Different audience demographics and preferences should produce significant descriptive differences in the content of presidential news, with Noticiero Telemundo (Telemundo) newscasts offering more treatment of presidential news concerning issues pertinent to Latinos than NBC Nightly News (NBC). In addition, presidents can influence Spanish-language news by targeting policy issues and locations most relevant to Latinos.
We offer a basic descriptive comparison of news features and also use probit methodology to predict the conditions that contribute to Spanish-language presidential news coverage over 85 days in early 2011.
Although Telemundo and NBC devote a similar amount of coverage to the president, Telemundo appeals to its Latino audience by reporting on issues relevant to Latinos. In addition, presidents increase the likelihood of Spanish-language news coverage by visiting border states.
Presidential influence of the news extends to Spanish-language television, even though Spanish-language news covers different topics in comparison with English-language news coverage.
How do immigrants become politically active? While this process has been extensively studied, the role of ties to formal and informal institutions of society has been understudied. We test whether informal (political discussion) and formal (connections to community organizations) ties encourage immigrant voters to participate in other campaign activities.
Data were collected through a 2008 exit poll of Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA voters. Along with assessing the bivariate relationship between social ties and campaign participation, we use a Poisson event count regression model to control for alternative explanations.
The positive relationship between social ties and campaign participation among immigrant voters disappears once we control for alternative explanations. There is, however, a positive relationship among the native born (including second-generation immigrants).
Voters need to acquire personal resources, and become assimilated into American political culture, before social ties have an effect on campaign participation.
Millions of U.S. adults are recipients of the high school (HS) equivalency (General Education Development [GED]) diploma. Virtually nothing is known about the health of this large group, although literature suggests GED recipients are considerably worse off than HS graduates in numerous economic and social outcomes. We analyze general health among working-age adults with a HS diploma, GED recipients, and HS dropouts.
Ordered and binary logistic models of self-rated health and activity limitations were estimated using data from the 1997–2009 National Health Interview Surveys (N = 76,703).
GED recipients have significantly and substantially worse health than HS graduates, among both sexes. In fact, the GED recipients’ health is generally comparable to that of HS dropouts. Health behaviors and economic factors explain a large proportion of the difference but the gap remains significant.
In terms of health, adults with a terminal GED are not equivalent to HS graduates. GED recipients report considerably worse general health and activity limitations. The disadvantage is only partly due to the worse economic outcomes and health behaviors; a significant difference remains unexplained and may be due to other, unobserved pathways, or to selection mechanisms.
To determine the role of linked fate, cultural factors, and experiences with discrimination on support for descriptive representation among Latinos.
Utilizing data from the Latino National Survey (2006) and ordered logistic regression this article analyzes the impact of Latino-linked fate, cultural factors, and personal and group experiences with discrimination on desire for Latino representation.
A higher sense of attachment to Latino-linked fate and Spanish results in a greater desire for Latino representatives. Similarly, Latinos who believed Latinos suffered from group discrimination were in greater support of Latino representatives.
By examining descriptive representation from the perspective of how Latinos feel, this investigation improves our understanding of how attachment to a linked fate, language, and experiences with discrimination work to influence support for Latino representatives.
Although public opinion generally is opposed to tax increases, voters frequently choose to raise their own taxes in property tax cap override elections. This study sought to uncover the factors that are associated with successful attempts to increase local property taxes.
This phenomenon was studied in Massachusetts towns, where over 1,200 overrides were successful from 1990 to 2007. Multivariate analysis was used to assess the relative importance of variables related to two theoretical perspectives: voting as utility maximization and voting as symbolic action.
The results show that override support reflects the fiscal condition of the town, the context of the particular override request, and, most importantly, the socioeconomics of the community. Overrides were more successful in communities that had higher levels of education, lower levels of affluence, and smaller nonwhite populations. In addition, overrides were more successful in towns with lower existing tax rates and where the particular override was less salient and narrower in scope.
On balance, the results are supportive of a symbolic theory of override voting in which voters are expressing their general views about government, rather than choosing in a way reflective of individual utility maximization.
The object of this study was to examine whether college-intending, low-income high school graduates are particularly susceptible to having their postsecondary education plans change, or even fall apart, during the summer after high school graduation. College access research has largely overlooked this time period. Yet, previous research indicates that a sizeable share of low-income students who had paid college deposits reconsidered where, and even whether, to enroll in the months following graduation. We assess the extent to which this phenomenon—commonly referred to as “summer melt”—is broadly generalizable.
We employ two data sources, a national survey and administrative data from a large metropolitan area, and regression analysis to estimate the prevalence of summer melt.
Our analyses reveal summer melt rates of sizeable magnitude: ranging from 8 to 40 percent.
Our results indicate that low-income, college-intending students experience high rates of summer attrition from the college pipeline. Given the goal of improving the flow of low-income students to and through college, it is imperative to investigate how to effectively intervene and mitigate summer melt.
The objectives of the study were to establish whether district ideology was reflected in legislator ideal points in the 1996–1999 Duma.
I integrate for the first time individual-level survey data on citizen attitudes to economic reform, the major dimension of political conflict in Russia in the 1990s, with individual legislator voting records from the 1996 to 1999 Duma. Using a Bayesian method, I estimate legislator ideal points as a function of individual and district characteristics and an individually specific random shock to assess the direct effect of district ideology and party membership.
According to my results, legislators were responsive to district preferences on salient legislation such as final passage votes and key votes.
The findings have implications for the effects of a mixed electoral system, which was introduced in many young democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America. The broader conclusion of the study is that the electoral incentives in the single-member district component of the election can encourage legislative responsiveness even in a “partial” democracy such as Russia.
Sexual selection theory suggests patterns of covariance among polygynous mating behaviors and ecological variables at the cross-national level. We quantified national levels of polygyny using the human polygyny index (HPI), a ratio of men's to women's variability in the numbers of sex partners over the past year.
HPI scores were available for 48 nations from the International Sexuality Description Project (Schmitt, 2005), and were used to test three hypotheses: (1) human polygyny should be associated with increased intrasexual competition (e.g., high male-male aggression and resource competition), (2) human polygyny should be associated with features of natural and intersexual selection (e.g., high pathogen stress and an emphasis on physical attractiveness in mate choice), and (3) human polygyny should be associated with early and more prolific reproduction.
All three hypotheses received at least partial support.
Discussion focuses on the limitations and implications of the current findings.
The reliability of general self-rated health status is examined using the reform of the public health insurance system of Germany in 2004 as a source of exogenous variation. The reform introduced a co-payment for ambulatory doctor visits and increased the co-payments for prescription drugs.
This natural experiment allows identification of the causal impact of the program on self-assessed health (SAH). A difference-in-differences estimator is applied to estimate the effect of the reform on SAH.
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, the results indicate that the reform improved the treatment group's average SAH even when there was no discernible impact on actual health.
The exercise reveals the sensitivity of SAH to a perturbation in the insurance system. More objective measures of health may be needed to acquire an accurate assessment of general health when the health system is in flux.
This study highlights the complex role that race plays in the restrictiveness of felon collateral consequence policies in the 50 states by introducing the combination of symbolic racism and racial threat as integral dimensions of the traditional race-based arguments made in this policy area.
Using Alec Ewald's felon collateral consequence scores for the 50 states as the dependent variable and symbolic racism and racial threat variables as the major independent variables, an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model estimated the effects of race-based, ideological, political, and demographic independent variables on a state's felon collateral consequence score.
The combination of symbolic racism and racial threat add an additional dimension to the traditional race-policy connection within this policy area. Specifically, states with high levels of racial threat and symbolic racism were more likely to have higher felon collateral consequence scores. Yet, the presence of a state with a high level of black representatives in its state's legislature negated the effect of these variables.
Although similar studies have confirmed that racially neutral policies, such as felon collateral consequence policies, are affected by race, they have limited their discussion to one specific dimension—racial threat. The evidence presented in this study provided support for the inclusion of a multidimensional race-based argument in this policy area.
In the environmental justice literature, uncertainty exists about the underlying causes of environmental risk disparities, especially as they relate to residential choices. To simplify, the two dominant views are racism/discrimination versus inevitable market dynamics. In this article, we move aside from these to examine the potential role of various residential choice constraints on environmental injustice and how they may be interrelated.
Using an agent-based simulation model, we examine the interaction of race-based constraints with other experimental conditions that can affect minorities’ residential choice sets.
Simulation experiments demonstrate that if the minority holds relatively lower similarity preferences, the environmental quality gap declines when other conditions are held constant. However, racial parity in communities also decreases the environmental quality gap, as do slower population growth and larger geographies.
These results enable us to look at the problem of race-based environmental injustice more holistically, and begin to think about holistic solutions that may finally address what has heretofore been an intractable social problem.
Building on work noting the difference between ambivalence and indifference, and long-standing theories of partisanship, this article seeks to examine the extent to which ambivalence and indifference differ in their impact on the likelihood of individuals defecting from their party when voting.
Examining two national surveys, the voting behavior of ambivalent, indifferent, and one-sided individuals are compared.
It is shown that indifferent individuals are the most likely to defect from their partisanship and vote for the other major party or a third party and one-sided the least.
Those who are indifferent toward the parties are distinct from those with one-sided or ambivalent evaluations, and this difference leads to a greater likelihood of voting against one's party in presidential elections.
To understand what kind of individuals lead particular regimes, this study examines the most influential people in politics, the executives, to uncover the relationship between their characteristics and the type of regime they govern.
This article employs data mining with characteristics of executives worldwide against the state's Freedom House ranking.
Through data mining, the results indicate that while there are still many important factors that coincide with democracy, the length of time in office and to a lesser extent the religious beliefs of executives and the likelihood of being classified as a democracy are heavily related.
This article concludes with a recommendation for supporting specific types of executives to increase the likelihood for successful democratization to minimize authoritarian rule.
The racial issue evolution theory has shaped our understanding of U.S. party politics since 1964. However, some scholars disagree that racial issues are the chief factors. Others argue that social identities are the key to understanding U.S. party politics.
Using logistic regression, this analysis addresses this controversy and joins the debate with a different test of the social identity theory.
It demonstrates that relationships between three racial psychological attachments (categorization, identification, and consciousness) and political orientation (party identification and political ideology) exist even when controlling for other factors.
The findings suggest that Americans rely on racial categorization and identification when identifying themselves with a political party, but not a political ideology. However, the findings suggest that Americans rely on racial and moral issues when adopting a political ideology, but not party identification.
Research has suggested that geosocial exposure to out-groups is associated with heightened threat perceptions on the part of the dominant white majority. However, findings are not consistent.
Drawing on realistic group conflict theory and research in political science that privileges the role of the economic context, we test if the effects of geosocial exposure are conditioned on individual expectations about the health of the macroeconomy using a unique data set from the New England states.
We show that a perceived increase in the presence of immigrants in the community positively correlates with restrictionist immigration policy preferences (in this case support for Arizona's anti-immigration law), but only when people are pessimistic about the future of the state's economy.
The information provided by the social context becomes relevant for people's policy preference formation only when they experience or expect material loss.
We investigate whether growing income inequality has heightened differences in economic interests between “the haves” and “the have nots” and if this class polarization has increased ideological polarization in the electorate.
We examine the trend in ideological orientation among low- and high-income voters from 1972 to 2008.
While both income inequality and ideological polarization have increased in recent years, this analysis indicates that the growth in ideological polarization is not the result of growing income inequality. The well-off have not become significantly more conservative and less liberal nor have those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder become significantly more liberal and less conservative.
The analysis indicates that ideological polarization is the result of the increased polarization of the political parties, not class polarization.
This study aims to evaluate the adolescent political socialization processes that predict political participation in young adulthood, and whether these processes are different for children of immigrants compared to white third-plus-generation adolescents. We focus on socialization agents based in the family, community, and school.
We use a nationally representative longitudinal survey of adolescents to evaluate the predictors of three measures of political participation—voter registration, voting, and political party identification—and whether the process leading to political participation varies by immigrant status and race/ethnic group.
We find that the parental education level of adolescents is not as predictive for many minority children of immigrants compared to white children of native-born parents for registration. Additionally, the academic rigor of the courses taken in high school has a greater positive estimated effect on the likelihood of registration and party identification for Latino children of immigrants compared to white third-plus-generation young adults.
The process of general integration into U.S. society for adolescent children of immigrants may lead to differing pathways to political participation in young adulthood, with certain aspects of their schooling experience having particular importance in developing political participation behaviors.
Do employees care about their relative (economic) position in comparison to their co-workers in an organization? And if so, does it raise or lower their performance? While the topic is widely discussed in the literature, behavioral evidence on these important questions is relatively rare.
This article explores the pay-performance relationship using a sports data set. The strength of analyzing such data is that sports tournaments take place in a very controlled environment that helps to isolate a relative income effect.
Using two large unique data sets that cover 26 seasons in basketball and eight seasons in soccer (Bundesliga), we find considerable support for the idea that a relative income disadvantage is correlated with a decrease in individual performance. In addition, there does not seem to be any tolerance for income disparity based on the hope that such differences may signal that better times are ahead.
This suggests the need to consider the impact of the relative income position when designing pay-for-performance mechanisms within firms and teams.
Marginalization of minority issues from the congressional agenda is widely recognized as a hurdle to the functional representation of African Americans and Latinos. This article examines whether the descriptive representation of minorities in positions of influence helps to address this marginalization.
Logistic regression analysis of over 27,000 hearings held in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1979 and 2008 examines whether congressional hearings addressing minority interest issues were more likely to occur under Latino and African-American committee and subcommittee chairs.
Findings reveal hearings chaired by Latinos and African Americans were more likely to address civil rights, social welfare, and housing issues.
These findings confirm that descriptive representation in positions with influence over committee agendas facilitates institutional attention to minority issues, and suggests that the acquisition of institutional power by black and Latino representatives is critical to the functional representation of minority interests.
We focus on variation in gender inequality in physics course-taking, questioning the notion of a ubiquitous male advantage. We consider how inequality in high school physics is related to the context of students’ local communities, specifically the representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations in the labor force.
This study uses nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and its education component, the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Transcript Study.
Approximately half of schools are characterized by either gender equality or even a small female advantage in enrollment in this traditionally male subject. Furthermore, variation in the gender gap in physics is related to the percent of women who are employed in STEM occupations within the community.
Our study suggests that communities differ in the extent to which traditionally gendered status expectations shape beliefs and behaviors.
Sociologists and other scholars have debated the causes of continuing residential segregation for several decades. Social class has been largely discounted as a substantial determinant of residential segregation by race, but recent studies have brought renewed attention to class variables. The present study reassesses the role of social class, using household income, while also considering metropolitan area characteristics.
This study expands on prior research by examining residential segregation between black-alone and white-alone households with 2000 decennial Census data for all U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) with at least 200,000 or more black population or 1,000,000 total population (60 MSAs total), using both spatial unevenness (dissimilarity) and two types of experiential (i.e., contextual) indicators (exposure indices), measuring socioeconomic status (SES) with a greater range and number of income levels than in past research, and using multivariate models to account for metropolitan area characteristics.
We find that both dissimilarity and exposure measures are significantly associated with household income—black households with higher household incomes live in neighborhoods with greater exposure to whites and lower isolation from other blacks than do black households with lower incomes. Additionally, a number of MSA-level characteristics—several of which have not been considered in previous research—are substantially associated with black/white residential segregation.
We interpret these findings in the context of spatial assimilation and place stratification perspectives, and conclude that racial segregation is at least partly based on class.
Although prior research has demonstrated the multiple pathways through which socioeconomic attainment occurs, one unexplored avenue regards the role of psychological mechanisms such as self-esteem in this process.
Using three waves of data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 1,952), we employed structural equation models to examine the relationship between parenting practices and attitudes, socioeconomic status, offspring's self-esteem, and the likelihood of offspring college attendance.
Self-esteem was positively related to the likelihood of offspring's college attendance. Additionally, self-esteem was found to be a modest mediator of the relationship between parental educational expectations and parental income, respectively, and the likelihood of offspring completing or being currently enrolled in college.
Self-esteem may constitute one previously unconsidered mechanism for reproducing the class structure in the United States.
This study investigates inequalities in the distribution of citizenship status among immigrants in Canada and the United States between 1970 and 2001. It is motivated by a desire to probe deeper into the gap in citizenship rates between the two countries.
Logistic regression analysis of census data is used to predict the odds of citizenship among the foreign born, controlling for a range of factors.
There has been a growing inequality in the distribution of citizenship in the United States, but not in Canada. Low rates of citizenship hide the appearance of a large disparity in citizenship between those with the lowest levels of education and everyone else. These results cannot be entirely ascribed to the presence of undocumented immigrants.
Persistent and large inequalities in citizenship leave the already disadvantaged unskilled immigrants without access to rights, representation, security, or job and educational opportunities.
Most public organizations use both materialistic and idealistic appeals to attract valued employees, with the latter being particularly important for difficult jobs. Teaching in high poverty communities is one such job, though none have studied whether successful high poverty schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools make relatively greater use of public service appeals in teacher recruitment. In education, we identify these materialistic and idealistic appeals as teacher-centered and student-centered incentives. Teacher-centered incentives are those that appeal to a teacher's desire for higher compensation or advancement opportunities, whereas student-centered appeals attempt to attract teachers with a public service mission.
We compare the use of teacher-centered and student-centered appeals in teacher recruitment by the universe of KIPP networks (n = 33) and neighboring traditional public school districts (n = 34), each serving disadvantaged populations. Coders record personnel website use of four teacher-centered appeals (including salary and benefits) and four student-centered appeals.
Chi-square tests show that KIPP schools make less use of teacher-centered appeals, especially monetary compensation, and more use of student-centered appeals in teacher recruitment.
Supplemented by fieldwork, findings suggest that appeals to mission may work better than merit pay in recruiting effective teachers for high poverty schools.
This study examines how religious affiliations, salience, beliefs, and practices influence engagement in interracial dating or romance.
Bivariate and multivariate analyses are employed using data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1,268). Logistic regression models are estimated in order to determine how certain dimensions of religious life predict whether one has engaged in interracial dating or romance, net of sociodemographic and ideological controls.
Relative to evangelicals, mainline Protestants are less likely to have engaged in interracial romance. Those who frequently attend church and affirm biblical literalism are less likely to have dated across race, but those who engage in devotional practices such as prayer and sacred text reading are more likely to have interracialy dated.
The relationship between religion and interracial romance is more complex than previously thought. Future studies should both acknowledge and account for this complexity in their analyses.
To understand how changes in the partisan control of the institutions of government may condition the effect of corporate political activities on bureaucratic decision making.
I examine the variation in the effectiveness of corporate political expenditures in reducing workplace safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) violations across partisan contexts between 1981 and 2006 for a large number of corporations.
Corporate expenditures have a greater suppressant effect on workplace safety violations (but not inspections) when the Republicans control the Congress or presidency.
Corporations are able to influence bureaucratic decision making, but bureaucrats balance the demands of corporations against those of other party constituencies and their political principals. Thus, the partisan control of government importantly conditions corporate influence in the bureaucracy.
This article investigates the extent to which people link policy preferences with unequal outcomes. As the American public is both aware and supportive of reducing income inequality in the abstract, it is an open question whether this concern is translated into support for policies that might help alleviate the rise in economic inequality.
Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is used with data from the General Social Survey (GSS).
The relationship between attitudes about wealth inequality and spending preferences is positive, but not strong. Moreover, there is no evidence that the least well-off are more attuned to linking attitudes about inequality with spending preferences than the upper or middle classes.
The main findings suggest that while citizens are able to link attitudes about inequality with spending preferences, the link might not be strong enough to propel elected officials to act as wealth inequality expands.
Objective. The objective of the research reported in this article is to determine if the NES scale for the measurement of equalitarianism is adequate for the measurement of attitudes toward equality in the mass public. Methods. The analysis begins with the conjecture that the items are framed in terms that are too abstract for the typical member of the mass public to comprehend. As a result, it is argued, each item will not measure the same latent variable, equalitarianism. Rather, item scores will be saturated with systematic error in the form of response set, with the items falling into separate groups depending on how they are framed, rendering scores on the items problematic for use in empirical analysis. For contrast, responses to the items constituting the NES racial resentment scale are also examined. The items comprising this scale are framed in more concrete terms. As a result, it is argued that items comprising the racial resentment scale should display much less systematic error in the form of response set when used in the mass public. Using NES data from a national sample drawn in 2008, responses to the items comprising the equalitarian and racial resentment scales were analyzed via differences of means, correlations, and LISREL (C)onfirmatory (F)actor (A)nalyses. Results. The results for the equalitarianism scale do not support the conclusion that each item is measuring the same latent variable. Rather, the results are consistent with the argument that response set is the dominant factor in shaping responses. The results for the racial resentment scale support the conclusion that each item is measuring what it is designed to measure and response set is playing a relatively minor role in shaping responses. An additional confirmatory factor analysis of scores on the equalitarian scale was done using only highly educated respondents. This segment of the population can be expected to deal relatively easily with items framed in abstract terms. The CFA for this group of respondents yielded results that bear out this expectation and are interpreted as buttressing the principal argument of the article that the items constituting the scale are not suitable for use in the mass public because they are couched in terms too abstract for the typical member of the mass public to comprehend. Conclusion. The article concludes with the suggestion that it would be useful to develop a new scale for the measurement of equalitarian attitudes in the mass public, along with some suggestions regarding the nature of such an instrument.
]]>Individual relationships to the state are shaped through encounters with a variety of institutions. Little scholarly attention has been devoted to how citizenship is shaped through everyday interactions with the social service arm of the state through local “welfare” offices. In Washington State, one-third of all residents are served by the state's primary social service agency. Does this state agency send different messages about citizenship to individuals according to race? We examine this question through encounters of individuals with front-line welfare office staff.
Using a systematic audit method, we collected data from 54 Community Service Offices in Washington State to explore messages sent to individuals.
We find consistent relationships between race and the quantity of information received and the quality of the interaction with the representatives of the state.
Our findings provide evidence that the state reinforces notions of both belonging and marginalization through patterns of racialized encounters with the state.
We examine (1) whether black migration trends from the final few decades of the 20th century continued during the first decade of the 21st century, (2) whether the black southern migration stream continues to be demographically distinctive, and (3) whether incorporating subjective/motivational factors into our models advances our understanding of race and interregional migration.
Using data from the 2000 to 2010 Current Population Surveys, we employ descriptive and inferential statistics to (1) map recent patterns of interregional migration in the United States by race and (2) estimate the effects of race, other sociodemographics, and subjective/motivational factors on people's propensity to migrate to the United States South.
We find that the rate of black migration to the South continues to exceed that of whites, and that black migrants differ from their white counterparts both demographically and motivationally. We also observe selected gender differences within the black southern migration stream.
Our results underscore the need for more research on race, gender, and interregional migration in the United States. We suggest directions for such work, with particular focus on possibilities for further inquiry when 2010 census materials become more widely available.
Empirical studies on environmental behavior have been using a multitude of different operationalizations of environmental concern, which complicates cumulative research. In this article, we empirically explore the dimensionality of four environmental scales of different specificity, their interrelatedness, and their partial contribution to the explanation of recycling behavior. To facilitate the comparison of different studies, we integrate the scales into a hierarchical model.
In a German mail survey (n = 1,330), we queried participation in household waste recycling, Inglehart's postmaterialism scale, the new environmental paradigm scale, and a general and specific attitude scale. Using traditional path analysis and latent structural equation modeling, we test the hierarchical structure of environmental values, beliefs, and attitudes and their contribution to explaining recycling behavior.
We find direct effects of specific attitudes on behavior, but no direct effects of higher-level cognitions. Rather, values and primitive beliefs influence general attitudes, which in turn determine specific attitudes. The empirical analyses confirm the proposed hierarchical structure.
Our research reaffirms Ajzen and Fishbein's postulate of correspondence. Comparison of different studies is only meaningful when the hierarchical position of the respective scales is taken into account properly. To facilitate cumulative research, we propose to use standardized general scales such as the NEP in addition to more specific operationalizations.
The objective of this article is to examine the impact of Indian gaming on reservation conditions in the contiguous American states following passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988.
Utilizing 1990 and 2000 Census data for 330 Indian nations, a pretest/posttest design permits a comparison of nongaming nations to three different types of gaming nations on eight economic measures, while controlling for multiple tribal characteristics and considering the effects of certain state contextual factors confronting nations due to location.
The analysis reveals (1) that the overall impact of gaming, while generally positive, is not as extensive after controlling for certain tribal features, (2) that there are differential effects evident across the three types of gaming nations, and (3) that the state context makes a difference in influencing the relationship between gaming and reservation conditions. The most substantial impacts are for a small subset of nations with Class III gaming and making per capita payments to their members in larger, wealthier states prohibiting non-Indian casinos.
These results challenge some of the core assumptions about Indian gaming radically changing the poor economic conditions endemic to Indian country.
The extent of individual mobility across hierarchical ranks of the income distribution is a critical factor in interpreting the sociopolitical significance of well-documented increases in cross-sectional inequality. The objective of this study is to replicate two earlier investigations of mobility, allowing one to discern trends in mobility rates and patterns.
Mobility was measured using data from NLSY79 (where NLSY is National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) for the years 1989–2004.
Results show that hierarchical (relative) mobility has remained substantial and pervasive from the 1970s through the 1990s for male workers, with no evidence of any attenuation. In view of the increased distance between (absolute) income ranks, this observation is both surprising and reassuring.
Despite substantial increase in cross-sectional inequality, long-term mobility rates have not changed since the 1960s.
Despite numerous studies on parental involvement in children's academic schooling, there is a dearth of knowledge on how parents respond specifically to inadequate academic performance. This study examines whether (1) racial differences exist in parenting philosophy for addressing inadequate achievement, (2) social class has implications for parenting philosophy, and (3) parents’ philosophies are consequential for children's academic achievement.
Using data from the Child Development Supplement (N = 1,041) to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we sort parents into two categories—those whose parenting repertoires for addressing poor achievement include punitive responses and those whose repertoires do not. We then determine whether racial differences exist between these categories and how various responses within the aforementioned categories are related to students’ academic achievement.
The findings show that white and black parents have markedly different philosophies on how to respond to inadequate performance, and these differences appear to impact children's achievement in dramatically different ways.
Educators and policymakers should pay particular attention to how parents respond to inadequate achievement as imploring parents of inadequately performing students to be more involved without providing them with some guidance might exacerbate the problem.
This article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual factors influence the length of prison sentences in California.
The analysis applies a hierarchical linear model to individual and county-level data.
Some characteristics of the racial, organizational, and public safety environments are found to influence the length of prison terms.
The findings support the organizational maintenance perspective and the idea of minority incarceration as a response to a perceived crime threat. Political environment is not found to have a significant effect on sentence lengths, and the findings do not support the racial threat hypothesis. The effects of contextual factors are more modest than those of individual attributes, including legally relevant variables, such as offense severity, prior record, parole status, and three strikes eligibility. African-American and younger offenders receive longer sentences, but this effect is not found for Latinos. Substantive, methodological, and policy implications are discussed.
In recent years, scholars have become concerned about the effects that declining levels of social capital are having on community life in the United States. Data suggest that Americans are less likely to interact with neighbors and less likely to participate in community groups than they were in the past. Nevertheless, researchers have found that participation in some types of organizations has a positive impact on social capital and civic involvement. Each year, millions of American youth participate in programs designed to promote positive youth development. Here, we examine the effect that participation in one of the largest youth organizations, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), has on adult social capital and community involvement.
Utilizing a national survey of adult males, we compare measures of social capital and community involvement for former Scouts and non-Scouts.
Our findings suggest that level of involvement in the Boy Scouts is significantly related to measures of adult social capital and community engagement.
Scouting tends to have a significant impact on the lives of its most committed members. Future research must continue to explore the long-term effects of participation in youth organizations.
This study examines grant funding to four-year universities to determine if institutions with more powerful congressional delegations receive more in research funding from the NIH and NSF.
We analyze grant awards to 1,501 universities from 2000 through 2009. We employ fixed and random effects models to determine the influence of representation on key congressional committees, in conjunction with institutional characteristics such as size and mission, in shaping institutional success in securing grant revenues.
Time-series cross-sectional analysis suggests that members of the U.S. House and Senate may be able to influence the allocation of seemingly merit-based grants and contracts made by the National Institutes of Health, but not the National Science Foundation.
We find that congressional-bureaucratic relationships appear to directly impact grant receipts, and that structural and organizational variations across bureaucratic agencies have important mitigating effects on the extent to which issues of political control matter.
I test the hypothesis that Latino voters were less likely to support Republican incumbents with strong anti-immigration records in the 2006 congressional elections in comparison to Republicans with less restrictive records. I also test whether non-Hispanic white voters were similarly sensitive to incumbent immigration records when determining vote choice.
To examine these questions, I created hierarchical models in which incumbent immigration records, individual views on immigration, and an interaction between the two were used to predict vote choice in the 2006 midterm elections. Individual-level data were provided by the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and incumbent immigration records were provided by NumbersUSA.
This analysis found little or no evidence suggesting that Latino voters are less likely to support Republican incumbents with anti-immigration records. There was evidence suggesting that vote choice among non-Hispanic whites was influenced by incumbent records on immigration, but the effect varied according to the respondent's own views on immigration.
This study found no evidence that incumbent Republicans could increase their share of the Latino vote by embracing less restrictive immigration policies. In fact, doing so may cost them votes among non-Hispanic whites.
This article investigates the role of discussion networks in agenda-setting. More specifically, the focus is on the question whether the partisan composition of people's discussion networks affects what they judge to be the most important problems facing the country.
Using data from the 2000 American National Election Studies (ANES), I employ logistic regression analysis.
The findings suggest that discussion networks indeed play a significant role in setting the public agenda, even taking into consideration people's media use and several other potentially relevant variables.
While prior research has already linked political discussion to participation and vote choice, this study provides evidence that it also affects what issues people prioritize.
To examine the effects of the concentration of Latino students in elementary schools on Latino first graders’ test scores, and to determine if the effects vary by children's nativity status.
We use generalized estimating equations (GEE) on a sample of Latino first graders from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998 (ECLS-K).
For math and reading, Latino concentration in schools improves students’ first grade test scores for Latino children of immigrants, but it has no effect for Latino children of U.S.-born parents. For general knowledge test scores, Latino concentration has no effect for children of immigrants and has a deleterious impact on the scores of children of U.S.-born parents. We also show no effect of Latino concentration on the scores of white children of U.S.-born parents.
The results suggest that Latino concentration in elementary schools promotes educational outcomes for children from Latino immigrant families, but Latino families headed by U.S.-born parents do not benefit from coethnic concentration, which is in accordance with expectations derived from assimilation theories.
Despite growing efforts to assess the views of Chinese citizens toward environmental issues, a crucial question remains unanswered: Do Chinese have a coherent system of environmental attitudes and beliefs as has been found among North Americans, making it appropriate to speak of “environmental concern” or “environmental consciousness” in China? To answer this question we use the belief system perspective and examine the degree of constraint among various environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors reported by Chinese citizens, and also examine the social bases of their environmental concern.
We use data from a 2003 nation-wide survey in China and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test a relatively comprehensive model of environmental concern. Then we construct a structural equation model (SEM) to examine the social bases of such concern.
The CFA results suggest that Chinese citizens have a reasonably coherent sense of generalized environmental concern, and the SEM results show that the higher educated, males, government employees, residents of large cities, and those affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party are more environmentally concerned than their counterparts.
The general public in China possesses a relatively coherent environmental belief system, similar to that found among North Americans, and education is a powerful predictor of environmental concern among the Chinese.
We investigate whether informational cues differentially affect a petition for review at each stage of the U.S. Supreme Court's agenda-setting process. We specifically test how the cost of identifying a cue and the degree of information provided within it affect the cue's impact.
We use a random sample of archival data obtained from the private papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun to jointly analyze the Court's discuss list and final outcome decisions.
Confirming our expectations, we find that both positive cues and negative cues play different roles across the two stages of the Court's agenda-setting process.
These findings are noteworthy since they suggest that the impact of some commonly studied case attributes differs between when a case is selected for the initial level of review versus when it is added to the Court's plenary docket.
In recent years, political scientists have found that civic education improves the democratic capacity of students, yet little research has been done to date on how and why civic education works when it does. In this study, we go inside the classroom to explore how teachers teach civics to find out what works best at preparing young people for responsible, democratic citizenship.
Using a survey of American students, principals, and teachers, we examine the varied instructional methods being employed by social studies teachers in ninth-grade classrooms across the country to determine which methods and which combinations of methods do the best job of enhancing students’ democratic capacity defined as their political knowledge, political efficacy, and intent to vote.
Our results suggest that there are four broad teaching approaches employed by social studies teachers: traditional teaching, active learning, video teaching, and maintenance of an open classroom climate. Teachers may employ some combination of these approaches. The analysis indicates that approaches that foster an open classroom climate (encouraging student input) in combination with the others tend to be the most fruitful across the board. While any combination including an open classroom climate maximizes benefit, traditional teaching (i.e., use of methods including textbook reading, worksheets, memorization, and so forth) combined with an open classroom climate seems to do the best. Also, the results suggest that the combinations that work best for stimulating internal efficacy vary greatly from those stimulating the other citizenship outcomes.
Taken together, our results suggest that fostering an open classroom climate when teaching civics is the surest way to improve the democratic capacity of America's youth. Further, teachers should be attentive to the instructional tradeoffs necessary to creating student capacities for both active and informed citizenship.
Our objective is to extend previous structural explanations of religious belonging and denominational variations concerning “closed communities” and the “divided by faith” thesis to the individual level by testing the effect of religious affiliation and church membership on levels of self-reported social network diversity among a nationally representative sample.
Survey data from the Panel Study—American Religion and Ethnicity (PS-ARE) were used to examine individual-level variations in social network diversity. A multifaceted measure of diversity was decomposed to examine racial, gender, educational, and occupational variations in network diversity using a series of hierarchical linear models.
Our results show that while previous structural explanations suggest that religious belonging is likely to lower the diversity of one's close social network at the individual level, the current findings indicate a positive relationship between religious membership and the diversity of one's close friendship network above and beyond the effects of denominational affiliation.
The results of the decomposition component analyses along with the hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) strategy highlight the relatively distinct role of race in understanding the differing dynamics associated with the many indicators of diversity and religious belonging.
This study investigates, from a cross-national perspective, the determinants of public willingness to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection. Departing from the argument that corrupt institutions diminish the potential for social cooperation, it argues that earlier studies fail to stress the effect of corruption and political trust on people's attitudes.
A multilevel regression analysis is performed using data from the International Social Survey Programme.
The study shows that the willingness to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection is affected by individual political trust while it is hard to actually disentangle any contextual effects of corruption from other contextual effects.
Acknowledging the effects of political trust and corruption improves the discussion on country differences in willingness to make economic sacrifices for environmental protection.
This study examines the effect of countries’ wealth on individuals’ willingness to pay for environmental protection. Former studies using the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) report a positive effect, while studies using the World Values Survey (WVS) or the European Values Study (EVS) find the opposite. In this article, we explain and reconcile these opposing findings.
First, we analyze the three data sets (ISSP, WVS, and EVS) separately by applying multilevel analyses and replicate the different findings. Second, we take respondents’ acquiescence into account and demonstrate that wealth has a positive effect on the willingness to pay in the combined data set.
Respondents in poorer nations in Asia and Eastern Europe have higher levels of acquiescence than respondents in richer Western nations. This difference conceals the wealth effect of studies analyzing the WVS or EVS. If acquiescence is properly taken into account, the wealth effect is confirmed.
Theory predicts that wealth and the willingness to protect the environment should be positively associated. This wealth effect is confirmed by our analyses of the ISSP, WVS, and EVS.
Previous studies demonstrate that campaigns play an important role in mobilizing citizen participation in elections. The present analysis examines the effects of campaign spending on voter turnout in the state legislative setting where our knowledge of campaign effects is quite limited.
In an examination of state legislative elections across 20 states over two election cycles, the analysis considers the influence of candidate spending on voter turnout.
The findings demonstrate that campaign spending has a strong influence on voter participation; however, this effect is mitigated by contextual features. Legislative professionalism reduces the influence of spending, while the presence of a high-stimulus statewide election enhances it. In addition, challenger spending is more effective at stimulating participation than incumbent spending.
Higher levels of campaign spending increase voter participation in state legislative elections; however, these effects vary according to context. These findings have important implications for theories of participation in American democracy as well for normative issues concerning the role of money in elections.
Research has shown that government spending can affect GDP growth rates, yet there is no comprehensive study that looks at how a country's choice of political institutions affects government spending. This article focuses on how the choice of regime type (presidential, parliamentary, or mixed), legislative chamber structure (bicameral or unicameral), legislative chamber size, and electoral rules affect the level of government spending.
The methodology used is pooled ordinary least squares for an unbalanced panel of 92 democracies between 1975 and 2007.
The results show that the relationship between legislative chamber size and government spending is linear in unicameral countries but nonlinear in bicameral countries, plurality electoral rule is always associated with less spending than any other type of electoral rule, and unicameral and bicameral countries should not be modeled together.
While countries that have long-standing political institutions are less likely to change the characteristics of those political institutions in order to change the level of government spending, the results of this article suggest that countries that are establishing new political institutions (e.g., South Sudan and Libya) stand to benefit from knowing what types of institutions are conducive for growth.
We examine whether people with disabilities are part of the political mainstream, or remain outsiders in important respects, by studying political participation and the underexplored topic of how disability relates to attitudes toward politics.
We analyze new disability measures on the 2008 and 2010 Current Population Surveys voting supplements, and two other nationally representative surveys for 2006 and 2007.
Citizens with disabilities remain less likely than nondisabled citizens to vote. While there are few differences in political preferences and party affiliations, people with disabilities tend to favor a greater government role in employment and healthcare, and give lower ratings on government responsiveness and trustworthiness.
People with disabilities continue to be sidelined in important ways. Fully closing the disability gap would have led to 3.0 million more voters in 2008 and 3.2 million more voters in 2010, potentially affecting many races and subsequent public policies.
This research addresses the effect of interruptions on task groups; interactions and individual group members' feelings about the task and the group itself. The interruptions that we consider are not generated from within the group, but have their source outside the group. Emphasizing the theories of structural ritualization, relational cohesion, and productive exchange, we predict that interruptions that have positive, negative, or neutral effects on the group all cause problems with the resolution of routine.
We design and conduct a four-condition experiment to test our predictions.
There was more stability in group procedures when there was no interruption than when there was any kind of interruption. There were no differences in efficiency or activities between positive and negative interruptions. However, there were more agreements in positive interruption groups than in negative interruption groups. Additionally, group members' perceptions varied by the type of interruption: those in positively interrupted groups reported higher levels of competence and feelings of success.
We find that interruption, in and of itself, creates problems with resumption of group processes. Whether the interruption is positive or negative, however, does create interaction differences and differences in group members' perceptions and affect related to the group and each other.
Although the United States 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act is considered meager by international standards, significant variation in family leave policies exists across U.S. states. This article develops a political theory—driven by mobilized interest groups—to explain variation in the duration and pay level of state parental leave policies.
Employing four different measures of family leave policy, we use ordinary least squares and logit models to test the effects of partisanship, women in the legislature, and evangelical populations on parental leave outcomes.
We find that states with a pattern of Democratic Party controlled legislatures and high percentages of legislative seats occupied by women see more generous parental leave protections, while states with large populations of evangelical Christians see less generous policies.
Family leave policies are the product of a battle between competing visions of the family and the state, shaped by partisanship, gender, and religion.
This study examines the impact of substantive representation—measured by pro-minority policies enacted in the United States—on political participation among Latinos.
To deal with the reverse causality that might flow from political participation to substantive representation, this study employs instrument variable regression analysis.
The results of the analysis show that Latinos in states with many pro-minority policies are more likely to take part in politics.
The previous studies on empowerment have mainly focused on descriptive representation as the source of empowerment, ignoring another dimension of minority representation—substantive representation. This study attempts to add to this literature by considering the effect of substantive representation on empowerment. The results indicate that Latinos respond to substantive representation in a positive way.
I test the importance of demographic and economic contextual variables for the success of extreme right parties.
I employ subnational data from the crucial case of Latvia to capture the effects of minority group size and economic change on the extreme right vote. Ethnic Latvians constitute a bare majority of the Latvian population and GDP dropped by 18 percent in 2009.
I find that localities with high or rising unemployment were less likely to support extreme right parties. The dampening effect of unemployment on the extreme right was greater in localities with large minority populations.
These counterintuitive findings raise questions about the logic and generalizability of existing explanations of extreme right voting. The study of the extreme right is hampered not only by ill-suited measures of group size and economic conditions, but also by overarching theories that predict group-based outcomes.
Washington State held its first “top two primary” in 2008. Under this system, the two candidates receiving the most votes move on to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. This study empirically examines the potential incentive under this top two primary system for each political party to discourage “excess” party candidates from entering primary contests.
We examine this possibility by looking at the Washington State Legislative Primaries in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. With these data, we estimate the factors impacting the number of primary candidates in a race for each political party, including the change in the primary format in 2008.
Our results indicate that the switch to the top two primary reduced the likelihood of having multiple Democratic candidates in a race, reduced the number of “excess” Democratic candidates, but did not have a significant impact on Republican candidates.
With many states revising their primary systems, an understanding of the incentives present under alternative systems is critical. As such, the results presented in this study provide evidence that the top two primary gives the political parties an incentive to discourage excess primary candidates.
The study examines spatial variation in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States in relation to the local distribution of the pollution burden.
We conducted between- and within-city analysis of geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project and data from the 2000 U.S. Census.
Average exposure in an urban area is positively correlated with the extent of racial and ethnic disparity in the distribution of the exposure burden. Average exposures also tend to be higher for all population subgroups, including whites, in urban areas with higher minority pollution-exposure discrepancies.
The correlations could arise from causal linkages in either or both directions: the ability to displace pollution onto minorities may lower the effective cost of pollution for industrial firms; and higher average pollution burdens may induce whites to invest more political capital in efforts to influence firms’ siting decisions. The analysis suggests that improvement in environmental justice could benefit not only minorities but also whites.
Contact theory posits that interracial contact can reduce racial prejudice and perceptions of prejudice. This relationship typically has been looked at from the perspective of whites’ views regarding race and racial relations, but few studies have examined the implications of interracial contact for blacks’ perceptions regarding the extent of prejudice and discrimination.
With data from the National Survey of Black Workers, I examine whether opportunities for contact in settings with varying racial concentrations in youth and adulthood are associated with blacks’ perceptions of prejudice. I use racial concentration—measured here as mostly black settings, half-black (racially balanced) settings, and mostly white settings (compared to all-black settings)—as an indicator of opportunities for interracial contact.
Multivariate analyses offer some evidence of the benefits of opportunities for contact in mixed-race and mostly white settings for blacks’ perceptions of prejudice.
Although having opportunities for contact can be beneficial, this evidence is limited to noncompetitive childhood environments, namely residential neighborhoods. Findings highlight the important of accounting for the racial balance of settings where interracial contact takes place.
During the 2008 presidential election, questions about Barack Obama's religious affiliations spread rapidly over the Internet and became a regular story in the national news. Despite Obama's repeated testimony that he is a Christian, surveys indicated that a sizeable portion of the public believed that he was a Muslim, while others indicated that they were “unsure” of his religious allegiances. We evaluate the extent to which racial attitudes played a role in how the public viewed Obama's religious affiliations.
We used nationally representative surveys conducted by the Pew Foundation and a state-level survey conducted in Arkansas.
Our findings suggest that attitudes about Obama's religious affiliation were significantly influenced by symbolic racism.
These findings suggest that the American public dialogue about racial politics has evolved in recent years to include religious denominations.
To explore the impact Hurricane Katrina on citizens’ trust in government. Of primary interest is the relationship between poor governmental performance in the aftermath of the storm and low levels of political trust. In addition, levels of trust are related to respondents’ predictions regarding the time it will take their communities to recover.
Relationships are investigated through an analysis of data from a survey of residents in the Katrina-affected areas of Louisiana and Mississippi. For this initial exploration, bivariate analysis is used to elaborate relationships between measures of trust in government and the experiences and attitudes of survey respondents.
Analyses reveal interesting and significant relationships among the variables. Negative experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina are correlated with low levels of political trust. Also, low levels of trust are associated with pessimistic predictions of the time it will take communities to recover from the storm.
Given the importance of political trust for the long-term health of the political system, it is critical that governments at all levels enhance their effectiveness in dealing with such disasters.
This study investigates the effect of attitudes, case facts, and political control on the fair housing decisions made by administrative law judges (ALJs) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Based on data obtained from HUD under a Freedom of Information Act request, we use Probit regression to model the outcomes of every housing discrimination case decided by the entire population of ALJs between 1989 and 2003.
We discover significant variation in the likelihood of a pro-complainant outcome and the amount of actual damages awarded in fair housing disputes.
The attitudinal model of judicial decision making appears to apply to ALJ behavior in housing discrimination cases. At the same time, case facts, bureaucratic oversight, and other legal factors constrain ALJs.
While previous cross-sectional research has suggested a relationship between the prohibition of alcohol sales and the presence of distinctive patterns of religious adherence, the relationship between policy adoption and social change is best evaluated through longitudinal analysis. We assess the extent to which a policy decision by a county to shift away from or toward a policy of prohibition is related to underlying changes in the composition of the countywide population.
Multinomial logistic regression analyses are used to describe the relationship between county-level demographic and cultural variables and changes in a county's prohibition policy status from dry to wet and wet to dry between 1970 and 2008.
The results demonstrate that certain kinds of social change are associated with changes in a county's public policy with respect to prohibition. By far, the strongest factor explaining shifts from dry status to wet status is an increase in a county's religious diversity. Conversely, there is also a relationship between a county's religious character and movement from wet status to dry status, specifically, the strongest factor associated with movement from wet status to dry status is an increasing rate of Evangelical adherence in the county.
There is a relationship between the religious character of a county and the preference for this particular policy option. While religious change is most important in explaining public policy on prohibition, changes in the religious milieu are one element of a broader process of modernization and other social change that involves such demographic variables as income, education, and urbanization.
Proponents of the “regime politics” approach argue that the U.S. Supreme Court tends to promote the interests of the dominant partisan coalition even while engaging in seemingly countermajoritarian behavior. These scholars suggest that the Court's invalidation of state laws is used to enforce a national consensus against outlier states. We argue this claim does not withstand empirical analysis.
We employ logistic regression analysis to evaluate the relationship between the invalidation of state laws by the Court and the ideological distance between the sitting national government and the state government that enacted the law.
Our analysis fails to find support for the regime enforcement hypothesis; in fact, we find evidence of a negative relationship between ideological distance and invalidation.
Our findings suggest that regime politics scholars have underestimated the Court's countermajoritarian role in reviewing state legislation.
We employ theories of causal reasoning to understand attributions about the 2007 Virginia Tech and 2011 Tucson shootings. We argue that attributions stem from two motives: (1) a partisan motivation to perceive events consistent with party attachments, and (2) a drive to minimize the cognitive burdens associated with extensive reasoning processes. The latter motive is expected to produce a fundamental attribution bias: the least educated respondents attribute blame for the shootings to the individual assailant while the most educated attribute blame to environmental conditions.
We test hypotheses using 2007 and 2011 national surveys reported just after the shootings.
Our findings suggest a major partisan divide on the causes of tragedy; Democrats believed social and political forces were responsible whereas Republicans blamed individual gunmen. Considerable differences between the least and most educated respondents were also discovered. Greater educational attainment was associated with environmental attributions. Finally, the analyses revealed that education had virtually no influence on Republican attributions, but enhanced Democrats’ penchant to blame the tragedy on environmental factors.
Our study highlights the utility of using motivational theories of causal attributions to understanding and modeling the cognitive processes involved in perceived causes about gun-related tragedies.
Many studies have examined how equity in personal relationships affects mental health and well-being. Often, such studies use measures based on how people perceive the balance in a relationship. In this study, the reverse causal path is studied, from well-being to perceived equity. The expectation is that depressed mood would lead to more negative views of the degree of equity in a relationship.
The reciprocal relationships between depressive symptoms and perceived equity are studied using a large representative survey with two waves of measurement. The focus is on intergenerational relationships and the perspective taken is that of the elderly parent.
Analyses show that there is little effect of equity on depressed mood once this is analyzed in a longitudinal fashion. More evidence is obtained for the reverse path: mothers (but not fathers) who are depressed develop a more negative view of the degree of equity in the relationships they have with their children, even when reports of actual support exchange are taken into account.
Depressed mood can bias perceptions of equity. In a more general way, the findings are in line with some recent experimental studies that have emphasized the importance of feelings for perceptions.
This article provides a timely assessment of U.S. life expectancy given recent stalls in the growth of length of life, the continuing drop in international rankings of life expectancy for the United States, and a period of growing social and economic insecurity.
Time-series analysis is used on over 70 years of data from the Human Mortality Database to forecast future life expectancy to the year 2055.
The results show limited improvements in U.S. life expectancy at birth, less than three years on average, for both men and women.
Even in uncertain times, it is important to look forward in preparing for the needs of future populations. The results presented here underscore the relevance of policy and health initiatives aimed at improving the nation's health and reveal important insight into possible limits to mortality improvement over the next five decades.
In this analysis, we ask whether there is systematic variation in the reporting of suicide by medicolegal system and if so whether this biases estimated effects of social correlates on suicide.
With cause of death records (1999–2002) and 2000 Census data, we use negative binomial regression to analyze the effects of medicolegal system on suicide and nonsuicide mortality aggregated at county of occurrence.
We find that elected coroners have slightly lower official suicide rates than medical examiners (MEs; all of whom are appointed) and appointed coroners. In addition, we find that omitting medicolegal system does not bias estimates of the social determinants of suicide.
Contrary to arguments that MEs' greater scientific training makes them more likely to underreport suicides, we conclude that appointed death investigators (MEs and appointed coroners) underreport suicide to a lesser degree than elected coroners, who are subject to greater public pressures that result in the misclassification of suicides.
This study investigates the effect of Hurricane Katrina on adolescent feelings of social isolation. Much anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals who continued to reside in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck felt isolated from the rest of the country. Based on Durkheim's concept of anomie, we suggest that adolescents in New Orleans (and the Gulf region) may experience social isolation as a result of the hurricane.
We test this hypothesis with data from the Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention Study, a multisite longitudinal study of adolescents in six cities around the United States.
We find that students in New Orleans are no different from students in the other five cities in their level of social isolation prior to the hurricane. In contrast, our posthurricane survey reveals significant differences between New Orleans (and Gulf region) students and students in the other five (comparison) cities in social isolation.
Our findings lend contemporary support to the concept of anomie and suggest the importance of mental health interventions for adolescents immediately following a natural disaster.
We examine the connection between pork-barrel projects and the election returns of members of the U.S. Congress. While previous researchers have uncovered little evidence of a direct link, we refine the perspective that pork has electoral implications by advancing the argument that its effects differ across geographic and partisan contexts.
Our empirical analysis focuses on the Senate—which has largely escaped attention—and utilizes a measure of pork that includes only those projects inserted by legislators as line items in appropriation bills from 1996 to 2004.
We find a direct relationship between pork and electoral performance, albeit one that is conditioned upon ideological congruence, constituency size, and the political ideology of the legislator.
Electoral payoffs for pork-barreling accrue to some but not all senators. Moreover, our findings demonstrate the pragmatic rationale for conservative opposition to earmarks.
Congressional votes are only recorded if a member formally requests a roll call vote, and that request is supported by one-fifth of those present. Many votes pass viva voce and are never recorded. We seek to examine changing patterns of unrecorded voting, analyze the causes of these changes, and consider the implications of these changes for congressional scholars.
Using landmark legislation from the 39th (1865–1867) to the 104th Congress (1995–1996), we analyze whether bills receive a recorded or unrecorded final passage vote.
We find that while the likelihood that a landmark law receives a recorded final passage vote fluctuates over time, electoral pressures consistently influence members’ decisions to record their votes.
We argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data.
Studies of minority representation customarily focus on groups whose social position remains steady over the time period in question. We consider whether and how Arab-American representation shifted following September 11th as the group's social status changed rapidly.
We analyze the determinants of Senate voting alongside the Arab-American Institute from 2000 to 2008. We employ ordinary least square (OLS) regression models that account for the time series cross-sectional (TSCS) nature of our panel data.
Our findings suggest that Arab-American representation significantly declined in the wake of September 11th, both among Democratic and Republican senators. As the political environment improved over time, representation slowly rose in subsequent years.
We show that the quality of Arab-American representation declined after September 11th despite no significant change in either their size or in electoral outcomes. We also show that broad theories of minority representation apply to even small ethnic groups, as the determinants of Arab-American representation parallel those of African Americans and Latinos.
This study explains how behavior genetic analysis using a twin design can help us assess the validity of our measures.
We test multiple indicators of response propensity, a measure used by survey researchers to better understand the similarities and differences between survey respondents and nonrespondents. The response propensity indicators evaluated include response to follow-up surveys and subsequent waves of a panel and the completion of a sensitive recontact information sheet to aid subsequent recontact efforts.
A classical and the newly proposed method of validation all point to insufficient validity of our response propensity measures. Construct validation using data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States exhibited little correlation between indicators. Genetic analysis suggests that the success of subsequent data-collection efforts is predominantly driven by additive genetic effects, while nonresponse to inquiries for recontact information is influenced predominantly by familial environmental predictors.
Our results indicate that different underlying constructs drive the response propensity indicators, suggesting that nonresponse is, at minimum, multidimensional.