Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

In his seminal work \"The Clash of Civilizations\" and the \"Remaking of World Order,\" Samuel Huntington argued provocatively and presciently that with the end of the cold war, \"civilizations\" were replacing ideologies as the new fault lines in international politics.His astute analysis has proven correct. Now Professor Huntington turns his attention from international affairs to our domestic cultural rifts as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country.America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the \"denationalization\" of American elites.September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. But already there are signs that this revival is fading, even though in the post-September 11 world, Americans face unprecedented challenges to our security.\"Who Are We?\" shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Nothing less than our national identity is at stake.Once again Samuel Huntington has written an important book that is certain to provoke a lively debate and to shape our national conversation about who we are.\\

Diasporas, Foreign Governments, and American Politics: An Excerpt from "Merging America with the World," in Who Are We? the Challenges to America's National Identity

/pdf/lying-moral-choice-in-public-and-private-life-52gzwr5asg.pdf

Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life

Perception and Misperception in International Politics

Propensity score methods are being increasingly used as a less parametric alternative to traditional regression to balance observed differences across groups in both descriptive and causal comparisons. Data collected in many disciplines often have analytically relevant multilevel or clustered structure. The propensity score, however, was developed and has been used primarily with unstructured data. We present and compare several propensity-score-weighted estimators for clustered data, including marginal, cluster-weighted, and doubly robust estimators. Using both analytical derivations and Monte Carlo simulations, we illustrate bias arising when the usual assumptions of propensity score analysis do not hold for multilevel data. We show that exploiting the multilevel structure, either parametrically or nonparametrically, in at least one stage of the propensity score analysis can greatly reduce these biases. We applied these methods to a study of racial disparities in breast cancer screening among beneficiaries of Medicare health plans.

/pdf/propensity-score-weighting-with-multilevel-data-1y4lekx4ju.pdf

Propensity score weighting with multilevel data

Every 4 years, during election season, we witness continuously growing appeals from Democrats and Republicans to the Latino electorate with the purpose of gaining enough of their vote to tilt the election to their respective advantage. Although Latinos regularly vote Democratic, Republicans assume that because of their continuing upward mobility and long-standing social conservatism, Latinos are in fact Republicans but just don’t know it yet. In this article, we test how likely Latinos were to abandon their historic attachment to the Democratic Party and identify with the Republican Party in 2000 and 2004. Our conclusion is that although Latinos may have increasingly voted for the Republican candidate in 2004 and over time may change their partisan preferences, the Hispanic electorate was far from abandoning its partisan attachment to the Democratic Party.

Are Latinos Republicans But Just Don’t Know It?: The Latino Vote in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential Elections

Using data from eight focus groups and two household surveys conducted in the cities of Tirana, Albania and Quito, Ecuador, this paper finds that migration from at least one parent has a negative impact on the life satisfaction of children and adolescents left behind relative to that of children and adolescents who live with both parents who have never migrated. The results of this paper suggest that the impact of migration goes beyond traditional ones (e.g. remittances), which is useful for understanding how different components of international migration in general, and parental migration in particular, relate to outcomes that not only affect the full development prospects of children and adolescents, but also have important implications for policy initiatives that seek to address both the positive and negative impacts of migration on sending countries.

Beyond the money: the impact of international migration on children’s life satisfaction: evidence from Ecuador and Albania

The fundamental problem of causal inference is that an individual cannot be simultaneously observed in both the treatment and control states (Holland 1986). Propensity score methods that compare the treatment and control groups by discarding the unmatched units are now widely used to deal with this problem. Propensity score matching works well when using individual level data (persons, countries, counties, etc.); however, when using data that have a multilevel structure, such as time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) data we need to combine propensity score matching procedures with multilevel modeling in order to take into account the unique structure of the data. In this paper we conduct Monte Carlo simulations with 36 different scenarios to test the performance of the two combined methods. The result shows that combining propensity score methods with multilevel modeling yields less biased and more efficient estimates. Two empirical case studies that reexamine the relationship between democratization and development and democracy and militarized interstate disputes also show the advantage of combining these two methods.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1461894_code693768.pdf?abstractid=1450058&mirid=1&type=2

What do We Gain? Combining Propensity Score Methods and Multilevel Modeling

The wall along the U.S.–Mexico border has become one of the most controversial issues in the immigration debate. Although the American public is often aligned with partisan predispositions, often i...

From a Distance: Geographic Proximity, Partisanship, and Public Attitudes toward the U.S.–Mexico Border Wall:

El Banco de México estima que durante 2004 entraron al país 16613 millones de dólares correspondientes a remesas familiares. Este flujo tuvo un incremento de 24% con respecto al año anterior y fue mayor a la inversión extranjera directa que ingresó a México en ese año. Asimismo, el informe del Banco Mundial, La pobreza en México, indica que las remesas son uno de los factores que permitieron a varios millones de mexicanos salir de la pobreza extrema (definida como un ingreso de un dólar por persona por día) entre 2000 y 2002. Tanto organismos internacionales y asociaciones civiles, como el gobierno de México, confían en el éxito de programas en los cuales las remesas financien proyectos de desarrollo regional.

Jeronimo Cortina

Papers

Are Latinos Republicans But Just Don’t Know It?: The Latino Vote in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential Elections

Beyond the money: the impact of international migration on children’s life satisfaction: evidence from Ecuador and Albania

What do We Gain? Combining Propensity Score Methods and Multilevel Modeling

From a Distance: Geographic Proximity, Partisanship, and Public Attitudes toward the U.S.–Mexico Border Wall:

Remesas: Límites al optimismo