Suchergebnisse

In recent years, citizen-run anti-crime organizations have brought important challenges to Mexico and other Latin American countries. Under what circumstances are citizens more likely to seek out their neighbors to confront crime directly? I argue that when citizens do not trust state authorities, their perception of the trustworthiness of their community can increase their likelihood of engaging in anti-crime organization attempts. I analyze data from Mexico and find that an average citizen's perception of the trustworthiness of his/her neighbors correlates with his/her likelihood of engaging in an anti-crime organization attempt. Further, consistent with the main argument of this paper, I find this link to be stronger among those who distrust the police. These findings contribute by bringing back citizens' relation to the state as an important moderating force in society, and helping us understand when social trust can translate into controversial forms of state substitution.

Under what conditions do citizens connect concerns about corruption to their evaluations of sitting executives? In contrast to conventional scholarship positing a direct, negative relationship between corruption and political support, we build on a small but suggestive body of research to argue that this relationship is conditional on economic context. We test this claim with national survey data collected in 19 presidential systems as part of the AmericasBarometer 2010 study. Using both fixed effects ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear regression analyses, we show that individuals facing bad (good) collective economic conditions apply a higher (lower) penalty to presidential approval for perceived political corruption. This result holds across both an individual-level indicator of national economic assessment and a regional economic measure; we further test, and find less substantial results for, the moderating influence of personal economic conditions on the political toll of corruption perceptions.

Every year, millions of immigrants arrive in countries that play multiple roles: they expel them, receive them, or shelter them. Sometimes, citizens welcome immigrants with open arms. Other times, they perceive them as potential criminals. Surprisingly, there is little research on the determinants of criminalization in multi-role countries. In this article, we analyze the results from a nationally representative survey experiment where we investigate how two sources of variation (the skin tone and national origin of others) bias citizens' willingness to blame suspects for crime. We find that individuals criminalize suspects more when they have a darker skin tone and, against expectations, less when they come from El Salvador. Moreover, in exploratory analyses, we find that coloristic bias is exacerbated among individuals with lower levels of education and, surprisingly, among those with a darker skin tone. Also interesting is that we found that, against contact theory, anti-American bias is stronger among Mexicans with direct or indirect cross-national contact. Our results highlight the various degrees to which migratory contexts influence public opinion.

Menacing news inclines individuals to acquire information, and research has explored how emotional reactions such as fear or anger condition this process. While scholars have debated the relevance of fear and anger for levels of attentiveness and learning in politics, fewer studies consider how variation in emotional responses can shape the substance of information searches in times of threat. We posit that heightened fear motivates interest in defense-oriented information among threatened individuals, while heightened anger motivates interest in aggression-oriented information. To test these hypotheses, we focus on international terrorist threat because of its known tendency to elevate both anger and fear. We use data that permit a behavioral measure of information seeking, via an experiment embedded within a Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) platform. Within this information-rich context, exposure to terrorist threat motivates a search for relevant information. Furthermore, we find that while an induction to elevate anger prompts more immediate attention to aggression-oriented information, an induction to elevate fear is more effective in steering attention toward defense-oriented information.