Henry E. Brady

Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation

This paper develops a resource model of political participation. The resources considered are time, money, and civic skills—those communications and organizational capacities that are essential to political activity. These skills are not only acquired early in life but developed in the nonpolitical institutional settings of adult life: the workplace, organizations, and churches and synagogues. These resources are distributed differentially among groups defined by socioeconomic status. A two-stage least squares analysis shows these resources have powerful effects on overall political activity, thus explaining why socioeconomic status has traditionally been so powerful in predicting participation. We disaggregate overall activity into three kinds of acts: those that involve giving time, those that entail donating money, and voting. Each requires a different configuration of resources resulting in different patterns of stratification across various political acts.

Race, Ethnicity and Political Resources: Participation in the United States

This article uses data from the Citizen Participation Study – a large-scale survey of the voluntary activity of the American public designed to oversample African-Americans and Latinos as well as political activists – to inquire about the extent and sources of differences in levels of political activity among African-Americans, Latinos and Anglo-Whites. Considering a variety of political acts, we find that, in the aggregate, African-Americans are slightly, and Latinos are substantially, less active than Anglo-Whites. However, the resources that facilitate participation – some of which, for example, education, are related to social class and others of which, for example, religious preference and activity are associated with race or ethnicity – are distributed very unevenly across the three groups, with Latinos at a particular disadvantage. After accounting for differences in politically relevant resources, there is no significant difference among the three groups in political participation.

Prospecting for Participants: Rational Expectations and the Recruitment of Political Activists

A survey of the American public is used to model citizen political recruitment as a two-stage process. First, those who recruit others to become active in politics seek likely activists through “rational prospecting.” Second, they seek acquiescence to their requests. We model each part of the process, delineating the characteristics of individuals that make them attractive prospects and that make them likely to say “yes.” Recruiters who have information about, and leverage over, their targets are more likely to be successful. In seeking out people who would be likely not only to participate but also to participate effectively, rational prospectors select people with characteristics that are already overrepresented among participants. The net result of the recruitment process for political activity in general—and for financial contributions, in particular—is to exacerbate participatory stratification.

Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet

What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …

The rolling cross-section design

This article describes the ‘rolling cross-section’, a design well-adapted to telephone surveys and to capturing real-time effects in campaigns. In one sense, the design is just a standard cross-section, but the day on which a respondent is interviewed is chosen randomly. As a result, analysis of longitudinal factors is possible with only modest controls. The design necessitates an estimation strategy that distinguishes time-series from cross-sectional effects. We outline alternative strategies and show that the design is especially powerful if it is wedded to a post-election panel wave. We also show how graphical analysis enhances its power. Illustrative examples are drawn from the 1993 Canadian Election Study. We compare the design to some obvious alternatives and argue that, for reasons of cost and simplicity, any national election study based on telephone interviewing is best conducted this way.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Turning Out to Vote: The Costs of Finding and Getting to the Polling Place

Could changing the locations of polling places affect the outcome of an election by increasing the costs of voting for some and decreasing them for others? The consolidation of voting precincts in Los Angeles County during Californias 2003 gubernatorial recall election provides a natural experiment for studying how changing polling places influences voter turnout. Overall turnout decreased by a substantial 1.85 percentage points: A drop in polling place turnout of 3.03 percentage points was partially offset by an increase in absentee voting of 1.18 percentage points. Both transportation and search costs caused these changes. Although there is no evidence that the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters changed more polling locations for those registered with one party than for those registered with another, the changing of polling places still had a small partisan effect because those registered as Democrats were more sensitive to changes in costs than those registered as Republicans. The effects were small enough to allay worries about significant electoral consequences in this instance (e.g., the partisan effect might be decisive in only about one in two hundred contested House elections), but large enough to make it possible for someone to affect outcomes by more extensive manipulation of polling place locations.

Reasoning Chains: Causal Models of Policy Reasoning in Mass Publics

Citizens do not choose sides on issues like busing or abortion whimsically. They have reasons for their preferences – certainly they can give reasons for them. But how is this possible? Citizens as a rule pay little attention to politics, indeed take only a modest interest in it even during election campaigns when their interest in politics is at its height. And since they pay little attention to politics, it is hardly surprising that they know little about it. Many, in fact, are quite ignorant of basic facts of political life – such as the identity of the party that controls Congress or indeed the name of the congressman who represents them. Which, of course, raises a question of some interest: how do citizens figure out what they think about political issues, given how little they commonly know about them?

Factor and ideal point analysis for interpersonally incomparable data

Interpersonally incomparable responses pose a significant problem for survey researchers. If the manifest responses of individuals differ from their underlying true responses by monotonic transformations which vary from person to person, then the covariances of the manifest responses tools such as factor analysis may yield incorrect results. Satisfactory results for interpersonally incomparable ordinal responses can be obtained by assuming that rankings are based upon a set of multivariate normal latent variables which satisfy the factor or ideal point models of choice. Two statistical methods based upon these assumptions are described; their statistical properties are explored; and their computational feasibility is demonstrated in some simulations. We conclude that is possible to develop methods for factor and ideal point analysis of interpersonally incomparable ordinal data.

Economic Behavior in Political Context

Inviting political scientists to tell economists how they could do better work is an act of disciplinary generosity. The reality is that contemporary political science is a net importer of ideas and methods from other disciplines, and from none more than economics. Indeed, some of the most exciting research in political science in the past 40 years has involved the incorporation of ideas from economics. We have neither the space nor the mandate to summarize that research here, but refer interested readers to Gary J. Millers (1997) extensive review. Our aim here is to offertwo modest case studies of specific instances of overlap between the interests and research efforts of economists and political scientists. Our first case study focuses on describing and explaining participation in the workforce, the polity, and many other social activities and organizations. Our second case study focuses on the impact of political processes and institutions on macroeconomic policies and performance. In both these instances the work of economists has been quite fruitful—but also, we think, hampered by a characteristic overreliance on standard economic models and methods. However, in both areas, recent developments may point the way toward a more constructive research style combining the theoretical and empirical rigor of economics with a broader and more eclectic approach familiar to political scientists.

Rational Action and Political Activity

Rational actor theory and the facts of political participation have long been in an uneasy relationship. Many citizens vote and take part in other political activities when theory would predict that they would take a free ride. This paper draws on several analyses of citizen participation for some of which rational actor theory is quite useful and for others it is less so. It attempts to specify the conditions under which the theory is applicable. It concludes that rational actor theory is more potent when applied to issues of cost rather than benefits or when the goals of participation can be specified in a clear manner and one can measure their degree of attainment.