Matthew A. Baum

The Invisible Hand of Democracy: Political Control and the Provision of Public Services

Despite considerable normative support, analysts have failed to identify any systematic effects of democracy on domestic policy outputs. Building on a theory of the state as a monopoly producer of public services and establishing a common foundation for studying variations in regimes and their policy consequences, the authors hypothesize that democratic states will earn fewer monopoly rents and produce a higher level of services than autocracies. They test this hypothesis both cross-sectionally and over time for a variety of public health and education indicators. The statistical results strongly support their hypotheses. The authors conclude that democracy has real, substantively important effects on the daily lives and well-being of individuals around the globe.

Schizophrenia risk from complex variation of complement component 4

Schizophrenia is a heritable brain illness with unknown pathogenic mechanisms. Schizophrenia’s strongest genetic association at a population level involves variation in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) locus, but the genes and molecular mechanisms accounting for this have been challenging to identify. Here we show that this association arises in part from many structurally diverse alleles of the complement component 4 (C4) genes. We found that these alleles generated widely varying levels of C4A and C4B expression in the brain, with each common C4 allele associating with schizophrenia in proportion to its tendency to generate greater expression of C4A. Human C4 protein localized to neuronal synapses, dendrites, axons, and cell bodies. In mice, C4 mediated synapse elimination during postnatal development. These results implicate excessive complement activity in the development of schizophrenia and may help explain the reduced numbers of synapses in the brains of individuals with schizophrenia.

Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public

This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to several recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high-profile political issues across different segments of the public.

The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital

Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth, we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies. We conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30-year panel of 128 countries. We find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth. Rather, we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in nonpoor countries. T he relationship between democracy and economic growth has received considerable attention in recent years. As yet, however, there is no consensus among analysts on the relationship between these two widely studied variables. Sound theoretical positions have been advanced suggesting that democracy is both an impediment and facilitator of growth. Careful quantitative tests of the relationship have produced contradictory results. In our view, existing studies fail to develop an adequate political theory of growth and as a result their empirical models are typically misspecified. With competing arguments on both sides of the question, many analysts merely add a variable for democracy to existing economic models and then look at the sign of the coefficient and its significance. This is inadequate. Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are important indirect effects of democracy on growth that are manifested through public health and education. Where economists typically use life expectancy and secondary school enrollment as proxies for human capital, we expect that democracy will itself be an important determinant of the level of public services captured in these indicators. Thus, in

Has Cable Ended the Golden Age of Presidential Television

For the past 30 years, presidents have enlisted prime-time television to promote their policies to the American people. For most of this era, they have been able to commandeer the national airwaves and speak to “captive†viewers. Recently, however, presidents appear to be losing their audiences. Two leading explanations are the rise of political disaffection and the growth of cable. We investigate both by developing and testing a model of the individuals viewing decision using both cross-sectional (1996 NES survey) and time-series (128 Nielsen audience ratings for presidential appearances between 1969 and 1998) data. We find that cable television but not political disaffection has ended the golden era of presidential television. Moreover, we uncover evidence that both presidents and the broadcast networks have begun adapting strategically to this new reality in scheduling presidential appearances.

The Oprah Effect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently

Do the news media provide voters with sufficient information to function as competent democratic citizens? Many have answered “no,” citing as evidence the proliferation of entertainment-oriented “soft news.” Yet, public affairs-oriented “hard” news is often unappealing to politically inattentive individuals. We argue that news “quality” depends upon how well it enables citizens to determine which candidate best fits their own preferences. In this regard, for politically inattentive citizens, we argue that soft news is more efficient than traditional hard news. Drawing on the logic of low-information rationality, we derive a series of hypotheses, which we test using the 2000 National Election Study. We find that politically inattentive individuals who consumed daytime talk shows (a popular form of soft news) were more likely than their nonconsuming, inattentive counterparts to vote for the candidate who best represented their self-described preferences. This suggests soft news can facilitate voting “competence” among at least some citizens.

The Constituent Foundations of the Rally-Round-the-Flag Phenomenon

Despite the massive attention heaped on the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon by public opinion scholars, relatively little attention has been paid to its constituent elements. Yet, recent research has found that different groups of Americans respond differently to presidents’ activities according to their interests and attentiveness. In this study, I disaggregate public opinion along two dimensions: political party and political sophistication. I argue that in responding to high-profile presidential activities abroad, different groups of Americans weigh various individual, contextual, and situational factors differently. I investigate all major U.S. uses of force between 1953 and 1998 and find that the propensity of different groups to rally does indeed vary according to individual and environmental circumstances. To explain these differences, I employ two models of public opinion. The first emphasizes the importance of threshold effects in explaining opinion change. That is, individuals who are closest to the point of ambivalence between approval and disapproval are most likely to change their opinion in response to external circumstances. The second emphasizes both the propensities of different types of individuals to be exposed to a given piece of information, and their susceptibility to having their opinion influenced by any additional information. My results offer a more nuanced picture of the nature and extent of the rally phenomenon than has been available in previous studies. My findings also hold important implications for other related scholarly debates, such as whether, and under what circumstances, the use of force can successfully divert public attention from a president’s domestic political difficulties.

Crossing the Water's Edge: Elite Rhetoric, Media Coverage, and the Rally-Round-the-Flag Phenomenon

The most widely accepted explanation for the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon is a relative absence of elite criticism during the initial stages of foreign crises. In this study we argue that the nature and extent of elite debate may matter less than media coverage of any such debate, and that such coverage is heavily influenced by commonly held professional incentives and norms that lead journalists to strongly prefer certain stories over others. We also argue that not all messages in this debate matter equally for public opinion. Rather, the persuasiveness of elite messages depends on their credibility, which, in turn, arises out of an interaction between the sender, receiver, and message. Hence, only by understanding the interactions between elites, the public, and the press can we account for variations in public responses to presidential foreign policy initiatives. We test our theory by examining public opinion data and network news coverage of all major U.S. uses of military force from 1979 to 2003. We content analyze all congressional evaluations of the president and the executive branch of government from the three network evening newscasts within 60-day time periods centered on the start date of each use of force. Our results offer strong support for the theory.

Going Private Public Opinion, Presidential Rhetoric, and the Domestic Politics of Audience Costs in U.S. Foreign Policy Crises

This study investigates why, despite the potential credibility enhancement associated with generating domestic audience costs, leaders (in this instance, U.S. presidents) frequently opt to “go private” by conducting foreign policy out of the public spotlight. The author argues that they do so for two primary reasons: (1) public scrutiny disproportionately raises the potential political price of a bad outcome, and (2) leaders’ efforts to generate audience costs can sometimes backfire, as the reactions of the domestic “audience”—once engaged—are not entirely predictable. An analysis of U.S. behavior in all international crises between 1946 and 1994 shows that when national security interests in a crisis are modest, American presidents are indeed less likely to speak publicly about potential adversaries, unless they are quite confident of success if a fight ensues.

Economic Class and Popular Support for Franklin Roosevelt in War and Peace

History has judged FDR as one of Americas greatest leaders in part because he maintained the publics confidence in seeing the nation through the travails of the Depression and World War II. During this era, the two most widely employed explanatory variables in contemporary presidential popularity scholarship-the economy and war-assumed their most extreme values of the twentieth century. Hence, not only is understanding Roosevelts public support historically important, but it represents a valuable case for filling in our understanding of the opinion dynamics of presidential support more generally. Yet, surprisingly, Roosevelts approval ratings have attracted little systematic scrutiny. Compiling time-series data from 1937 to 1943, partially disaggregated by economic class, we investigate FDRs popular support among different classes during both national crises. We find that Roosevelts peacetime support divided along class lines, while during the war class divisions blurred. Roosevelts support was indeed conditioned by external events, refracted through the interests of different societal groups. We conclude that public support for modern presidents should be similarly studied as the sum of opinions among heterogeneous constituencies.