The forthcoming article “Candidates or Districts? Reevaluating the Role of Race in Voter Turnout” by Bernard L. Fraga is summarized by the author here:

The recent film “Selma” highlighted the struggle by African-Americans to win voting rights. Yet even as we mark the 50th anniversary of these events, Black, Latino, and Asian American turnout continues to lag non-Hispanic White turnout. The 2008 and 2012 elections appeared to be an exception, however: Black turnout matched or exceeded White turnout nationally. Given Barack Obama’s candidacy, media naturally asserted that his historic run encouraged African-Americans to turn out when they otherwise would have stayed home. The same sort of candidate race-turnout connection also forms a tenet of modern political science understandings of race and politics. But does candidate race impact who turns out to vote? If so, do we see a similar pattern across racial/ethnic groups?

In “Candidates or Districts? Reevaluating the Role of Race in Voter Turnout,” I examined and contrasted White, Black, Latino, and Asian American turnout via detailed, individual-level voter registration records. The focus of the study was on recent congressional primary and general elections, where hundreds of candidates of various racial/ethnic backgrounds seek office each election cycle. Importantly, the analysis was conducted at the state or congressional district level, thus allowing me to account for demographic and partisan differences across jurisdictions using Census data.

In line with past work, I find that when minority candidates are on the ballot, minority turnout is often substantially higher. However, the relationship between candidate race and turnout is overshadowed of a more robust impact of “district” race and turnout: Black and Latino citizens are more likely to turn out to vote in places where they compose a large share of the population. Since Black and Latino candidates tend to seek office in places where their ethnic group is a substantial portion of the population, we see a spurious relationship between candidate background and participation better explained by the demographic (that is, racial/ethnic) makeup of the districts themselves. After accounting for this factor, we see no difference in rates of turnout attributable to the race/ethnicity of congressional candidates. Asian Americans, America’s fastest-growing minority group, also show no signs of increased turnout when same-race candidates are on the ballot, nor do non-Hispanic White citizens.

In short, I demonstrate that candidate race matters less than the unique racial/ethnic makeup of the places these candidates usually seek office. But what explains such a finding? One possibility is that voters are more likely to turn out when their ethnic group holds sway in election outcomes, or has done so historically. Another is that savvy politicians (of any race) will mobilize groups when they have to to win election; mobilization of a large, cohesive bloc of minority voters may be an obvious strategy to politicians of any background. More work needs to be done to understand which of these processes is occurring, but from a practical standpoint these findings clarify what matters and what does not when it comes to race and voter turnout. As America becomes more diverse, minority groups will play an even larger role in determining election outcomes. Perhaps a long-elusive equality in rates of participation will accompany such changes.

The forthcoming article “The Influence of News Media on Political Elites: Investigating Strategic Responsiveness in Congress” by Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, René Lindstädt and Ryan J. Vander Wielen is summarized here:

It is hard to imagine democracy in action without a free press. News media provide a crucial link between elected representatives and the people they represent. Scholars tend to focus on the influence news media have on members of the mass public. Yet we should also consider how news media influence the behavior of elected representatives. After all, politicians are consumers of news, too.

The incremental roll-out of Fox News in the late 1990s helped us investigate the influence of news media on elected representatives’ behavior by creating something akin to a natural experiment. Between the introduction of Fox News in 1996 and its nationwide availability by 2002, some U.S. House districts had cable systems with Fox News in the channel line-up, while others did not. Moreover, the roll-out of Fox News was unrelated to the political characteristics of voters in the districts. This allows us to compare the voting behavior of U.S. House members who had Fox News in their districts to those who did not; and it also allows us to compare the voting behavior of U.S. House members before and after Fox News entered their districts.

We focused on votes in the U.S. House that divided the parties, with the majority of Democrats and Republicans taking opposing positions, because these are the sorts of issues on which the influence of news media is expected to be most evident. Our analysis of these votes finds that Fox News did, indeed, influence the voting behavior of U.S. House Representatives, but not in a uniform fashion.

First, the influence of Fox News was most apparent in the months approaching Election Day. At this point in the election cycle, Fox News caused Republican members of Congress to be more likely to side with their party on partisan votes and caused Democratic members to be less likely to side with their party. Thus, Fox News bolstered Republican coalitions on partisan votes toward the end of the election cycle. However, we find no evidence of differences in voting behavior across members with and without Fox News in the early months of the election cycle. This pattern of voting is consistent with the explanation that members of Congress respond to the news media in a strategic way. They are more responsive to news media when voters are paying attention (i.e., closer to Election Day).

Second, the influence of Fox News strengthened as the composition of congressional districts became more Republican. These findings imply that politicians do not respond to news media in a vacuum. Rather, the effect of news media on political elites depends in large part upon members’ electoral landscapes.

Our research demonstrates that elected representatives respond to news media, but their response is constrained and contingent. Our findings also suggest that the steady polarization of the U.S. Congress during the late 1990s cannot be blamed on Fox News. If anything, Fox News may have done more in its early days to bring members of Congress together—in support of the Republican agenda.

With each controversial case they hear, questions arise about the influence of public opinion on the Supreme Court. Matthew Hall examines the types of cases where the Supreme Court appears constrained, and finds when a ruling must be implemented by government actors outside the judicial hierarchy, external pressures exert a stronger influence on the Court. He argues that nonimplementation fears are only relevant to a small subset of cases in the Supreme Court docket, indicating that judicial scholars should be attentive to different contexts rather than searching for universal tendencies of the Court’s behavior.

In June 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act cases. In the months leading up to the ruling, President Obama and congressional Democrats “waged a not-so-subtle pressure campaign on the Supreme Court,” urging the justices to uphold the Act, yet despite these efforts, the justices insisted they were impervious to external pressure. When asked about the health care case, Justice Thomas dismissed the possibility of outside influence: “You stay focused on what you’re supposed to do. All that other stuff is just noise.” Three months later, Chief Justice Roberts unexpectedly joined the liberal wing of the Court and voted to uphold the health care law.

Notwithstanding assurances from Justice Thomas, Court observers have long noted its tendency to, in the words of the famous Mr. Dooley, “follow th’ illiction returns” (follow the election returns). Scholars have amassed considerable evidence that public opinion constrains the justices’ decision making, and elite preferences constrain their exercise of judicial review. Yet, others raise doubts about the extent and nature of external influence, and scholars continue to debate the causal mechanism behind this phenomenon.

In this article, I evaluate an often mentioned, yet untested theory of Supreme Court constraint: I argue the Court is constrained, at least in part, because the justices fear nonimplementation of their decisions. Accordingly, the effect of external pressure is strongest when the threat of nonimplementation is most severe. When the justices can confidently assume implementation of their decisions, they are less constrained by external forces.

The Court has traditionally been viewed as holding “no influence over either the purse or the sword.” In fact, many argue that the Court is severely limited in its ability to induce social or political change, and “[i]mplementation of the Court’s policies is far from perfect.” However, other studies suggest the Court may possess significant power to affect social change, at least in certain contexts. The Court is especially successful at altering behavior when it issues rulings related to criminal law, civil liability, or judicial administration, regardless of public opinion. The Court tends to alter behavior in these “vertical” cases because implementation is controlled by lower courts in the judicial hierarchy, and these courtsoverwhelmingly adhere to Supreme Court precedent. Of course, lower-court compliance is not perfect; judges sometimes exercise considerable discretion when making decisions. Nonetheless, lower-court defiance is rare, and the Court’s “hierarchical control appears strong and effective.”

The Court does not enjoy the same degree of policy control in cases unrelated to criminal law, civil liability, or judicial administration. Rulings in these “lateral” cases must be implemented by government actors outside the judicial hierarchy, usually elected officials or their agents. These elected officials must consider their constituents’ interests and generally respond to public opinion. Consequently, the implementation of Court rulings in lateral cases depends on the popularity of those rulings, whereas the implementation of rulings in vertical cases does not.

This differential power dynamic creates an avenue for evaluating whether the fear of nonimplementation drives judicial constraint. If the Court is at least partly constrained by a fear of nonimplementation, then the degree to which it is constrained should depend on its implementation power. Therefore, external constraint should be most prominent in important lateral cases because those are the cases in which implementation depends on public support.

I test my theory of a semiconstrained Court in two separate analyses. First, I evaluate the influence of public opinion and elite preferences on the ideological outcome of Supreme Court decisions. Second, I evaluate the influence of these external forces on the Court’s decision to invalidate federal statutes. I employ logistic regression models to evaluate the influence of public mood and congressional ideology on the justices’ final votes on the merits in vertical versus lateral cases. Each of these analyses confirms that external pressures exert stronger influence when nonimplementation is a concern.

I find that the fear of nonimplementation is a critical factor motivating the Supreme Court’s response to external pressure. Consequently, these external forces exert differential effects in different issue contexts. When deciding important lateral cases, the Court is highly constrained by external forces because it lacks the necessary implementation powers to give efficacy to its rulings in the absence of popular and/or elite support; however, when deciding vertical cases, the justices are relatively less constrained because their decisions tend to be implemented by lower-court judges regardless of external pressure. When the Court considers unimportant cases, the chance of strong public opposition is low; therefore, nonimplementation is unlikely and the justices can disregard external pressure. Although numerous scholars have found that the Supreme Court is constrained, I find that constraint is a significant factor in only a small subset of its docket.

My findings suggest that the U.S. Supreme Court is relatively independent when deciding cases related to criminal prosecution, civil liability, or judicial administration; however, the Court is more constrained when trying to alter policy beyond the control of lower courts, at least when those cases may potentially attract public interest. As a result, studies of judicial independence should be conscious of the varying institutional contexts surrounding cases in different issue areas. Rather than search for universal tendencies of Supreme Court behavior, judicial scholars should be attentive to differences in judicial power and independence across different contexts.

This article is based on the paper “The Semiconstrained Court: Public Opinion, the Separation of Powers, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Fear of Nonimplementation,” which appeared in the American Journal of Political Science.

Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. 

About the author

Matthew E.K. Hall- University of Notre Dame
Matthew E.K. Hall is an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in American political institutions with an emphasis on judicial power and independence. His book, The Nature of Supreme Court Power (Cambridge University Press, 2011), won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for Best Book on Law and Courts from the American Political Science Association.

This post originally appeared on the LSE USAPP – American Politics and Policy blog here and 
is reposted with permission

The forthcoming article “How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change” by Gijs Schumacher, Marc van de Wardt, Barbara Vis and Michael Baggesen Klitgaard is summarized here:

Do government parties or opposition parties change their election platform more? It has long been assumed that opposition parties change more than government parties. After all, opposition parties have been the losers of the past years. They had no or little influence on policy, no ministerial portfolios or access to interesting perks. Our article – How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change – demonstrates the opposite: government parties change their election platforms more than opposition parties do. Why is this? And what are the consequences hereof?

How did we measure party platform change?

Parties dedicate attention to a large number of issues in their electoral programs and on many of these issues they take a position. The Manifesto Research Group has coded 3749 electoral programs of European, North American and Antipodean parties in de period 1945-now. They distinguish between 56 different categories in this coding and indicate per category the percentage of attention dedicated to it in the respective election program. Many researchers have used this dataset to construct left-right positions. To measure the change between a party’s current and previous electoral program, we have analyzed the change in attention per category (such as position on multiculturalism and attention to law and order). To get more meaningful categories, we reduced the 56 categories to 19 ones. On average, parties change on about 4 categories. Government parties almost change on average on one category more than opposition parties do (3.8 categories versus 4.6). This difference becomes stronger if we control for alternative explanations of party platform change such as electoral results, public opinion shifts and fluctuations in economic performance. We also find this difference if we construct party platform change differently or if we use another dataset (the Chapel Hill Expert Survey). These conclusions are based on a sample of 1686 election programs of 214 parties in 21 democracies in the period 1950-2013.

Why do government parties change more?

Some theories that claim that opposition parties change more than government parties use loss aversion as an explanation. This mechanism – part of Tversky and Kahneman’s Prospect Theory – claims that individuals take more risks when confronted with losses and become risk-averse when confronted with gains. According to this logic, parties that have lost (elections or government participation) should change more. We employ a different interpretation. Loss aversion is about prospects and thus future – not past – performance. Ample research demonstrates that on average government parties lose votes. Due to this so-called ‘cost of governing’, government parties expect losses at the next elections. Negative opinion polls can awaken or reinforce these expectations. Confronted with these future losses, government parties change their electoral program. One or more opposition parties expect electoral gains, which makes them risk-averse and less likely to adapt their electoral platform.

It depends on your aspirations

But not every opposition party is the same. Some parties have never been in government (for example various Green, Radical Right or Radical Left parties). Other parties switch frequently between being a government or an opposition party. And other parties are almost always in government (Dutch Christian Democrats until 1994, Swedish Social Democrats between 1936 to 1976). Because of these differences in historical success parties have different aspirations to office. For one party opposition is a disaster; for the other party opposition is the norm.  Aspiration to office should therefore condition the effect of government participation on election platform change.

The results demonstrate that government parties who govern for the first time are the most likely parties to change their platform in the next elections. For example, the pacifists from the German Greens in the red-green Schröder I coalition gave the green light for German participation in a NATO-intervention in Kosovo. The Dutch Christian Union (a small orthodox protestant party) became considerably less homophobic during its first and only term in office (2006-2010). More recently (2011-2014) we have seen the Danish Socialist People’s Party shifted towards the center on economic issues during its first spell in government. The reason that these parties change considerably is that they are most at risk of electoral punishment or they have very little faith in continued success because of their lack of experience.

In contrast, some parties are more likely to suffer from an overdose of confidence because they have almost always been in government. The Dutch Christian Democrats and its predecessors have been part of every Dutch government until 1994. The Swedish Social Democrats were in office from 1936 to 1976. The Swedish People’s Party (in Finland!) has been in government since 1966. Of course this type of party is rather rare. Still, we found that these parties change drastically once they end up in opposition for the first time. For example, the Dutch Christian Democrats changed on 16 categories in 1998 after their first spell in opposition, one of our most extreme observations. In sum, how you respond to government participation or opposition status really depends on your aspirations vis-à-vis government.

What does this mean?

Our results suggest that opposition parties who are winning in the polls are likely to take less-and-less risks. Government parties on the other hand are likely to take more-and-more risks with elections approaching.

Of course this article also raises some new questions. Do parties indeed respond to polls? And which levels of the party push for party platform change? Who initiates the changes? These questions we hope to address in future research.

It is incredibly unlikely that any one person’s vote will change the outcome of an election and individuals derive no immediate benefit from the actual act of voting, making it a deeply altruistic act. Following this idea, Toby Bolsen, Paul J. Ferraro, and Juan Jose Miranda examine whether voters are also more likely to take action on other issues that have a positive societal impact, but no direct benefit to them. They found that when asked to conserve water during a drought, frequent voters, regardless of political affiliation, made more significant reductions to their water consumption than non-voters.

Are voters more cooperative in general than other citizens? Do conservatives and liberals respond differently when asked to contribute to the public good? In democracies, the answers to these questions can affect how governments solve the most pressing issues of our time. The answers also shed light on how social norms operate in a society. Take voting, for example. Despite the infinitesimally small chance that any one individual’s vote will affect an election outcome, millions of people participate in local, state, and national elections each year in the United States.

Decades of research provide insights into the reasons why people vote. People are not guided by cost-benefit calculations based on the likelihood that one’s vote will be the deciding ballot cast. They are guided by a belief that voting fulfills a social norm – it is viewed as “doing one’s part” to help provide something that benefits the collective. Democratic societies promote voting as a socially-valued obligation. On voting days, citizens walk around their offices and neighborhoods proudly sporting “I voted today” stickers on their chests.

If social norms motivate voters to vote, these same cooperative predispositions might also make voters more likely to take actions that benefit others in different settings. We recently examined whether frequent voters are more willing to take collectively beneficial action in the context of a request for water conservation during a drought in the southeastern United States. To do this, we merged data from a large field experiment (> 100,000 households) conducted in partnership with the Cobb County Water District, in Cobb County, Georgia, with voter turnout data for all primary and general elections between 1990 and 2008. We studied the amount of water each house used between June and September 2007.

Our measure for vote frequency was equal to the number of times every registered voter in the household voted in a primary, general, or special election (1990-2008) divided by the number of times every registered voter in the household could have voted, which depended on each person’s birth year. We created this measure to assess whether there is a relationship between past voting behavior and a household’s response to receiving a randomized letter requesting voluntary water conservation. If frequent voters are more likely than infrequent voters to reduce water use as a result of receiving a letter via first-class mail requesting cooperation, then it suggests that social norms motivate some people to take actions that are socially-valued, and which benefit others, across settings.

We find that registered voters who have no voting history and who received a letter requesting water conservation reduce their water consumption by 691 gallons on average over the summer. In contrast, the most frequently voting households who received a letter reduced their water consumption by an average of 2,507 gallons over this same period (a 6.2% overall reduction in water use over the summer of 2007). To give this some perspective, consider that a five minute shower uses between 10 and 25 gallons of water, and the average top-load washing machine between 40 and 45 gallons of water per usage.

To plumb the depths of the role of social norms further, we explored whether Democrat or Republican households were more responsive to receiving a letter requesting cooperation for an environmental objective. Lots of survey data suggests liberals and conservatives have very different views on environmental goals, yet there is little evidence about how they actually react when asked to contribute to environmental collective actions. To address this lack of evidence, we explore whether Democrat or Republican households were more responsive to receiving a letter requesting water conservation. Our measure for partisanship was based on the number of times every registered voter in a household had voted in a Democratic primary election versus the number of elections each registered voter in a household had voted in a Republican primary election.

To answer this question, we looked at Democrat and Republican primary voters who received a pro-social letter and find that they are indistinguishable in terms of their response to a water conservation request – that is, both groups significantly reduce water use upon receiving a letter relative to non-primary voting households that did not receive a letter; however, in additional analyses that made use of pre- and post-experimental measures of household water use, we find that the decrease in water use among Democrat and Republican households is due to an unobservable characteristics common to both groups of primary voters, such as an internalized sense of civic-mindedness that motivates some individuals to participate in collectively beneficial endeavors.

Understanding why some citizens, but not others, take action for the public good lies at the heart of political science. The degree to which individuals are willing to make voluntary contributions to the public good determines the policies that need to be in place to reach outcomes beneficial for everyone. What is novel about our study is that it is the first to examine actual behaviors in different settings and look at whether frequent voters are more likely to participate in an unrelated collective action, in a different domain, when presented with an explicit request for cooperation.

This article is based on the paper “Are Voters More Likely to Contribute to Other Public Goods? Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Policy Experiment,” in the American Journal of Political Science.

Note:  This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. 

About the authors

Toby Bolsen – Georgia State University
Toby Bolsen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. His research interests include the study of political behavior, public opinion, media and communications, experimental methods, and U.S. energy policy.

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Paul J. Ferraro – Georgia State University
Paul J. Ferraro is a Professor of Economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His research interests include the design and evaluation of environmental policy, with an emphasis on biodiversity and ecosystem protection, as well as experimental methods and behavioral economics.

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Juan Jose Miranda – The World Bank
Juan Jose Miranda is an economist at the World Bank. His research interests include environmental and natural resource economics, development economics, applied econometrics/program evaluation, and experimental/behavioral economics. You can follow him on Twitter @unicojm.

This post originally appeared on the LSE USAPP – American Politics and Policy blog here and 
is reposted with permission

The forthcoming article “The Achilles Heel of Plurality Systems: Geography and Representation in Multi-Party Democracies” by Ernesto Calvo and Jonathan Rodden is summarized here:

The most recent elections in Britain and some of its former colonies have yielded some rather striking asymmetries between votes and seats.  In the UK, the Conservatives came close to an outright majority with 36 percent of the votes.  The Canadian Conservatives preside over a legislative majority in spite of winning less than 40 percent of the vote.  In India, the BJP recently took a commanding 62 percent of the seats with only 39 percent of the votes.

These are only the most recent examples of what Graham Gudgin and Peter Taylor referred to as the “Achilles Heel” of plurality electoral systems in their classic work on political geography:  when more than two parties compete in electoral systems with winner-take-all districts, the geographic distribution of partisan support across districts can lead to surprisingly large asymmetries between votes to seats.

This paper provides a theoretical model that attempts to capture the most crucial aspects of this problem, and develops a corresponding empirical model that allows us to estimate the relationship between a party’s territorial support and its representation in the legislature.

We capture a perennial problem, well known to the Liberals in the UK and the NDP in Canada, whereby small parties can do very well in transforming votes to seats when they emerge and consolidate with sufficient geographic concentration that they can form majorities in their “heartland” constituencies.  However, as such parties attempt to expand their support base and become national parties, they are unable to transform votes to seats, and their widespread incursions into other districts generate knock-on effects for the other parties as well, increasing the disproportionality of the whole electoral system.

We also uncover some interesting subtleties about the representation of the larger, established parties as their support surges and declines over time.  The historical development of one of the parties—like the Democrats in the United States or Labour in Great Britain—leaves it with a set of extremely safe districts while their main opponent’s support is more dispersed.  This relative geographic concentration allows them to suffer fewer seat losses during their periods “in the wilderness.”  Yet we also see that this underlying geographic concentration is something they must shed if they are able to win crucial centrist districts and win elections.

Thus the ebb and flow of geographic support distributions for the major parties are not mirror images of one another, and votes do not flow between parties in a uniform way across constituencies from one election to the next.  Our paper provides useful insight into the transformation of votes to seats for different types of parties as their support waxes and wanes.

John S. Earle and Scott Gehlbach summarize their article “The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm-Level Evidence from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution” here:

Recent events have illustrated the winner-take-all nature of politics in contemporary Ukraine. When Viktor Yanukovych fled the presidential palace in February, he was accompanied by a coterie of officials overwhemlingly drawn from the country’s Russian-speaking east, including Yanukovych’s home region of Donetsk. The governors who ran Ukraine’s regions under Yanukovych fared no better. Oleksandr Turchynov, who served as acting president from February to June, did what all Ukrainian presidents do: he fired the existing governors and replaced them with figures friendly to the new regime.

Much the same happened in 2004, when Yanukovych was forced by street protests and allegations of electoral fraud into a do-over presidential election. In “The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm-Level Evidence from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution,” we explore the impact of these events on the economic performance of enterprises in regions more or less supportive of Viktor Yushchenko, who emerged the winner in this earlier contest for power. To do so, we use data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises that we track over many years, both before and after the Orange Revolution.

Our primary finding is that the productivity of firms in regions that supported Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 increased after Yushchenko took power, relative to the productivity of firms in regions that supported Viktor Yanukovych (and, implicitly, his patron Leonid Kuchma, whom Yushchenko succeeded as president). This effect is most pronounced among firms that had the most to gain or lose from presidential turnover: firms in sectors that rely on government contracts; private enterprises, given Ukraine’s appallingly weak property rights; and large enterprises. Other measures of economic performance suggest that these results are driven by favorable treatment of particular firms, either before or after the Orange Revolution, rather than by broad changes in economic policy.

Political turnover is often desirable. Nonetheless, our results suggest the distributional consequences can be profound when institutions are weak, that is, when access to those in power is the primary guarantee of market access, contract enforcement, and property-rights protection. Oscillation of privilege from one region or sector to another is inefficient, as firms initiate or postpone restructuring based on who is in power. The optimal solution, of course, is not to restrict turnover, but to make turnover safe for economic activity. This requires that institutions be reformed to guarantee equal treatment for all economic actors—a difficult process that has barely begun in post-Yanukovych Ukraine.

The forthcoming article, “Social Protest and Policy Attitudes: The Case of the 2006 Immigrant Rallies” by Valerie Martinez-Ebers  is summarized here:

Mass demonstration has been characterized as the “defining trope of our times” (Andersen 2011). The scope and number of protests in one year alone was so exceptional that “The Protester” was recognized as the 2011 Person of the Year by Time magazine. Individuals participate in political protests for the purpose of making their opinion heard, in an attempt to influence public opinion and, ultimately, government actions. Do protests actually sway public opinion? If so, why and how? To answer these questions, we exploited an opportunity that occurred in the spring of 2006 when activists staged rallies across the U.S. in protest of H.R. 4437 (Border Protection and Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005), a bill that would have increased penalties on undocumented immigrants and anyone who employed or assisted them. While these protests were occurring, the Latino National Survey (LNS) was in the field. About a third of the LNS respondents were surveyed prior to the protests, and the rest were surveyed afterwards. This allowed us to examine whether policy preferences were noticeably different after the protests. /

Generally speaking, our analysis found that respondents interviewed after the rallies began generally expressed greater support for less restrictive immigration policy options than respondents surveyed before the protests. Our second finding was that among respondents surveyed after the protests began, those living in areas where a protest occurred were more supportive of less restrictive policy than those living in areas with no protests. However, the influence of the protests was not uniform across the population. Those most likely to be negatively affected by H.R. 4437 (i.e. noncitizens and their relatives and friends) were the most supportive of amnesty – the least restrictive option. Interestingly though, support for amnesty also increased among citizens – both naturalized and native-born –as their exposure or proximity to local protests increased.

/Our study, we think, advances our knowledge regarding social protest in several ways. First, it demonstrates that protest influences policy preferences. Second, it illustrates that spatial exposure or closer proximity increases the influence of the protest on policy preferences. Third, individual-level characteristics may moderate the effect of the protest. Thus, our study suggests a more nuanced idea of how protest influences attitudes among individuals within a group or groups tied to a particular protest issue.

The article, “Political Quid Pro Quo Agreements: An Experimental Study” by Jens Großer, Ernesto Reuben, and Agnieszka Tymula, appears in the July 2013 issue of the American Journal of Political Science. Here, the authors summarize its contents:

Some scholars argue that the amount of money in politics is fairly small compared to the stakes, and campaign donors ought to have little leverage because contributions come from many individuals and typically in small amounts. But there are good reasons to suspect there is some truth behind the common belief that money in politics is undesirable. There are scholars supporting the notion that corporate firms and organized special interest groups are able to secure tax breaks, subsidies, and favorable regulations at the expense of the public via tacit quid pro quo agreements with political candidates. However, it is usually very difficult if not impossible to determine whether or not illegal political quid pro quo happened.

The objective of our article is to study the circumstances under which political quid pro quo occurs and the mechanisms that facilitate it. Specifically, we use game theory and a laboratory experiment to examine strategic situations where a single special interest can transfer money to two competing candidates in order to influence redistributive tax policies. Importantly, the candidates need not respond to transfers, and they choose their tax policies under the shadow of an upcoming majoritarian election where the special interest prefers lower taxes and a majority of voters prefers higher taxes. At the heart of the game is the opportunity of the triad of the special interest and both candidates to collude by exchanging transfers and policy favors in order to profit at the expense of the majority. Like in the field, we do not allow candidates and the special interest to write enforceable contracts. Therefore, quid pro quo agreements must be formed tacitly through observed decisions and self-enforced through norms of trust and reciprocity.

In our experiment, tacit quid pro quo agreements form in about 40% of societies when the special interest and two candidates encounter repeatedly but never with one-shot encounters. Hence, a substantial number of our participants make use of the opportunity to form tacit quid pro quo agreements at the expense of a majority. Moreover, we find that mutual reciprocation between the special interest and both candidates is essential for successful quid pro quo (candidates reward increased transfers with lower taxes and the special interest rewards lower taxes with higher transfers). However, reciprocity between the two candidates is also important (i.e., lowering one’s tax policy if the other candidate’s tax policy is smaller than one’s own). If successful, tacit quid pro quo agreements increase the welfare of the involved triad, while the welfare of the majority decreases. Overall, our experiment suggests that considerable quid pro quo agreements are likely, especially in the form of long-term relationships between single organized special interests (e.g., corporate firms) and policymakers.

Our experiment can be seen as a first step in a line of research into the largely unexplored existence of political quid pro quo and its potential welfare-reducing consequences. Our findings are largely consistent with findings of existing studies that use observational data. However, importantly, the insights we gain are not easily addressed with other methods. For example, we are able to demonstrate the exact mechanism of mutual reciprocation between the special interest and candidates as well as between the two candidates that leads to successful quid pro quo agreements that are harmful for society. These and future insights from various extensions can help us better understand the underlying conditions and consequences of political quid pro quo and improve policies aimed at preventing welfare-reducing special interest influence. In particular, our results suggest the need to take a more careful look at single organized special interests with large economic impact, where favors can be especially harmful.

About the Authors: Jens Großer is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, Ernesto Reuben is an Assistant Professor at Columbia Business School, Columbia University and Agnieszka Tymula is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Sydney.