Suchergebnisse

We explore the importance of generational effects and the changing economic circumstances of Blacks to explain variations over time in the partisan attachments of African Americans. More specifically, we explore whether generational differences have caused the cohorts that came of political age following the Civil Rights movement to be less Democratic than generations that lived through the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath. We find that while life‐cycle effects explain a portion of the movement away from the two major parties, generational effects account for the small but significant increase in Republican party identification in the youngest generation. Additionally, living in the South accounts for the steepest gains in political independence. Finally, changing economic influences over time appear to have led poorer Blacks to change from the most likely to the least likely to identify with a major party.

The authors explore how to define a welfare spell and how well surveys measure welfare spells. By comparing survey and administrative data from the Work Pays Demonstration Project in California on the receipt of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), they find that a substantial amount of administrative churning occurs in administrative data. Through a mixing model of several break lengths, the authors find that a single definition of a break in welfare is not applicable to all respondents. Additionally, it appears that there is substantial variation in the break lengths respondents utilize. Finally, the authors show that the complexity of defining an accurate break in spells creates difficulties for detecting biases in survey responses.

The conventional wisdom among students of elections is that the choices of voters are largely driven by powelforces that have lasting effects from one election to the next‐enduring political orientations and retrospective judgments about economic performance. The authors'article revises this account by suggesting that scholars have been looking in the wrong place campaign effects. Based on analyses of the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections, it largely confirms the constraining effects of enduring electoral forces on Democratic and Republican campaigns butsugests that the personality traits of thirdparty candidates do exert signGcant iniuence on voters.