Kyle L. Saunders

Is Polarization a Myth

This article uses data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test Fiorinas assertion that ideological polarization in the American public is a myth. Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists—they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens. Moreover, contrary to Fiorinas suggestion that polarization turns off voters and depresses turnout, our evidence indicates that polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.

Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate: Social Identity vs. Ideology

This article uses data from the 1952-2004 American National Election Studies and the 2004 U.S. National Exit Poll to compare the influence of ideology and membership in social groups on party identification. Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (2002) that party loyalties are rooted in voters’ social identities, we find that party identification is much more strongly related to voters’ ideological preferences than to their social identities as defined by their group memberships. Since the 1970s, Republican identification has increased substantially among whites inside and outside of the South with the most dramatic gains occurring among married voters, men, and Catholics. Within these subgroups, however, Republican gains have occurred mainly or exclusively among self-identified conservatives. As a result, the relationship between ideology and party identification has increased dramatically. This has important implications for voting behavior. Increased consistency between ideology and party identification has contributed to higher levels of party loyalty in presidential and congressional elections.

Effective Quotas, Relative Party Magnitude, and the Success of Female Candidates Peruvian Municipal Elections In Comparative Perspective

The extraordinary success of gender quotas in the 1998 Peruvian municipal elections defies conventional wisdom in electoral studies. This article evaluates several institutional variables that are prominently featured in the literature and several others that were “discovered” in Peru, using pooled ordinary least squares regression models and original data sets. Two of the newly discovered variables—effective quotas and seats guaranteed by the effective quota and the relative magnitude of the largest party—were the most important determinants of female electoral success at the provincial level and in districts outside Lima, whereas collective action stimulated by quota legislation made a difference in the capital. In contrast, district magnitude—widely considered to be the most important variable in party-list systems—had no impact. The article extends its principal findings beyond Peru, argues that quotas can follow diverging logics in different electoral systems, and suggests directions for future research.

Ideological Realignment and Active Partisans in the American Electorate

This article investigates the consequences of ideological realignment for the motivations and policy preferences of active partisans—Democratic and Republican identifiers who engage in electoral activities that go beyond the act of voting. We hypothesize that, consistent with the logic of persuasion and selective recruitment/derecruitment, the influence of ideology as a motivation for campaign participation varies over time and between parties depending on the salience of the ideological cues provided by a party’s candidates and office-holders. Evidence from the 1972 to 2000 American National Election Studies supports this hypothesis. As a result of an ideological realignment led by conservative Republican leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, by the mid-1990s, ideology had become a much more important motivation for participation among Republicans than among Democrats, and active Republicans were farther to the right of the electorate than active Democrats were to the left of the electorate on a wide range of policy issues.

Pillar Talk Local Sustainability Initiatives and Policies in the United States—Finding Evidence of the “Three E’s”: Economic Development, Environmental Protection, and Social Equity

This article examines local sustainability initiatives in the United States through the lens of the “three pillars” of sustainability: economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. A comprehensive index is created using national-level survey data on local sustainability initiatives, then census and other data are used to examine local activities related to all three pillars of sustainability. Analysis of a series of correlations and means comparisons provides evidence that several factors are interrelated with local government engagement in sustainability initiatives, including population size, central city locations, diversity, ethnicity and race, political leanings of a community, and region. In addition, cities are ranked by their scores on this index creating a “best cases” list for future research.

A New Kind of Balancing Act: Electoral Certainty and Ticket-Splitting in the 1996 and 2000 Elections:

Using data from the 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, this article analyzes the behavior of voters who split their tickets, voting for one party’s presidential candidate and the opposing party’s House candidate, in presidential election years. We test the hypotheses that balancing behavior is likely to occur only when the outcome of the presidential election is relatively certain, and that balancing is most likely to occur among relatively sophisticated voters who have reservations about the policy positions of their preferred presidential candidate. The results of the study support the presence of this type of balancing behavior in the 1996 election and suggest that balancing can play an important role in producing divided government.

It’s Not All About Resources: Explaining (or Not) the Instability of Individual-Level Political Participation Over Time

The dominant political science explanations of the causes of individual-level political participation converge on three sets of antecedents—resources/skills, recruitment, and political engagement. However, the overwhelming majority of the empirical tests of these antecedents rely on cross-sectional data, obscuring the fact that micro-level participation in the United States is more accurately characterized by instability rather than by stability. Using the American National Election Study and Jennings time-series data, we for the first time demonstrate the inability of traditionally examined antecedents to explain individual-level variation in political behavior over time. Finding extant theory inadequate in this regard, we propose a modification of participation theories that puts the concept of motivation in the foreground. We argue that a model that includes motivation may both pave the way for a better understanding of the variation in participation over time and suggest possible prescriptions to help alleviate representational biases at the individual level.

Conspiracy Theories in the United States: More Commonplace than Extraordinary

ABSTRACT In American Conspiracy Theories, Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent provide an important corrective to empirical work suggesting that conspiracy theories are the domain of paranoids. The authors provide convincing evidence that conspiracy endorsement is a motivated-reasoning process that connects conspiracy theories that buttress psychologically threatened identities to the ideological worldviews of those who feel anxious, alienated, or powerless.