Christopher Kenny

Political Participation and Effects from the Social Environment

This paper examines the distinction made by Huckfeldt (1979, 1986) and Giles and Dantico (1982) between individually and socially based forms of participation as affected by social environment. Using survey responses from the 1984 South Bend study, the relationship between political discussion partners is explicitly modeled and estimated for several forms of individually and socially based participatory acts. The evidence indicates that certain types of both individually based and socially based participation are affected by those in the immediate social environment, suggesting that a modification of this distinction is in order.

The Microenvironment of Attitude Change

Studies of social influence have suffered from limitations in available data resources. Consequently, they usually have either failed to consider the dynamic nature of attitudes or have specified the social environment in some restricted way. This article evaluates a dynamic model of attitude change that includes direct information on individuals named as political discussants. Using party identification as an attitude subject to social influence, several findings are advanced. Political discussants are shown to significantly affect change in party identification. In addition, these effects are enhanced or inhibited depending on characteristics of the discussion partners, the nature of the relationship, and properties of the interaction. The nature of the relationship interacts with the other components in some interesting and surprising ways as well. Overall, the results show that intimacy and respect are more important deter-minants of social influence than previously given credit.

The Behavioral Consequences of Political Discussion: Another Look at Discussant Effects on Vote Choice

While there have been a great number of studies addressing the general question of how social environment influences political behavior, there is little empirical confirmation of any particular theoretical framework describing the process of personal influence at the micro level Part of the problem stems from a lack of appropriate individual-level data for testing hypotheses about this process In a recent investigation using a dataset that includes direct information on pairs of political discussants, Huckfeldt and Sprague (1991) find little support for a social cohesion model of personal influence, concluding that among unrelated discussants, a structural equivalence explanation makes more sense In this paper, I reexamine their claims using a measure of vote change as the dependent behavior of interest rather than the cross-sectional measure they employ I find much greater support for the social cohesion model, suggesting that it is too early to dismiss its general applicability.

Black Environmentalism in the Local Community Context

In this article it is argued that existing studies of Black environmentalism do not appropriately measure the environmental concerns and activities most relevant to Blacks and hence do not accurately reflect the extent to which African Americans are responsive on environmental issues. Using data that measure Black environmental concern and activity in communities threatened by hazardous industries to various degrees, the authors evaluate 2 competing sets of expectations regarding the manner in which these concerns and activities are affected by differential environmental threats to the community. They find that specific local concerns and activities depend, to some extent, on the nature of the threat from nearby industry, but that more general attitudes toward the regulation of industry and concern about the environment do not Reasons as to why this might be the case are discussed.

An individual-level multiequation model of expenditure effects in contested house elections

e shall address questions concerning the impact of candidate spending in congressional elections in a new way. We develop a multiequation model of congressional vote choice a v that takes the endogeneity of expenditures into account. We then estimate both this model and the more traditional single-equation model using individual level survey data. The substantial differences we find between the two models indicates that the simultaneity bias present in the single-equation model is not trivial. The challenger and incumbent expenditure terms are each significant (whereas only challenger expenditures are in the single-equation setup) and of much greater magnitude in the multiequation case. In addition, we evaluate hypotheses grounded in persuasive communications theory concerning the type of individuals most affected by the messages emanating from the campaigns. We find that individuals with higher education, those with greater interest in campaigns, and those with strongly held convictions are unaffected by candidate spending, whereas individuals lacking each of these attributes are greatly influenced by campaign expenditures.

A Dynamic Model of the Effect of Campaign Spending on Congressional Vote Choice

The relationship between campaign spending and congressional vote choice is clearly dynamic, yet the typical formulation of this process involves aggregate models estimated with cross-sectional data. In this paper, we estimate an explicitly dynamic model of the relationship between spending and votes in a single House district in 1984. By attaching only contributions raised at the point of survey interviews, we eliminate the measurement error present in the only other study of this sort. By defining spending as the lag of contributions, we are able to investigate which expenditure schemes seem to benefit candidates most. We find statistically significant effects for challenger spending but not for that of the incumbent. The sharpest effects occur when contributions are lagged only one day. We also find that money has the greatest effect on the preferences of those individuals who did not vote, suggesting that the people most susceptible to the candidates message are also the ones least likely to follow through on the commitment.

The Microenvironment of Political Participation

This article investigates the claim that individual political participation is affected by the tendency of politically significant others to participate, particularly if that other is a spouse. Models of reported turnout, validated turnout, and campaign activity are developed that explicitly model the relationship between pairs of political discussants. These models are estimated using a unique data set collected in South Bend, Indiana during the 1984 presidential election that includes direct information for both respondents and individuals named as political discussants. The results show that the likelihood of participation increases as discussants become more likely to participate. Spouses are found to be particularly important types of discussants in the case of turnout, but not when campaign activity is the measure of participation.

The Effects of Independent Expenditures in Senate Elections

Independent expenditures are designed to influence the preferences and behavior of the electorate. Like candidate expenditures, the money is generally spent trying to persuade voters to act a certain way on election day. Because of the continuous nature of the spending, the sophisticated techniques of influence it buys, and the absence of accountability, there is good reason to believe these expenditures are important determinants of the vote. Expenditures for the incumbent and against the challenger should help the incumbent, and expenditures for the challenger and against the incumbent should help the challenger. Using individual-level survey data, we develop a model of Senate vote choice that considers these independent expenditures as both exogenous and endogenous to the process. We then estimate this model in the 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1996 elections. We find that independent expenditures can significantly affect vote choice, especially when modeled as endogenous to the process. These effects depend, however, on the electoral context, the type of independent spending, and the type of candidate. In general, our results seem roughly to conform to the conventionally accepted account of the 20-year history of independent expenditures in U.S. elections.

Up Close and Personal: Campaign Contact and Candidate Spending in U.S. House Elections

Very little evidence exists on which forms of voter contact have the greatest impact on election outcomes. In this article we attempt to assess systemati cally the effect of different forms of voter contact on congressional vote choice. By estimating a system of equations for spending and vote choice with three different forms of personal and media contact we are able to investigate how different forms of contact directly affect the vote choice as well as mediate the impact of candidate spending. We find that incum bents and challengers benefit differently from the different forms of con tact. Challengers tend to get a bigger direct effect from contact in general probably because as a group they are less well known than incumbents. Incumbents, on the other hand, seem able to use contact through the me dia to maintain their advantage. Contact through television enhances the effect of spending to a much greater extent than is true for challengers, suggesting that incumbents who reach a large percentage of the electorate are difficult to beat.

Partisanship and political discussion

Abstract The question of how individuals affect each other politically has drawn considerable interest in the social sciences for some time. Unfortunately, little in the way of a theoretical formulation of the social interaction process has been developed. Using party identification as an attitude subject to social influence, this paper evaluates the general hypothesis that individual party identification is affected by the party identification of a politically significant other, as well as specific hypotheses about the conditions that facilitate this process. Using data collected specifically for this task in South Bend, Indiana, the analyses indicate that individual partisanship responds to discussant partisanship, and that this effect is enhanced in situations of homogeneous political content, frequent discussion, and where the partisanship of the discussant is known.