The forthcoming article “Segregation and Inequality in Public Goods” by Jessica Trounstine is summarized by the author here:

America remains an extremely segregated nation.  Although neighborhood racial segregation has lessened in recent decades, today the typical white American lives in a neighborhood that is about 75% white, while Black, Latino, and Asian Americans live in substantially more integrated places (Logan and Stults 2011). [1] These patterns have created stark divides between white and non-white communities (Enos 2011).   When a city is residentially segregated by race, issues cleave along racial and not just spatial lines and groups are more likely to be intolerant, resentful, and competitive with each other.  The result, is that segregated cities have a high degree of racial political conflict.

In an analysis of 91 mayoral election contests in the 25 largest cities in America, I find that more segregated cities are more likely to witness racially polarized voting.

Note: Predicted marginal effects of regressing racial divide in mayoral vote on segregation with controls for city demographics and governmental institutions. Racial divide in mayoral vote measured as the absolute value of the largest difference in racial group support for winning candidate. Segregation measured using Theil’s H index calculated for two groups (whites and non-whites). Gray shading represents 95% confidence interval

I also find that segregated cities spend less on a wide range of services and public goods for their residents.  They raise fewer dollars, and have smaller budgets for roads, law enforcement, parks, sewers, welfare, housing, and community development.

Note: Figures show predicted relationship between Theil’s H segregation index and per capita spending on public goods in constant 2007 dollars.  Gray shading represents 95% confidence intervals.

Compared to a city in the 25th percentile of segregation (like Palm Bay, Florida, Oregon City, Oregon, or San Louis Obispo, California) a city in the 75^th percentile (like Madison, Wisconsin, Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Jersey City, New Jersey) will spend about $100 less per resident each year.  Given that the average per capita expenditure on police is about $180, and about $57 on parks, this difference has the potential to dramatically affect the quality of public goods that individuals experience.

White residents are more likely than people of color to live in cities with low levels of segregation.  So, not only are whites segregated from racial and ethnic minorities within cities, they are also segregated from people of color across city lines.  This fact means that access to public goods is segregated along racial lines as well.  As the nation has become more diverse, it has also become more unequal.  Segregation and access to public goods play important roles in linking these phenomena.

[1]  African Americans, Latinos, and Asians live in neighborhoods that are comprised of 22%-46% of their own group.

The forthcoming article “The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936-2014” by Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw is summarized by the authors here:

Many political science theories rely explicitly or implicitly on models of policy change. This is true of both of the determinants of government policies, such as shifts in public mood or changes in the eligible electorate, and of the effect of policy feedback on political and social outcomes. Moreover, many of the most ambitious theories focus not on individual policies or policy domains, but on the character of government policy as a whole. In short, most theories of policymaking are both dynamic and holistic: they are concerned with changes in the general orientation of government policy.

However, the literature on U.S. state politics relies almost exclusively on policy indicators that are either measured at a single point in time or else cover only a partial subset of state policy outputs. Static measures are poorly suited to studying causes of policy change over time. And while domain-specific measures may provide useful summaries of some aspects of state policy, such as welfare spending or gay rights, they are imperfect proxies for the overall orientation of state policy.

In this paper, we develop a holistic yearly summary of the ideological orientation of state policies, which we refer to as state policy liberalism. This measure is based on a unique dataset of 148 policies, which covers nearly eight decades (1936–2014) and includes policy domains ranging from social welfare to abortion to civil rights. Based on these data, we estimate policy liberalism in each year using a dynamic Bayesian latent-variable model. Despite the disparate policy domains covered by our dataset, we find that a single latent dimension captures the bulk of the systematic variation in state policies. Indeed, our dynamic measure is highly correlated with existing cross-sectional measures of state policy liberalism as well as with issue-specific scales on gay rights, welfare benefits, anti-discrimination laws, and abortion policies.

We interpret our measure of policy liberalism as capturing a set of ideas and issue positions that, in the context of American politics, “go together”. Relative to conservatism, liberalism involves greater government regulation and welfare provision to promote equality and protect collective goods, and less government effort to uphold traditional morality and order at the expense of personal autonomy. Conversely, conservatism places greater emphasis on the values of economic freedom and cultural traditionalism.

Our dynamic measure of state policy liberalism opens up multiple avenues of research not possible with cross-sectional measures. Most obviously, it facilitates descriptive analyses of the ideological evolution of state policies over long periods of time. The map below shows the geographic distribution of state policy liberalism in 1940, 1975, and 2010. Blue shading indicates liberalism and red shading indicates conservatism. The map shows that the geographic distribution of policy liberalism has remained remarkably stable, despite huge changes in the distribution of mass partisanship, congressional ideology, and other political variables over the past seven decades. Throughout the period, Southern states such as Mississippi have had the most conservative policies. This holds not only on civil rights, but on taxes, welfare, and a host of social issues. By contrast, the most liberal states have consistently been in the Northeast, Pacific, and Great Lakes regions. New York, for example, has long had among the most liberal tax and welfare policies in the nation, and it was also one of the first states to adopt liberal policies on cultural issues such as abortion, gun control, and gay rights.

The overall picture of aggregate stability, however, masks considerable year-to-year fluctuation in policy liberalism as well as major long-term trends in certain states. These details can be discerned more easily in a plot of the yearly time series of four states— Mississippi, Idaho, Vermont, and New York—along with the average policy liberalism across all states. As this figure illustrates, states’ policy liberalism can change substantially between years. For example, until the mid-1960s Vemont’s policies were a bit more conservative than the average state, but since then Vermont’s policies have become steadily more liberal relative to the nation. Whereas it had been a laggard in passing racial anti-discrimination laws in the 1950s and 1960s, in more recent decades Vermont has been at the forefront of adopting gay marriage and other rights for homosexuals. Its welfare benefits and regulatory policies exhibited a similar evolution. The liberalizing trajectory of Vermont and other Northeastern states, such as Delaware and Maryland, have made the region’s policies much more unifomly liberal than they once were. By contrast, several Midwestern, Mountain, and Southern states have followed the opposite trajectory. Idaho, for example, became much more conservative over this period. In the 1930s–1950s, Idaho actually had some of the most generous welfare benefits in the nation, but by the early 2000s they were among the least generous.

Our yearly estimates of policy liberalism are illuminating for their own sake, revealing historical patterns in the development of state policymaking that would be hard to discern otherwise. But they also open up research designs that leverage temporal variation in state policies to explore questions involving the causes and effects of policy outcomes. For example, scholars could examine how the cross-sectional relationship between public opinion and state policy liberalism has evolved over time; estimate the state-level relationship between changes in opinion and changes in policy; or analyze how interest groups or electoral institutions moderate the link between public opinion and state policy. Scholars could also evaluate the policy effects of electoral outcomes or the partisan composition of state government.

The relevance of our paper extends well beyond the field of state politics. In addition to facilitating the study of topics of general significance, our measurement model could be applied to policymaking by local governments as well as in cross-national studies. Even more generally, our dynamic approach to measurement helps to illustrate the value of data-rich, time-varying measures of important political concepts like policy liberalism.

Devin Caughey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (caughey (at) mit.edu).

Chris Warshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (cwarshaw (at) mit.edu).

The forthcoming article “Electoral Backlash against Climate Policy: A Natural Experiment on Retrospective Voting and Local Resistance to Public Policy” by Leah C. Stokes is summarized by the author here:

In many policy areas, the public holds a shared view. For instance, we would all like cleaner air and a stronger economy. But for some policies, not all groups in society share the same preferences. Sometimes, local costs are imposed disproportionately on some groups, while the entire country and planet benefits. Controversies have arisen when local communities are asked to host airports, housing projects, roads, subways, hospitals, jails, and waste facilities. While we might all benefit from these projects, local groups often resist putting them in their backyard.

This dynamic also occurs with climate policy. Across the globe, the majority of people strongly support climate policy, with actions including installing wind and solar projects, or creating a fee for carbon pollution. However, some groups in society may disproportionately bear the costs of these changes. Specific communities have industries that rely heavily on carbon pollution, and they will face significant costs in the transition away from fossil fuels. Other communities will have wind energy projects installed in their backyards, creating sound and visual changes to the landscape.

If these small groups in society are able to mobilize politically, they may be able to block the will of the majority. This dynamic is amplified if opponent groups are spatially concentrated—if opponents live and vote together. In the case of climate policy, groups have mobilized to block wind energy projects across North American and Europe, often succeeding in blocking projects. But is this mobilization politically consequential? Does the protest spill over from the local level to impact state or national elections?

To answer this question, I studied a specific policy that created a ‘natural experiment’ by sorting communities’ receipt of wind projects as a function of local wind speed. The case is Ontario, Canada, which established an ambitious climate and clean energy policy at the provincial-level in 2009 and did not allow communities to reject wind projects. I investigated whether citizens living near wind energy projects punished the government more than we would otherwise expect. Using a variety of statistical estimators, I identify electoral losses for the governing party ranging from 4% to 10%. Even people living up to 2 miles or 3 km away from these wind projects punished the government more than we would expect.

We often think that voters are not able to follow public policy, particularly in a complex area like energy policy. However, my research shows that voters only punished the provincial government responsible for the climate policy, not the federal government. Together, these findings provide evidence that voters can be informed about public policy, at least insofar as it impacts their ‘backyard.’

Despite majority support for policy to thwart climate change, implementing this policy is often difficult. As this study shows, when opponents are concentrated in communities, they can reduce democratic accountability and exacerbate political barriers to addressing climate change. Similar to locating other kinds of controversial facilities, policymakers may need to engage citizens more during project development, to build trust, address concerns about fairness, and if necessary, require revenue sharing with the community to build support. Experimenting with policy designs that lead to greater political acceptance of renewable energy will be crucial to minimizing political barriers to effectively addressing climate change.

Leah C. Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (stokes@polsci.ucsb.edu)

The forthcoming article “Death & Turnout: The Human Costs of War and Voter Participation in Democracies” by Michael T. Koch and Stephen P. Nicholson is summarized by the authors here:

International conflict has the potential to engage even the least politically interested individuals in society. In our research, we examined whether international conflicts that witnessed combat casualties mobilized voters. We proposed that this happens because mortality salience causes people to defend their beliefs. Studies from psychology have shown that if reminded of death, people are more likely to defend their worldview and others who share it. Since casualties invoke thoughts and feelings related to death, we predicted that increasing casualties would motivate people to vote.

Using both cross-national and individual level data, we examined whether combat casualties increased voter turnout in established democracies. Studying twenty-three democracies over a fifty-year period, we found that mounting casualties increased national-level turnout. We also examined survey data from the United States and United Kingdom during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and found that the effect of casualties on turnout is enhanced if they are from the local community and happen close to the election. Although one might expect that people who opposed the war are most likely to turnout, we found no clear partisan effects. In the United States, for example, neither Democrats nor Republicans were disproportionately mobilized to vote. Nor was the effect concentrated among Independents. Rather, we found that the effect happened among the least politically interested members of society regardless of party affiliation. In both the United States and United Kingdom, those who were least interested in politics were just as likely as the most interested to vote as casualties accrued.

Our research has important implications for democracy as well as democratic foreign policy making.  Increased voter participation, especially in response to local combat casualties suggests that democratic institutions provide the public with a means of expressing voice. Increased electoral participation during wartime might also increase the responsiveness of elected leaders to the public. However, the absence of a partisan dimension to the mobilizing effects of casualties during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars likely mean that U.S. leaders were more beholden to their base constituencies.  It suggests that leaders may anticipate the public’s response to the use of force abroad, informing their preferences about whether to engage in international conflict. Policy choices that ultimately involve the human costs of war, can deeply engage audiences, mobilizing even the least politically interested

The forthcoming article “Are Voters Equal under Proportional Representation?” by Orit Kedar, Liran Harsgor, and Raz A. Sheinerman is summarized by the authors here:

Are voters equally represented under proportional representation? We focus on countries employing proportional representation with districts – the most prevalent electoral system in the democratic world – and draw on an often overlooked fact: in most such countries some voters cast their ballots in districts of few representatives (usually in agricultural areas and small towns) and others (residing in cities) in large districts of many representatives. While in some countries the latter is larger than the former by up to twenty-fold in others the variation is quite small. This implies that in countries with substantial variation in district magnitude some votes are counted by quasi-majoritarian rules and others by proportional ones.

Given that in Western democracies cities tend to be liberal in comparison to rural areas and small towns that are often conservative, we show that the majoritarian boost in small districts is granted to conservative votes while large and proportional districts do not offer a comparable boost to liberal votes. This leads to a systematic ideological inequality in parliamentary representation within countries: the parliamentary pie is often biased in favor of conservative voters compared to their share the electorate.

In our journey to analyze inequality in parliamentary representation we borrow and adapt tools of analysis from the study of income inequality — Gini index and Lorenz curve. Our index of representational inequality (RI) allows us to compare the level of representational inequality across countries. We find that countries with districted PR tend to resemble majoritarian ones in their level of representational inequality more than commonly assumed. We also find that irrespective of the magnitude of the average (or median district) the greater the share of parliament elected via small districts, the larger the level of representational inequality in that country.

Our study challenges the ‘on average’ approach to the study of representation and puts forth new considerations at the doorstep of institutional designers.

Author: George A. Krause, Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

Agency leaders, defined as upper-echelon PAS confirmed political executives, are vital to shaping both the content and character of democratic governance in the United States.  Agency leaders play a prominent role in shaping policy agenda setting and formulation, programmatic planning, and guidelines for administering public policies.  In addition, agency leaders functionally serve as ‘intermediaries’ between political institutions and a bureaucratic organization with a concretely defined policy mission anchored by civil servants.  Unsurprisingly, presidents place considerable thought and effort in selecting individuals to serve in these agency leadership positions.

In our forthcoming AJPS article “Experiential Learning and Presidential Management of the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy: Logic and Evidence from Agency Leadership Appointments”, Anne Joseph O’Connell and I seek to better understand how presidential appointment choices are made for these critical positions in two ways that depart from existing research on this topic.

First, we assert that presidents make these agency leadership appointment choices based on the expected capabilities of these individuals’ regarding (1) loyalty to the administration’s objectives, (2) managerial skills, and (3) policy expertise.  Presidents base these characteristic assessments on a given individual’s ‘dossier’ containing objective biographical data known prior to the nomination decision.

Second, rooted in organizational theories from various cognate social science disciplines, we maintain that individual presidential administration learn as the accrue experience in office.  In turn, we posit that presidents should become better at managing to serve their own policy interests, and hence, this will influence how they select agency leaders in response to changing administrative and political conditions.

Latent trait estimate measures of an agency leader’s loyalty to the appointing president, managerial competence, and policy competence come from our original biographical database containing objective publicly available information on 1372 agency leader appointee observations for 39 U.S. federal agencies (56, including executive offices and bureaus) covering the entirety of five presidential administrations (Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush).

The empirical evidence reveals that with greater experience in office, presidents become:

• More effective at compensating for uncertainty regarding an appointee’s expected capabilities (Agent Selection Learning);

• Rely less on mechanism design strategies that mitigate information and policy biases by engaging in counterbalancing appointees’ expected capabilities within the upper-echelons of U.S. federal agencies (Agent Monitoring Learning);

• Placing a premium on reducing expected capabilities pertaining to competence (managerial and policy) compared to increasing loyalty as a rational response to legislative policy conflict (Common Agency Learning).

Our study offers considerable promise for understanding the prospects and limits of executive authority in the U.S. federal government.  Not only are presidents able to effectively assuage the effects of formal institutional constraints that they encounter by adapting how they wish to select agency leaders, but they also become more skilled at managing loyalty-competence tradeoffs.  This is especially encouraging news for those viewing both enhanced executive branch coordination and the robust exercise of executive authority as means to offset the diminution of power and influence (in the form of declining political capital and reputation loss) that presidents generally experience the longer that they serve in office.

The forthcoming article “Ideology, Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence” by Daniel M. Butler, Craig Volden, Adam M. Dynes, and Boris Shor is summarized here:

One of the benefits of American federalism is the ability for states and localities to try out new policies, keeping the successes, abandoning the failures, and learning from one another.  However, in ideologically polarized times, this system of learning and policy diffusion may be under serious strain.

To explore this possibility, we embedded experiments in surveys of local policymakers across the U.S.  We offered vignettes of the policies tried in other communities and asked the local officials whether they wanted to learn more, perhaps to try similar policies at home.  The policies were left-leaning government interventions in the areas of commercial zoning and home foreclosures.  And, as may be expected, liberal-leaning officials were more interested in learning than were conservative officials.

However, our study showed that interventions can overcome the observed conservative bias against learning about these policies.  For the experimental component of our studies, we varied how the policies of others were described – as successes or failures, and as adopted by Republicans or Democrats.  When described either as a success or as a policy previously tried by Republicans, conservatives became as interested in learning more as were liberals in the control condition.  In the end, about two-thirds of them wanted to learn more about others’ experiences with the policies.

On the whole, this study establishes that ideological biases do exist in the willingness of officials to consider new policies across American cities and towns.  But those biases can be overcome under the right circumstances.  Policymakers want to learn about what works, and will pay close attention to the experiences of co-partisans, even if they are initially ideologically predisposed against the policy in question.

The forthcoming article “When Are Monetary Policy Preferences Egocentric? Evidence from American Surveys and an Experiment” by David H. Bearce is summarized by the author here:

In the field of political behavior, “egocentrism” refers to the idea that the beliefs of individuals about what constitutes good public policy are based largely on their own varied material considerations (e.g. their income and where they work). The field of international/ comparative political economy has built different models of egocentric preferences based on income, industry of employment and, more recently, firm-based characteristics. But recent survey research, focused largely on trade policy preferences, has found little support for egocentrism on any basis.

In our American Journal of Political Science article, we reconsider this conclusion with a focus on a different macroeconomic issue: should monetary policy be more focused on domestic or international policy goals? Given the fact that such macroeconomic issues are complex, we argue that individuals should only be able to express egocentric preferences when they have sufficient contextual information. We define “contextual information” as content about the costs and benefits of a particular policy. By itself, contextual information does not directly indicate that a policy is good or bad; instead, it summarizes the relevant policy tradeoffs. Without contextual information, expressed policy preferences on a complicated issue may largely be incoherent. But with sufficient contextual information, egocentrism may emerge.

To test this hypothesis, we focus on U.S. monetary policy since it is a complex international macroeconomic issue with relatively low informational content. We sample American monetary policy attitudes using three surveys (two nationally representative) and a survey experiment. Our surveys and experiment ascertain whether contextual information added through survey vignettes can produce egocentric monetary policy preferences.

Our results show that an American respondent whose employer does more business in overseas markets has a lesser preference for domestic monetary autonomy (findings in support of firm-based egocentrism). We also find in a survey experiment that the strength of this egocentric relationship depends on the informative power of the vignette: a more contextually informative vignette produces a stronger relationship between the individual’s overseas business activity and his/her preference against domestic monetary autonomy.

The forthcoming article “Leader Incentives and Civil War Outcomes” by Alyssa Prorok is summarized here:

As one of the most common, persistent, and deadly forms of violence in the international system, civil war has garnered significant attention from scholars and policy-makers alike.  Academics have shed significant light on country and conflict-level factors that influence how and when civil wars end, such as combatants’ military strength, the design of settlement agreements, and the presence of natural resources.  Policy and media accounts of these conflicts, however, frequently stress the role of individual leaders in the success or failure of settlement processes.  Leaders like Joseph Kony of the LRA and Bashar Assad of Syria are frequently attributed personal responsibility for thwarting efforts to end persistent conflict in their respective countries.  This raises an important question, one which existing scholarship has yet to answer: do rebel and state leaders influence the trajectory and outcome of civil wars?

In an article forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, I eschew standard approaches to the study of civil war that focus on country and conflict characteristics, instead examining the influence that rebel and state leaders have on civil war outcomes.  By focusing on leaders’ incentives, I am able to account for the fact that leaders, at times, are driven more by a desire to avoid punishment (e.g. loss of power, exile, imprisonment, or death) than by a desire to act in the best interests of their constituents.  My research shows that the risk of punishment is particularly high for leaders who bear responsibility for the war – those in power when the war started or who share political or familial connections with the first leader.  In fact, responsible leaders are between 65% and 96% more likely to be punished for performing poorly in war than non-responsible leaders (i.e. those not connected to the original decision to fight).

How does the high risk of punishment for responsible leaders affect conflict outcomes?  Because responsible leaders face an increased risk of punishment should they fail to achieve wartime objectives, these leaders are unlikely to settle for compromise terms, and are more likely to experience an extreme outcome – major victory or total defeat – than their non-responsible counterparts.  In fact, my research shows that responsible leaders are 315% more likely to experience extreme outcomes and are 69% less likely to make concessions to end their wars.

What does this tell us about the prospects for peaceful settlement of the world’s most persistent civil conflicts?  In some ways, the news is not particularly bright: my findings suggest that the prospects for successful negotiated settlement are low when responsible leaders hold power.  In fact, settlement efforts may be largely futile under these circumstances, as the very process of negotiation and compromise increases responsible leaders’ vulnerability.  On the other hand, my findings do suggest possible strategies for making mediation and settlement attempts more successful.  In particular, if negotiators can simultaneously address the political issues at stake and the personal security concerns of responsible leaders, they may be able to overcome high barriers to settlement and achieve lasting peace.  Finally, my results ultimately suggest that the ripest moments for conflict resolution occur only once non-responsible leaders take power.  Thus, the Colombian peace process with FARC began in 2012, shortly after two non-responsible leaders came to power.  Despite fits and starts since then, many commentators view this process as the best opportunity for lasting peace since the conflict began over 50 years ago, and my own research corroborates this view.  Only time will tell whether or not such optimism is warranted.

The forthcoming article “Does Compulsory Voting Increase Support for Leftist Policy?” By Michael M. Bechtel, Dominik Hangartner and, Lukas Schmid is summarized by the authors here:

The functioning of democracy rests on an ingenious idea: Since politicians seek re-election, they will pursue policies that enhance a country’s overall welfare. A fundamental problem with this idea may be, however, that in reality only a fraction of all citizens vote. Does this lead to policy choices that differ from those politicians would make if almost everybody voted? If so, unequal political participation in a democracy fails to enhance the welfare of its citizens because politicians only provide benefits to those – typically richer and higher educated – individuals that turn out to vote. Because of the potential gravity of this problem, some have argued that countries should introduce compulsory voting.

Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to ascertain the causal impact compulsory voting on policy. For one, a simple comparison of election outcomes before and after the introduction of compulsory voting will likely provide misleading results. Too many things other than compulsory voting will have changed simultaneously, for example, the most pressing social and economic problems, international affairs, the candidates running for office, and the policies they advocate. As a consequence, we cannot say whether a change in election results is due to compulsory voting or some of these other developments.

There is another important problem. Most of the time, citizens vote for parties and candidates that offer entire policy packages. Therefore, whenever we observe an election, we do not really know whether the eventual result has something to do with a specific policy that a candidate proposed or with other characteristics such as their competence or personality.

To circumvent these problems we study federal referendums in a Swiss canton in the first half of the 20^th century. Within that period, the canton of Vaud practiced sanctioned compulsory voting for about 20 years. In many other cantons, however, voting remained voluntary at that time. Yet, they voted on the same policy proposals in federal referendums as citizens in Vaud and faced largely similar economic, social, and political contexts. This makes them useful as a comparison group.

We find that compulsory voting brings turnout close to 90% in Vaud. This turnout increase doubles electoral support for left policy proposals: Bills that propose stricter market regulation and larger welfare programs. This policy effect of compulsory voting is lower in referendums on core topics, presumably because parties concentrate campaign spending efforts on these frontline issues, which limits the potential mobilization effect compulsory voting can have on referendum outcomes.

These findings have several implications. First, and most directly, our evidence suggests that low turnout may indeed lead to policy choices that reflect the views of those who vote, possibly at the expense of those who are politically under-represented. Second, the findings add to a debate in which some worry that compulsory voting mobilizes uninformed voters who will vote almost randomly. This could cause more erratic electoral outcomes and unstable political majorities. At least in the case we examine, sanctioning non-voting leads to a relatively stable increase in electoral support for leftist policies, and only a negligibly small increase in the number of empty ballots. This appears difficult to square with the random voting argument.

This article is part of the AJPS Virtual Issue:  Most Cited, 2015-16.