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What motivates citizens to vote or abstain from voting? What determines vote choice? Models of turnout predominantly focus on a series of factors that affect perceptions of the benefits and costs of voting. The economy's influence on those perceptions has gone largely undeveloped. Models of vote choice routinely account for economic influences while ignoring turnout. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the role of the economy as mobilizer and demobilizer. I argue that the economy has an impact on turnout decisions and that its impact is asymmetric. All else equal, the incumbent party is able to mobilize more supporters, relative to the non-incumbent party, in good economic times and more supporters are demobilized in adverse economic times. However, Democrats and Republicans are not sensitive to the same elements of economic performance. This is in part a function of the way in which the economy influences perceptions of the closeness of the impending election and of the candidates and their parties. Analysis of pooled data from ANES surveys for the twelve presidential elections from 1956 to 2000 confirms the validity of these arguments. Adapted from the source document.

What motivates citizens to vote or abstain from voting? What determines vote choice? Models of turnout predominantly focus on a series of factors that affect perceptions of the benefits and costs of voting. The economy's influence on those perceptions has gone largely undeveloped. Models of vote choice routinely account for economic influences while ignoring turnout. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the role of the economy as mobilizer and demobilizer. I argue that the economy has an impact on turnout decisions and that its impact is asymmetric. All else equal, the incumbent party is able to mobilize more supporters, relative to the non-incumbent party, in good economic times and more supporters are demobilized in adverse economic times. However, Democrats and Republicans are not sensitive to the same elements of economic performance. This is in part a function of the way in which the economy influences perceptions of the closeness of the impending election and of the candidates and their parties. Analysis of pooled data from ANES surveys for the twelve presidential elections from 1956 to 2000 confirms the validity of these arguments.

This article pits the current competing perspectives on the causal connection between presidential policy making and public opinion‐that politicians are sensitive and responsive to movements in global public opinion, or public mood, over a range of issues as opposed to context‐ and issue‐specific opinion‐against each other in a case study of the Kennedy administration and civil rights policy. It finds that Kennedy's initial caution was the result of his greater attention to issue‐specific opinion and that the subsequent change of strategy occurred as the salience and character of the civil rights question shifted. There is little evidence to suggest the administration was aware of, or responsive to, global public opinion.

Research on authoritarianism has provided conflicting findings on its relationship with threat. Some studies indicate that in the face of heightened threat individuals with stronger authoritarian predispositions express more right‐wing and illiberal preferences; others suggest that it is individuals at the other end of the continuum, with weak authoritarian dispositions—libertarians—who are most likely to change and express such attitudes. Extant efforts to reconcile the differences have been unsatisfactory. We offer a new perspective in which both processes may occur simultaneously. Higher authoritarians are responsive to elevated "normative threat," characterized by dissatisfaction with established parties and their leaders and perceptions of "belief diversity," while libertarians respond with more right‐wing and illiberal preferences to heightened physical and personal threat, such as from terrorism, which does not affect high authoritarians. We suggest different contexts in which normative threat and personal threat vary, and we are thus likely to see change either in individuals toward one or other end of the authoritarian continuum or among both. Drawing on data in the quasi‐experimental context of the 2017 general election in Britain, during which there were two terror attacks, we confirm this pattern in a setting in which both personal and normative threat were elevated.

Integrating musical and sonic forms and materials from world music into music theory classes steeped in Western musical concepts raises challenging questions and pedagogical conundrums: How might instructors engender interest in students with no training or background in non-Western musical materials? Could non-Western music (NWM) stimulate deeper thinking and understanding about the broader contexts of music production, such as its culture, religion, politics, and history, as well as indigenous musical terms and concepts? To what extent should critical contextual consideration be given prior to the study of non-Western sounds, musics, or performances? How might students and instructors alike engage NWM without extending the troubling histories of colonialism, western hegemony, and privileged, white perspectives? To address these and other questions from multiple viewpoints, this article takes the form of a dialogue between two students and two music professors, the latter representing the disciplines of music theory and ethnomusicology. As these four interlocutors explore the questions above, they also consider and revise a "Pin Drop" assignment, in which music theory students explore the musical culture found at various locations selected around the globe. Rather than offer any final conclusions, the dialogue itself demonstrates how the productive tensions that arise when studying and teaching NWM in Western music classrooms, when examined from multiple disciplinary angles, can be mutually beneficial and enriching, making possible new musical insights, methodological syntheses, and pedagogical priorities.

Much of the conventional wisdom about partisan media effects is based on the single case of the United States. Without more comparative research, we know little about whether the findings are generalizable, however, and thus cannot be certain of their causes. But comparative research presents several challenges. This paper takes advantage of the case of the War on Iraq to examine the effects of partisan press coverage on perceptions of leaders and ultimately on voting behavior in two countries, the United States and Britain. We test three competing hypotheses of partisan media effects. We find support for the argument that the reputation of the incumbent party moderates the influence of partisan coverage on perceptions of war but also show that opposition partisan media coverage undermines perceptions of the qualities of incumbent leaders. Media outlets that support the incumbent do not have similar positive effects. We conclude that the war cost a left-wing leader, Blair, more than a right-wing leader, Bush, because of (1) the ambivalence of incumbent-supporting newspapers in Britain, (2) the absence of a parallel to the boost in approval that incumbent-supporting newspapers provided for Bush, and (3) greater damage to perceptions of Blair's attributes among readers of opposition-supporting newspapers.