Cindy D. Kam

Beyond the Self: Social Identity, Altruism, and Political Participation

Scholars have recently extended the traditional calculus of participation model by adding a term for benefits to others. We advance this work by distinguishing theoretically a concern for others in general (altruism) from a concern for others in certain groups (social identification). We posit that both concerns generate increased benefits from participation. To test these theories, we use allocations in dictator games towards an unidentified anonymous recipient and two recipients identified only as a registered Democrat or a registered Republican. These allocations permit a distinction between altruism and social identification. The results show that both altruism and social identification significantly increase political participation. The results also demonstrate the usefulness of incorporating benefits that stem from sources beyond material self-interest into rational choice models of participation.

Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science: Students as Experimental Participants

An experiment entails randomly assigning participants to various conditions or manipulations. Given common consent requirements, this means experimenters need to recruit participants who, in essence, agree to be manipulated. The ensuing practical and ethical challenges of subject recruitment have led many researchers to rely on convenience samples of college students. For political scientists who put particular emphasis on generalizability, the use of student participants often constitutes a critical, and according to some reviewers, fatal problem for experimental studies. In this chapter, we investigate the extent to which using students as experimental participants creates problems for causal inference. First, we discuss the impact of student subjects on a studys internal and external validity. In contrast to common claims, we argue that student subjects do not intrinsically pose a problem for a studys external validity. Second, we use simulations to identify situations when student subjects are likely to constrain experimental inferences. We show that such situations are relatively limited; any convenience sample poses a problem only when the size of an experimental treatment effect depends on a characteristic on which the convenience sample has virtually no variance. Third, we briefly survey empirical evidence that provides guidance on when researchers should be particularly attuned to taking steps to ensure appropriate generalizability from student subjects. We conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of our findings.

Reconsidering the Effects of Education on Political Participation

The consensus in the empirical literature on political participation is that education positively correlates with political participation. Theoretical explanations posit that education confers participation-enhancing benefits that in and of themselves cause political activity. As most of the variation in educational attainment arises between high school completion and decisions to enter postsecondary institutions, we focus our inquiry on estimating the effect of higher education on political participation. Our primary purpose is to test the conventional claim that higher education causes political participation. We utilize propensity-score matching to address the nonrandom assignment process that characterizes the acquisition of higher education. After the propensity-score matching process takes into account preadult experiences and influences in place during the senior year of high school, the effects of higher education per se on participation disappear. Our results thus call for a reconsideration of how scholars understand the positive empirical relationship between higher education and participation: that higher education is a proxy for preadult experiences and influences, not a cause of political participation.

Terror and Ethnocentrism: Foundations of American Support for the War on Terrorism

The events of 9/11 set in motion a massive reordering of U.S. policy. We propose that the American publics response to this redirection in policy derives, in part, from ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism—“prejudice, broadly conceived”—refers to the commonplace human tendency to partition the social world into virtuous ingroups and nefarious outgroups. Support for the war on terrorism, undertaken against a strange and shadowy enemy, should hold special appeal for Americans with an ethnocentric turn of mind. To see if this is so, we analyze the panel component of the 2000–2002 National Election Study. We find that ethnocentrism powerfully underwrites support for the war on terrorism, across a variety of tests and specifications, and the strength of the relationship between ethnocentrism and opinion is influenced in part by the extraordinary events of 9/11. Ethnocentrism is easily found among Americans, but its relevance and potency for politics depends, we suggest, upon circumstance.

Risk Orientations and Policy Frames

In this article, we examine the effect of citizens’ risk orientations on policy choices that are framed in various ways. We introduce an original risk orientations scale and test for the relationship between risk orientations and policy preferences using an original survey experiment. We find that individuals with higher levels of risk acceptance are more likely to prefer probabilistic outcomes as opposed to certain outcomes. Mortality and survival frames influence the choices citizens make, but so does our individual-difference measure of risk acceptance. Finally, using a unique within-subject design, we find that risk acceptance undercuts susceptibility to framing effects across successive framing scenarios. The findings suggest that citizens’ risk orientations are consequential in determining their policy views and their susceptibility to framing effects.

The Long-Term Dynamics of Partisanship and Issue Orientations

Partisanship and issue orientations are among the foundational concepts for behavioral researchers. We seek to understand their causal relationship. One view suggests that party identification, as a central and long-standing affective orientation, influences citizens’ issue positions. Another view claims that issue orientations influence party identification. We take both theories into account in this article and argue that the direction of causality may depend upon the political context. Using the Political Socialization Panel Study, we analyze the long-term dynamic relationship between partisanship and issue orientations. The results from our cross-lagged structural equation models are inconsistent with a single, time-invariant, unidirectional causal story. The causal relationship between partisanship and issue orientations appears to depend upon the larger political context. In the early period from 1973 to 1982, partisanship causes issue orientations. In the later period, from 1982 to 1997, the causal...

Political Campaigns and Open-Minded Thinking

This article argues that campaigns do more than shape the electoral choices that citizens make. Campaigns also encourage citizens to engage in open-minded thinking. Analyses of the Senate Election Study show that intense campaigns chip away at pro-incumbent biases, motivating citizens to acknowledge pros and cons regarding the candidates. These gains in open-minded thinking appear among both more- and less-educated citizens. Intense campaigns provide citizens with the motivation to engage in open-minded thinking regarding candidates for public office. As such, electoral campaigns, as recurring national and subnational conversations about politics, can fulfill an important social function by pulling citizens into open-minded thinking.

Rejoinder: Reinvestigating the Causal Relationship between Higher Education and Political Participation

In this issue, Henderson and Chatfield (2011) and Mayer (2011) critique the findings of our initial article, suggesting that in fact, higher education does have an effect on political participation. Both research notes raise concerns of inherent biases in our findings due to our use of propensity score matching and reestimate the relationship between higher education and participation using genetic matching. In this response, we take up their methodological critiques. We also provide additional evidence based on genetic matching which supports our initial conclusions. Finally, we discuss epistemological issues regarding the question of whether higher education causes political participation.

When Duty Calls, Do Citizens Answer?

This article proposes that campaigns can serve a social function by drawing citizens into thinking about politics. Through an analysis of experimental data, the article reports that when subtle reminders of citizen duty appear in campaign discourse, citizens respond. Individuals who are reminded of citizen duty are more likely to learn where the candidates stand on issues, to think more about the candidates, and to search for information in an open-minded way. The results suggest that how citizens think about politics is flexible, rather than fixed, and can be shaped in consequential ways by the nature of elite appeals during election campaigns.

From the Gap to the Chasm Gender and Participation among Non-Hispanic Whites and Mexican Americans

This article focuses on gender and ethnic inequalities in political participation across non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans. Using a mainstream model of participation, the authors find that differences in the levels of resources, motivations, and opportunities effectively account for gender gaps within the two populations. However, this mainstream model leaves largely unexplained the chasm in participation across non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans. The authors incorporate socialization experiences specific to Mexican Americans to identify the roots of participatory inequality across these groups. Differences in linguistic, educational, and general assimilation account for participatory differences across Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. Equalizing these factors closes the chasm in participation.