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Political Behavior (political + behavior)
Selected AbstractsWhen is the median voter paradigm a reasonable guide for policy choices in a representative democracy?ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 3 2003Alex Cukierman The median voter paradigm (MVP) has been widely used to study the interactions between economic and political behavior. While this approach is easy to work with, it abstracts from institutional detail. This paper explores whether the MVP leads on average to the same policies that would be chosen in a two-party representative democracy (RD). When it does not, the paper fully characterizes the size and magnitude of the average divergence (or bias) between policy choices in MVP and in RD in terms of the degree of polarization between the parties, their relative electoral prospects, and the distribution of electoral uncertainty. The results are then applied to the influential Meltzer and Richard (1981) theory of the size of government. [source] Balancing Theory versus Fact, Stasis versus Change: A Look at Some Introductions to International RelationsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 1 2004Andrew J. Enterline Do dramatic events in international relations (IR) signal fundamental changes in political behavior? How do international relations texts address change, and what are the implications of textbook design for the way that we teach undergraduate introductions to the field? This article provides an initial inquiry into these questions by surveying a sample of five international relations texts. Rather than seek to pick the best book, the article examines the methods by which the textbook authors balance theory versus facts, as well as stasis versus change, in formulating introductory frameworks. This analysis is motivated by way of a general comparison of the sample texts with Organski's (1958) text, World Politics. Finally, the author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of different balancing strategies, and the implications of these strategies for teaching introductions to international relations. [source] Political will, political skill, and political behaviorJOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 3 2005Darren C. Treadway The current study used Mintzberg's (1983) conceptualization of political will and political skill to evaluate the predictors and consequences of political behavior at work. As elements of political will, we hypothesized that need for achievement and intrinsic motivation would predict the use of political behavior at work. Furthermore, we argued that political skill would moderate the relationship between political behavior and emotional labor. Data gathered from employees (N,=,193) representing a wide array of organizations substantiated the proposed relationships. Specifically, need for achievement and intrinsic motivation were positively associated with political behavior. In turn, those opting to employ political behavior at work experienced a higher degree of emotional labor, but this relationship was found to operate differently at low and high levels of political skill. Specifically, emotional labor was a consequence of political behavior for those low in political skill, but emotional labor reactions from political behavior were neutralized for individuals high in political skill. Implications of these results, strengths and limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Affect and Cognition in Party IdentificationPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2005Barry C. Burden Despite the centrality of party identification in understandings of political behavior in the United States, there is an unacknowledged disparity between our theories and measurement of the phenomenon. The traditional method of measuring party identification relies on supplying cognitive cues by explicitly asking respondents to "think" about their partisanship. The Michigan theory of party identification, in contrast, assumes that partisanship is primarily affective. Using a survey experiment, we explore the effects of asking respondents to feel rather than think about their party identification. The new questions reveal that the electorate is more Republican than previously thought. Response timers show that respondents take longer to answer the new items, suggesting that they are surveying a wider and deeper array of considerations. These results serve to revive many of our traditional conceptions of how party identity works while also opening the door for new research questions. [source] The Prospects for Prospect Theory: An Empirical Evaluation of International Relations Applications of Framing and Loss AversionPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2004William A. Boettcher III International relations theorists have tried to adapt prospect theory to make it relevant to the study of real-world decision-making and testable beyond the constraints of the laboratory. Three experiments with undergraduate samples were conducted in an effort to clarify the advantages and limitations of prospect theory as adapted to explain political behavior. The first experiment tested hypotheses regarding the impact of prospect framing on group polarization, but these were only weakly supported. The second and third experiments examined alternative adaptations of the concept of framing; the results suggest that the political science expansion of the concept of framing may, under certain conditions, produce clear and robust preference reversals. [source] Irrational Wanting and Subrational Liking: How Rudimentary Motivational and Affective Processes Shape Preferences and ChoicesPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2003Piotr Winkielman People's wanting and liking reactions reflect not only high-level beliefs, but also the operation of rudimentary biopsychological processes. Previous studies suggest that the following wanting and liking processes may be relevant to political behavior: irrational wanting (where wanting is triggered by activation of the brain dopamine system and becomes dissociated from liking); unconscious liking and wanting (where evaluative judgments and behavior are modified without awareness of the eliciting affective stimuli or of the underlying affective response); and fluency-based liking (where preferences are influenced by the ease of stimulus processing). This review suggests how conceptual and methodological tools from affective neuroscience and psychophysiology can refine our understanding of basic affective and motivational processes that shape political attitudes and choices. [source] Moral Values and Vote Choice in the 2004 U.S. Presidential ElectionPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 2 2007Jonathan Knuckey Scholars and journalists have emphasized the growing importance of cultural issues and a "values divide" in shaping recent political behavior of the American electorate. Discussion of a values-based cleavage has been especially evident since exit polls for the 2004 presidential election revealed that "moral values" topped the list of issues that respondents cited as the "most important" issue in the election. While there has been considerable debate and disagreement over the influence of moral values in 2004, no analysis has performed a crucial test of the moral values hypothesis, namely developing a multivariate model to examine the effect of moral values on vote choice relative to other issue preferences and demographic variables. This article develops such a model using data from the 2004 American National Election Study. Findings suggest that moral values exerted an important effect on vote choice in the 2004 presidential election, even when other predictors of vote choice were included in a multivariate model. [source] ORGANIZATIONAL INVOLVEMENT AND BLACK PARTICIPATION: CONTINUITY AND CHANGEPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 4 2000Darryl L. McMiller Empirical investigations of black political activity either do not include measures for associational affiliation among blacks or take into consideration differences among black organizations in their capacity to promote political activity among their members. In this investigation, a model of black political behavior was presented that included not only the standard predictors of political activity, but also incorporated measures for membership in different types of voluntary associations. Two important conclusions emerge from this study. First, this investigation demonstrated that since the 1960s, there has been an important transformation in the organizational infrastructure of the black community: blacks changed their voluntary memberships from political to nonpartisan organizations. Second, these findings showed that the decline in group-based political mobilization since the 1960s is partly the result of this shift from partisan to nonpolitical affiliations. [source] What to Do about Missing Values in Time-Series Cross-Section DataAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2010James Honaker Applications of modern methods for analyzing data with missing values, based primarily on multiple imputation, have in the last half-decade become common in American politics and political behavior. Scholars in this subset of political science have thus increasingly avoided the biases and inefficiencies caused by ad hoc methods like listwise deletion and best guess imputation. However, researchers in much of comparative politics and international relations, and others with similar data, have been unable to do the same because the best available imputation methods work poorly with the time-series cross-section data structures common in these fields. We attempt to rectify this situation with three related developments. First, we build a multiple imputation model that allows smooth time trends, shifts across cross-sectional units, and correlations over time and space, resulting in far more accurate imputations. Second, we enable analysts to incorporate knowledge from area studies experts via priors on individual missing cell values, rather than on difficult-to-interpret model parameters. Third, because these tasks could not be accomplished within existing imputation algorithms, in that they cannot handle as many variables as needed even in the simpler cross-sectional data for which they were designed, we also develop a new algorithm that substantially expands the range of computationally feasible data types and sizes for which multiple imputation can be used. These developments also make it possible to implement the methods introduced here in freely available open source software that is considerably more reliable than existing algorithms. [source] Exploiting a Rare Communication Shift to Document the Persuasive Power of the News MediaAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009Jonathan McDonald Ladd Using panel data and matching techniques, we exploit a rare change in communication flows,the endorsement switch to the Labour Party by several prominent British newspapers before the 1997 United Kingdom general election,to study the persuasive power of the news media. These unusual endorsement switches provide an opportunity to test for news media persuasion while avoiding methodological pitfalls that have plagued previous studies. By comparing readers of newspapers that switched endorsements to similar individuals who did not read these newspapers, we estimate that these papers persuaded a considerable share of their readers to vote for Labour. Depending on the statistical approach, the point estimates vary from about 10% to as high as 25% of readers. These findings provide rare evidence that the news media exert a powerful influence on mass political behavior. [source] Campaign Learning and Vote DeterminantsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009David A. M. Peterson How campaigns shape voters' decisions is central to the study of political behavior. The basic conclusion is simple: campaigns matter. While we know who campaigns influence, there is no clear empirical evidence of why or how campaigns matter. This comes from two things. First, despite different theories about campaigns, the existing studies measure the campaign as a function of time. Second, these studies ignore the individual-level psychological mediators of these effects. We know that there are differences across time during a campaign, but we do not know how or why. In this article I suggest that campaigns work by altering voters' uncertainty about the candidates and combine aggregate and individual-level data using a hierarchical logit estimated via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. I find that voters change how they weigh their attitudes during the campaign because of changes in their uncertainty about the candidates. [source] | |||||||||||||