Suchergebnisse

We assess the importance of the public's policy agreement with the Supreme Court on public approval of the court. Using survey data on a range of recent court cases, we measure respondents' perceived ideological closeness to the court. Then, we test various theories of court approval (doctrinal, functional, attitudinal). People who believe the court has decided recent cases as they themselves would have done, or that judges share their partisanship, report higher court approval than those who perceive the court as ideologically distant from them. We compare these findings with similar effects of policy agreement on Congressional and Presidential approval.

How do constituents respond to the president's policy decisions? Theories of democratic accountability posit that voters elect officeholders to advance their policy preferences and punish them for failing to do so. We investigate the accountability mechanism in the context of presidential unilateral action. Data from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study provide evidence of issue‐based presidential accountability, as presidential approval ratings are consistently associated with respondents' evaluations of policies achieved through unilateral action. These findings persist when accounting for respondents' partisan and ideological congruence with the president and across model specifications and measurement strategies. Our evidence indicates that presidents are held accountable for unilateral directives and, in the aggregate, suggests a constraint on presidential action.

Court-ordered redistricting in the mid-1960s eradicated severe disparities in the populations of U.S. state legislative districts. We examine the geographic distribution of money by states to counties. Cross-sectional analysis shows that counties with relatively more legislative seats per person prior to redistricting received relatively more transfers from the state per person. Over time, counties that lost legislative seats subsequently received a smaller share of state funds per capita. We calculate that population equalization significantly altered the flow of state transfers to counties, diverting approximately $7 billion annually from formerly overrepresented to formerly underrepresented counties, an effect missed by past studies. For those concerned with the design of democratic institutions around the world today, the American experience provides clear evidence of the political consequences of unequal representation. (American Political Science Review / FUB)

Experiments show significant demobilizing and alienating effects of negative advertising. Although internally valid, experiments may have limited external validity. Aggregate and survey data offer two ways of providing external validation for experiments. We show that survey recall measures of advertising exposure suffer from problems of internal validity due to simultaneity and measurement error, which bias estimated effects of ad exposure. We provide valid estimates of the causal effects of ad exposure for the NES surveys using instrumental variables and find that negative advertising causes lower turnout in the NES data. We also provide a careful statistical analysis of aggregate turnout data from the 1992 Senate elections that Wattenberg and Brians (1999) recommend. These aggregate data confirm our original findings. Experiments, surveys, and aggregate data all point to the same conclusion: Negative advertising demobilizes voters.

THE AUTHORS REASSESS AND REAFFIRM THEIR EARLIER RESEARCH, WHICH CONCLUDED THAT NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADVERTISING DEMOBILIZES VOTERS.