Garrett Glasgow

Uncertainty and Candidate Personality Traits

Due to the high level of uncertainty in the electorate about candidate issue positions, many scholars believe that voters instead use simpler cues such as personality traits to evaluate candidates. However, information about candidate personality traits is also subject to uncertainty. Using a new direct survey measure of uncertainty included in the 1995 and 1996 National Election Studies, we examine the effect of trait opinions on candidate evaluations and test the effect that uncertainty about those opinions has on the use of traits in an evaluation. We find that uncertainty about a candidates personality traits reduces both the use of opinions about that candidates traits in evaluations of that candidate and the overall evaluations of that candidate.

Local Development Policies and the Foreclosure Crisis in California: Can Local Policies Hold Back National Tides?

Can local governments shape the long-run fortunes of their communities through their own policies, or is the autonomy of localities swamped by larger macroeconomic forces? This study considers the relationship between California municipalities’ policy orientations toward residential development at the start of the housing boom in the late 1990s and the subsequent incidence of foreclosures during the housing crisis in 2008 and 2009. The authors find that cities reported to have stronger city council opposition to residential growth had a lower incidence of foreclosures a decade later, even after controlling for the rate of increase in the housing stock and other local economic, demographic, and geographic characteristics. Although the foreclosure crisis was driven by national and global forces, more cautious local government policy approaches to residential growth appeared to moderate the damage.

A New Approach to the Study of Parties Entering Government

British Journal of Political Science / FirstView Article / December 2014, pp 1 16 DOI: 10.1017/S0007123414000015, Published online: 28 May 2014 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007123414000015 How to cite this article: Garrett Glasgow and Sona N. Golder A New Approach to the Study of Parties Entering Government . British Journal of Political Science, Available on CJO 2014 doi:10.1017/ S0007123414000015 Request Permissions : Click here

The Influence of Environmentalism on Attitudes Toward Local Agriculture and Urban Expansion

This article uses the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) to examine attitudes toward local agriculture and land use issues in Santa Barbara County (SBC), California. To do so, we use data collected for the Central Coast Survey in 2010. Although our study has a narrow geographic scope, it has broad implications. Our results suggest that people with stronger pro-environment views support agriculture, and prefer it over urban expansion, but are also critical of agricultures negative environmental effects. In addition, we find no significant differences between the traditionally pro-agriculture north and the traditionally pro-environment south SBC residents on key policy issues, which suggests that broad political divisions do not dictate attitudes toward rural–environment conflicts.

Introduction to the Virtual Issue: Recent Advances in Discrete Choice Methods in Political Science

A “discrete choice” situation occurs when a political agent (i.e., voter, political leader, country) faces a choice or a series of choices from among a finite set of discrete options. These types of situations are frequently studied by political scientists, but it is only in the last decade that our understanding and use of discrete choice models has really started to evolve. While even into the mid-1990s it was not unusual to see linear regression applied to binary or ordinal dependent variables (e.g., Gerber 1996), now discrete choice models are part of the standard toolkit for applied researchers, and methodological training in the use of these models is required in many graduate programs. The leading edge of the field has also advanced rapidly. In the last decade political methodologists have moved beyond the “welcoming” of discrete choice methods from economics and other fields (Beck 2000) to the development of new discrete choice methods. In this virtual issue I have selected six articles from Political Analysis that I feel best exemplify this trend. These articles are:

Electoral Outcomes, Economic Expectations and the 'Ethic of Self-Reliance'

This paper examines how election outcomes affect individual economic expectations. In particular, we are interested in how differences in economic individualism change the relationship between election outcomes and individual expectations for personal economic well-being. We hypothesize that economic individualists will not link electoral outcomes to expectations for their personal economic well-being, while individuals who are not economic individualists will link the two. We confirm this hypothesis empirically using a postelection survey from the 1994 German Bundestag election.