Recent crisp items

Assessment of Interracial/Interethnic Conflict in Los Angeles

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles has a history of considerable racial and ethnic conflict, ranging from the “zoot suit riots” of 1943 through the Watts riots of 1965 and the so-called “Rodney King” rioting in 1992. Politics in Los Angeles has often reflected this intergroup conflict, from Sam Yorty’s mayoralty campaign against the black Tom Bradley, that many observers felt was laced with quasi-racist appeals, through the high-intensity contentions over busing for school integration in the 1970's and over illegal immigration in the 1990's, to the ethnic rivalries that surfaced in the 2001 mayoralty race between James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa.

At the end of World War II Los Angeles County had an overwhelmingly white population. That has changed over time, most dramatically in the last two decades. Now there is no majority ethnic group in Los Angeles County. The largest consists of Latinos, with about 41% of the total population, according to the 2000 Census. Trailing well behind are non-Hispanic...

Long-Term Continuities in the Politics of Race

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

This study tests for long-term continuities in the politics of race. It uses a quasi-experimental method to examine the role of racial issues in presidential voting in the present era. It identifies two earlier historical eras in which it is generally agreed racial issues were a central point of partisan division in national politics: the immediately antebellum and civil rights periods. It uses presidential voting data to demonstrate continuity in the distribution of the vote across states between those two eras, and between both eras and the present. The pattern of the vote has been quite different in eras when race has not been a central national political issue. We argue that these data are consistent with the view that divisions over race continue to underlie partisan preferences to a significant degree in the present era.

Self Interest, Moral Principle, and Social Context: A Rational Choice Analysis of the Abolitionist Movement

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Is it possible to explain all political behavior in terms of self-interest? If we interpret self-interest as narrow, direct and short-term, the answer is obviously no. Things that we might call culture, ideology, ideas and moral principles clearly affect individual choices, and, thereby, political outcomes. But inquiries into the the logic behind these other forces often bring us back to interest. Much behavior that appears at odds with self-interest can be “rationalized” by considering long time horizons and the complexities of social interaction. In acting against my short-term self-interest, I may be building a useful reputation, winning and maintaining allies, making credible commitments, or establishing a focal point. Recent game theoretic work has shown how patterns of behavior that we might attribute to culture (Kreps 1990, Fearon and Laitin, 1996), partisanship (Aldrich 1995), ideology (Bawn 1999) or ideas (Garret and Weingast 1993, Weingast 1995, Bates, de Figueiredo...

Built on Rock or Sand? The Stability of Religiosity and Attitudes Towards Abortion

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines two questions. First, how stable is religiosity over time? Second, how does religiosity affect the stability of attitudes over time? I begin by discussing several reasons why religiosity might help to stabilize attitudes. Then, drawing on the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel, I examine the stability of religious tradition, religious movement identification, church attendance, view of scripture, and the overall importance of religion. For the most part, these indicators are found to be fairly stable, though not uniformly so. I then examine the effect of religiosity on the stability of attitudes towards abortion. Religiosity is found to have no significant impact. I conclude by speculating on reasons why.

A Paradox of Public Opinion: Why a Less Interested Public is More Attentive to War

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

This study argues that even as the American people declares themselves, in countless public opinion surveys, less concerned with foreign affairs in the Post-Cold War era than at any time since the end of World War II, they are nonetheless growing increasingly attentive to foreign policy crises. I develop a theory suggesting that this trend is attributable to a “direct marketing” revolution in television broadcasting, which has for many Americans increased the appeal of information about foreign crises. As evidence, I conduct two statistical investigations. The first examines the relationship between individual media consumption habits and attentiveness to three recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. The second compares public opinion trends during the three major post-World War II American uses of military force -- Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, to determine whether the relationships identified at the individual level can account for aggregate trends in public...

The Blanket Primary: Candidate Strategy and Voter Response

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

The party coalitions that emerged from the New Deal realignment were defined by race, nationality and ethnicity, religion, region, and social class. In the last decade, the "religious impulse" has become an increas-ingly important aspect of the party coalitions as Republican and Demo-cratic identifiers have become increasingly distinct in terms of their re-ligiosity and religious practice. The paper traces the increasing impor-tance of religiosity and social class as correlates of party identification and argues that the contemporary GOP has a support base that is highly similar to that of conventional Christian Democratic parties. It further suggests that the pattern of issue politics between the parties today is a result of this new cleavage structure.

The Stealth Campaign: Experimental Studies of Slate Mail in California

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is a preliminary consideration of slate mail. We provide some basic information about the nature and use of slate mail in California and about the policy debates that have surrounded it in the last decade or two.4 We then briefly describe a program of experimental research into the effects of slate mail and report and analyze in detail the results of one such experiment.

The Persistence of the Past: The Class of 1965 Turns Fifty

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

This paper revisits the linked questions of attitudinal crystallization and generational formation in an attempt to nudge the understanding of these matters forward. Our goal, put most generally, is to bring ideas about the formation of political generations into an analysis of the long-term dynamics of attitude crystallization. Although scholars have quite often tried to trace the long-term development of political generations, and often employ comparison groups (e.g., Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb 1991, Cole, Zucker, and Ostrove 1998, Elder 1974, Fendrich and Lovoy 1988, Jennings 1987, Markus 1979, Stewart, Settles, and Winter 1998), less common are analyses of attitudinal crystallization that bring ideas about political generations to bear. We do this in the paper in two ways.

First, our analysis distinguishes within an age-cohort between those who were politically engaged and those who were politically unengaged during their early adult, and presumably politically formative,...

Is It Really Racism? The Origins of White Americans' Opposition to Race-Targeted Policies

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

We address the role of racial antagonism in whites’ opposition to racially-targeted policies. The data come from four surveys selected for their unusually rich measurement of both policy preferences and other racial attitudes: the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies, the 1994 General Social Survey, and the 1995 Los Angeles County Social Survey. They indicate that such opposition is more strongly rooted in racial antagonism than in non-racial conservatism, that whites tend to respond to quite different racial policies in similar fashion, that racial attitudes affect evaluations of black and ethnocentric white presidential candidates, and that their effects are just as strong among college graduates as among those with no college education. Second, we present evidence that symbolic racism is consistently more powerful than older forms of racial antagonism, and its greater strength does not diminish with controls on non-racial ideology, partisanship, and values. The origins...

Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer

Wed, 8 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000

With political campaigns becoming increasingly adversarial, scholars have recently given some much-needed attention to the impact of negative advertising on turnout.In a widely recognized Review article and subsequent book, Ansolabehere and his colleagues (1994, 1995) contend that attack advertising drives potential voters away from the polls. We dispute the generalizability of these claims outside of the experimental setting. Using NES survey data as well aggregate sources, we subject this previous research to rigorous real-world testing. The survey data directly contradict Ansolabehere et al.'s findings, yielding evidence of a turnout advantage for those recollecting negative presidential campaign advertising. In attempting to replicate Ansolabehere et al’s earlier aggregate results we uncover quite significant discrepancies and inconsistencies in their dataset. This analysis leads to the conclusion that their aggregate study is hopelessly flawed. We must conclude that attack...

Reformulating the Party Coalitions: The "Christian Democratic" Republicans

Wed, 8 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000