Political Behavior

A study of the conditions under which parents reproduce their political ideologies in their adolescent children, conducted in Israel, shows that (1) parents do reproduce their political outlooks, (2) there is a greater likelihood that hawkish parents will have like-minded children than dovish ones, and (3) whereas the reproduction of doves is dependent on higher education, hawks reproduce regardless of their level of education, authoritarianism, or religiosity. The data are from 400 parent/child interviews. Cohort and intrafamily analysis are used to explain the change from generation to generation and the continuity and change within families. Clues to the tendency to move right are discerned in (1) the relative hawkishness of parents of 18-year-olds who are about to begin their army service, (2) the relative complexity of the dovish position, (3) the continuous Israeli-Arab conflict into which Israeli adolescents are born, and (4) the rise of the ideology advocating Israel's right to the territories conquered in 1967.

Party identification is a standard part of our understanding of presidential voting, but the effects of presidential incumbency on presidential voting have not been recognized in most voting models. Democratic candidates in the twentieth century received 10 percent more of the two-party vote when Democratic incumbents were running for reelection than when Republican incumbents were running. National Election Studies surveys show that the effect of incumbency varies with individual partisanship, with the greatest effect, as expected, among independents. Opposition party identifiers defect at a higher rate than incumbent party identifiers when the incumbent is running for reelection. Even after controlling for retrospective and prospective economic voting, a 6 percent effect is found for incumbency. Incumbency thus conditions the impact of partisanship on presidential voting.

Where tolerance is defined as a person's willingness to put up with political expression that the person finds objectionable, we see three prerequisites for tolerance. The person must support the general right of political expression, the general right of people to engage in the particular acts under consideration, and finally the right of members of even objectionable groups to engage in those specific acts. Many past studies of tolerance proceed directly from the first of these prerequisites to the third, and, in doing so, fail to distinguish between general attitudes regarding particular acts of expression (i.e., does the survey respondent support the right of people in general to hold public rallies) and attitudes regarding particular groups engaged in those same acts (i.e., does the respondent support the right of Communists or militia groups to hold public rallies). The consequence is ambiguity in interpretation of the meaning and etiology of tolerance, and in cross-national comparison. We demonstrate our concerns using data from a split-ballot survey conducted in Romania. Results reveal that accurate interpretation of Romanians' tolerance of the right of ethnic Hungarians to engage in various acts of political expression requires attention to respondents' general attitudes regarding those same acts.

Scholars have spent a great deal of effort examining the effects of negative advertising on citizens’ perceptions of candidates. Much of this work has used experimental designs and has produced mixed findings supporting one of two competing theories. First, negative ads may harm candidates who sponsor them because citizens tend to dislike negativity. Second, negativity may drive down citizens’ support for the targeted candidate because the attacks give people reasons to reject the target. We argue that the mixed findings produced by prior research may be driven by a disregard for campaign dynamics. We present a critical test of these two theories using data drawn from 80 statewide elections—37 gubernatorial and 43 U.S. Senate contests—from three election years and public opinion polling collected during the last 12 weeks of each campaign. We find that a candidate’s support declines as her advertising strategy includes a higher proportion of negative ads relative to her opponent and that this process unfolds slowly over the course of the campaign.

This study analyzes the internal and external consistency of standard and alternative measures of stratification position. Researchers and theorists have used a number of concepts to describe individual's position within the stratification system, e.g., level of education, occupational prestige, and Marxist class position. The central issues of this paper are the degree to which each of the operationalizations of these concepts (current in the literature) are related to one another, the degree to which the operationalizations of each concept are related to the operationalizations of other concepts that measure stratification position, and the extent to which these operational measures are “interchangeable.” Using data collected in the SRC/CPS 1980 American National Election Study, we find the strongest relationships to exist among those indicators which measure the same concept (e.g., the NORC Prestige Scale and the Duncan SEI), although all indicators are positively related. Regression analyses employing different criterion variables as dependent variables and several measures of stratification position as independent variables reveal that these measures are not “interchangeable.”

What makes violence political? Existing research argues that experiencing violence generates anger and grievances, which cause political mobilization, retribution, and spirals of escalating violence. I argue that the effect of violence on the political behavior of survivors is highly variable: situation-specific information shapes how survivors of violence experience anger, and whether they attribute blame to individual perpetrators or form more durable, expansive political grievances toward targets like police or prosecutors. I use qualitative and computational methods to analyze transcripts of original interviews with relatives of Black and Latinx homicide victims in Chicago, IL. Results show substantial diversity in emotional experience and blame attribution. I argue that this diversity is caused by variation in clarity about identity and motive of the perpetrator, and variation in perception of perpetrator responsibility. Having or lacking crucial information determines whether survivors become angry at perpetrators or form broader political grievances after traumatic experiences. Evidence from Chicago challenges the notion that violent trauma and anger have automatic or straightforward consequences for political behavior.

This essay asks what might be most usefully studied in future analyses of the impact of groups on the voting behavior of individuals. A dimension of group analysis so far neglected concerns some value orientations that affect the relevance of group consciousness to voting or other political behavior. In particular, the legitimacy of group political action and of group politics more generally is of central importance. Connected to such evaluations is the character of group comparisons, such as in group-focused relative power deprivation. Also of relevance are competing political value constellations, especially individualism and majoritarianism. By the use of a variety of National Election Studies and Wisconsin survey data, these themes are explored empirically to show the extent of a group focus that goes beyond the usual measures of group consciousness. Relative approval of group-based pluralism is also shown to affect the patterns of relationships of major predictors of turnout. And finally, a LISREL analysis is presented that shows that a group focus is as important as a party focus in affecting the level of political alienation pertinent to voter participation.

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public attitudes toward ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ government spending. Federal social welfare spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public attitudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects.