but weak or no evidence that voter bias, party affiliation, or primary type do so. The study suggests that workers struggle to compete in primaries and calls for further research explaining what prevents workers from winning public office.
{"title":"Primary Barriers to Working Class Representation","authors":"Sarah A. Treul, Eric R. Hansen","doi":"10.1177/10659129231154914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231154914","url":null,"abstract":"How do working class candidates perform in primary elections? Working class candidates rarely emerge, but existing evidence suggests workers perform as well as white-collar candidates once on the ballot. However, this evidence comes from studies of general elections. It is unknown whether these findings extend to other types of elections like primaries, where candidates compete without the political and financial backing of a party. We collect and analyze novel data describing the occupational background of all candidates who competed in U.S. House primaries between 2008 and 2016. The results show that working class candidates received an average vote share 24 percentage points lower than nonworkers and are 31 percentage points less likely to win their primaries. Controlling for other candidate, contest, and district characteristics helps to attenuate the performance gap. We find mixed evidence that fundraising and prior officeholding experience moderates workers' performance, but weak or no evidence that voter bias, party affiliation, or primary type do so. The study suggests that workers struggle to compete in primaries and calls for further research explaining what prevents workers from winning public office.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"1516 - 1528"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49377097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-25DOI: 10.1177/10659129231151388
D. Bergan, Caitlin Finerty, Jack B. Harrison, Siyuan Ma, Isabel Virtue
Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives’ voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives’ votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested.
{"title":"Can People Use Party Cues to Assess Policymaker Positions? Ecological Rationality and Political Heuristics","authors":"D. Bergan, Caitlin Finerty, Jack B. Harrison, Siyuan Ma, Isabel Virtue","doi":"10.1177/10659129231151388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231151388","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars disagree about the ability of people to use heuristics to make political judgments, with some arguing that heuristics are easy-to-use pieces of information and others arguing that applying heuristics may require some degree of political expertise. We argue that these debates have been somewhat intractable because most prior work has not considered the ecological rationality of political judgments—that is, the potential for cues to yield accurate judgments about a clearly defined reference class. In this paper, we present the results of two studies exploring whether people use party labels to make judgments about a random sample of U.S. Representatives’ voting behaviors. We find that respondents consistently performed worse in guessing U.S. Representatives’ votes than if they had correctly used a simple partisan heuristic. There is also some evidence that people performed worse with the presence of more nonparty cues. Attention to politics had a positive relationship with accuracy in both studies, although the relationship was modest. The results suggest that party cues may be more difficult to apply than some research has suggested.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"1502 - 1515"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42461299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-23DOI: 10.1177/10659129231151413
Tatishe M. Nteta, Jesse H. Rhodes, Gregory Wall, K. Dixon-Gordon, Raymond J. La Raja, Brian Lickel, Andrea Mah, Matthew Macwilliams, E. Markowitz, Allecia E. Reid, Alexander G. Theodoridis
In recent years, a number of prominent elected officials on both sides of the partisan divide have weighed in on the possibility of making Washington, D.C., the nation’s fifty-first state. While Democratic supporters of statehood for D.C. emphasize issues of equal representation, some Republican opponents have stressed the partisan and ideological consequences of D.C. statehood. Other Republican opponents, in justifying their position, have made the claim that Washington, D.C., lacks the necessary and sufficient characteristics associated with statehood, and these claims have been widely interpreted as implicitly racist appeals. In this paper, using three nationally representative surveys, we explore whether mass opinion on this issue is primarily shaped by partisanship, ideology, racial status threat, or racial prejudice. We find clear and consistent evidence that while partisan and ideological attachments, as well as perceptions of racial status threat, influence opinion on statehood for Washington, D.C., the strongest determinant of opposition to statehood are negative racial attitudes. We take these results as further evidence of the debate over D.C. statehood, like debates over public policies that are purported to benefit African Americans, is intimately intertwined with negative racial views expressed by the mass public.
{"title":"Rooted in Racism? Race, Partisanship, Status Threat, and Public Opinion Toward Statehood for Washington, D.C.","authors":"Tatishe M. Nteta, Jesse H. Rhodes, Gregory Wall, K. Dixon-Gordon, Raymond J. La Raja, Brian Lickel, Andrea Mah, Matthew Macwilliams, E. Markowitz, Allecia E. Reid, Alexander G. Theodoridis","doi":"10.1177/10659129231151413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231151413","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, a number of prominent elected officials on both sides of the partisan divide have weighed in on the possibility of making Washington, D.C., the nation’s fifty-first state. While Democratic supporters of statehood for D.C. emphasize issues of equal representation, some Republican opponents have stressed the partisan and ideological consequences of D.C. statehood. Other Republican opponents, in justifying their position, have made the claim that Washington, D.C., lacks the necessary and sufficient characteristics associated with statehood, and these claims have been widely interpreted as implicitly racist appeals. In this paper, using three nationally representative surveys, we explore whether mass opinion on this issue is primarily shaped by partisanship, ideology, racial status threat, or racial prejudice. We find clear and consistent evidence that while partisan and ideological attachments, as well as perceptions of racial status threat, influence opinion on statehood for Washington, D.C., the strongest determinant of opposition to statehood are negative racial attitudes. We take these results as further evidence of the debate over D.C. statehood, like debates over public policies that are purported to benefit African Americans, is intimately intertwined with negative racial views expressed by the mass public.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"1486 - 1501"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41380700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-04DOI: 10.1177/10659129221145938
Daniel DiSalvo, Patrick Flavin, Michael T. Hartney
We investigate the effects of states’ labor laws, which can enhance or diminish the political power of public and private sector labor unions, on government responsiveness to public opinion. Drawing on newly developed measures of public opinion and policy liberalism in the US states over time, we leverage differences in the timing of law enactments across the states and find that labor laws impact government responsiveness in distinct ways. States that adopt right-to-work laws that lessen private sector union influence enact economic policies that are more conservative than public opinion, whereas states that adopt mandatory collective bargaining laws for public sector employees enact economic policies that are more liberal than opinion. These findings are consistent across a variety of different model specifications, timeframes, and measurement techniques and have substantively important implications for understanding the impact of government policies on the power of organized interests and the dynamics of political representation in American democracy.
{"title":"State Labor Laws and Government Responsiveness to Public Opinion","authors":"Daniel DiSalvo, Patrick Flavin, Michael T. Hartney","doi":"10.1177/10659129221145938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221145938","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the effects of states’ labor laws, which can enhance or diminish the political power of public and private sector labor unions, on government responsiveness to public opinion. Drawing on newly developed measures of public opinion and policy liberalism in the US states over time, we leverage differences in the timing of law enactments across the states and find that labor laws impact government responsiveness in distinct ways. States that adopt right-to-work laws that lessen private sector union influence enact economic policies that are more conservative than public opinion, whereas states that adopt mandatory collective bargaining laws for public sector employees enact economic policies that are more liberal than opinion. These findings are consistent across a variety of different model specifications, timeframes, and measurement techniques and have substantively important implications for understanding the impact of government policies on the power of organized interests and the dynamics of political representation in American democracy.","PeriodicalId":51366,"journal":{"name":"Political Research Quarterly","volume":"76 1","pages":"1475 - 1485"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47736754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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