John Strate

Life span civic development and voting participation

Although a variety of age-related processes are known to affect rates of political participation over the adult life span, little is known about their interrelationships and relative impact. We set out a theory of life span civic development that focuses on how age-related changes in community attachment, strength of partisanship, church attendance, government responsiveness, family income, and civic competence impinge on voting participation. To test the theory, we estimated the coefficients of a structural equation model using data from nine National Election Studies combined into a large, cross-sectional time series data set. The model specifies the age-related processes and also controls for the effects of a large number of other variables. Overall, about one-half of the age-related increases in voting participation were attributable to these processes.

Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences

The central argument of Lynn and Vanhanen’s book Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences is that the intelligence of nations more than any other independent variable accounts for the largest proportion of variation across a very large number of economic, political, and social indicators. The details of the argument are presented, systematically and exhaustively, in chapters 3 through 12. Throughout these chapters there’s an inconvenient truth, as with global warming, that can’t be ignored—the intelligence of nations (as is true of the intelligence of individuals) matters a great deal. Intelligence has great explanatory power and deserves status as a ‘‘unifying’’ construct in the social sciences (p. 1). In each chapter, the authors dutifully cite the often large number of studies that support their own findings. However, the authors’ measures of national IQs, in some respects, are problematic. To the authors, national IQs are ‘‘measures of general intelligence defined as the totality of cognitive abilities’’ (p. 9). National IQs include Spearman’s g as well as other cognitive abilities independent of g. The national IQs for 161 countries are calculated using scores from intelligence tests alone (50 countries), scores from tests of school achievement alone (24 countries), or scores from both sources (87 countries). The tests of school achievement are the TIMSS (The International Math and Science Studies), the PISA (Program for International Assessment) studies, and several other studies. These tests measure abilities in math, science, and reading comprehension. Since scores from these tests are highly correlated with scores from intelligence tests, they are taken to be valid measures of cognitive ability. For 42 of 203 countries, the authors have no data at all, and infer national IQs using those of geographically and/or culturally similar countries or regions. This is seemingly an effort to make bricks without straw. Is the national IQ of North Korea the same as South Korea (104.6)? The authors average, transform, adjust and combine the intelligence and test scores in various ways to ensure that the final national IQs are as comparable as possible across countries. Plainly, the national IQ scores have measurement errors. The authors admit this and discuss and evaluate the quality of the data. It’s important to note that if there is measurement error in an independent variable (random, systematic, or both) estimates of coefficients and other statistics will be biased. Are these biases so large that they would significantly alter the authors’ basic findings regarding national IQ and its relationships with various dependent variables? It’s of course difficult to know for sure, but probably not. The authors leave no stone unturned with respect to finding dependent variables. Table 1 lists the ten analytical chapters in the book. For each of these chapters, the authors analyze the effects of national IQ upon various indicators of economic, political, and social well-being. The analytic approach remains the same throughout. The authors first identify and discuss the relevant dependent variables, data sources, and the adequacy of data. In Chapter 5, for example, the dependent variables include Vanhanen’s index of democratization, Freedom House’s combined ratings of political rights and civil liberties, Polity IV project’s scores on authority, women’s percentage share of seats in parliament in 2008, the United Nations Development Program’s gender inequality index, and Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index. The authors next step is to calculate the inter-correlations

Does Changing Mayors Matter

In this article we examine the effect of leadership change on public policy at the urban level. We ask whether cities in which elections result in mayoral change experience changes in public policy that differ from those of cities in which incumbents are reelected. We employ change in real per capita operating expenditures and changes in expenditure shares (priorities) as measures of public policy (although they are only two among many) and include in our analysis the universe of U.S. cities with population in excess of 100,000 for the years 1974 to 1985. We hypothesize that mayoral change will have a greater policy effect in cities where facilitative structures (i.e., mayor-council systems) exist than in cities with nonfacilitative structures (i.e., council-manager systems). We make comparisons between expenditure changes and priorities for incumbent and new mayors, employing both simple descriptive and multivariate analyses which controls for other factors that influence expenditure change. We conclude that in general new mayors changed spending more than did incumbents, and although differences are small, at least with respect to the measure of policy change we employ, changing mayors did matter.

Modes of participation over the adult life span

Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, in their 1972 workParticipation in America, advance the notion that political participation is not unidimensional, but is comprised of different modes. In recent years, the availability of panel and cross-sectional time series data has led to greater interest in the temporal dimension of political participation. Using data from nine American National Election Studies, we confirm the Verba and Nie findings with respect to voting and campaign participation and expand upon them. We examine the factor structure of indicators used in composite indices of voting and campaign participation and find that the structure of participation is stable across age groups, cohorts, and periods, confirming that composite indices of voting and campaign participation are not confounded by age, cohort, or period effects.

Democracy among Strangers: Term Limits' Effects on Relationships between State Legislators in Michigan

By truncating service, term limits create massive turnover in some state legislatures where they exist, bringing flocks of newcomers into office. With less time to get to know each other and to develop expertise and influence, how do legislators know who to consult and whose advice to rely on? We explore this and other questions about three relationships (influence, friendship, and policy consultation) with a longitudinal study of the Michigan House of Representatives, a highly professionalized body with stringent limits on legislative terms. We found that term limits lead to a more pronounced regional component of friendship, greater concentration of influence among caucus leaders, consulting networks with more prominent hubs that could control the flow of information, and a decline in relationships across party lines. We argue that these effects of term limits bode poorly for bipartisan negotiation and consensus-building among legislators representing diverse constituencies.

Are there Election-Driven Tax-and-Expenditure Cycles for Urban Governments?

Do tax-and-expenditure cycles exist at the city level? Local politicians cannot manipulate the economy to improve their own or their partys electoral prospects and thereby produce apolitical business cycle. However, they can manipulate tax revenues and expenditures over the election cycle, with some constraints. Using data from medium-and large-sized U.S. cities from 1978 through 1985, the authors found evidence that tax-revenue cycles exist in many cities with mayor-council governments, where politicians prefer to cut taxes or avoid tax increases in fiscal years when an election is imminent. There was little evidence, however, of operating expenditure cycles.

Public opinion on school choice: The Detroit metropolitan area

This paper analyzes public opinion on the issue of school choice using telephone survey data from the Detroit metropolitan area. Four choice plans are examined: within-district, cross-district, statewide, and tax-credit. There is substantial support for school choice, the level of support varying with the expansiveness of the choice plan, the geographical area, and the race of the respondent. Overall, the residents of the Detroit metropolitan area, as elsewhere in the United States, are receptive to the idea of school choice, despite the areas history of extreme racial segregation.

Physician-assisted suicide and the politics of problem definition

In the United States the issue of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) first reached the governmental agenda in the state of Michigan. This occurred because of the personal crusade of Dr Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, to legalize PAS. In June 1990 Kevorkian initiated his crusade by assisting Janet Adkins, who suffered from Alzheimers disease, to commit suicide. The bizarre nature of the suicide—conducted in the back end of Kevorkians Volkswagen van, and using a suicide machine to deliver a lethal dose of a drug, created an international media sensation. The efforts of prosecutors to stop Kevorkian were frustrated because Michigan, unlike most other states, did not have a law prohibiting assisted suicide. In response to the controversy, the Michigan state legislature enacted a temporary ban on assisted suicide and created the Michigan Commission on Death and Dying, charging it with developing legislative recommendations on aid-in-dying. The Commission, comprising 22 groups, is of historical interest because it was one of the first public bodies in the United States to debate the issue of PAS. The debate that occurred on the Commission illustrates three different definitions of physician-assisted suicide deriving from beliefs rooted in political ideology, moral intuitions and religious belief. It also illustrates that the politics of PAS for some time is likely to involve conflict over different problem definitions.

Paging Dr. Death: The political theater of assisted suicide in Michigan

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak, Michigan, created an instant sensation on June 4, 1990, when he assisted Janet Adkins in committing suicide by lethal injection. Kevorkians activities, and the ineffectual efforts of public officials to stop him, generated social conflict, issue expansion, and political theater. In this case, political theater involved acts of civil disobedience that resulted in arrests, three high-profile criminal trials, and three subsequent acquittals. As the participants in the conflict tried to generate public support for their respective positions, the debate degenerated into name-calling, hyperbole, and rights talk. This kind of public discourse limits the potential for self-governance and leads to reliance on the courts or other methods of conflict resolution.

A Naturally Occurring Quasi-Experiment in the States: Research on Term Limits in Michigan

Term limits provide a rare opportunity to employ pre- and post-intervention research designs to investigate the effects of turnover in legislatures. This article describes a study of term limits in Michigan that takes advantage of this opportunity. With eight states implementing term limits in 2002 or soon thereafter, there are opportunities for other scholars to replicate all or parts of the study described here. The payoffs for such projects in terms of generating systematic answers to the impacts of legislative turnover and term limits are considerable.