Suchergebnisse

Are political understandings of bureaucracy incompatible with Weberian features of administrative neutrality? In examining the question of whether interest groups and elected officials are able to influence how government agencies implement the law, this book identifies the political origins of bureaucratic neutrality. In bridging the traditional gap between questions of internal management (public administration) and external politics (political science), Huber argues that 'strategic neutrality' allows bureaucratic leaders to both manage their subordinates and sustain political support. By analyzing the OSH Act of 1970, Huber demonstrates the political origins and benefits of administrative neutrality, and contrasts it with apolitical and unconstrained administrative implementation. Historical analysis, interviews with field-level bureaucrats and their supervisors, and quantitative analysis provide a rich understanding of the twin difficulties agency leaders face as political actors and personnel managers

Experimental research on pay inequality attitudes often provides information about pay inequality with the expectation that greater awareness of pay differences will increase the belief that pay inequality is unfair, thereby strengthening support for policies addressing pay inequality. Less explored is whether providing information about why pay inequality might be justified may lower support for addressing pay inequality or counteract the effect of providing information about such inequality. This paper finds that providing static information about pay differences across the income distribution generally does not affect support for policies addressing pay inequality. However, providing information about pay inequality followed by a labor economics argument in support of pay differences (priming structural fairness) generally decreases support for such policies. One mechanism through which this effect may operate is by increasing the belief that differences in pay are justified.

Partisans often offer divergent responses to survey items ostensibly unrelated to politics. These gaps could reveal that partisanship colors perception or, alternatively, that in answering survey questions, individuals communicate partisan proclivities by providing insincere, or "expressive" responses, to send a partisan message. This study tests two techniques for reducing expressive responding that (1) avoid criticisms about using monetary incentives for accuracy, which have reduced measured partisan differences for objective facts; and (2) can be used in contexts where incentives are infeasible, such as when objective benchmarks for correct responses are unavailable. This study experimentally tests these techniques in replicating a study that found that partisanship affected attractiveness evaluations. These interventions, which allow partisans to express their partisan sentiments through other survey items, substantially reduce apparent partisan differences in beauty evaluations and show that standard survey items likely confound sincere partisan differences with elements of expressive responding.

Testing theories of how candidate positions affect voting is often complicated by the strong correlation between candidate partisanship and candidate positions. We take advantage of Donald Trump's unusual candidacy to understand how candidates who depart from standard party positions affect perceptions of ideology and voting. We show in both 2016 and 2008 that respondents were more likely to report voting for the more ideologically proximate candidate, an advantage enjoyed by Trump in 2016 at much higher rates, in part because he was perceived as more moderate than prior candidates. What is most exceptional about Trump relative to previous candidates, however, is that voters were much less willing to place him anywhere in an ideological space. Being unwilling to place Trump was correlated with being much less likely to vote for him and suggests that some voters do not reward ambiguous or nonstandard issue positioning. More generally, we find evidence that in the contemporary era of strong partisan attachments, some voters still appear to decide which candidate to support, in part, on assessments of candidate ideology.