Theory: Social capital is the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitates resolution of collection action problems (Coleman 1990; Putnam 1993). Although normally conceived as a property of communities, the reciprocal relationship between community involvement and trust in others is a demonstration of social capital in individual behavior and attitudes. Hypotheses: Variation in social capital can be explained by citizens' psychological involvement with their communities, cognitive abilities, economic resources, and general life satisfaction. This variation affects citizens' confidence in national institutions, beyond specific controls for measures of actual performance. Methods: We analyze the pooled General Social Surveys from 1972 to 1994 in a latent variables framework incorporating aggregate contextual data. Results: Civic engagement and interpersonal trust are in a tight reciprocal relationship, where the connection is stronger from participation to interpersonal trust, rather than the reverse.

Individual-Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel.' These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership. Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work. This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.

Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House

A large literature has demonstrated that such economic factors as growth, inflation, and unemployment affect the popularity of incumbents within many democratic countries. However, cross-national aggregate analyses of "economic voting" show only weak and inconsistent economic effects. We argue for the systematic incorporation of political factors that shape the electoral consequences of economic performance. Multivariate analyses of 102 elections in 19 industrialized democracies are used to estimate the cross-national impact of economic and political factors. The analyses show that considerations of the ideological image of the government, its electoral base, and the clarity of its political responsibility are essential to understanding the effects of economic conditions on voting for or against incumbents.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111378.pdf

A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context

Although theories of prejudice have been extensively catalogued, empirical confrontations between competing theories are surprisingly rare. The primary goal of the present research was to test two major theoretical approaches to prejudice by whites against blacks: realistic group conflict theory, which emphasizes the tangible threats blacks might pose to whites' private lives; and a sociocultural theory of prejudice termed symbolic racism, which emphasizes abstract, moralistic resentments of blacks, presumably traceable to preadult socialization. The main dependent variable in our analysis is suburban whites' voting behavior in two mayoral elections in Los Angeles, both strongly influenced by racial issues, that matched the same two candidates, one black and one white. In both elections, symbolic racism (sociocultural prejudice) was the major determinant of voting against the black candidate for people removed from possible personal threats posed by blacks as well as for those at risk. Direct racial threats to whites' private lives (to their jobs, their neighborhoods, their children's schooling, their families' safety) had little effect on either antiblack voting behavior or symbolic racism. The article closes by developing the implications of these results for theories of prejudice and, more speculatively, for interpretations of the effects of voters' private lives on their political behavior. Theories of racial prejudice suffer from benign neglect. Although the theories themselves have been extensively and ably catalogued (most notably, by Allport, 1954; Ashmore & DelBoca, 1976; LeVine & Campbell, 1972), empirical confrontations between alternative theories occupy surprisingly little

/pdf/prejudice-and-politics-symbolic-racism-versus-racial-threats-18dv3udq5d.pdf

Prejudice and politics: Symbolic racism versus racial threats to the good life.

American elections depend substantially on the vitality of the national economy. Prosperity benefits candidates for the House of Representatives from the incumbent party (defined as the party that controls the presidency at the time of the election), whereas economic downturns enhance the electoral fortunes of opposition candidates. Short-term fluctuations in economic conditions also appear to affect the electorate's presidential choice, as well as the level of public approval conferred upon the president during his term. By this evidence, the political consequences of macroeconomic conditions are both pervasive and powerful. But just how do citizens know whether the incumbent party has succeeded or failed? What kinds of economic evidence do people weigh in their political appraisals? The purpose of our paper is to examine two contrasting depictions of individual citizens – one emphasizing the political significance of citizens' own economic predicaments, the other stressing the political importance of citizens' assessments of the nation's economic predicament - that might underlie the aggregate entwining of economics and politics. Ours is an inquiry into the political economy of individual citizens.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007123400002544

Sociotropic Politics: The American Case

It is widely assumed that political action is motivated most powerfully by issues that impinge immediately and tangibly upon private life. For example, this assumption pervades the aggregate research that has reported consistent relationships between general economic conditions and congressional election outcomes (e.g., Kramer, 1971). Our analysis of individual-level data, however, indicates that voting in congressional elections from 1956 to 1976 was influenced hardly at all by personal economic grievances. Those voters unhappy with changes in their financial circumstances, or those who had recently been personally affected by unemployment, showed little inclination to punish candidates of the incumbent party for their personal misfortunes. The connection between economic conditions and politics was provided, instead, by judgments of a more general, collective kind -- e.g., by judgments regarding recent trends in general business conditions, and, more powerfully, by judgments about the relative competence of the two major parties to manage national economic problems. These collective economic judgments had little to do with privately experienced economic discontents. Rather they stemmed from voters' partisan predispositions and from their appraisal of changes in national economic conditions.

Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting

Why do majority congressional parties seem unable to act as an effective policy-making force? They routinely delegate their power to others internally to standing committees and subcommittees within each chamber, externally to the president and to the bureaucracy. Conventional wisdom in political science insists that such delegation leads inevitably to abdication usually by degrees, sometimes precipitously, but always completely. In "The Logic of Delegation," however, D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins persuasively argue that political scientists have paid far too much attention to what congressional parties can't do. The authors draw on economic and management theory to demonstrate that the effectiveness of delegation is determined not by how much authority is delegated but rather by how well it is delegated. In the context of the appropriations process, the authors show how congressional parties employ committees, subcommittees, and executive agencies to accomplish policy goals. This innovative study will force a complete rethinking of classic issues in American politics: the "autonomy" of congressional committees; the reality of runaway federal bureaucracy; and the supposed dominance of the presidency in legislative-executive relations."

The logic of delegation : congressional parties and the appropriations process

Additional Information: © 1983 University of Chicago Press. ​ ​ This book grew directly out of the doctoral dissertation I wrote at Yale University. I would like to thank several people there who helped me immeasurably by providing generous amounts of advice, commentary, and criticism: above all, my advisor, Donald R. Kinder; my teachers David Cameroon, Paul Johnson, Gerald Kramer, Robert Lane, David Mayhew, Steve Rosenstone, and Edward Tufte; my fellow graduate students Jim Austin, Jay Budzizewski, Tom Cavanagh, Jennifer Hochschild, John Morgan, Joe Morone, and Harold Stanley; and my wife Lorraine. I would also like to thank Sandy Aivano for her help in programming and computing, and Yale University for its generous financial aid during my years in graduate school. ​ ​ During the last few years I have also benefited from extensive discussions of this research with my colleagues at Caltech, especially Bob Bates, Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, Morris Fiorina, and Roger Noll. I am also indebted to Richard Brody, Ben Page, and David Sears for their valuable comments and criticism. Finally, I would like to thank Barbara Calli for a superb job of word processing and Carl Lydick for his valuable assistance in preparing this book for publication.

Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues.

State and local governments have long had constitutional limits on the issuance of full faith and credit debt. Our analyses find that levels of such debt depend upon the type of restriction in place. States that either prohibit guaranteed debt or require referendum approval to issue it have less guaranteed debt than those that require a supermajority of the legislature to issue debt or those that have revenue-based limitations. Although the issuance of state nonguaranteed debt does not appear to be generally motivated by the aim of circumventing constitutional limitations on guaranteed debt, restrictive provisions at the state level do result in the devolution of debt issuance to governments at the local level. Our findings suggest that current proposals for constitutional limitations on borrowing at the federal level would have much less impact on total government borrowing than their proponents anticipate.

D. Roderick Kiewiet

Papers

Sociotropic Politics: The American Case

Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting

The logic of delegation : congressional parties and the appropriations process

Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues.

Constitutional Limitations on Borrowing: An Analysis of State Bonded Indebtedness