Many fear that democracies are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. This book focuses on 'democratic deficits', reflecting how far the perceived democratic performance of any state diverges from public expectations. Pippa Norris examines the symptoms by comparing system support in more than fifty societies worldwide, challenging the pervasive claim that most established democracies have experienced a steadily rising tide of political disaffection during the third-wave era. The book diagnoses the reasons behind the democratic deficit, including demand (rising public aspirations for democracy), information (negative news about government) and supply (the performance and structure of democratic regimes). Finally, Norris examines the consequences for active citizenship, for governance and, ultimately, for democratization. This book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of comparative politics, public opinion, political culture, political behavior, democratic governance, political psychology, political communications, public policymaking, comparative sociology, cross-national survey analysis and the dynamics of the democratization process.

Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited

T | 'he usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the "retrospective" economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience (voter as "peasant"). A second model assumes a "sophisticated" economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations (voter as "banker"). Using the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series. With aggregate consumer expectations about long-term business conditions in the approval equation, neither the usual economic indicators not the other ICS components matter. Moreover, short-term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy. The qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome: the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen. Economics moves political behavior. With hard times, administrations lose support; with good times, they gain it. We know this to be true. But when we ask how-by what processes-the political translation of economic experience occurs, the an

Peasants or Bankers? The American Electorate and the U.S. Economy.

The Changing American Voter.

PERSONALITY COMPRISES PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS AND BEHAVIORAL STRATEGIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 The Fundamental Situational Error . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . . 461 Problem-Specificity of Psychological Mechanisms 461 The Sociobiological Fallacy .... . . . .... . . . . . ......... . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . ..... . .. . . . ... . . . . . . . . 463 Behavioral Strategies, Tactics, and Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . .. . 463 EVOLUTIONARY FOUNDATIONS OF PERSONALITy . . . . ... .... . 464 Adaptive Problems and Their Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 464 Human Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466 Goal-Directed Tactics and Strategies as Units of Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . 468 Personality as the Adaptive Landscape: The Five-Factor Model 471 Explaining the Origins of Individual Diff erences . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473 Interim Summary. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 476 CLARIFYING CORE CONTROVERSIES IN PERSONALITY PSy CHOLOGy .. . .... 477 An Evolutionary Resolution of the Personality Consistency Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477 An Evolutionary Perspective on Interactionism . . . .. . . . . . ... . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . ... . . ...... 479 Context, Situation, and Environment 481 Emotions, Desires, Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482 Culture and Personality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 483 CONCLUSION........ . . .... . 484

/pdf/evolutionary-personality-psychology-53pxgune5u.pdf

Evolutionary personality psychology

Debates over the political sophistication of mass publics smolder on. The more fundamental question, however, is why people become as politically sophisticated or unsophisticated as they do. This paper develops a nonlinear simultaneous equation model to weigh explanations of three general sorts: the politicalinformation to which people are exposed, theirability to assimilate and organize such information, and theirmotivation to do so. The estimates suggest that interest and intelligence, representing motivation and ability, have major effects, but that education and media exposure, the big informational variables, do not. I consider the reasons and sketch some implications for the sophistication of mass publics, for the study of sophistication and other “variables of extent,” and for democratic theory.

Explaining political sophistication

Theory: We examine the relationship between blatant racial prejudice and anger toward affirmative action. Hypotheses: (1) Blatantly prejudiced attitudes continue to pervade the white population in the United States. (2) Resistance to affirmative action is more than an extension of this prejudice. (3) White resistance to affirmative action is not unyielding and unalterably fixed. Methods: Analysis of experiments embedded in a national survey of racial attitudes. Some of these experiments are designed to measure racial prejudice unobtrusively. Results: Racial prejudice remains a major problem in the United States, but this prejudice alone cannot explain all of the anger toward affirmative action among whites. Although many whites strongly resist affirmative action, they express support for making extra efforts to help African-Americans.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111770.pdf

Racial prejudice and attitudes toward affirmative action

In recent years, a great deal of evidence has been generated regarding the impact of retrospective evaluations of the economy on vote choice. Yet little attention has been focused on the actual process whereby such evaluations are formed. This paper employs panel data to test a model of retrospective evaluations of inflation and unemployment. Our findings suggest, first, that retrospective evaluations are influenced by personal economic circumstances and knowledge about national economic conditions. And second, our findings indicate that the lag times in the public's learning of economic trends differs significantly for inflation and unemployment, with the public reacting more quickly to changes in unemployment. The reasons for such findings and their political implications are discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2131168

Judging Inflation and Unemployment: The Origins of Retrospective Evaluations

The debate over the extent of ideological awareness in the American electorate has been characterized as an argument over whether the "ideology glass" is half empty or half full. This characterization results from the fact that analyses to date have employed various alternative indicators of ideology in isolation from each other. This paper presents an integrated assessment of ideological thinking in the American electorate. Specifically, it examines the effects of partisanship, ideological identification and policy preferences on the presidential vote in 1980 within the "levels of conceptualization." It concludes that when ideological sentiment is supported by the level of sophistication required to merit classification as an "ideologue" it has a substantial impact on candidate choice. Under all other conditions its impact is marginal, at best.

Ideology in the 1980 Election: Ideological Sophistication Does Matter

Recently, a great deal of attention has been focused on the impact of prospective evaluations of the economy on vote choice. Yet, little attention has been focused on the actual process whereby such evaluations are formed. This paper employs panel data to test a model of the formation of prospective evaluations of inflation and unemployment. Our findings indicate that retrospective assessments of economic conditions do not greatly influence economic forecasts. Instead, economic forecasts are shaped by personal economic circumstances and partisan assessments of governmental performance. The political implications of such findings are discussed.

The Personal and Political Underpinnings of Economic Forecasts

According to the "expectation/disillusion" interpretation of the decline of presidential popularity over time, popularity declines as unrealistically high expectations of presidential performance inevitably give way to more realistic assessments. This paper puts that interpretation and several specific aspects of it to the test through analysis of data from a series of nationwide polls conducted between 1977 and 1979. Lee Sigelman is Professor and Chairman, and Kathleen Knight is Assistant Professor, in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky. The data employed in this paper were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data for CBS News/New York Times Polls, 19771979, were originally collected by CBS News and the New York Times. Neither the collectors of the original data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. We are grateful to Richard Brody and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 47:310-324 ? 1983 by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/83/0047-310/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 06:51:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WHY PRESIDENTIAL POPULARITY DECLINES 311 of this paper is to test what seems to us to be the most plausible explanation that has yet been offered, the so-called "expectation/ disillusion theory" (Stimson, 1976). Explaining the Growth of Presidential Unpopularity What accounts for the large-scale erosion in public support that has beset each postwar presidency except Eisenhower's and the prematurely terminated Kennedy's? Mueller, adapting one of Anthony Downs's (1957) ideas, sought the answer in an antipresidential "coalition of minorities." According to this explanation, the longer a president stays in office, the more decisions he makes, and the more decisions he makes, the more people he antagonizes. Even if each decision gains widespread acceptance, each is also likely to displease at least a few people. "A clever opposition, under appropriate circumstances, could therefore form a coalition of these intense minorities until it had enough votes to overthrow the incumbent" (Mueller, 1973: 205). In our view, this explanation falls short in several respects. In the first place, a coalition of minorities cannot form without being abetted by a "clever," well-organized opposition, and in recent decades the out-party has certainly not always been well-organized, let alone clever. Irrespective of the quality of the opposition, a coalition of minorities should emerge only under "appropriate" circumstances. Mueller did not indicate what these circumstances might be, but at the very least they ought to include a public that is well informed and highly issue-oriented, along with a president who is either sufficiently willing or sufficiently inept to make an incessant series of decisions which alienate different segments of his support coalition. There is also reason to believe that it is not presidential decisions per se but the results of these decisions which affect the president's public standing (Kernell, 1978:521). If this is true, then an explanation which focuses on presidential decision making seems somewhat misdirected. According to a second explanation, length of time in office has no substantive meaning of its own, but simply provides the context within which various phenomena, such as economic fluctuations, wars, and international rally points, occur. It is these time-based phenomena and not time itself which influence presidential popularity (Kernell, 1978). Consistent with this view, Kernell (1978:520) reports that when the effects of various time-based phenomena are held constant, the passage of time no longer has any impact on presidential popularity. However, Kernell's argument does not explain why popularity almost always declines over time. The only answer that This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 06:51:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 312 LEE SIGELMAN AND KATHLEEN KNIGHT Kernell's interpretation seems to permit is that substantive time-based phenomena (i.e., occurrences in the domestic and international arenas) invariably begin to deteriorate very early in the president's term and continue to do so until some point in the third year-not, we think, a very realistic assumption. The real problem is to determine why the reaction to the substance of presidential actions nearly always has a cumulatively negative impact on presidential popularity. Mueller's "coalition of minorities" interpretation provides an answer, but one which addresses the individual-level opinion dynamics underlying aggregate popularity change in a very oblique fashion. This brings us to an alternative interpretation which has been most clearly articulated by James Stimson (1976) but which, as Stimson acknowledged, is derived from Mueller's War, Presidents and Public Opinion. The basic idea underlying this interpretation is that "in the process of being elected, the president invariably says or implies that he will do more than he can do, and disaffection of once bemused supporters is all but inevitable" (Mueller, 1973:206). In contrast to the "coalition of minorities" interpretation, which places the blame squarely on the president's shoulders, Stimson (1976) argued that the erosion of presidential popularity is impervious to presidential initiatives and is best understood as a result of the inevitable disjuncture between presidential promise and performance. Stimson assumed, on the basis of considerable evidence, that many Americans are poorly informed and have no well-developed policy preferences. In these circumstances, the "utter simplicity" of campaign pledges contributes to the spread of naive expectations about what a candidate will be able to accomplish if he is elected. In

Kathleen Knight

Papers

Racial prejudice and attitudes toward affirmative action

Judging Inflation and Unemployment: The Origins of Retrospective Evaluations

Ideology in the 1980 Election: Ideological Sophistication Does Matter

The Personal and Political Underpinnings of Economic Forecasts

Why Does Presidential Popularity Decline? A Test of the Expectation/Disillusion Theory