How what you believe about democracy influences how you vote

While the concept of democracy often means different things to different people, are there elements which people can agree or disagree on? Judd R. Thornton and Kris Dunn examine the relationship between people’s beliefs about democracy and how they vote. They find that while most people believe that free elections and protecting civil rights are essential to democracy, Democrats are more likely to believe that redistribution and unemployment security are essential parts of democracy, while Republicans are not

Conflicting estimates of natural geologic methane emissions

Global bottom-up and top-down estimates of natural, geologic methane (CH4) emissions (average approximately 45 Tg yr–1) have recently been questioned by near-zero (approximately 1.6 Tg yr–1) estimates based on measurements of 14CH4 trapped in ice cores, which imply that current fossil fuel industries' CH4 emissions are underestimated by 25%–40%. As we show here, such a global near-zero geologic CH4 emission estimate is incompatible with multiple independent, bottom-up emission estimates from individual natural geologic seepage areas, each of which is of the order of 0.1–3 Tg yr–1. Further research is urgently needed to resolve the conundrum before rejecting either method or associated emission estimates in global CH4 accounting

Supplemental_Online_Appendix_APR – Supplemental material for Partisan Ambivalence, Partisan Intensity, and Racial Attitudes: The Impact of Shifting Policy Positions on Partisan Evaluations in the 1960s

<p>Supplemental material, Supplemental_Online_Appendix_APR for Partisan Ambivalence, Partisan Intensity, and Racial Attitudes: The Impact of Shifting Policy Positions on Partisan Evaluations in the 1960s by Robert N. Lupton and Judd R. Thornton in American Politics Research</p

Political Sophistication and the Dimensionality of Elite and Mass Political Attitudes, 1980-2004

Among the terms central to the literature on political attitudes have been complexity and constraint, with some scholars asserting that increased complexity constrains political attitudes to a single ideological dimension while others argue that complexity instead leads to a multidimensional attitude structure. We investigate the role of sophistication in structuring issue attitudes using a unique survey of Democratic and Republican party elites in conjunction with the ANES. The two surveys allow us to compare directly the structure of elite and mass issue attitudes. We hypothesize that elite attitudes are unidimensional and mass attitudes are multidimensional. The difference, we argue, is that political sophistication constrains elite attitudes to a single ideological dimension, whereas much of the mass public is not fully capable of making the necessary connections between ideology and issue attitudes. The results of comparisons between elite and mass attitude structures from 1980-2004 support our hypotheses