Whether public policy affects electoral politics is an enduring question with an elusive answer. We identify the impact of the highly contested Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 by exploiting cross-state variation created by the 2012 Supreme Court decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. We compare changes in registration and turnout following the expansion of Medicaid in January of 2014 to show that counties in expansion states experience higher political participation compared to similar counties in nonexpansion states. Importantly, the increases we identify are concentrated in counties with the largest percentage of eligible beneficiaries. The effect on voter registration persists through the 2016 election, but an impact on voter turnout is only evident in 2014. Despite the partisan politics surrounding the ACA–a political environment that differs markedly from social programs producing policy feedbacks in the past—our evidence is broadly consistent with claims that social policy programs can produce some political impacts, at least in the short-term.

Philip E. Converse has challenged the findings of a 1965 article, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” and other work by Burnham. Converse asserts that most of the very high voter participation which occurred before 1900 can be explained by a combination of electoral corruption, the absence of personal-registration requirements and other “undramatic” factors, and thus that the anomalies which Burnham reported are largely spurious. Issues of major importance for social-science explanation are joined. The present article attempts to demonstrate that intervening structural variables cannot come close to explaining all the post-1900 decline in voting participation and that the genuine existence of universal nineteenth-century rural corruption has yet to be demonstrated. These efforts to explain away anomaly are held to be unpersuasive. The weight of evidence supports the objective reality of the phenomena originally reported. This in turn means that more adequate conceptualizations are needed to integrate empirical findings than those which have hitherto dominated the voting-behavior research community.

A large literature expects rising middle classes to promote democracy. However, few studies provide direct evidence on this group in nondemocratic settings. This article focuses on politically important differentiation within the middle classes, arguing that middle-class growth in state-dependent sectors weakens potential coalitions in support of democratization. I test this argument using surveys conducted at mass demonstrations in Russia and detailed population data. I also present a new approach to studying protest based on case-control methods from epidemiology. The results reveal that state-sector professionals were significantly less likely to mobilize against electoral fraud, even after controlling for ideology. If this group had participated at the same rate as middle-class professionals from the private sector, I estimate that another 90,000 protesters would have taken to the streets. I trace these patterns of participation to the interaction of individual resources and selective incentives. These findings have implications for authoritarian stability and democratic transitions.

The central argument of this paper is developed as a criticism of a widely accepted interpretation of collective violence in new states. It is shown that instead of indicating political decay, violence in these states is an integral part of the process of accumulation of power by the national state. To the degree that this power accumulation is necessary for the imposition or maintenance of order, collective violence also indicates movement towards political order on a new scale. Admittedly, our evidence is far from definitive. Nevertheless, it consistently contradicts the interpretation of violence as political decay and supports our interpretation of violence as a usual feature of the process of primitive accumulation of power.

Nudging policies rely on behavioral science to improve people's decisions through small changes in the environments within which people make choices. This article first seeks to rebut a prominent objection to this approach: furnishing governments with the power to nudge leads to relations of alien control, that is, relations in which some people can impose their will on others—a concern which resonates with republican, Kantian, and Rousseauvian theories of freedom and relational theories of autonomy. I respond that alien control can be avoided, if nudging is suitably transparent and democratically controlled. Moreover, such transparency and democratic control are institutionally feasible. Building on this response, I then provide a novel and surprising argument for more nudging: democratically controlled public policy nudging can often contain the power of private companies to nudge in uncontrolled and opaque ways. Therefore, reducing alien control often requires more rather than less nudging in public policy.

Voters evaluate politicians not just by what they say, but also how they say it, via facial displays of emotions and vocal pitch. Candidate characteristics can shape how leaders use—and how voters react to—nonverbal cues. Drawing on role congruity expectations, we study how the use of and reactions to facial, vocal, and textual communication in political debates varies by candidate gender. Relying on full-length videos of four German federal election debates (2005–2017) and a minor party debate, we use video, audio, and text data to measure candidate facial displays of emotion, vocal pitch, and speech sentiment. Consistent with our expectations, Angela Merkel expresses less anger than her male opponents, but she is just as emotive in other respects. Combining these measures of emotional expression with continuous responses recorded by live audiences, we find that voters punish Merkel for anger displays and reward her happiness and general emotional displays.

We develop a bargaining model in which a legislature divides a budget among particularistic and collective goods. By incorporating both private and public goods in a unified model, we uncover nonmonotonic relationships between legislative preferences for collective spending and the amount of the budget actually allocated to collective goods. Put simply, policy proposers can exploit coalition partners' strong preferences for public goods to actually provide fewer public goods in equilibrium while directing more private goods to themselves. These results explain why policy reforms to limit special interest spending often fail. This unified model also sheds new light on when legislatures prefer open or closed amendment rules and when coalitions take different sizes and shapes.

Recent child development research shows that the psychosocial or noncognitive skills that children develop—including the ability to self-regulate and integrate in social settings—are important for success in school and beyond. Are these skills learned in childhood also important for adult political behaviors like voting? In this article, I use a unique school-based 20-year field experiment to explore whether children who develop psychosocial skills early on are more likely to vote in adulthood than those who do not. Matching subjects to voter files, I show that this intervention had a noticeable long-run impact on political participation. These results highlight the need to better understand how childhood experiences shape civic behaviors later in life. During this critical period, children can be taught the not explicitly political, but still vital, skills that set them on a path toward political participation in adulthood.

Survey data are used to test the basic tenets of rational choice theory. We find that (1) voters' preferences are orderly but voters do not always have preferences. When the perceived difference between two candidates is below some threshold, voters are indifferent between them. (2) Most voters choose candidates whose issue positions are congruent with their own. (3) Lack of knowledge about candidates affects choice and utility through two routes—indifference and risk aversion.

Most voters have highly structured utility functions, but the thresholds and risk aversion in these functions place relatively unknown candidates at a disadvantage in presidential primaries and other electoral situations. Moreover, the importance of knowledge in these functions suggests that social choice theorists must take seriously the classic concerns of public opinion research—the operation of the media and the dynamics of information in elections.

Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.

Virtually all previous studies of domestic economic redistribution find white Americans to be less enthusiastic about welfare for black recipients than for white recipients. When it comes to foreign aid and international redistribution across racial lines, I argue that prejudice manifests not in an uncharitable, resentful way but in a paternalistic way because intergroup contact is minimal and because of how the media portray black foreigners. Using two survey experiments, I show that white Americans are more favorable toward aid when cued to think of foreign poor of African descent than when cued to think of those of East European descent. This relationship is due not to the greater perceived need of black foreigners but to an underlying racial paternalism that sees them as lacking in human agency. The findings confirm accusations of aid skeptics and hold implications for understanding the roots of paternalistic practices in the foreign aid regime.

It has long been assumed that urban political machines trade services for votes. However, this study of Chicago found no evidence to suggest that the political machine uses vital public services to reward loyal supporters and to punish enemies. With few exceptions, distribution patterns are a function of past decisions, population shifts, technological changes, and reliance upon technical-rational criteria and professional values. The urban bureaucracy is the major actor in the distributional process. Equity in the distribution of resources is accomplished according to formula and is increasingly a by-product of allegiance to professional standards.

Traditional studies of voter turnout in the United States have identified three factors which are presumed to explain most of the differences between the states in voter turnout: socio-demographic differences, electoral competitiveness, and differences in the rules under which elections are conducted. These studies have not, however, clearly distinguished the three factors largely because of their exclusive reliance on aggregate data to analyze the differences. The purpose of this paper is to 1) distinguish between individual and systemic components of turnout and 2) to attempt to partition the variation in turnout between the components. Unlike previous research, this study used both survey and aggregate data to decompose the variation in turnout among the states into first two components—individual and systemic, and then the latter into political (electoral competitiveness) and legal.

Common conceptions of the electoral connection often make two assumptions about the behavior of candidates and voters. The first is that candidates focus their campaigns on their records. The second is that voters evaluate candidates on the basis of their campaign messages. This article explores how candidates' backgrounds influence these two components of representation. The main premise is simple: Campaign messages are more effective if they emphasize issues on which candidates have built a record that appears favorable to voters. Consequently, candidates tend to focus on this type of issue when choosing campaign themes. Candidates are less successful in winning favorable evaluations if they stray from their records and make unsubstantiated claims.

This article explores the diffusion of criminal justice policy in the American states. Drawing on policy design theory, I code newspaper coverage of 44 criminal justice policies adopted across state governments from 1960–2008, identifying the image and power of target populations—the group singled out for special treatment under law. I test whether electoral pressure leads governments to disproportionally emulate innovations that reinforce popular stereotypes regarding who is entitled to policy benefits or deserving of policy burdens. I find strong support for this theory: State governments are more likely to adopt innovations that extend benefits to strong, popular, and powerful target populations or that impose burdens on weak and politically marginalized groups. This bias can be explained by pressures for responsive policy making, as my findings indicate that it is the national salience of the crime problem—but not the competitiveness or timing of state elections—that influences state adoption of popular “law and order” policy innovations.

Public goods in the United States are largely funded and delivered at the local level. Local public goods are valuable, but their production requires overcoming several collective action problems including coordinating supply and minimizing congestion, free-riding, and peer effects. Land use regulations, promulgated by local governments, allow communities to solve the collective action problems inherent in the provision of local public goods and maintenance of property values. A consequence of these efforts is residential segregation between cities along racial lines. I provide evidence that more stringent land use regulations are supported by whiter communities and that they preserve racial homogeneity. First, I show that cities that were whiter than their metropolitan area in 1970 are more likely to have restrictive land use patterns in 2006. Then, relying on Federal Fair Housing Act lawsuits to generate changes in land use policy, I show that restrictive land use helps to explain metropolitan area segregation patterns over time. Finally, I draw on precinct level initiative elections from several California cities to show that whiter neighborhoods are more supportive of restricting development. These results strongly suggest that even facially race-neutral land use policies have contributed to racial segregation.

The apparent fact that interactive effects are more common in policy innovations taking a long time to diffuse among the states, contrary to the presumed effects of interaction, suggests the existence of alternate diffusion mechanisms. Some policies diffuse directly from a federal model, while others diffuse among states via a segmented pattern of emulations. The order of state adoption of fair employment practices legislation is compared with the adoption order for three labor policies and two civil rights policies. Fair employment practice, by this test, is identified as a civil rights policy and not as a labor policy. State minimum wage legislation is discussed as a case of federal influence in the diffusion process. A first wave of diffusion was followed by a period of federally inspired court rescission. Federal legislation in 1938 began another wave of diffusion. In a third wave of innovations, states with existing laws amended those laws by emulating the new federal legislation.

Students of citizen participation in public affairs disagree as to the effectiveness of such citizen involvement. Using the General Revenue Sharing program as a case study and applying techniques of both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, this article examines the effectiveness of one form of citizen participation, the public hearing. It is found that in the revenue-sharing program, the public hearing did have an immediate, but only short-term, impact on levels of public interest and citizen involvement. Evidence to support some short-term and some long-term effects on reported expenditure decisions is presented; however, these impacts generally are found to be inconsequential and not statistically significant. It is concluded that, as a form of citizen participation, the public hearing—at least as demonstrated in the General Revenue Sharing program—has not had much of an impact on citizen behavior or policy choices.

We use an agency model to analyze the impact of judicial review on the incentives of elected leaders to “posture” by enacting bold but ill-advised policies. We find that judicial review may exacerbate posturing by rescuing leaders from the consequences of unwise policies, but may also discourage posturing by alerting voters to unjustified government action. We further find that judges will defer to the decision of elected leaders unless posturing is sufficiently likely. We then show how judicial review affects voter welfare, both through its effect on policy choice and through its effect on the efficacy of the electoral process in selecting leaders. We also analyze how the desirability of judicial review is affected by characteristics of the leaders and the judges.

Any theory of policy evaluation has to address the problem of the choice of criteria for decision making. In most theories of policy rationality, derived from economic theories of the utility-maximizing individual and a positivist conception of valuation, such values are to be regarded as the “preferences” of the policy maker. The stipulation and ordering of standards of judgment is not considered to be part of policy rationality itself. This conception of rationality is not obligatory. Understanding rationality as having good reasons for an action, and policy judgment as a process of argument, enables us to stipulate certain standards at the metapolitical level which any system of policy evaluation must meet. It is possible to identify a logical sense in which such classic principles as authority, justice and efficiency can be understood as necessary considerations in any rationally defensible policy appraisal.