Andrew H. Sidman

Explaining the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge

Much scholarship has noted that there are significant differences in the political behavior of women and men. Women, for example, are found to be more likely to identify as and vote for Democrats, less likely to hold conservative issue positions, and more likely to vote for incumbents. One of the more disturbing gender gaps occurs in political knowledge: Specifically, women are typically found to be less knowledgeable about politics and government than their male counterparts. We propose that much of the gap can be explained by theories of risk aversion, which imply that women are less likely to guess on questions for which they are uncertain. Using item response models, we demonstrate that failure to consider these gender-based differences leads to scales that significantly underestimate the political knowledge of women. Consistent with other work in this area, we find that accounting for the higher propensity of men to guess decreases the gender gap in knowledge by around 36%.

Exchange Theory, Political Parties, and the Allocation of Federal Distributive Benefits in the House of Representatives

Much work has acknowledged partisan differences in distributive benefits. Few works, however, have empirically examined the role party building activities play in these distributions. Through Exchange Theory, we hypothesize that legislators are rewarded with distributive benefits for promoting the legislative and electoral goals of the party. Using data on party unity, member-to-member contributions, and distributive benefits, we observe these exchange relationships occurring between members and their parties in the House of Representatives, as well as directly between representatives and members of the Appropriations Committee. The analyses point to the importance of political parties in distributive politics.

On the Measurement of Judicial Ideology

ABSTRACT Researchers cannot assess the importance of ideology to judicial behavior without good measures of ideology, and great effort has been spent developing measures that are valid and precise. A few of these have become commonly used in studies of judicial behavior. An emphasis has naturally been placed on developing continuous measures of ideology, like those that exist for other institutions. There are, however, concerns with using continuous measures because they are built on two assumptions that may be untenable when examining judicial decision-making: that the level of precision assumed by these measures is capturing true ideological distinctions between judges, and that the effects of ideology as measures are uniform across levels. We examine these assumptions using different specifications of ideology finding that categorical measures are more valid and better depict the impact of ideology on judicial decision-making at the U.S. Courts of Appeals, but not the Supreme Court.

The New Deal Realignment in Real Time

We offer a new view of the New Deal realignment. It was the wartime experience and the postwar prosperity, not the Great Depression or the New Deal, that gave the Democratic Party its overwhelming hold on the American electorate for the next three decades. The 1948 election plays the critical role, not the 1932 or the 1936 election. The generation that contributed the most to the Democratic ascendancy is the one that came of age in the 1940’s, not the one that did in the 1930’s. Whatever gains the Democratic Party had reaped in party identification by 1936 were short-lived. Generational replacement, not conversion, makes the major contribution to the transformation of partisanship. We reach these conclusions with a “real-time” analysis of party loyalties in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The data come from over 170 polls, mostly conducted by Gallup, that probed party identification during that time.