M. Stephen Weatherford

Measuring Political Legitimacy.

Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an enumeration of the informational requirements for assessing legitimacy in hopes of finding a conceptualization that better utilizes available survey indicators to tap relevant macro dimensions. I specify formal measurement models for both conventional and revised conceptualizations of legitimacy orientations and compare the fit of the two models systematically on data from the U.S. electorate. The revised model appears preferable on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Economic Voting and the “Symbolic Politics” Argument: A Reinterpretation and Synthesis

Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of “symbolic” preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the dispute between personal and collective decision referents into the broader perspective of a multi-stage model of information processing and decision making. Personal and collective decision referents are shown to define the poles of a continuum, and several hypotheses are derived to predict the relative weights assigned to each in the voters calculus. The model is used in analyses of both the publics evaluations of incumbent economic management and economic voting in different electoral arenas by varying issue publics. Designed to maximize comparability with aggregate studies, this research includes both objective and subjective measures of economic conditions and indexes changes in personal conditions over time from panel data.

HOW DOES GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE INFLUENCE POLITICAL SUPPORT

Much of the literature on political support is of little use to policy makers or those attempting to understand ordinary politics, because the concepts guiding research have focused attention on extreme cases of little relevance. If we are to interpret political support in terms of regime stability, then it is seldom at issue in advanced democratic societies; but if it indicates only approval for authorities, then direct measures of popularity do the job better. This paper works toward an empirical conceptualization of political support intermediate along that continuum by investigating the relationship between support orientations and the publics evaluation of governmental policy performance. Empirical hypotheses are drawn from an elaboration of the policy-relevant aspects of political support, and of the support-relevant aspects of policy evaluations. These hypotheses are tested against the American publics responses to the governments management of the economy, and they reveal several patterns useful to interpreting changes in the level of political support.

Economic ‘Stagflation’ and Public Support for the Political System

Declining trust in politicians and political institutions is one of the most dramatic and well-documented trends in American public opinion. Confidence in religious, educational and other institutions has also waned, but emphasis has focused on diminished political trust, both because it may summarize a wide range of diffuse grievances and because it might indicate an increased potential for disruptive action, political violence and instability. In the decade from 1968 to 1978, the level of political trust (measured by the conventional five-item CPS/NES index) was halved, the proportion of the public expressing moderate or high levels of trust falling from 64 to 33 per cent. The greatest decline in the index level (a drop of 14 points) occurred between 1972 and 1974.

Evidence Use and the Common Core State Standards Movement: From Problem Definition to Policy Adoption

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other types of evidence. By drawing on elite interviews, we find that CCSS promoters and developers used evidence in much the way that policy analysis research would predict and that while research evidence was a major resource, it was combined with other types of evidence depending on political and policy goals at different stages of the CCSS process.

Organized Interests and the Common Core

Among the notable aspects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the diverse array of interest groups supporting them. These organizations must now apply the strategies they used so effectively in advancing the Common Core to stem mounting opposition to it. This article draws on theories of political and policy learning and interviews with major participants to examine the role that CCSS supporters have played in developing and implementing the standards, supporters’ reasons for mobilizing, and the counterarguments and strategies of recently emerging opposition groups.

Recessions and social classes: Economic impacts and political opinions

Economic classes represent groupings of individuals in terms of some long-run distribution of economic advantages. Recessions and inflations impose unequal short-run costs which may or may not be congruent with class inequalities. This paper begins with the hypothesis that the class structure channels the personal impacts of macroeconomic fluctuations and helps to explain the opinion formation process which underlies any observed political response. The empirical puzzle involves properly specifying and implementing a test of this hypothesis.I outline two alternative conceptions of social stratification: one emphasizing individualistic competition for places in a continuously rankedstatus system, and the other focusing on patterned inequalities arising in the productive process and resulting in a discontinuous distribution ofclasses. The two are only modestly related empirically.The analysis section of the paper shows that status and class covary in distinctive ways with measures of financial condition and political opinion. The paper suggests that earlier research based on continuous indexes of social status may have erred in concluding that stratification is irrelevant to short-run fluctuations in political opinion.

Deliberation with a Purpose: Reconnecting Communities and Schools

This chapter examines a trio of deliberative experiments, alternative realizations of a general template that aspired, as its title proclaimed, to “Reconnect Communities and Schools” in South Carolina. Reconnecting sought not only to foster citizen deliberation but also to influence the decisions of school and community elites. In the end, Reconnecting succeeded in mobilizing parents of students along with community residents who had no direct connection to the schools, and in fostering a series of penetrating discussions whose civility and equality surprised seasoned local observers. These South Carolina forums take their place among the steadily cumulating body of cases showing the constructive potential of citizen deliberation over significant, contested public issues. But unlike other deliberative assemblies, the citizens who participated in Reconnecting were not content simply to discuss the current state of their public schools; their intention was to develop an action plan, and to see that their recommendations received a hearing and visibly moved school policy and community practice. Neither the rich theoretical literature nor empirical research on deliberative democracy yields much insight about the conditions under which a citizen deliberative forum can preserve its autonomy and yet influence policymaking in a political context typified by adversarial bargaining.

Crime, policing and the perception of neighborhood safety

Abstract Crime is a powerful political issue in urban America, but policies to abate crime pose difficult trade-offs for governments. Given the high costs of policing and the multiplicity of other pressing needs for scarce budgets, it is imperative that spending be directed as efficaciously as possible: governments wish, that is, to direct spending toward geographical areas and crimes where the public feels most concerned or threatened. Unfortunately, little systematic information is available about how individuals form a conception of neighborhood safety, or how the demand for police services relates to the occurrence of crime in their area. This paper reports on an exploratory analysis of that question. The study combines approaches from economics (to estimate marginal willingness to pay for publicly provided police services), political science (the spatial analysis of voting data), and geography (using GIS techniques to test alternative specifications of the relationship between crime and demand for police services). Whilst the application of GIS techniques fosters a more realistic formulation of the analytical question, it also reveals ambiguities in both the theory and method used in earlier work. Using census tract-level data on crime rates and voting on an initiative to increase taxes to pay for police services, our analysis shows that the public is more willing to pay for the abatement of violent crime than property crime. But even this inference is sensitive to assumptions about how individuals gather and process information concerning the frequency and severity of crime in their local area. We specify a range of information-processing models, and draw inferences for further research.

Crafting an Education Reform Agenda through Economic Stimulus Policy.

The economic stimulus enacted during President Obamas initial weeks included a down payment on his ambitious education reform agenda. By combining short-term policy with reform, the strategy gained his administration three advantages: a discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on his agenda; and the ability to shape the national reform discussion for more than a year, without being constrained by negotiations over a specific piece of legislation. This article details the strategy and discusses whether the Obama administrations political dexterity can be matched by skill in fashioning institutional arrangements to ensure the long-term sustainability of these reforms.