Brandon L. Bartels

Politics at the Checkout Line: Explaining Political Consumerism in the United States

Political consumerism is the intentional buying or abstention from buying specific products for political, social, or ethical purposes. We develop and test hypotheses regarding the individual sources of political consumerism in the United States. Analysis of survey data shows that similar to voting, education, political interest, and citizen duty promote political consumerism. Akin to protest behavior, political consumerism is enhanced by political distrust and general discontent. In contrast to turnout, political consumerism significantly decreases with age. Given the extraelectoral and self-initiated nature of political consumerism, citizen initiative and a proclivity for individualized forms of activism are significant sources of political consumerism.

The Incidence and Timing of PAC Contributions to Incumbent U.S. House Members, 1993-94

In this article, we discuss how donor and recipient characteristics affected the incidence and timing of political action committee (PAC) contributions to incumbent members of the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1993-94 election cycle. We contribute to the campaign finance literature by modeling the timing of contributions, which is important because timing affects the perception of political actors about the competitiveness of elections and the loci of power among members of Congress, interest groups, and between members of Congress and interest groups. Split-population event history models allow us to compare and contrast determinants of whether and when contributions are made across various types and sizes of PACs.

Public Opinion, Policy Tools, and the Status Quo: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

The method in which a government policy is delivered—for example, as a tax break rather than a direct payment—could potentially have significant implications for how the public views that policy. This is an especially important consideration given the importance of indirect policy approaches like tax breaks to modern American governance. We employ a series of survey experiments to test whether citizens react more favorably to tax breaks than to equivalent spending programs. We find that citizens prefer tax breaks, particularly when they are the established means of intervention. When direct intervention is the status quo, or when any government involvement on the issue is unfamiliar, the preference is reduced. We also find an interactive effect for ideology, with conservatives strongly preferring tax breaks to direct intervention, though the effect is still present among liberals. This study establishes the importance of delivery mechanism to citizens’ policy preferences and suggests that the policy status quo structures citizens’ perceptions of policy proposals.

Choices in Context: How Case-Level Factors Influence the Magnitude of Ideological Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court

Most scholarship on Supreme Court decision making assumes that justices’ ideological preferences exhibit a uniform impact on their choices across a variety of situations. I develop a theoretical framework positing the importance of case-level context in shaping the magnitude of ideological voting on the Court. I hypothesize how issue-related factors influence this magnitude. I test the hypotheses using a multilevel modeling framework on data from the 1953-2004 terms. The results provide support for several of the hypotheses; issue salience, issue attention, the authority for the decision (statutory interpretation versus constitutionality of federal or state laws), intercourt conflict, the presence of a lower court dissent, and mandatory versus discretionary jurisdiction all significantly influence ideological voting. Overall, the article adds significant qualifications to extant theories of judicial decision making by showing how ideological voting on the Court is shaped by the varying situations that confront the justices from case to case.