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Prior research linking public-private contracts with political donations has not examined the dynamics of exchange. Evaluating data from Wisconsin, I test for a temporal association between the awarding of public-private construction contracts and political donations by construction firm owners and executives. My findings indicate that donation activity peaks near the months when contracts are approved; that contract-related donation premiums are comparable in magnitude to election cycle premiums; and that political giving varies across three separate procurement processes. I deduce that patterns of political giving reflect strategic expenditures during the negotiation phase of the public-private procurement process. These findings have implications for campaign finance reform and privatization policy.

This study considers the linkage between social capital and government performance. The latter concept is disaggregated into two dimensions: policy activism and administrative efficiency. Social capital may be related to government performance either because it increases the level of political sophistication and facilitates the cooperation within society, helping people to voice their policy demands better, or because social capital, being shared also by the bureaucratic elites of a polity, facilitates cooperation and helps to overcome the agency problem within the bureaucratic organization. The former argument links social capital to policy activism while the latter links it to administrative efficiency. Empirical tests with data from the German and American subnational governments provide support for the former but not for the latter argument.

How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are interested in how these factors affect the vote across voters with varying levels of political information. Using the 2000 Tomás Rivera Policy Institute pre-election poll, we explore the degree to which Latino voters relied on issue-positions to judge the two major party candidates and compare the effect of such considerations with symbolic and candidate-specific appeals. We find that policy issues played an important role in shaping voting preferences, but only among politically knowledgeable voters, while among uninformed voters, symbolism and long-standing partisan preferences matter most. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for political representation and Latino politics.

Endorsements by groups in American politics have typically been studied as voting cues only for members of the given organization. Using both the formal theoretical and low-information cognitive voting literatures, this article argues for a broader electoral role for group endorsements. Specifically, if groups that have clear ideological or policy preferences endorse candidates, these endorsements should provide all voters with ideological or issue information about the endorsed candidates. This inferred information should then impact voters' behavior, especially in low-information scenarios. Using both an experimental test and a test with American National Election Studies (ANES) survey data, this study analyzes the hypothesis in terms of elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. It finds that when the AFL-CIO endorses Democratic candidates, voters behave as though a liberal message has been sent—liberals are significantly more supportive while conservatives are significantly less supportive than they are when no endorsement is given, regardless of whether or not they are union members. At the same time, however, the analysis finds no support that endorsements of Republicans have any ideological impact on voting.

This article argues that, like fashion, national identity may be influenced by "neighbors" in a broadly defined sense. Inspired by models of collective choice, we hypothesize that, in Taiwan, a subethnically divided society facing a dilemma in its relationship with China, township residents and occupational peers are subject to mutual influence in the formation of their national identity. Methodologically, we compare spatial regression with dummy variable regression and hierarchical linear models. Based on spatial regression with survey data, our findings show that the formation of national identity in Taiwan indeed exhibits strong neighborhood influence.

This study contributes to our understanding of the dynamic relationship between protest and repression. It employs vector autoregressions to analyze daily data from six Latin American and three African countries from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The results suggest that there is a reciprocal relationship between protest and repression and that protest is consistent over time. Democracies were found to be most likely to accommodate the opposition and, at the same time, were least likely to display continuous repressive behavior. However, if faced with popular dissent, democracies were just as likely to respond with negative sanctions as other regime types, whereas negative sanctions were particularly unsuccessful to solicit dissident cooperation in democracies.

Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGBs) are far more likely than heterosexuals to support the Democratic Party and its candidates. But is this support due to the Democratic Party support for the civil rights agendas of historically disadvantaged groups, or is it based on other factors? In this article, we use the issue of same-sex marriage to attempt to explain the nature of the sexual identity gap. We demonstrate that a substantial portion of LGBs place a great deal of importance on winning healthcare and other employee benefits for their spouses, but that they are less concerned about having legally recognized marriages. Furthermore, we find that it is the goal of acquiring spousal benefits, not the right to marry, that influences the degree to which LGBs support the Democratic Party. We conclude that the sexual identity gap is generated more from LGB concerns about acquiring tangible economic benefits than from an interest in pursuing civil rights.

Recent research has suggested that punctuated equilibrium models best describe the outputs of policymakers. While this literature has convincingly demonstrated that the distributions of policy outputs conform to the expectations of punctuated equilibrium theory, little attention has been paid to testing hypotheses related to the causes of punctuated equilibrium distributions. This research note illustrates a method for testing hypotheses related to punctuated equilibrium theory with a test of the effects of congressional reorganization. The results suggest that congressional reorganization has made the budgetary outputs of Congress less consistent with punctuated equilibrium theory.

Attempts to explain the effects of social class on electoral choices have focused on the relative impact of sociological, or "bottom-up," versus political, or "top-down," factors. We examine these contending approaches in post-Communist Russia, which has undergone both a significant economic transformation and major shifts in the politicization of class by its main electoral contenders, making it an informative context in which to examine competing explanations of the class-vote relationship. The analysis is based on data from five nationwide surveys conducted over the period 1993-2001 and provides evidence that an association between class position and presidential choice emerged in the mid-1990s in which the two largest classes, the working class and professional and managerial workers, provided a stable basis of support for the main free market versus interventionist axis of political division. These findings indicate the presence of rapid political learning among Russians and the resilience of class-based preferences despite Putin's centrist political program

Campaign contribution limits have been a common feature of campaign finance reform efforts in most states. Despite their apparent popularity, campaign contribution limits have been criticized in academic literature. In particular, it has been suggested that contribution limits are likely to increase the disparity in contributions among candidates in general and the disparity between incumbents and challengers in particular. In this article we subject this important criticism of campaign contribution limits to empirical testing. Analyses of both the number of contributors and the dollar amount of contributions to gubernatorial candidates suggest no sup-port for an increased bias in favor of incumbents resulting from the presence of contribution limits. If any-thing, contribution limits can work to reduce the bias that traditionally works in favor of incumbents. Also, contribution limits do not seem to increase contribution disparity between candidates in general. Results hold for different subsets of contributors: all contributors, particularistic contributors, and corporate contributors.

I model the ideological representativeness of state legislative committees and their majority-party slates, testing hypotheses derived from extant models of committees and institutional choice. Committee representativeness and the representativeness of majority-party slates vary across states as a function of their effective number of parties and professionalization, but the jurisdiction of a committee has little discernible effect on representativeness of either. A possible mechanism is that competitive parties create committees that more closely adhere to the party ratio of the chamber, eliminating many possible outlying committees.

Most researchers studying presidential approval with time series analysis assume that foreign and economic policy have a time-invariant weight in citizens' judgments of presidential performance. However, those studying presidential approval in cross-sectional analysis find that the weight of foreign and economic policy on job performance fluctuates as news about these issues changes. These competing views can be incorporated into a model of rational learning that makes it possible to test whether the public weighs foreign and economic policy differently over time in its evaluation of the president. The analysis presented here shows that foreign and economic policy exhibit different patterns in their relationship to overall approval—economic policy has a consistent impact over time, while foreign policy ebbs and flows.

Analysis of panel data from Brazil, Mexico, and Russia suggests that presidential campaigns have ambiguous effects on inequalities in political knowledge. In all three countries, the "knowledge gap" among citizens with different levels of socioeconomic resources stayed the same or widened. At the same time, less affluent and educated citizens who paid a great deal of attention to the campaign learned more than equally attentive high-status citizens. These findings suggest that modern, media-intensive electoral campaigns do provide information to low socioeconomic status citizens in readily digestible form, but they fail to stimulate sufficient attention to politics among these citizens to close the knowledge gap.

Scholars of southern partisan change have been reluctant to proclaim a realignment among southern whites. Despite a Republican advantage in presidential elections, a Democratic advantage continued to persist in party identifications. However, in the 1990s a Republican advantage in party identifications emerged, one that has persisted throughout the decade. Indeed in 2000 a majority of southern whites held Republican party identifications, while only one in three southern whites held Democratic identifications. This article examines the causes of the changing party identifications of southern whites in the 1990s and focuses on four explanations that have been discussed by scholars: the role of racial attitudes, social class polarization, social and cultural attitudes and general ideological realignment. Using a multivariate analysis, the study finds that national forces, specifically an ideological realignment and class-status polarization played some role in producing changes in partisanship of southern whites. However, regional differences between the South and the rest of the nation remained evident, with racial attitudes and views on abortion exerting significant effects on party identifications in the 1990s. The findings suggest that the Republican advantage in party identifications that emerged in the 1990s is durable and, if anything, is likely to increase in future years.