Suchergebnisse

In this short manuscript, I explore the predictive validity of a common component of racial resentment—(dis)agreement with the idea that minority racial groups need special favors to get ahead. Specifically, this analysis takes advantage of different "special favors" questions included in the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2012-2014 Panel Study to assess whether affirmative action preferences are uniquely racialized. I find that (1) respondents react differently to the special favors instrument on the basis of the racial group in question, (2) these assessments vary among liberals and conservatives, and (3) they predict racialized outcomes stereotypically associated with a given racial group. These findings dovetail with recent work that illustrates an ideological sorting of such measures, while offering modest evidence that a prominent instrument used in symbolic racism scales is, in fact, race-coded to specific target groups.

AbstractA growing body of research connects Christian nationalism—a preference for a religiously conservative political regime—to social and political beliefs. This paper raises questions about the validity of a popular scale used to measure those attitudes. I begin by exploring the factor structure of the six-item Christian nationalism index. I then show how semi-supervised machine learning can be used to illustrate classification problems within that scale. Finally, I demonstrate that this index performs poorly at the interval level, a combination of measurement error and the sorting out of religious and political preferences. These attitudes have become so bound up in conventional politics that they often exhibit a threshold rather than a linear relationship to political preferences. I conclude with an appeal for care in matching theory to empirics: Christian nationalism is a prominent political theology, but research must grapple with the limitations of prevailing measurement tools when operationalizing it.

The New Mexico's Inspection of Public Records Act is a sunshine law created to allow the public access to its government's operations. From its inception, the IPRA has been interpreted broadly towards disclosure of documents to keep government agents accountable for their conduct. While there are enumerated exceptions to the IPRA, they are narrowly construed and specific. However, of late government agencies have been pressing to enlarge the construction of these exceptions. A series of cases have been brought under the IPRA to challenge the use of the Law Enforcement Exception by New Mexico's Department of Public Safety as a means to extend a blanket denial to requesters of investigation records. This article argues that such a broad reading of the Law Enforcement Exception is not supported by a plain reading of the statute, nor by the case law that has interpreted the IPRA. Further, these repeated challenges underscore a need to address the lack of clarity regarding a process to address governmental denials of IPRA requests as to not only the Law Enforcement Exception but all exceptions. This article suggests that a new denial process that more thoroughly informs the requestor of the basis for the agency's denial would better inform the public, and New Mexico's courts when a matter is litigated, of the agency's conduct and reasoning.

In this article, I explore the relationship between sorting and the value that individuals assign to compromise. Analyzing four separate, nationally-representative surveys from 2007 to 2016, I show that a reliable asymmetry among partisans exists regarding their preference for political leaders who compromise. Among persons with right-leaning identities, high levels of overlap between partisanship and ideology undercut the professed desirability of compromise and amplify the association between compromise and selling out one's principles. However, when individuals are asked about the specific extent to which one's "side" deserves greater deference in the policymaking process, differences between persons with left- and right-leaning identities disappear. Well-sorted individuals are uniformly unwilling to distribute policymaking demands equally. Although this disconnect is emblematic of the general tension between abstract principles and episodic behavior (or "practicing what you preach"), it also highlights how the introduction of material threat may challenge expressive commitments to lofty ideals.

ObjectiveThis article explores how religion affects the extent to which individuals connect their ideological to partisan identities—a process termed partisan‐ideological sorting.MethodTo explore this relationship, I analyze data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) Time‐Series surveys and the Youth‐Parent Socialization (YPS) panel study.ResultsI find that a matrix of belief, belonging, and behavior constrains the convergence between citizens' political identities, with one important caveat: evangelical affiliation functions as the primary conduit through which religiosity shapes this sorting. Building on these results, I then estimate the direct impact of religion on sorting over time.ConclusionThese findings show that religion has produced asymmetric sorting in the mass public among persons with right‐leaning identities. Further, they provide a social explanation for partisan‐ideological sorting that complements extant institutional ones.

Conventional wisdom suggests that citizens who recognize party polarization exhibit well-sorted preferences. Curiously, however, this extant research has not grappled sufficiently with how pervasive perceptual biases might moderate the relationship between perceptions of elites and sorting. In this manuscript, I show that perceived out-group dissimilarity affects sorting, albeit in an asymmetric manner: perceived out-group dissimilarity corresponds to greater sorting for persons with right-leaning identities compared to those with left-leaning ones. I then analyze the 1992–1996 ANES Panel Study and find that these patterns mostly hold, with one caveat: sorting also shapes perceptions of out-group dissimilarity. These findings offer preliminary evidence of the existence of a feedback loop between perceptions of elites and sorting.

This paper investigates how casting a winning or losing vote affects perceptions of external efficacy across varying conditions of electoral disproportionality. I find that as a political system's electoral mechanisms become more disproportional-that is, when institutional rules produce an increasingly unequal ratio of votes cast to the percentage of seats won-individuals who voted for losing parties become significantly less efficacious than their winning counterparts. Under these conditions, electoral winners are more likely to perceive that it matters what party is elected, while losers' attitudes about the meaningfulness of electoral representation sour. However, when disproportionality is minimal, no significant difference between winners' and losers' perceptions of external efficacy is observed, suggesting that the winner-loser framework has context-specific utility. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

AbstractIntroductionThis short article investigates how violations of civility norms by politicians affect attitudes about the importance of norms and demand for political accountability after wrongdoing.ResultsOur main findings are twofold: (1) support for norms and (2) demand for punishing norm‐breaking increases when parties hold political officials accountable for their actions—especially in the case of in‐group norm‐breaking.ConclusionsThese findings contribute to a growing literature on Americans' support for norms by implying that elites play an important role in sustaining the standards of democratic exchange. When elites impose punishment on copartisan elites, they signal to the public that accountability is acceptable.

AbstractScholars have used network analysis to explore the structural properties of mass ideology. This article incorporates two important, though ignored features in past research by investigating how time shapes the properties of belief networks for different populations of people—those who exhibit high and low levels of political knowledge. We find that (1) belief network density increases asymmetrically among people with high relative to low knowledge; (2) symbolic preferences are more central to belief networks irrespective of survey timing or population; in contrast, policy beliefs exhibit some increase in centrality over time among the politically knowledgeable; and (3) a belief's centrality is unrelated to the amount of change it explains in other beliefs. Troublingly, this latter finding presents problems for describing belief networks using the vernacular of Conversian belief systems—a disconnect that seems grounded in the mismatch between Converse's individual‐level theory and network analysis' population‐based properties.