Replication data for: Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States, 1960-93

We construct dynamic measures of the ideology of a state's citizens and political leaders, using the roll call voting scores of state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state legislatures, the party of the governor, and various assumptions regarding voters and state political elites. We establish the utility of our indicators for 1960-93 by (i) examining and, whenever possible, testing the assumptions on which they are based, (ii) assessing their reliability, (iii) assessing their convergent validity by correlating them with other ideology indicators, and (iv) appraising their construct validity by analyzing their predictive power within multivariate models from some of the best recent research in the state politics field. Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized

Replication data for: Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the American States,1960-1993

We construct dynamic measures of the ideology of a state's citizens and political leaders, using the roll call voting scores of state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state legislatures, the party of the governor, and various assumptions regarding voters and state political elites. We establish the utility of our indicators for 1960-93 by (i) examining and, whenever possible, testing the assumptions on which they are based, (ii) assessing their reliability, (iii) assessing their convergent validity by correlating them with other ideology indicators, and (iv) appraising their construct validity by analyzing their predictive power within multivariate models from some of the best recent research in the state politics field. Strongly supportive results from each battery of tests indicate the validity of our annual, state-level measures of citizen and government ideology. Substantively, our measures reveal more temporal variation in state citizen ideology than is generally recognized

Kids these days: political knowledge, young people, and the internet

In order for Americans to fully and effectively participate in their government, they must be adequately informed and knowledgeable about the policies, people, and processes therein. Prior literature has shown that those with lower levels of political information (women, less educated, and the young) are often the same groups whose political interests are under-represented in government. For this reason, this dissertation seeks to determine where and how political knowledge is distributed amongst demographic groups and also how, specifically, Internet access and use affect overall levels of political knowledge. As with most new media, political scientists were unsure the effect the Internet might have on the American public. Initial theories on ways the Internet would trigger population-wide gains in political knowledge have given way to more current theories about why this has not been the case. This dissertation's purpose is to add to the literature on the Internet and political knowledge by assessing the ways traditional political knowledge gaps have been affected by increases in Internet access and use. At the forefront of the three major analyses is the political knowledge gap between young people and older cohorts. Are the young, often provided with more opportunities for access and higher skills in Internet use, gaining political knowledge at a faster rate than older cohorts? Analyses of the effects of Internet access and Internet use are performed over separate survey data. One of the analyses in this dissertation also focuses on two additional political knowledge gaps, the education-and gender-based knowledge gaps, and how frequency of Internet use compares to the use of more traditional media. In addition to spotlighting the ways Internet and other media have affected political knowledge levels, measurement issues relating to political knowledge in the American National Election surveys are also addressed. In two of the three analyses, new composite items are constructed and tested as measures of political knowledge of the American population. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

The sense of international and being-with-in-common

Where do(es) international relations present? The discipline of International Relations (IR) avoids this question because the answer is so obvious. What constitutes the discipline of IR is an attempt to localize the place of international relations as a form of politics that has unique characteristics. These characteristics refer to the limits of politics. In this sense, international relations constitutes an outside of the political sphere within which the political self finds the certainties upon which its political self-understandings rely. It is a projection of the transformation of universal politics to the particular and internal, through the territorial mentality of the classical—in the Foucauldian sense, judicial-political—sovereignty theories. Following this tendency, political theory ignores international relations as an element of the ontological status of being-with, while for its part, the discipline of IR does not take account of the everydayness of being-with as a concern for international politics or attempt to translate our everyday encounter into the particular language of international relations. This project attempts to reverse this shared lacuna of both disciplines and tries to treat the international—as a sense which produces specific meaning of nearness and a particular version of being-inside—which operates in the ontological status of being-with. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Black Substantive Representation in State Legislatures from 1971-1994

To determine if increased black descriptive representation in state legislatures has resulted in greater influence over policy outputs. Copyright (c) 2005 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.