Taking The Initiative: Exploring The Influence Of Citizen Legislating On Good Goverance In The American States

The citizen legislator is both a controversial and recurring phenomenon of interest in political science research. A longstanding concern for the discipline has been whether or not involvement of the public in the lawmaking process is an asset or a liability to quality governance. This study explores the desirability of citizen legislating in the American states. A four dimensional index is created that includes empirical indicators of substantive and procedural governance. These indicators include voter turnout, fiscal health, the ideological distance between government and the citizenry, and the diversity of a state\u27s interest group system. The total number of initiatives and popular referendums that appear biennially within each of the fifty states is employed as the key explanatory variable to capture the degree of citizen legislating that is occurring in the states between 1980 and 2000. A random-effects generalized least squares regression reveals that higher ballot measure counts are statistically and substantively associated with better quality governance, indicating that citizen legislation is a quality input into the political system. Key control variables such as divided government, interparty competition, citizen ideological extremism, state legislative term limits, and legislative professionalism also tell particularly poignant stories about the road to good governance

Restrictive ballot access laws reduce the technical complexityof initiatives and make them more likely to pass

Many states and local governments in the U.S. allow citizens to place measures on the ballot, but in recent years, some state governments have put into place restrictions such as requiring a greater number of signatures. In new research which studies nearly 600 ballot initiatives over 15 years, Kerri Milita finds rather than reducing the number of ballot initiatives which pass, these more restrictive laws may be having the opposite effect. She explains that since long and technically complicated ballot proposals are less likely to be approved by voters, those who sponsor initiatives in states with greater restrictions will tend to put forward less complex measures, which in turn have a greater chance of being successful

Testing the Significance of Background in the Decline of Congressional Comity: an Analysis of Implicated Members, 1970-2005.

This study aims to test the significance of background characteristics, and the entailing socialization, in explaining acts of incivility by members of Congress. The research diverges from traditional approaches to the study of conflict in Congress in its belief that discord in Congress is two dimensional, one geme born of policy and principle and the other arising from personality differences among members. Specifically, fourteen different variables that pertain to either an individual\u27s background experiences or Congress specific contextual considerations are scrutinized. Two major newspapers are used to identify uncivil acts, or more specifically, the violation of congressional n01ms intended to promote a courteous and decorous legislative work environment. The time period studied is 1970 to 2005. The specific acts or violations of comity are presented in an Appendix. Of particular interest to this study_is a test of whether legislators that can be defined as ideologues are more likely to be implicated in uncivil acts. Ultimately, the research finds that many of the background experiences such as previous occupation and previous state legislative experience are statistically linked to the probability of being implicated in personality-based conflict, thus weakening the traditional notion that discord in Congress is solely a function of ideological extremism

Beyond roll-off: individual-level abstention on ballot measure voting

<p>Why do individuals who have turned out to vote abstain from voting on certain ballot measures? Previous work examines abstention at the aggregate level by observing ballot roll-off, and focuses on the readability of the ballot summary for a measure as the primary determinant of whether individuals will abstain. In contrast, I hypothesize that three individual-level factors interact with the accessibility (i.e. ease or difficulty) of a ballot measure’s issue content to influence one’s propensity to abstain. Individuals with low issue information, who are risk averse, and who attach low importance to the issue should be more likely to abstain from voting than those with high knowledge, who are risk-acceptant, and who attach high importance to the issue. Furthermore, the impact of each of these individual-level traits strengthens as the issue raised in the measure becomes increasingly complex. I find strong empirical evidence for these hypotheses using an experimental design.</p

Replication Data for: It Could Happen to You: How Perceptions of Personal Risk Shape Support for Social Welfare Policy in the American States

Is public support for social welfare programs contingent on an individual’s exposure to risk? Prior work has examined whether tough economic times lead people to “reach out” (i.e. become more accepting of government expansion of social welfare programs) or “pull back” (i.e. become less supportive of welfare). However, these studies do not account for the conditional relationship between an individual’s exposure to risk and his or her risk orientation. Using new survey data, we find that an individual’s risk orientation moderates the relationship between risk exposure and public support for welfare spending. When individuals perceive exposure to economic risk, those who are risk averse are highly supportive of welfare expansion; those that are risk acceptant become less supportive. Broadly, these findings suggest that public support for welfare spending is contingent on whether an individual perceives exposure to risk and, if so, the individual’s propensity to tolerate that risk

Appendix_for_Milita_Ryan_PRQ_online_supp – Supplemental material for Battleground States and Local Coverage of American Presidential Campaigns

<p>Supplemental material, Appendix_for_Milita_Ryan_PRQ_online_supp for Battleground States and Local Coverage of American Presidential Campaigns by Kerri Milita and John Barry Ryan in Political Research Quarterly</p

Replication Data for: How Gender Affects the Efficacy of Discussion as an Information Shortcut

There are a number of observed gender differences in the frequency of political dis-cussion, perceived levels of expertise, and importantly, openness to persuasion. This manuscript explores the consequences of these differences for political choices. Given the difficulty in separating influence from homophily with observational data, this manuscript relies on a group-based experiment. Results suggest that when selecting between candidates, women are more likely to accept information from others, even if the information in the signals is not helpful. Men, on the other hand, often ignore out- side signals in favor of sticking with their own choices even when outside signals would be helpful to their decision-making. A reanalysis of a previously published experiment on social communication leads to similar gender differences

Clear as Black and White: The Effects of Ambiguous Rhetoric Depend on Candidate Race

To replicate our analyses, open the Stata dataset. Then run the "constructing variables" do-file, which makes the variables we use in the analyses. Then run the "replication analyses" do-file, which also notes which analyses go with which table or figure