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How does racial diversity affect public policy outcomes in the states? The policy backlash hypothesis suggests that the presence of blacks increases antagonistic attitudes toward minorities among whites and thus produces racially conservative policies. The electoral constraint hypothesis argues that the presence of blacks increases the size of population that supports policy liberalism and thus results in more liberal policies. The authors reconcile these competing explanations by arguing that the hypothesized negative impact of minority group size on policy liberalism varies across states in accordance with socioeconomic and institutional conditions that strengthen or weaken the impacts of electoral constraint or backlash.

The authors analyze the choice of voting mode in the 2008 presidential election using a large-sample survey with national coverage that allows a new perspective of convenience voting. Most importantly, they make clear distinctions among the major forms of convenience voting and demonstrate that not all "convenience voters" share the same attributes. In addition, the authors find little support for the hypothesis that convenience voting methods have partisan implications, despite the differences among mail, early, and election-day voters. Results like these have important implications for future moves toward convenience voting and the design of new outreach campaigns.

This article examines the practices, logics, and politics of foie gras production and consumption. It argues that scholars need to rethink both pain and sentience to account for the fact that ducks are responsive, and not just reactive. Rather than using the capacities of animals to judge when power relations between species are acceptable, it suggests that scholars should start with the power relations themselves to account for how animal and human experiences are made.

Using data from the American National Election Studies, this article addresses whether the Sarah Palin affected vote choice in 2008. Findings indicate not only that evaluations of Palin were a strong predictor of vote choice—even when controlling for confounding variables—but also that Palin's effect on vote choice was the largest of any vice presidential candidate in elections examined dating back to 1980. Theoretically, the article offers support for the proposition that a running mate is an important short-term force affecting voting behavior. Substantively, the article suggests that Palin may have contributed to a loss of support among "swing voters."

This article uses the post-Katrina migration as an exogenous shock to test theories of racial threat while minimizing concerns about selection bias. Drawing in part on a new survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the national concern about issues of race and poverty following Katrina, people in communities that took in evacuees became less supportive of spending to help the poor and African Americans. The results suggest a novel hypothesis that threatened responses to newcomers hinge on both local conditions and the frames that develop around their arrival.

Studies of policy making by courts need to examine the actual policy adopted in the majority opinion rather than studying votes. The authors examine the responsiveness of state supreme courts to precedents announced by the US Supreme Court by examining their treatment of the precedents in their opinions, testing the utility of precedent vitality versus the impact of ideological preferences. They find that the vitality of Supreme Court precedent is a strong predictor of the way in which the precedent is treated by state courts, even after controlling for ideological distance and institutional features of state court systems.

Why is the descriptive (or numerical) representation of women in policy-making positions higher in some cities than in others? Despite a strong body of work on the descriptive representation of women in state government, research on the presence of women in municipal government is limited in empirical scope and theoretical development. This study is different. First, the authors employ an original data set of 239 cities with populations of 100,000 or more to update and extend the empirical reach of scholars' knowledge. Second, the authors develop and test hypotheses to explain how the urban political context affects women's descriptive representation. The analysis reveals that the election of women as council members and mayors are interdependent phenomena. The authors also find that political characteristics of local communities are consequential for predicting the presence of women as municipal policy makers—just as consequential as electoral structures and other institutional features.

This article presents the first systematic analysis of support for democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran and contributes to the scholarly literature on popular views of democracy in an authoritarian regime. It reaches three main findings. First, religiosity is strongly and negatively related with support for democracy. Second, education and age indirectly affect support for democracy; their effects are mediated through satisfaction with regime performance. Third, greater dissatisfaction with the regime strongly correlates with greater demands for democratization. The data come from a survey conducted in Tehran in 2008 and the 2005 Iranian World Values Survey.

Studies comparing the ideological leanings of voters and elected officials are often hampered by the lack of a common measure. The authors use legislative referenda—on which state legislators and voters both vote on the same issue—as bridging observations to develop a common measure for both. They use this measure to help assess two theories of legislative representation, the well-known dyadic model and a partisan model that assumes legislators are also accountable to a collective party agenda. Examining referenda votes during several sessions of the California Assembly, the authors report several findings that are consistent with the partisan model. They find that legislators are significantly more ideologically extreme than the median voter in their districts. They also find that members of the majority party are considerably more extreme relative to their districts than members of the minority party are and that the majority party becomes even more extreme the longer it maintains control of the chamber.

Given scarce resources, Supreme Court justices hear cases that maximize their auditing capacities. The authors argue that justices rely on the identity of lower court judges and the ideological disposition of lower court decisions to decide which cases to review. The authors find justices are most likely to audit disagreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically disagreeable panel judges and are least likely to review agreeable lower court decisions rendered by ideologically agreeable panel judges. Furthermore, when faced with the same ideologically disagreeable lower court decision, justices are less likely to review decisions made by ideological allies than those by ideological foes.

Patriotism poses a threat, not just to democracy but also to life itself. It finds expression in a new species of civic memorial dedicated to animals. In wartime, the animal world, including dogs, horses, elephants, and mules, is forced to serve. It is treated as militarily indispensable but also utterly disposable. Millions of animals have been killed in the name of country—not despite the patriotic love professed for them, but precisely because of it. The treatment of animals mimics the treatment of citizens and vice versa, where no sacrifice ultimately lies beyond justification. Thus, patriotism's dependence on and even addiction to death acquires added intensity and depth.

Incorporating race into tactical spending for electoral gain, this article revisits the relative effects of vote production and vote retention on distributive politics. It investigates whether a "compassion strategy" to influence the electoral behavior of voters while being responsive to need-based social welfare demands affected federal discretionary grants to faith-based organizations (FBOs) during the administration of George W. Bush. The findings suggest that federal domestic social welfare funding of FBOs may have involved a combination of the tactical use of grants for both electoral purposes (i.e., vote production and vote retention) and the reduction of need among the states.

Explanations for differences in political preferences between men and women continue to be debated, generating more heat than light in attempts to locate their source and potential influence. The reason for this confusion rests on the lack of conceptual clarity concerning the difference between sex, typically referring to biological differences, and gender, assumed to result from socialization, and the difference these constructs might elicit in political outcomes. Utilizing two gender scales, the authors find gender identity exerts an impact on voter preferences above and beyond sex. They also find that individual differences in gender identity are not found to result from social influences but largely derive from unique experiences and innate disposition. The results have substantial implications for social scientists who theorize about and investigate sex and gender in studies of political attitudes and behaviors.

Observers of U.S. elections have reason to believe that third parties are not relevant political actors since they rarely win many votes or influence which major party wins an election. Researchers should use dependent variables besides vote choice and vote share to find third party effects that are a normal aspect of the American two-party system. A spatial model of elections motivates the hypothesis that a higher likelihood of third party entry induces greater major party candidate divergence. An empirical test that uses candidate positioning data in the 1996 U.S. House elections provides evidence of this third party effect.