Public Opinion and Campaign Finance: A Skeptical Look at Senator McCain's Claims

Sen. John McCain of Arizona and other advocates of additional regulations on campaign finance argue that spending on elections has caused public cynicism about and mistrust of American government. They also believe that public opinion indicates that Congress should move immediately to pass new campaign finance regulations. This paper uses public opinion data to test both claims. McCain and his allies are wrong on both counts. The data show that campaign spending could not have caused increases in public mistrust of government--indeed, rising soft money spending has been followed by increases (not decreases) in public trust in government--and that there is no statistical relationship over time between campaign spending and public trust in American government. The data also show that the public assigns a low priority to altering campaign finance regulations. Both findings militate against the current attempt in Congress to pass the McCain-Feingold regulations on campaign fundraising. New regulations on campaign finance will not increase public trust in government because campaign spending did not cause public cynicism. Moreover, contrary to Senator McCain's opinion, the low priority given campaign finance regulations by the public suggests that the McCain-Feingold bill should be dealt with much later in the 107th Congress, after more pressing issues have been addressed

Online reverse discourses? Claiming a space for trans voices

In recent years, online media have offered to trans people helpful resources to create new political, cultural and personal representations of their biographies. However, the role of these media in the construction of their social and personal identities has seldom been addressed. Drawing on the theoretical standpoint of positioning theory and diatextual discourse analysis, this paper discusses the results of a research project about weblogs created by Italian trans women. In particular, the aim of this study was to describe the ways online resources are used to express different definitions and interpretation of transgenderism, transsexuality and gender transitioning. We identified four main positioning strategies: \u201cTransgender\u201d, \u201cTranssexual before being a woman\u201d, \u201cA woman who was born male\u201d and \u201cJust a normal woman\u201d. We conclude with the political implications of the pluralization of narratives about gender non-conformity. Specifically, we will highlight how aspects of neoliberal discourses have been appropriated and rearticulated in the construction of gendered subjectivities

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Campaign Finance Laws and Political Efficacy: Evidence From the States

The decline of political efficacy and trust in the United States is often linked to the rise of money in politics. Both the courts and reform advocates justify restrictions on campaign donations and spending as necessary for the improvement of links between the government and the governed. We conduct the first test of whether campaign finance laws actually influence how citizens view their government by exploiting the variation in campaign finance regulations both across and within states during the last half of the 20th century. Our analysis reveals no large positive effects of campaign finance laws on political efficacy. Public disclosure laws and limits on contributions from organizations are in some cases associated with modest increases in efficacy, but public financing is associated with a similarly modest decrease in efficacy.Campaign finance, trust, social capital

The Effects of Campaign Finance Laws on Turnout, 1950-2000

Scholars have proposed many routes by which campaign finance laws may impact turnout. For instance, laws restricting campaign spending may decrease mobilization, resulting in lower turnout. Alternatively, such laws might increase the competitiveness of elections, resulting in higher turnout. Existing studies tend to focus on only one causal pathway, ignoring the net effects of campaign finance reforms on voter turnout. We exploit the variation in state campaign finance laws from 1950 to 2000 in order to estimate the reduced-form relationships between reform and turnout. Using both aggregate and individual-level data, we find that campaign finance laws on net have little impact on turnout in gubernatorial elections. There are two exceptions to this finding: Limits on organizational contributions are shown in an individual level analysis to increase turnout prior to a sea change in campaign finance ushered in by the Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976, while public financing laws are shown to have an equally large negative impact on turnout in the post-Buckley era. These results strengthens the existing literature, which finds similarly perverse effects of public financing on the quality of democracy, and demonstrates the advantages of reduced-form analysis for understanding the influence of laws on behavior.voting, campaign finance

Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data

Researchers often seek to understand the effects of state policies or institutions on individual behavior or other outcomes in sub-state-level observational units (e.g., election results in state legislative districts). However, standard estimation methods applied to such models do not properly account for the clustering of observations within states and may lead researchers to overstate the statistical significance of state-level factors. We discuss the theory behind two approaches to dealing with clusteringclustered standard errors and multilevel modeling. We then demonstrate the relevance of this topic by replicating a recent study of the effects of state post-registration laws on voter turnout (Wolfinger, Highton, and Mullin 2005). While we view clustered standard errors as a more straightforward, feasible approach, especially when working with large datasets or many cross-level interactions, our purpose in this Practical Researcher piece is to draw attention to the issue of clustering in state and local politics research.mixed-level data, voter turnout

Campaign Finance Laws and Political Efficacy: Evidence From the States

The decline of political efficacy and trust in the United States is often linked to the rise of money in politics. Both the courts and reform advocates justify restrictions on campaign donations and spending as necessary for the improvement of links between the government and the governed. We conduct the first test of whether campaign finance laws actually influence how citizens view their government by exploiting the variation in campaign finance regulations both across and within states during the last half of the 20th century. Our analysis reveals no large positive effects of campaign finance laws on political efficacy. Public disclosure laws and limits on contributions from organizations are in some cases associated with modest increases in efficacy, but public financing is associated with a similarly modest decrease in efficacy

The Effects of Campaign Finance Laws on Turnout, 1950-2000

Scholars have proposed many routes by which campaign finance laws may impact turnout. For instance, laws restricting campaign spending may decrease mobilization, resulting in lower turnout. Alternatively, such laws might increase the competitiveness of elections, resulting in higher turnout. Existing studies tend to focus on only one causal pathway, ignoring the net effects of campaign finance reforms on voter turnout. We exploit the variation in state campaign finance laws from 1950 to 2000 in order to estimate the reduced-form relationships between reform and turnout. Using both aggregate and individual-level data, we find that campaign finance laws on net have little impact on turnout in gubernatorial elections. There are two exceptions to this finding: Limits on organizational contributions are shown in an individual level analysis to increase turnout prior to a sea change in campaign finance ushered in by the Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976, while public financing laws are shown to have an equally large negative impact on turnout in the post-Buckley era. These results strengthens the existing literature, which finds similarly perverse effects of public financing on the “quality of democracy,” and demonstrates the advantages of reduced-form analysis for understanding the influence of laws on behavior

Attraverso e oltre le maschilità subordinate: Performatività e soggettivazione nella produzione delle maschilità di uomini GBTQ+

Scholarship in the field of critical studies on men and masculinities rarely took into consideration the way in which men who identify in non-normative sexualities and genders are actively involved in the production of masculinity. The few works that explored this topic from the point of view of critical studies on men and on masculine people focused mainly on homosexual men and, to a lesser extent, on trans men to define if and to what extent they reproduce the gender norms around which the exaltation of masculinity is founded. The focal point that emerges from this literature is that, by internalizing the rules relating to masculinity, these subjectivities find themselves in a condition of irreconcilability between the urge to define themselves as masculine and the risk of being continually feminized because of their structural distance from the subject around to which these norms gravitate, that is the heterosexual man cisgender, giving for this reason place to contradictory forms of masculinity. Within this frame, men who identify in non-normative sexualities and genders do not seem to have an active role in the production of masculinity. Placed in a position of necessary exclusion from the field in which such production takes place, they can only reflect the dynamics or reject them, but also, in this case, they do not produce a significant transformation in gender norms. Starting from these considerations, I have built a research project aimed at problematizing the way in which the production of masculinity is articulated in the ways in which men who recognize themselves in a non-normative sexuality or genders give meaning and materiality to their identification. From a methodological point of view, the research was carried out by integrating three qualitative methods: (1) the analysis of 20 free diaries lasting 3-6 months, produced online by men aged between 20 and 29 years that identify in a non-normative gender or sexuality; (2) an ethnographic research, carried out over a period of 8 months within contexts where the presence of LGBTQ+ people was explicitly thematised; (3) a auto-ethnographic research, which was articulated both through the use of a personal diary and by retrieving previous personal documents. The analysis of the material highlighted 4 ways of configuring the process of production of masculinity. The configuration called "production of an ideal masculinity" is articulated through the production of a "real" masculinity which is placed defined as privileged over feminized positions. In the second configuration, "forms of identification with the feminine", femininity, constructed as an essentialized property, is positively valued as a compensation for negative aspects of masculinity. In the third configuration, "non-normative sexualities and genders as protest masculinities", the heterosexual and cisgender masculine subject is displaced from the hegemonic position in favour of masculinities rooted in an essentialized view of non-normative sexualities and genders. Finally, the fourth configuration, "disidentifications from masculinity", refers to practices of subjectivation which advance an instance of disarticulation of one's own identification as a man

Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data

Researchers often seek to understand the effects of state policies or institutions on individual behavior or other outcomes in sub-state-level observational units (e.g., election results in state legislative districts). However, standard estimation methods applied to such models do not properly account for the clustering of observations within states and may lead researchers to overstate the statistical significance of state-level factors. We discuss the theory behind two approaches to dealing with clustering—clustered standard errors and multilevel modeling. We then demonstrate the relevance of this topic by replicating a recent study of the effects of state post-registration laws on voter turnout (Wolfinger, Highton, and Mullin 2005). While we view clustered standard errors as a more straightforward, feasible approach, especially when working with large datasets or many cross-level interactions, our purpose in this Practical Researcher piece is to draw attention to the issue of clustering in state and local politics research