Sergio C. Wals

Does What Happens in Los Mochis Stay in Los Mochis? Explaining Postmigration Political Behavior

This article seeks to understand how immigrants’ premigration political socialization experiences shape their views of the new polity, the extent to which this imported socialization affects their degree of postmigration political engagement, and how long the content of immigrants’ political suitcases remains consequential during their civic lives in America. The author offers tests utilizing unique survey data of Mexican immigrants residing in the United States. Results reveal that attachment to a Mexican political party heightens the prospects for political engagement in the American context, and trust in the Mexican government corresponds with trust in the U.S. government.

Assumed Transmission in Political Science: A Call for Bringing Description Back In

News outlets cannot serve as reliable conveyors of social facts, nor do their audiences crave such content. Nonetheless, much political science scholarship assumes that objective information about social, political, and economic topics is routinely transmitted to the mass public through the news. This article addresses the problem of selection bias in news content and illustrates the problem with a content analytic study of New York Times coverage given to American war deaths in five major conflicts that occurred over the past century. We find that news coverage of war deaths is unrelated to how many American combatants have recently died. News coverage is more likely to mention war deaths when reporting combat operations and less likely to mention them when a war is going well. These findings underscore the need to document selection biases in information flows before theorizing about proximate causes underlying the relationships between political systems and public opinion.

Uplifting Manhood to Wonderful Heights? News Coverage of the Human Costs of Military Conflict From World War I to Gulf War Two

Domestic political support is an important factor constraining the use of American military power around the world. Although the dynamics of war support are thought to reflect a cost-benefit calculus, with costs represented by numbers of friendly war deaths, no previous study has examined how information about friendly, enemy, and civilian casualties is routinely presented to domestic audiences. This article establishes a baseline measure of historical casualty reporting by examining New York Times coverage of five major wars that occurred over the past century. Despite important between-war differences in the scale of casualties, the use of conscription, the type of warfare, and the use of censorship, the frequency of casualty reporting and the framing of casualty reports have remained fairly consistent over the past 100 years. Casualties are rarely mentioned in American war coverage. When casualties are reported, it is often in ways that minimize or downplay the human costs of war.

A neglected nexus: Human rights and public perceptions

ABSTRACT Although human rights scholars have extensively focused on the origins of human rights, research is underdeveloped that attends to the origins of public perceptions of human rights. We expand our knowledge of state-level and individual-level determinants of human rights perceptions. Unlike prior work that ignores within-country variation, we take advantage of state-level variation within Mexico to explore the extent to which human rights perceptions are influenced by context. Specifically, we examine whether the publics human rights perceptions are influenced by violence levels and human rights organizational activities at the state level. Additionally, we assess whether the publics human rights perceptions are related to trust in domestic institutions and security forces and whether sharing partisan ties with the current administration is a contributing factor. Finally, we assess how education levels moderate human rights perceptions. Our results show that human rights perceptions are linked to both state-level and individual-level factors.

Love Thy Neighbor? Trust in Foreigners and Support for Transnational Policies

This study assesses the extent to which individual levels of trust in foreigners relate to preferences about regional transnational policies. We use a nationally representative survey from Mexico (2003), an emerging democracy with relatively high levels of nationalism and several multinational trade agreements. We argue that clarifying the target of social trust is essential for understanding the attitudes of citizens of less powerful countries toward the international policy realm. Statistical analysis strongly suggests that in fact trust in foreigners, above generalized trust, is key to understanding such attitudes. Our results indicate that trust in foreigners among Mexican respondents is positively associated with support for open immigration policies, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and political union with the United States.

Personality, Political Behavior, and Political Views about Mexico’s 2012 Presidential Election

People’s electoral behavior is understood as political predispositions and attitudes in specific institutional contexts. Recent scholarly work has included personality as a key explanatory factor in individual-level models of political participation. In this paper we build upon these recent efforts. We utilize the Big Five approach to assess the effects of different personality traits on people’s likelihood of political engagement during the 2012 presidential election in Mexico. We focus on the effects of personality on voting in the election and on individual views about the integrity of the electoral process. We use post election survey data collected for the Comparative National Elections Project in the 2012 Mexican presidential election. Our findings show that extraversion is a critical individual-level factor accounting for the propensity to turnout in this election as well as to encourage political discussion with family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.