American Politics

Port Huron at Fifty: The New Left and Labor: An Interview with Kim Moody

by Christopher Phelps

Published in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 9, Issue 2 (summer 2012): 25-46.

This interview with Kim Moody, who was present at the Port Huron convention of 1962 as a twenty-two-year-old Johns... more This interview with Kim Moody, who was present at the Port Huron convention of 1962 as a twenty-two-year-old Johns Hopkins University student, illuminates the early history of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), especially the neglected labor-related portions of The Port Huron Statement, one of the most influential manifestos of the sixties radicalization. In a wide-ranging discussion on labor and the New Left, Moody explains the different views of labor represented at Port Huron, appraises individual thinkers such as Tom Hayden and C. Wright Mills, and explores topics such as the meaning of participatory democracy, the politics of labor in the 1960s, class relations in the civil rights movement, the SDS economic and research action projects, and the general relationship between organized labor and the New Left.

Why Do Citizens Discount the Future? Public Opinion and the Timing of Policy Consequences

by J. Scott Matthews

Co-authored with Alan M. Jacobs
British Journal of Political Science, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000117, Published online by Cambridge University Press 10 May 2012.

It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term... more It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of significant discounting of delayed policy benefits and indicates that citizens’ policy bias towards the present derives in large part from uncertainty about the long term: uncertainty about both long-run processes of policy causation and long-term political commitments. There is, in contrast, little evidence that positive time-preferences (impatience) or consumption-smoothing are significant sources of myopic policy attitudes.

Political Uncertainty and Policy Trade-offs: An Experimental Investigation

by J. Scott Matthews

Co-authored with Alan M. Jacobs
Paper presented at the April 2012 EGAP Conference, Vancouver, BC, April 27-28, 2012.

The Religious Right in America: A Historical Examination, Strategy for Regaining Credibility, and the Consequences of “Staying the Course”

by Mark Bound

Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U.S. House: A Replication Incorporating Recent Regression Discontinuity Design Methodology

by Patrick Button

2011, Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine

This paper replicates Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004) using new advances in the regression discontinuity design... more This paper replicates Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004) using new advances in the regression discontinuity design literature. Specifically, this paper applies local linear regression techniques to estimate discontinuities based on optimal bandwidths described by Imbens and Kalyanaraman (2009). In addition, this paper modernizes the authors’ polynomial modeling techniques based on advice in Lee and Lemieux (2010). As an extension to the robustness checks run by the authors, this paper applies McCrary (2008)’s density test to investigate sorting around the treatment cutoff and investigates the sensitivity of estimates to the addition of covariates, polynomial order, and bandwidth selection. The conclusions of Lee, Moretti, and Butler (2004) still hold up under this more rigorous scrutiny. They conclude that politicians do not moderate their policies in response to leftward or rightward shifts in the median voter. Thus, voters “elect” policies by selecting a politician, rather than being able to “affect” policies through the election process.

Electing to Reform: Maine and the District Plan for Selection of Presidential Electors

by James Melcher

Paper presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the New England Political Science Association, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA, August 30-September 1, 2004.

This paper looks at the history of Maine's enactment of the district plan for electoral college elector allocation.... more This paper looks at the history of Maine's enactment of the district plan for electoral college elector allocation. This paper was a precursor to a chapter I later wrote in Gary Bugh's 2010 book Electoral College Reform.

Polarized Political Communication, Oppositional Media Hostility, and Selective Exposure

by Chad Murphy

Co-authored with Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson

Previous research has consistently documented a hostile media effect in which people see bias in balanced reporting on... more Previous research has consistently documented a hostile media effect in which people see bias in balanced reporting on political controversies. In the contemporary fragmented media environment, partisan news outlets intentionally report political news from ideological perspectives, raising the possibility that ideologically biased news may cause viewers to become
increasingly suspicious of and antagonistic toward news media – which we call oppositional media hostility. However, the fragmented media environment also gives television viewers
ample opportunities to tune out news outlets with which they disagree as well as the news altogether, and this should moderate oppositional media hostility. We investigate the effects of partisan news shows on media perceptions across six laboratory-based experiments. We find that counter-attitudinal news programming is more likely to induce hostile media perceptions than pro-attitudinal programming, but that the presence of choice blunts oppositional media hostility.
We explore possible mechanisms that underlie the moderating effects of selective exposure.

Tea Talk: The Rhetoric of Tea Party Governors

by James Melcher

Co-authored with Amy Fried, University of Maine. Presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the New England Political Science Association , Portsmouth, New Hampshire, April 2012.

Using New Media Effectively: an Analysis of Barack Obama's Election Campaign Aimed at Young Americans

by Ekaterina Rozenoer (Alexandrova)

Master Thesis

On November 4, 2008, more than 12 million young Americans elected the person who made them believe in their abilities... more On November 4, 2008, more than 12 million young Americans elected the person who made them believe in their abilities to bring about change, the person who gave them hope, and the person who let them feel united. It was Barack Obama who won the election, and it was young people who were pivotal in helping him win. This paper explores the communication strategy that allowed Barack Obama to engage youth so effectively; it also reveals successful tactics of using new media for reaching the Millennial generation.

Issues with Feminism; The Fallacy of Connell et. al

by Mark Bound

Social and Political Theory; From the perspective of the Caucasian, Moderate, Male

by Mark Bound

American Middle Eastern Policy; A Needed New Direction

by Mark Bound

Why Radical Conservatism Doesn't Work

by Mark Bound

The Federalist Papers #10 18th Century Hope Crushed by 21st Century Reality

by Mark Bound

Humour, political satire and ironic tension between the “real” and the “fictional” Stephen Colbert

by Jennifer Phillips

[Non-refereed Op-ed] Whose Arms Will Embrace You? The United States and the Beijing Consensus

by Amarnath Amarasingam

The United States is increasingly playing a game of subtle communication in the international arena. I suspect we had... more The United States is increasingly playing a game of subtle communication in the international arena. I suspect we had a passing glimpse of this at the 19th Session of the Human Rights Council, which gathered in Geneva last month. The question is: who is the United States talking to and what is it trying to say?

Review Essay: The Public Presence of American Political Cartoons

by Kristine Ronan

The Hedgehog Review 10:2 (Summer 2008)

Review essay of Donald Dewey’s "The Art of Ill Will" (2007) and J. G. Lewin and P. J. Huff’s "Lines of... more Review essay of Donald Dewey’s "The Art of Ill Will" (2007) and J. G. Lewin and P. J. Huff’s "Lines of Contention" (2007).

Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics

by Richard Baxstrom

Co-authors: Deborah Poole, Bhrigupati Singh, Naveeda Khan, in Theory and Event. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vol. 8, No. 4, 2005.

[from the article]

Within such an atmosphere, of certainty conjoined with panic, what constitutes a radical... more [from the article]

Within such an atmosphere, of certainty conjoined with panic, what constitutes a radical perspective? What tasks might radical scholarship set for itself? Words such as Democracy, Justice, Freedom, and Revolution have been used so often, by so many people, first and foremost by the Bush administration, that it would be completely disabling if the only work left to do were to adjudicate their "correct"or "truthful"application. Finding ourselves at a loss, as a first step we felt it crucial to address that which lay closest to us, which, given our location within the academy, meant returning to the question of intellectuals and power, or the intellectual life of power, in all its specificity, within the American context. With such an inquiry in mind we began to investigate the set of networks and institutions known as think tanks, seemingly the most crucial intellectual node in what is commonly known as the military-industrial complex.

April 1912 Didn't Just See the Sinking of the Titanic -- The Fortunes of the GOP Sank, Too

by Adam Burns

An op-ed on the sinking of the Titanic and its role in the Republican 1912 election nomination battle between William... more An op-ed on the sinking of the Titanic and its role in the Republican 1912 election nomination battle between William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. It draws parallels with the Republican Party divisions of spring 2012.

Whatever Happened to The Christian Coalition?: A Sociohistorical Content Analysis of the Contract with the American Family and the Republican Party Platform

by Landon Schnabel