Political science

Do citizens turnout to vote because of changes in their personal financial situation or are they influenced by the nation's economic performance? Previous research on this question is far from united. We attempt to unify the disparate literature on the effects of pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations on voter turnout in midterm and presidential elections. Our analysis of ANES data from 1978 to 2004, based on a reference-dependent model of voter turnout, indicates that both pocketbook and sociotropic considerations affect individuals' decision of whether to vote in midterm elections. Those who perceive that over the last year their own financial situation has improved relative to the economy are less likely to vote than those who view the economy as outperforming their own financial situation. Keywords Voter turnout Á Sociotropic Á Pocketbook Á Economic status The disconnect between pocketbook concerns of ordinary Americans and the preoccupations of their politicians…has yet to grow into a political wave that could sweep significant numbers of lawmakers from power next year, but both parties face risks if they fail to pivot their attention to economic issues.

This is a draft of a chapter prepared for The State of the Parties, a book edited by John Green, director of The Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. The book, to be published by Rowman and Littlefield, grows out of an October 2009 conference at the ...

It has long been understood that political knowledge in the U.S. is very low. For those who care about the quality of American democracy, this is a big problem. In attempting to find a solution, many people often blame education. While increasing civic knowledge is a laudatory goal, increased political sophistication does not necessarily turn individuals into good democratic citizens. Research in cognitive and social psychology paints a picture of people as motivated reasoners. Instead of having an open-minded engagement with issues, individuals typically only seek, see, and understand information in a manner that reinforces what they already believe. Here, we examine motivated reasoning and argue that the strongest partisans and the most committed ideologues will be the most susceptible to holding contradictory policy positions with regard to same-sex marriage and religious freedom.

Objectives: Authoritarianism has a long history suggesting that it is primarily a phenomenon of the right. However, I argue that this has led to scholars overlooking the potential that in some contexts, authoritarianism can lead to support for left-wing candidates. African-American voters in the U.S. provide such a context. A key component of right-wing authoritarianism is that individuals will support whom they believe to be their rightful leader. In the U.S., who one believes to be their group's rightful leader is contingent on the race of the voter and the party of the candidate. I hypothesize that as African-American voters' level of authoritarianism increases, they will be more likely to support the left-wing Democratic candidate. Methods: I test this hypothesis with a national sample of voters after the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I estimate multiple logit models predicting the probability of voting for Obama. The key independent variables being respondents' right-wing authoritarian score, their race, and the interaction of these two variables. Results: The results present strong support for my hypothesis that an increase in right-wing authoritarianism increases the probability of African-American votes choosing Obama. Conclusion: The results show that the effect of authoritarianism on vote choice is contingent on race/ethnicity. Too often scholars have overlooked the potential that whom individuals deem to be their established authority is contingent on the political context. These results challenge scholars to provide a more nuanced approach to how authoritarianism influences behavior.

In this chapter, the author develops his thesis that an individual’s personality is a durable and measurable manifestation of unconscious brain processes that systematically influence individuals’ civic aptitude, that is, the quality of one’s engagement with the political world. The chapter examines a vast array of works across the academic fields of psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, genetics, and neuroscience. In particular, this chapter builds the argument that the Big Five (also known as the Five Factor Model) personality traits are significant contributors to the successes and failures citizens have in understanding and participating in politics in four separate areas: (1) citizens’ ability to understand politics with abstract notions like liberal and conservative; (2) know factual information about important public policy areas; (3) connect their own personal policy preferences to the correct party; and (4) understand their own relationship with government p...

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When people vote, does their preferred candidate represent the policies that are best for them? Not necessarily – a lack of information can often lead to people voting ‘incorrectly’ against their interests or beliefs. Using a new method of measuring this incorrect voting in presidential elections, Aaron Dusso finds that when choosing between candidates, strong partisans and those who believe that the economy is doing better for them, but who also have poor knowledge of candidates’ policy positions, are much more likely to vote for the ‘wrong’ candidate.

Functioning democracies require voters to connect their own personal and subjective policy preferences to the political party that best represents them. Aaron Dusso's new book examines how individual psychologies and people's tendencies to be introverted or extroverted affects their ability to match their policy preference to the correct political party. He finds that the more extroverted one is, the less ...

This study highlights the role that critical events play in the demobilization of protest campaigns. Social movement scholars suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of polarization within the campaign or the cooptation of the campaign leaders. I offer critical events as an alternative causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns in ethnically divided societies are particularly combustible as they have the potential to trigger unintended or unorchestrated communal violence. When such violence occurs, elite strategies change, mass support declines and the campaign demobilizes. An empirical investigation of the dynamics of the demobilization phase of the anti-foreigner protest campaign in Assam, India between 1979 and 1985 confirms this argument. A single group analysis is conducted to compare the dynamics of the campaign before and after the communal violence by using time series event data collected from The Indian Express, a national newspaper. The study has wider implications for the literature on collective action as it illuminates the dynamic and complex nature of protest campaigns.

This study argues that escalation and de-escalation processes lie at the heart of protest campaigns. These processes are largely determined by the interactions between protesters and governments, as well as the timing and types of strategies and tactics employed. The study examines the dynamics between the Turkish government and the protesters during the 2013 Gezi Protest Campaign. This campaign escalated quickly by generating massive support from different segments of the Turkish society in its earlier days, and then de-escalated and eventually demobilized without securing major concessions. By using original data collected from a Turkish newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the study illustrates how the trajectory of the Gezi campaign changed in response to the interactive dynamics between the government and the dissidents. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies

We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government's use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing.

Do voters care about anti-democratic behavior by their leaders? While political pundits and academics often hope that they do, there has been little research that tests the effects that specific anti-democratic actions have on voters during elections. This is because there are few clear instances where violations of democratic norms are so visible to the average voter that one would expect it to have an effect; above and beyond traditional predictors of the vote. However, the recent elections in Turkey offer a unique opportunity to test the effect that nullifying an entire election (an unequivocal violation of democratic norms) has on voters. We do exactly that with a survey of voters following the election redo. We find that even in such an extraordinary circumstance, voters rely on standard voting drivers like partisanship, rather than concern for the functioning of democracy itself. Ultimately, our findings have important implications for voting in competitive authoritarian regimes, as they fail to show that anti-democratic behavior is punished.

This study examines how military counter-terrorism (CT) measures affect the quality of democracy by altering civil-military relations (CMR) and focuses on civilmilitary relations as the main causal mechanism. We argue that the use of a military approach in counter-terrorism jeopardizes democracy at the societal level by increasing the belief that only the military is equipped to deal with the threat at hand. Therefore, erosions of civil liberties are tolerated in exchange for security. Second, we argue that military CT measures change the balance between the military and executive powers in procedural and liberal democracies. While the military's executive power increases in procedural democracies, the civilian ruler's control of the military power increases in liberal ones. Case studies of the U.S. and Turkey show that a military counter-terrorism approach affects CMR in these countries, which generate a similar tradeoff between security and the quality of democracy, albeit via different causal mechanisms. While that tradeoff is less severe in the U.S., Turkey is more vulnerable to erosion of democracy.

This study investigates the dynamics of transition from a peaceful protest wave to a violent insurgency. It examines the causal path leading to a major shift in the intensity of a protest wave and argues that the transition is the product of the interactions between the dissidents, the state, and external actors. By studying the protest wave in Kashmir (1979-88), it identifies state repression and external support as the key factors driving the transition process. Time series analysis is used to analyze the original empirical evidence collected through content analysis. By providing a comprehensive understanding of the origins of the insurgency in Kashmir, this study shows that protest waves and civil wars are intimately linked.

This study examines the demobilization of the Ogoni protest campaign in the oil producing Niger Delta region of Nigeria in the mid-1990s. The contentious politics literature suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of the polarization between radical and moderate protesters. In this study, we offer a different causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns can demobilize before such indiscriminate repression. Moreover, states can prevent the subsequent radicalization of a protest campaign followed by harsh repression by coopting the radicals and the remaining moderate elites while continuing to use repression to prevent collective action. Our conclusion assesses how relations between extractive industry firms and their local host communities have or have not changed in the twenty years since the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.