Political Research Quarterly current issue

A Clash of Civilizations? The Influence of Religion on Public Opinion of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Baumgartner, J. C, Francia, P. L., Morris, J. S. — 2008-05-06

The authors argue in this study that religious beliefs play a significant role in predicting American public opinion on foreign policy issues in the Middle East. Their findings reveal that Evangelical Christians have remained strong supporters of a hawkish foreign policy toward the Middle East, even as overall public support for the Iraq War declines. They also find that Evangelicals are among the strongest supporters of Israel and hold more negative views of Islam than others. These results reinforce the growing importance of the "faith factor" in public opinion and American politics as a whole.

God's Party? Race, Religion, and Partisanship over Time

McDaniel, E. L., Ellison, C. G. — 2008-05-06

The Republican Party has aggressively attempted to recruit black and Latino Evangelicals; however, the success of these efforts has been questioned. The authors argue that the GOP's diminished success in recruiting these groups, compared to Anglos, is based on differing religious worldviews. Using data that allow them to track partisanship over two decades, the authors examine how religious conservatism has shaped Anglo, Latino, and black partisanship. They find that the GOP has been most successful in recruiting Anglos, followed by Latinos. Blacks appear to be unaffected. In addition, they find support for their underlying assumption of differing religious worldviews among the racial/ethnic groups.

Belonging, Behaving, and Believing: Assessing the Role of Religion on Presidential Approval

Olson, L. R., Warber, A. L. — 2008-05-06

We operationalize three dimensions of religion—religious affiliation, religious commitment, and religious belief—to offer a detailed analysis of how religion affects presidential approval ratings. Using data from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies, we demonstrate that operationalizing religion as a rudimentary Protestant—Catholic affiliation dichotomy masks its influence on presidential approval. We find that religious affiliation, even when measured more precisely than with a Protestant—Catholic dichotomy, contributes less to models of presidential approval than do measures of religious commitment and (especially) orthodoxy of religious belief.

From the Gap to the Chasm: Gender and Participation among Non-Hispanic Whites and Mexican Americans

Kam, C. D., Zechmeister, E. J., Wilking, J. R. — 2008-05-06

This article focuses on gender and ethnic inequalities in political participation across non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans. Using a mainstream model of participation, the authors find that differences in the levels of resources, motivations, and opportunities effectively account for gender gaps within the two populations. However, this mainstream model leaves largely unexplained the chasm in participation across non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans. The authors incorporate socialization experiences specific to Mexican Americans to identify the roots of participatory inequality across these groups. Differences in linguistic, educational, and general assimilation account for participatory differences across Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. Equalizing these factors closes the chasm in participation.

Gender, Race, and Intersectionality on the Federal Appellate Bench

Collins, T., Moyer, L. — 2008-05-06

While theoretical justifications predict that a judge's gender and race may influence judicial decisions, empirical support for these arguments has been mixed. However, recent increases in judicial diversity necessitate a reexamination of these earlier studies. Rather than examining individual judges on a single characteristic, such as gender or race alone, this research note argues that the intersection of individual characteristics may provide an alternative approach for evaluating the effects of diversity on the federal appellate bench. The results of cohort models examining the joint effects of race and gender suggest that minority female judges are more likely to support criminal defendants' claims when compared to their colleagues on the bench, even after controlling for other important factors. This suggests that our understanding of judicial behaviors may be assisted by the inclusion of how individual characteristics overlap rather than examining those characteristics alone.

Sex Differences in the Acceptability of Discrimination

Kuran, T., McCaffery, E. J. — 2008-05-06

A large telephone survey conducted after the attacks of September 11, 2001, suggests that the willingness to tolerate discrimination varies significantly across domains, with a very high tolerance of discrimination against poorly educated immigrants and a strikingly low tolerance of discrimination against the genetically disadvantaged. Regardless of domain, tolerance is greater among men than among women. A survey conducted simultaneously over the World Wide Web, using volunteer panels, replicated the phone survey results and revealed an even larger sex gap. This finding suggests that a social desirability bias leads women to overstate and men to understate their tolerance of discrimination in public.

Press Coverage of Mayoral Candidates: The Role of Gender in News Reporting and Campaign Issue Speech

Atkeson, L. R., Krebs, T. B. — 2008-05-06

Some research on gender bias in news coverage of political campaigns indicates that the media portray male and female candidates differently. Research to date, however, has focused only on elections to national or statewide offices, where confounding variables such as party, incumbency, and competitiveness are present. The authors resolve this problem by focusing their analysis of media campaign coverage on nonpartisan, open-seat, and competitive mayoral races. The authors' content analysis of press coverage in six mayoral elections suggests that press coverage is not biased in favor of male candidates. The authors, however, find that the presence of a woman on the ballot expands the range of issue coverage in local campaigns in ways favorable to perceived strengths of female candidates.

Political Attitudes and Ideologies of Multiracial Americans: The Implications of Mixed Race in the United States

Masuoka, N. — 2008-05-06

A contemporary rise in multiracial self-identification provokes a number of questions about the significance that this racial identity may hold for American politics. This research focuses on the political attitudes of multiracial Americans to determine how multiracial identities may influence individual public opinion. I offer a test of three competing theoretical models of multiracial political attitude formation: Classic Assimilation, Minority Trumping, and New Identity Formation. This research finds that, generally, multiracial individuals who self-identify as such develop political opinions that parallel with their minority counterparts.

The Political Resocialization of Immigrants: Resistance or Lifelong Learning?

White, S., Nevitte, N., Blais, A., Gidengil, E., Fournier, P. — 2008-05-06

Theories of political socialization contain competing expectations about immigrants' potential for political resocialization. Premigration beliefs and actions may be resistant to change, exposure to the new political system may facilitate adaptation, or immigrants may find ways to transfer beliefs and behaviors from one political system to another. This analysis empirically tests these three alternative theories of resocialization. The results indicate that both transfer and exposure matter; there is little evidence that premigration beliefs and actions are resistant to change. Moreover, how immigrants adapt depends on which orientation or behavior is being considered and on what kind of political environments migrants come from.

Improving Causal Inference: Strengths and Limitations of Natural Experiments

Dunning, T. — 2008-05-06

Social scientists increasingly exploit natural experiments in their research. This article surveys recent applications in political science, with the goal of illustrating the inferential advantages provided by this research design. When treatment assignment is less than "as if" random, studies may be something less than natural experiments, and familiar threats to valid causal inference in observational settings can arise. The author proposes a continuum of plausibility for natural experiments, defined by the extent to which treatment assignment is plausibly "as if" random, and locates several leading studies along this continuum.

Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options

Seawright, J., Gerring, J. — 2008-05-06

How can scholars select cases from a large universe for in-depth case study analysis? Random sampling is not typically a viable approach when the total number of cases to be selected is small. Hence attention to purposive modes of sampling is needed. Yet, while the existing qualitative literature on case selection offers a wide range of suggestions for case selection, most techniques discussed require in-depth familiarity of each case. Seven case selection procedures are considered, each of which facilitates a different strategy for within-case analysis. The case selection procedures considered focus on typical, diverse, extreme, deviant, influential, most similar, and most different cases. For each case selection procedure, quantitative approaches are discussed that meet the goals of the approach, while still requiring information that can reasonably be gathered for a large number of cases.

The Effects of Measurement and Methods Decisions on Committee Preference Outlier Results

Sprague, M. — 2008-05-06

Studies of outlying committee preferences have been conducted with different preference measures and methodological approaches and have generated conflicting results. To assess the effects of these study design differences, I use multiple methodological approaches to examine committee-floor differences with jurisdiction-specific interest group data during a longer time period than earlier studies. After comparing results across methods, I compare them to past findings using the same method but different preference measures. I find that differences in preference measures largely explain previous contradictory results. Additionally, outlying tendencies exist among all committees expected to be outliers under conditional claims of the distributive theory.

Justice and the Environment in Nussbaum's "Capabilities Approach": Why Sustainable Ecological Capacity Is a Meta-Capability

Holland, B. — 2008-05-06

What principles should guide how society distributes environmental benefits and burdens? Like many liberal theories of justice, Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities approach" does not adequately address this question. The author argues that the capabilities approach should be extended to account for the environment's instrumental value to human capabilities. Given this instrumental value, protecting capabilities requires establishing certain environmental conditions as an independent "meta-capability." When combined with Nussbaum's nonprocedural method of political justification, this extension provides the basis for adjudicating environmental justice claims. The author applies this extended capabilities approach to assess the distribution of benefits and burdens associated with climate change.

State Policy Innovation in Perspective: Courts, Legislatures, and Education Finance Reform

Roch, C. H., Howard, R. M. — 2008-05-06

Why and when courts will change policy has been the subject of significant scholarly attention, but there has been little effort to integrate this research within the existing research of determinants of state legislative policy change. In this article, the authors incorporate both of these research areas to answer the question of whether policy change will occur through the legislature or through the courts, examining the important issue of education finance reform. To understand and predict this change, the authors characterize the state policy environment as consisting of political, legal, and strategic factors. The authors find that a combination of political and strategic factors influences legislatures and the courts, but that law matters greatly to the courts, particularly state constitutional education clauses. The authors also find that institutional structure influences the degree to which politics matters to the courts.

Allocating Lobbying Resources between Collective and Private Rents

Godwin, R. K., Lopez, E. J., Seldon, B. J. — 2008-05-06

How do firms allocate their lobbying resources among their political goals? The authors approach this question using a game-theoretic model that integrates three concepts from the lobbying literature: the distinction between private and collective rents, the competition for a rent, and the impacts of political institutions. The model indicates how competition and political institutions affect lobbying expenditures and expected net returns for private and collective lobbying. The outcomes predicted differ with those of past formal models and produce the counterintuitive expectation that competition typically reduces expenditures. The authors test the model's predictions by examining the lobbying decisions of sixty-two firms.

Announcements: Western Political Science Association

2008-05-06