Politics of the Body

Theory and evidence suggests that respondents are likely to overreport voter turnout in election surveys because they have a strong incentive to offer a socially desirable response. We suggest that contextual influences may affect the socially desirable bias, leading to variance in the rate of overreporting across countries. This leads us to hypothesize that nonvoters will be more likely to overreport voting in elections that have high turnout. We rely on validated turnout data to measure overreporting in five countries which vary a great deal in turnout: Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. We find that in national settings with higher levels of participation, the tendency to overreport turnout may be greater than in settings where low participation is the norm.

Why are some terrorist organizations so much more deadly then others? This article examines organizational characteristics such as ideology, size, age, state sponsorship, alliance connections, and control of territory while controlling for factors that may also influence lethality, including the political system and relative wealth of the country in which the organization is based. Using data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism's Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB), we use a negative binomial model of organizational lethality, finding that organizational size, ideology, territorial control, and connectedness are important predictors of lethality while state sponsorship, organizational age, and host country characteristics are not.

Applying the theories of agenda building and frame building and previous work related to the shared negotiations between sources and journalists in constructing news dramas, this article examines the role of the mass media in the evolution of the stem cell controversy. How does a scientific issue gain, maintain, or lose political and media attention? What forces combine to emphasize certain dimensions of an issue over others? Using data from a content analysis of stem cell-related articles appearing between 1975 and 2001 in the New York Times and the Washington Post, the authors analyze patterns of media attention, media framing, and media sourcing across stages of scientific, political, and policy development.

Much research shows that politicians represent public preferences in public policy. Although we know that there is representation, we do not understand the nature of the relationship in different policy areas. We do not know whether and to what extent representation varies across domains. Even where we find representation, we do not know what policy makers actually represent. This article explicitly addresses these issues, focusing on a set of nine spending domains in the United States. At the heart of the article is a simple conjecture: representation varies across domains, and the pattern is symmetrical to the pattern of public responsiveness to budgetary policy itself. Analysis of the relationships between opinion and policy over time in the different spending domains supports the conjecture. The patterns fit quite nicely with what we know about the influence of different issues on voting behavior in American national elections. Based on this analysis, then, it appears that politicians' responsiveness to public preferences reflects the public importance of different policy domains.

Research on representative bureaucracy has failed to deal with whether or not representative bureaucracies produce minority gains at the expense of nonminorities. Using a pooled time series analysis of 350 school districts over six years, this study examines the relationship between representative bureaucracy and organizational outputs for minorities and nonminorities. Far from finding that representative bureaucracy produces minority gains at the expense of nonminorities, this study finds both minority and nonminority students perform better in the presence of a representative bureaucracy. This finding suggests an alternative hypothesis to guide research, that representative bureaucracies are more effective than their nonrepresentative counterparts.

elections, randomized voter mobilization experiments were conducted in Bridgeport, Columbus, Detroit, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and St. Paul. Names appearing on official lists of registered voters were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. A few days before Election Day, the treatment group received a face-to-face contact from a coalition of nonpartisan student and community organizations, encouraging them to vote. After the election, voter turnout records were used to compare turnout rates among people assigned to treatment and control groups. Consistent with the recent experimental results reported by , the findings here indicate that face-to-face voter mobilization was effective in stimulating voter turnout across a wide spectrum of local elections.

, for their support of our research. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose comments pushed us to think more critically about this important topic. We are very appreciative of their efforts on our behalf. McClain et al.

This article explores the roots of white support for capital punishment in the United States. Our analysis addresses individual-level and contextual factors, paying particular attention to how racial attitudes and racial composition influence white support for capital punishment. Our findings suggest that white support hinges on a range of attitudes wider than prior research has indicated, including social and governmental trust and individualist and authoritarian values. Extending individual-level analyses, we also find that white responses to capital punishment are sensitive to local context. Perhaps most important, our results clarify the impact of race in two ways. First, racial prejudice emerges here as a comparatively strong predictor of white support for the death penalty. Second, black residential proximity functions to polarize white opinion along lines of racial attitude. As the black percentage of county residents rises, so too does the impact of racial prejudice on white support for capital punishment.

There is no shortage of scholarship on questions about state sovereignty and international intervention. Particularly in the field of international relations (IR), historical, theoretical, legal, and ethical treatments of how the concept and institution of state sovereignty have evolved over time in response to developments in state discourse and practice have remained an enduring feature of the literature since IR was first established as an academic discipline (e.g., Hinsley 1986; James 1986; Jouvenel 1957; Kelsen 1920). Indeed, much of modern Western political theory, on which most of contemporary IR theory is based, was preoccupied with questions of sovereignty and order, dating back at least to the early writings of Jean Bodin (1992). Envisaged most fundamentally as an attribute of the political communities that we today call states, sovereignty constitutes the basis for the most fundamental right of states-that of nonintervention. Most observers of international affairs share an intuitive understanding of what sovereignty is and what it means for a state to be sovereign, yet also tend to agree that sovereignty is constantly under attack and evolving according to prevailing practice and discourse. Sovereignty is thus, paradoxically, the most fickle-and at the same time the most enduring-feature of the international system.

Power in policy making revolves in part around the ability to control media attention to an issue while framing an issue in favorable terms. These two characteristics of media coverage both reflect and shape where an issue is decided, by whom, and with what outcomes. In understanding this process, a number of studies have observed cyclical waves in media attention and historical shifts in how an issue is framed, linking these features to policy decisions. Yet there has been little theoretical specification and testing of the social mechanisms that drive these cycles. With this in mind, this study outlines a model for understanding "mediated issue development." The theoretical components of the model include the type of policy arena where debate takes place, the media lobbying activities of strategic actors, the journalistic need for narrative structure, and the competition from other issues for attention across policy and media environments. Related factors include the type of journalist assigned coverage and the level of attention from opinion pages. Using data from a content analysis of twenty-five years of coverage at the New York Times and Washington Post, the model is applied and tested against the issue of plant biotechnology. Generalizability of the model is the primary goal,and the authors conclude with comparisons to other issues such as the Human Genome Project and intelligent design. Understanding, however, why plant biotechnology remains at low levels of controversy in the United States compared to the rest of the world remains the object of considerable curiosity, and the focus of this study posits several explanations.

While a large body of work exists on presidents' public approval, no study identifies the conditions under which approval generates policy influence. This gap is particularly significant since empirical research has produced inconsistent findings on whether popularity affects a president's legislative success. In the following, we argue that public salience and issue complexity determine the extent to which a president can capitalize on approval, and we proceed to test this hypothesis on U.S. House of Representatives roll-call votes between 1989 and 2000. The empirical analysis provides strong support for our hypothesis, which holds across a variety of econometric specifications and estimates of approval.

To express attitudes and act according to their self-interest, citizens need relevant, up-to-date information about current affairs. But has the increased commercialization in the media market increased or decreased the flow of political information? Hallin and Mancini stress that the existing empirical evidence is fragmented and that this question therefore has been difficult to answer. In this article the authors present new data that allow them to systematically examine how the flow of political information on TV occurs across six Western countries during a thirty-year period. The authors find that the flow of political information through TV varies according to the degree of commercialization. The flow of news and current affairs is lowest in the most commercially oriented television system and among the commercial TV channels. There is however important cross-national variation even within similar media systems. The authors' data do not suggest a convergence toward the liberal system when it comes to the political information environment on TV. Rather, what strikes them is how strongly resistant some European countries have been to subordinating the needs of democracy to profit making.

Although mediatization as a term is commonly used in the academic literature, it is rarely defined well and there are almost no studies that explicitly seek to investigate the mediatization of politics. Drawing on the literature on mediatization, media interventionism, political news journalism and related areas, the purpose of this article is to develop indicators of the degree to which news content is mediatized, and test these in a comparative content analysis of how Swedish and US television news covered the 2006 Swedish and 2008 US election campaigns. The results show that election news on US television is more mediatized than that on Swedish television, as expected. However, few differences were found across commercial and public service television news within Sweden. The study also suggests that the mediatization of news content may be moderated by national journalism cultures, political news cultures and political communication cultures.

Do varieties of welfare capitalism exist in the developing world? This analysis challenges scholars of comparative political economy and international political economy who treat the political economies of less developed countries (LDCs) as more or less identical to one another or, at the other extreme, as nations marked by tremendous diversity. This paper is one of the first attempts to highlight systematic differences among the political economies of the developing world, particularly with respect to their distribution regimes. Using cluster analysis, the results illustrate that welfare efforts in LDCs are either directed towards promoting market development (a productive welfare state), protecting select individuals from the market (a protective welfare state) or both (a dual welfare state). The discovery of distinct patterns of welfare regimes in LDCs presents hitherto unknown implications for the influence of domestic politics and policies in late twentieth-century globalization. Rudra 4 Existing scholarship overlooks the possibility of varieties of welfare capitalism in the developing world. In contrast, discussions abound regarding identifiable and systematic differences in domestic institutional arrangements within the advanced capitalist countries, particular with respect to their distribution regimes. Is it feasible that distribution regimes of relatively poor countries also fall into distinct patterns? By implication or design, studies in comparative political economy (CPE) and international political economy (IPE) treat less developed countries (LDCs) as more or less identical to one another or, at the other extreme, as nations marked by tremendous politico-economic diversity. It is startling that neither scholars nor policy-makers have a clear sense of 'peer groups' among developing nations, outside of broad, amorphous categories such as region or level of economic development. This analysis challenges long-standing conceptions of LDC political economies by providing theoretical and empirical support for 'systematic divergence' in their choice set of social welfare policies. The discovery of distinct patterns of welfare regimes in LDCs presents hitherto unknown implications for the influence of domestic politics and policies in late twentieth-century globalization.

Prior scholarship on the effect of the increasing number of female judges leads to three contrasting sets of expectations. Early writings and views of affirmative-action activists suggested that female judges would be more liberal than male judges. On the other hand, a series of empirical studies suggest that we should expect no gender differences. In contrast to both of these perspectives, several feminist scholars suggest that women will be more liberal only when that position expresses support for full participation in the community. These contrasting expectations were tested by analyzing the votes of appeals court decisions in three issue areas. No differences were discovered between male and female judges in obscenity or criminal search and seizure cases. However, in employment discrimination cases, female judges were significantly more liberal than their male colleagues.

Little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over the campaign cycle. How does the outcome come into focus as the election cycle evolves? Do voters' preferences evolve in a patterned and understandable way? What role does the election campaign play? In this article, we address these issues. We translate general arguments about the role of campaigns into a set of formal, statistical expectations. Then, we outline an empirical analysis and examine poll results for the 15 U.S. presidential elections between 1944 and 2000. Our analysis focuses specifically on two questions. First, to what extent does the observable variation in aggregate poll results represent real movement in electoral preferences (if the election were held the day of the poll) as opposed to mere survey error? Second, to the extent polls register true movement of preferences owing to the shocks of campaign events, do the effects last or do they decay? Answers to these questions tell us whether and the extent to which campaign events have effects on preferences and, if so, whether these effects persist until Election Day. The answers thus inform us about what we ultimately want to know: Do campaigns have any real impact on the election outcome? The results of our analysis suggest that they do.

This study compares the news coverage of election campaigns in three Swedish newspapers at the time of the 2002 national election and three U.S. newspapers at the time of the 2004 presidential election. The results from the content analysis show that the metaframe of politics as a strategic game was more common in the U.S. newspapers, while the metaframe of politics as issues was more common in the Swedish newspapers. U.S. articles were also more likely to use the horse-race and political strategy frames. While U.S. coverage was predominantly descriptive in focus, an interpretive journalistic style was more often dominant in the Swedish articles. The results also show that the U.S. news stories were triggered by the words and actions of the campaigns more often than the Swedish news stories.