PS: Political Science & PoliticsPS: Political Science & Politics is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on contemporary politics, teaching, and the discipline. PS is also APSA’s journal of record for the profession.
March 2012 VOLUME 45 NUMBER 2
In this issue...
From analysis of party registration as a general indicator of political orientation and predicting the upcoming French presidential election in May 2012 to saving taxpayers' money, the April issue of PS: Political Science and Politics variety of research articles, commentary, and features appeals to a broad readership. In addition, more than 100 pages of "association news" keeps APSA members informed about news about our association, colleagues, and events. We also lists more than 1,200 dissertations completed in 2010 and 2011.
"The Big Sort" That Wasn't: A Skeptical Reexamination
Authors Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College and Morris Fiorina of Stanford University provide a rebuttal to the theory put forth in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, a recent popular book endorsed by president Bill Clinton. In that book journalist Bill Bishop writes that
"We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighborhood (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know, can't understand, and can barely conceive of 'those people' who live just a few miles away."
The empirical foundation of Bishop's argument is an increase in "landslide" counties. In 1976 a quarter of the electorate lived in such counties; in 2004 nearly half did. But the problem with such comparisons is that successive presidential elections offer voters very different choices. An election pitting a moderate Midwestern Republican (Gerald Ford) against a moderate southern Democrat (Jimmy Carter) not surprisingly muddled partisan lines more than an election between a Massachusetts liberal (Kerry) and a Texas conservative (Bush).
Abrams and Fiorina show that party registration is a more general indicator of political orientations. The electoral characteristics of states with and without partisan voter registration are very similar, and the presidential vote difference identified by Bishop is slightly stronger in the states that register by party. But in contrast to the presidential vote, party registration figures show that the proportion of the electorate living in politically homogeneous counties was three times larger in the 1970s than today.
Counties are not appropriate units to study neighborhood homogeneity, of course, but even if neighborhoods were becoming more politically homogeneous, the negative consequences postulated by Bishop are doubtful. Bishop bases his arguments on the small group literature of social psychology, but Fiorina and Abrams show that American neighborhoods are not small groups. In fact, survey evidence indicates that a majority of Americans do not know most of their neighbors, rarely or never talk to their neighbors about politics, and see themselves as living in politically heterogeneous neighborhoods.
Forecasting the 2012 French Presidential Election
Who will win the next French presidential election? Forecasting electoral results from political-economy models is a recent tradition in France. Martial Foucault and Richard Nadeau (University of Montreal) pursue this effort by estimating a vote function based on both local and national data for the elections held between 1981 and 2007. This approach allows them to circumvent the small N problem and to produce more robust and reliable results. Based on a model including economic (unemployment) and political (approval and previous results) variables, they predict the defeat, although by a relatively small margin, of the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the French presidential election to be held in May 2012. Such a model rests on two assumptions largely shared by forecasters: First, it assumes that national electoral outcomes in most countries can be satisfactorily explained by a limited number of political and economic variables. Second, it hypothesizes that the values taken by these variables several months in advance are often more useful to predict electoral outcomes than information picked closer to Election Day. The predicted vote share for the socialist candidate, François Hollande, is set at 51.85%.
Political Influence and TARP: An Analysis of Treasury's Disposition of CPP Warrants
In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, many have suggested that the US government's administration of the taxpayer-funded rescue of the financial industry offered disproportionate benefits to politically active firms. However, quite the opposite occurred. Puente's research into Treasury's handling of the disposition of warrants (assets similar to stock call options) acquired through the Capital Purchase Program (CPP) shows that, at least in this phase of the "bailout," political variables did not matter. That is, lobbying expenditures, campaign contributions, and connections with Secretary of the Treasury Geithner, among other independent variables, cannot explain variance in the percentage of market value Treasury received for these warrants. Moreover, according to Puente, the more politically active a firm is, the more likely Treasury is to auction its warrants (thereby receiving fair market value). This suggests that Treasury is attempting to counter-act allegations of preferential treatment. Taxpayers should be pleased. By insulating itself from politics and making efforts to maximize the taxpayer return on the warrants, Treasury may have prevented billions of dollars in taxpayer losses.
SYMPOSIUM: New Research on Gender in Political Psychology
In this three-article symposium the rationale, model, and outcomes from an NSF-sponsored mentoring conference focused on gender and political psychology are presented. Organized by two junior scholars, Monica C. Schneider (Miami University, Ohio) and Angela L. Bos (College of Wooster) the conference and the articles intend to create intentional and productive mentoring opportunities for scholars at all stages of their careers and to promote new and innovative scholarship on gender in political psychology. "Mentoring to Fix the Leaky Pipeline" describes how the goals and configuration of the conference responded to the need for mentoring and how the authors assessed the success of their conference structure. "Data, Methods, and Theoretical Implications" reports on innovative teaching ideas discussed at the conference. In it, the authors develop an argument for mainstreaming gender throughout the political science curriculum and share specific exercises conference participants have used successfully to this end. The final article, "Integrating Gender into the Political Science Core Curriculum" presents an overview of the research directions and new methodologies identified at the conference.
The April 2012 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics contains these articles and many more that focus on contemporary political science with a wide range of feature articles.
FEATURES
Reading the Tea Leaves: Understanding Tea Party Caucus Membership in the US House of Representatives (Bryan T. Gervais and Irwin L. Morris, University of Maryland)
US Media Coverage of the Cancún Climate Change Conference (Jules Boykoff, Pacific University);
An Interesting Bias: Lessons from an Academic's Year as a Reporter (David Niven, University of Cincinnati);
The Making of the Pundit, 2010: When Strong Ties Trump Weak Ones (Paul Musgrave, Georgetown University).
THE TEACHER
Umpires as Legal Realists (William Blake, University of Texas, Austin)
Learning Political Science with Prediction Markets: An Experimental Study (Cali Mortenson Ellis and Rahul Sami, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Youth, Life and Politics: Examining the Everyday in Comparative Politics (Maria Ortuoste, California State University, East Bay).
Common Expositional Problems in Students' Papers and Theses (Forrest D. Colburn, City College of New York and Norman Uphoff, Cornell University)
Learning through Writing: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in Writing Assignments ( Gamze Çavdar and Sue Doe, Colorado State University).
In the "People" section of PS, read about the milestones and achievements of more than 65 of our members. In Association News, learn details about the APSA Annual Meeting, the next editors of APSR, new options for receiving APSA journals, and the 2012-13 APSA Minority Fellows.
Two articles by former APSA congressional fellows, "A Window Seat on American Politics: Reflections on the GMFUS/ APSA Congressional Fellowship" (Sebastian Bruns, University of Kiel) and "Nuclear Weapons in the 112th Congress: Politics and Policy after New START (Thomas Karako, Kenyon College) offer insights into this APSA program and what it offers to its fellows.
As the "journal of record" for APSA, the Gazette section gives updates to the 2012 APSA Committees and activities.
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