Is there a woman\u27s perspective? : an exploration of gender differences along republican and conservative lines.

Is there a distinct “woman’s perspective?” This paper argues that the answer is an emphatic yes. American National Election Study survey data are used to explore Republican and conservative women’s attitudes concerning social spending issues and religiosity. Most of the previous gender gap research focuses on gender differences in attitudes by examining gender shifts in political party identification and voting, but do not adequately address opinion differences along gender lines between groups that think of themselves as similar. This paper asserts that if men and women who classify themselves as both conservative and Republican exhibit distinct differences, evidence of a “woman’s perspective” is more convincing because the expectation is that there would be more similarity within these groups. Inferential statistical methods indicate that Republican and conservative women favor social spending more than men. Women also exhibit higher levels of religiosity. Furthermore, it is theoretically suggested that these differences manifest a diverging conceptualization of conservatism, with men viewing conservatism in economic terms while women conceptualize it in religiously based terms, resulting in the actualized behavior of value-based voting

Congressional actions and public reactions.

This paper explores the link between congressional actions and public attitudes about government responsiveness, public efficacy, and public trust in government. Congressional actions are moves by members of Congress that are potentially consequential to public opinion. The theory contends that actions taken by Congress influence these perspectives on government within an alert stratum of the public. This relationship is demonstrated by employing a pooled time-series logistical regression modeling data that come from the American National Election Studies merged with historical actions data. The findings support the contention that increased actions by Congress increase public efficacy and trust in government, and also improve public attitudes about government responsiveness

Ambivalence about social welfare : an evaluation of measurement approaches.

Research across disciplines, including political science, has embraced the idea that individuals often possess ambivalent attitudes, but there is considerable disagreement about how to measure ambivalence. Determining an effective way of capturing such phenomena is important to our understanding of politics and public opinion. The literature offers several meta-attitudinal and operative measures of ambivalence. I discuss strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches and conduct a test of the relative construct validity of two meta-attitudinal and two operative measures of social welfare ambivalence using data from a statewide survey of Florida residents in 2004. The findings suggest that one of the operative measures that forces respondents to rate their positive and negative feelings separately performs better than any of the other approaches currently offered. I conclude with a discussion of the implications for researchers and practitioners

Why does voting get so complicated? : a review of theories for analyzing democratic participation.

The purpose of this article is to present a sample from the panoply of formal theories on voting and elections to Statistical Science readers who have had limited exposure to such work. These abstract ideas provide a framework for understanding the context of the empirical articles that follow in this volume. The primary focus of this theoretical literature is on the use of mathematical formalism to describe electoral systems and outcomes by modeling both voting rules and human behavior. As with empirical models, these constructs are never perfect descriptors of reality, but instead form the basis for understanding fundamental characteristics of the studied system. Our focus is on providing a general, but not overly simplified, review of these theories with practical examples. We end the article with a thought experiment that applies different vote aggregation schemes to the 2000 presidential election count in Florida, and we find that alternative methods provide different results

Religion and core values : a reformulation of the funnel of causality.

This study reformulates the classic funnel of causality proposed in The American Voter. Where The American Voter suggests that group affiliation and values are equally influential in candidate choice, the foundational sociological literature suggest that values are derived from group affiliation, and therefore The American Voter has misconceptualized the ordering of these influences. We concur with the sociological literature, which suggests that values are more proximate to that decision than is group affiliation. Examining data from a 2002 statewide survey of Florida residents, and using religious affiliation as a measure of group affiliation, we explore the effects of political core values, such as egalitarianism and moral traditionalism, and religious affiliation on support for Florida Governor Jeb Bush and vote intentions. We employ ordered logistical models to test our Proximity Hypothesis, finding support for the contention that in the process of forming an attitude about a political candidate, core values are more proximate to the final attitude than is group affiliation. This finding is an important contribution to the debate in political behavior over the relative influence of individual belief systems and groups

Civic education and democratic capacity : how do teachers teach and what works?

Objectives In recent years, political scientists have found that civic education improves the democratic capacity of students, yet little research has been done to date on how and why civic education works when it does. In this study, we go inside the classroom to explore how teachers teach civics to find out what works best at preparing young people for responsible, democratic citizenship. Methods Using a survey of American students, principals, and teachers, we examine the varied instructional methods being employed by social studies teachers in ninth-grade classrooms across the country to determine which methods and which combinations of methods do the best job of enhancing students’ democratic capacity defined as their political knowledge, political efficacy, and intent to vote. Results Our results suggest that there are four broad teaching approaches employed by social studies teachers: traditional teaching, active learning, video teaching, and maintenance of an open classroom climate. Teachers may employ some combination of these approaches. The analysis indicates that approaches that foster an open classroom climate (encouraging student input) in combination with the others tend to be the most fruitful across the board. While any combination including an open classroom climate maximizes benefit, traditional teaching (i.e., use of methods including textbook reading, worksheets, memorization, and so forth) combined with an open classroom climate seems to do the best. Also, the results suggest that the combinations that work best for stimulating internal efficacy vary greatly from those stimulating the other citizenship outcomes. Conclusions Taken together, our results suggest that fostering an open classroom climate when teaching civics is the surest way to improve the democratic capacity of America\u27s youth. Further, teachers should be attentive to the instructional tradeoffs necessary to creating student capacities for both active and informed citizenship

The electronic ballot box : class, age and racial bias on the Internet.

This research creates a theoretical framework for understanding the effect of Internet voting on the electorate. Based on standard Downsian rational choice voting theory, we claim that Internet voting lowers the cost of voting for certain voting demographics based upon race, age, and income.We further contend that this electoral advantage may crystallize the growing turnout disparity be-tween demographic groups. The theory is tested using Bayesian inferential methods with data from the Internet turnout in the 2000 Arizona Democratic Presidential Primary merged with demographic data obtained from the 2000 Census. Our findings lend support for the theory that the Internet provides an electoral bias towards white voters, younger voters, and to the more affluent

Bowling online : the Internet and the new social capital.

The decline thesis proponents in the social capital literature have largely ignored the fastest growing venue for new social capital formation – the Internet. We argue that the Internet is making a larger impact than the current research acknowledges. Using survey data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project combined with a survey of college students, we confirm a strong positive relationship between online social networking and political participation. Further, we present evidence that, at least in 2008 election, there was a bias toward voting for Democrats among those who utilized online social networking services including Facebook and Twitter. The implications of these results are discussed

Measuring ambivalence about government in the 2006 ANES Pilot Study.

Although scholars increasingly recognize that people often possess multiple and even conflicting attitudes about a given topic, our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of such attitudinal ambivalence is limited by a lack of consensus as to how the concept should be operationalized. In this paper, we examine three separate measures (one subjective, two operative) of ambivalence regarding the federal government in Washington that were asked in the 2006 ANES Pilot Study. Our findings indicate that while the operative measures are less susceptible to question-order and response-order effects, none of the three indicators fares particularly well in various other tests of construct validity