Suchergebnisse

AbstractOne of the long-standing puzzles in the political behavior literature is about immigrants' low level of political participation: after achieving comparable and sometimes even higher levels of socioeconomic status relative to the native-born citizens, why do immigrants still participate less in politics? We argue that the different formative years experiences associated with immigrants who moved to the United States at an older age is the key that explains the participation gap between immigrants and the native-born population. Using the 1994–2016 Current Population Survey and their Voting and Civic Engagement Supplements as data sources, we develop a hierarchical model that simultaneously accounts for region-, country-, and individual-level variables. The results are striking. We show that immigrants who move to the United States at a young age participate in politics at a rate that is indistinguishable from the native-born population; those who migrated at an older age participate less. The fact that over 60% of the immigrant population moved to the United States as adults is a main factor that contributes to the political participation gap between immigrants and the native-born population.

Current thinking on the origins and size of the welfare state often ignores household relations in which people may depend on others for income or have dependents themselves. The influence of "dependency status" on individuals' political preferences is unknown. We report results from a laboratory experiment designed to estimate the effect of dependency on preferences for policies that insure against labor market risk. Results indicate that (1) willingness to vote in favor of a social insurance policy is highly responsive to unemployment risk, (2) symmetric, mutual dependence is unrelated to support for insurance, but (3) asymmetric dependence (being dependent on someone else) increases support for social insurance. We connect our lab results to observational survey data and find similar relationships.

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or as nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological divide between the major parties.

Although educational attainment is one of the strongest correlates of mass political participation, researchers disagree about whether it has a causal impact on voter turnout. One prominent theory proposes the observed correlation between higher educational attainment and political participation is spurious, largely reflecting early-life factors such as genetics, family resources, and parental values. To test this claim we analyze siblings in a longitudinal survey to control for the pre-adult environmental effects on official measures of turnout among older adults. We find some support for spurious effects of education, particularly in a midterm election where the most politically engaged individuals are mobilized. Because patterns of political engagement are formed in childhood, early-life experiences may be more influential in midterm elections where fewer stimuli and resources are present to mobilize voters.

Physical and mental health is known to have wide influence over most aspects of social life—be it schooling and employment or marriage and broader social engagement—but has received limited attention in explaining different forms of political participation. We analyze a unique dataset with a rich array of objective measures of cognitive and physical well-being and two objective measures of political participation, voting and contributing money to campaigns and parties. For voting, each aspect of health has a powerful effect on par with traditional predictors of participation such as education. In contrast, health has little to no effect on making campaign contributions. We recommend additional attention to the multifaceted affects of health on different forms of political participation.