Political Research Quarterly

The use of a nonpartisan ballot was one of the many Progressive reforms introduced around the turn of the century that is still heavily used today. The intent of the change to a nonpartisan format was, and still is, to remove party cues from a voter's decision, thereby causing the voter to seek out other information about a candidate. This study seeks to examine the effects of nonpartisan elections on patterns of voter decisionmaking. We examine the structure of electoral choice in partisan and nonpartisan elections at the state and local levels using paired comparisons and interrupted time series. Using precinct and district level voting data, we compare mayoral races in the sister cities of Champaign and Urbana (IL) and state legislative elections in Nebraska and Kansas. In addition, we examine the city of Asheville (NC) during its change from partisan to nonpartisan elections in the early 1990s and state legislative elections in Minnesota during its change from nonpartisan to partisan contests in the early 1970s. The analysis of these cases helps us to understand the effects of removing party identification from the ballot. We find that nonpartisanship depresses turnout and that in nonpartisan contests voters rely less on party and more on incumbency in their voting decisions. The nonpartisan ballot “works,” but how one evaluates the results depends on one's view of the electorate and the purpose of elections.

The congressional redistricting following the 1990 Census resulted in the creation of a number of majority-minority congressional districts. While the descriptive representation of various minority groups in the U.S. House was increased as a result, there is some question about how these changes affected the roll-call behavior of incumbent House members whose districts underwent a change in racial composition following redistricting. We explore the effect of changes in district racial composition associated with the creation of majority-minority districts on the roll-call behavior of members of the U.S. House. Our findings indicate that, as the black population in a district changes following redistricting, House incumbents respond with changes in their roll-call behavior. The strongest effects are found among House incumbents representing districts that underwent large changes (i.e., 10 percent or greater) in black constituency composition; these members exhibit substantial changes in their roll-call liberalism in response to changes in the racial composition of their districts brought on by redistricting. Overall, our findings point to the importance of considering both the dynamic element of representation and possible nonlinear effects in reaching an understanding of the effects of race-based redistricting.

Some aspects of democracy appear more sensitive than others to the availability throughout society of political information. Individual-level political engagement poses a puzzle in this regard. An instrumentalquantitative conception of information that is central to rational theories and is also found in some behavioral theories of participation appears contradicted by historical trends. I treat the contemporary expansion in political information made possible by new information technology as a form of natural experiment. I test for a relationship between information availability and political engagement using survey data about Internet use in the period 1996-99. This test is relevant to the applied debate over whether the information revolution will prove salutary for participation, and at the same time sheds light on contending theories of information. I find little relationship exists; the only form of participation which is demonstrably connected to Internet use is donating money This finding fails to support instrumental conceptions of information and instead endorses cognitive conceptions employed in psychological and certain behavioral theories of political engagement.

The traditional model of agenda setting places the Presidency as the primary agenda setter in American politics, particularly in foreign policy. Recent challenges to the traditional model argue that the President's foreign policy agenda is inherently responsive to media coverage and international events (Edwards and Wood 1999; Wood and Peake 1998). These studies rely on examinations of a restricted set of highly salient and vitally important foreign policy issues and find limited presidential influence on the foreign policy agenda. I extend the previous analyses of foreign policy agenda setting by examining foreign policy issues that are less salient and arguably less vital to American national security interests. The extended analysis suggests that Presidents have greater influence on the agendas of the media and Congress than recent research suggests. When systemic attention to an issue is generally light and the President makes the issue a policy priority, presidential success in setting the agenda increases.

This article attempts to explain the variation in Japanese official development assistance in eighteen Latin American countries for the period 1979 to 1993. The findings suggest that recipient need and some Japanese economic interests have influenced disbursements in the region. The study does not provide support for theories that claim that U.S. strategic and economic interests are important determinants of Japanese ODA decisions.

Generations of state politics scholars have believed that a U.S. state is more likely to adopt a law if its neighboring states have already done so, that is, that there is a positive regional effect on policy diffusion. But rarely has the social learning process, the theoretical underpinning of this effect, been examined critically Furthermore, the statistical models used to assess this effect have been fundamentally flawed. In this article, I consider more fully the potential impacts of social learning on policy diffusion, and develop a simple approach to modeling these impacts more flexibly. Using this approach, I take a fresh look at data from two classic studies of state policy diffusion and demonstrate that the regional effect is more complex than previously believed.

This article investigates how parties affect legislative gridlock-the inability of government to enact significant proposals on the policy agenda. Conventional accounts suggest that divided party control of govemment causes such stalemate. I offer an alternative partisan model of gridlock that incorporates party polarization, party seat division, and the interaction between these two factors. Using an original data set of major legislative proposals considered between 1975 and 1994, I find that divided govemment does not affect gridlock once party polarization and party seat division are taken into account. Instead, I find that higher party polarization increases the likelihood of encountering gridlock on a given proposal, but that the magnitude of this increase diminishes to the extent that a party is close to having enough seats to thwart filibusters and vetoes.

Explanations regarding the gender gap in state legislative representation have centered on attitudinal, institutional, and situational characteristics of states (e.g., Carroll 1994; Nechemias 1987; Norrander and Wilcox 1998; Rule 1981, 1990; Welch 1977). In regard to attitudinal characteristics, researchers have primarily focused on the impact political culture and ideology have on female representation. Less attention has been paid to specific gender-role attitudes due to the lack of a state-level gender-role attitudes measure. Consequently, little is understood about how culture, ideology, and gender-role attitudes relate to one another or female representation in the states. Recently, a cross-sectional measure of state-level gender-role attitudes constructed from the General Social Survey (GSS), 1974-1996 by Brace et al. (1999) has become available. A cross-sectional analysis of 38 states reveals that gender-role attitudes affect the level of state legislative female representation independent of political culture and ideology. Thoughts on why this is the case are discussed, suggesting future lines of research made possible by this new measure.

Researchers and political observers often assume that campaign contributions help political action committees (PACs) and their affiliated lobbyists gain access to members of Congress. But empirical studies demonstrating that contributions purchase access are extremely rare. In this paper, we compare the degree to which organized interests with PACs have more contact with members of Congress than groups without an affiliated PAC, and we also identify why PAC affiliates might have an advantage in making contact. Our empirical analysis is based on data we collected from a mail survey of lobbyists involved in one of four issues, and campaign finance data we obtained from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Our analysis indicates that PAC affiliated organizations contacted significantly more undecided committee members than nonaffiliated groups. However, this lobbying advantage derives not from PAC affiliates' contributions but from the base of support these groups have established in congressional districts around the country.

A majority of recent studies finds that black members of Congress are more supportive of blacks' interests than are white members of Congress, even white Democrats. These results are limited, however, exclusively to the contemporary period as scholars have not studied how black members of Congress behaved during Reconstruction, the first era of blacks' descriptive representation. Although black representatives from this era are typically portrayed as having been responsive to blacks' interests, some recent studies suggest that they often supported whites' interests on issues important to their black constituents. Employing a measure of racial ideology as well as a measure of general ideology developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997), we investigate the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation in the U.S. House immediately after the Civil War, through the use of descriptive statistics, OLS regression, and forecasting techniques. We find that black Republicans during Reconstruction were more ideologically liberal on both general and racial issues than their white Republican colleagues in the South. These results suggest that the linkage between descriptive and substantive representation for blacks is not merely a recent phenomenon, but rather has more general applicability across time.

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why women remain underrepresented in Congress. One of those hypotheses is that some voters have blatant prejudices against women politicians, while others hold stereotypes about men and women politicians that favor men. In contrast, others claim that women candidates for Congress actually have an advantage in running for office because voters prefer women politicians. We test those hypotheses using pooled 1988, 1990, and 1992 National Election Studies data and the pooled 1988-1992 Senate Election Study and building on Krasno's (1994) model of voter choice in House and Senate elections. We find evidence that some voters prefer women candidates in House races, but not in Senate races. The advantage for women candidates in races with a challenger and incumbent is slight and can be attributed to the strong support of well-educated women voters. An advantage for women candidates is more pronounced in open-seat contests. In open-seat races, women voters, regardless of their education levels, more strongly support women candidates. Overall, candidate sex was not significant to male voters.