No description available.

I reassess the influence of presidential approval on state legislative election outcomes, incorporating the period from the 1940s to the 1970s in my analysis. Previous research finds that presidential approval has a significant effect, but such findings may be biased-they focus on elections after the 1970s, when the president was more visible to the public. Using an original state partisan balance dataset, I measure the effects of presidential approval and find that it has as much influence on state legislative elections from the 1940s to the early 1970s. These findings may engender concerns of state legislative accountability-if state legislators’ electoral prospects become increasingly reliant upon assessments of the president than themselves, they are less likely to feel beholden to voters and uphold their interests.

No description available.

This dissertation explores the extent to which weather and climate systematically affect political behavior. The idea that weather (and other elements of the natural world) exercise a fundamental influence on politics has long been a theme in classical and modern political thought. As political science moved from pure description to a more social-scientific form of analysis, scholars became less interested in understanding the impact of climate. If mentioned at all, weather typically is referred to as one of the various elements making up the "error term" in our statistical analyses. Recent work in the natural and social sciences, however, has suggested there are systematic and important links between weather, climate, and behavior. This work (which I review) not only inspires a return to a traditional focus of political analysis, but more importantly provides a number of hypotheses to guide our analysis of politics. Inclement weather increases the costs of moving from place to place. Sunlight enhances while extreme temperature depresses mood. Finally, hot weather is associated with enhanced aggression. These correlates of climate have implications for a variety of subfields across political science, including comparative politics and international relations. This dissertation concentrates primarily, however, on American politics, particularly from a behavioral perspective. To see if weather has a significant effect on politics, then, I explore behavior in four settings that have been especially important in mainstream studies: Presidential approval; social capital; Election Day voting; and finally elite participation (in the form of abstention on roll call voting). In terms of the first, if (as Zaller argues) a response to a telephone survey indeed entails a summing up of `considerations' regarding an issue rather than expression of a `true' attitude, then it is likely sunlight should stimulate positive responses to questions because it encourages the release of serotonin, which makes people more positive in general. Controlled logistic regression of sunlight on Presidential approval reveals that, in spring, sunlight boosts approval. The next chapter explores how hot climates and rain may reduce levels of social capital. This is because heat boosts levels of aggression, which should diminish helping behavior, and because rain makes it more difficult to volunteer and associate with other people. Analysis of state-level social capital data and city-level volunteer data provides some evidence that these propositions are correct. The third empirical chapter focuses upon voting on Election Day. While it finds that rain does have a depressive effect upon voting rates among the poor due to raising the costs associated with voting, there is little evidence that vote choice is affected by the weather. The final empirical chapter examines how weather conditions may affect voting rates among members of the United States House of Representatives, which seems possible because, like regular citizens during Election Day, House members pay costs when visiting the Capital to vote, and unpleasant weather could comprise a real if minor cost. OLS regression at the vote-level and logistic regression at the legislator level reveals that in the winter and spring, sunlight boosts voting, while summer humidity depresses voting and heat in winter has a positive effect. While these conclusions are interesting in themselves and meaningfully contribute to contemporary academic discussions, they further suggest some things about how we thing about political science. In particular, analyses of political topics could often be enhanced by reflectively considering the contents of the error term, as this exercise can offer new and useful perspective on current scholarship. Further, this dissertation also suggests that political science (and research in general) could benefit from taking a more comprehensive view of the environmental context of human behavior.

The relationship between economic performance and support for the incumbent government varies across voters and electoral contexts. While some of this variation can be explained by factors that make it easier or harder to hold politicians accountable, an additional explanation is that the electoral importance of economic issues varies systematically across groups and contexts. Because issues that are personally important tend to be more easily accessible when voting, we prose that exposure to economic shocks generates higher incentives to place more weight on economic conditions when voting. We test this hypothesis using archived and original survey data from Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. The analysis demonstrates that economic vulnerability enhances the economy's salience. Specifically, poverty generates incentives to cast an egotropic vote while wealth, insecure employment, informal employment, and exclusion from governments welfare programs enhances sociotropic voting because these groups have greater stakes in the national economy. By implication, elections in developing countries with large numbers of vulnerable voters should be more strongly contested over economics despite the weak institutional environment that potentially undermines the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. Aggregate elections returns and the CSES survey support this proposition and demonstrate that economic voting is substantially more common in Latin American than in Western Europe or North America. Thus variations in economic voting provide opportunities to not only learn about the conditions under which elections can serve as mechanisms of accountability but also a laboratory to model the process of preference formation and the demands voters place on their representatives. / Dissertation

A standing phenomenon exists in the fields of both political science and communication studies regarding the impact that the news media have on public opinion. This study recognizes the average American citizens' reliance on the press to gain information about international conflicts. Hence, it is theorized that news reports on a political occurrence could very well influence the mass-level opinion of an event such that positive news stories generate positive public opinion, and vice versa. Since foreign crises define a presidency in the public's minds, presidential approval ratings determine the degree to which the news media manipulate public opinion. Specifically, news media coverage of two international conflicts, the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars, are analyzed in light of their effect on American citizens' public opinion of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George H. W. Bush, respectively.

No description available.

The thesis aims to discuss a theoretical framework of the U. S. congressional midterm elections and specify their fundamental funtions and importance. The thesis analyses the transformation of midterm elections as well as their effects on the political system with a special focus on the period 1990-2008. Following the analysis of particular midterm elections, it concludes that some of the theoretical premises need to be revised.

[pt] Nós mostramos que um fator político que explora a variação cross-section em retornos individuais de ações pode prever o resultado de eleições nacionais, incluindo o ganho líquido de assentos no congresso e o presidente. Usando eleições presidenciais dos Estados Unidos desde 1928, nós também encontramos que esse portfolio long-short construído ao redor da eleição entrega informação sobre aprovação presidencial por um longo período depois da eleição. / [en] We show that a political factor that exploits cross-sectional variation in individual stock returns can forecast national election results, including net House seat gains and the president. Using US presidential elections since 1928, we also find that this long-short portfolio constructed around the election period delivers information on presidential approval for a long period after the election.

This study was done to see the effects of a war on the economy and the internal politics of the United States. In selecting the engagement, we would study we agreed the Iraq War would be aided by a large amount of sampling of public opinion that was more nuanced than in previous wars. The Iraq War was a very complicated war, as it was controversial from the beginning and became a political issue while continuing to be a war fought by Americans abroad. Based on the literature, there were many starting effects and assumptions that were accounted for such as the ‘rally round the flag effect.' As a historical landmark, the Iraq War is important for being a significant conflict after the Vietnam War, another very controversial conflict in the eyes of the American public. The hypothesis that I presented were not supported by the data. The impact of the war on the economy was not strong enough that it would create pressure for the sort of model I created to apply. In this model the economic problems faced domestically could lead to more unemployment and therefore to higher military recruitment rates. While this was partially true in 2008, the consequence was not a significantly higher amount of people in the military. Ultimately, this project requires to be done in a more thorough setting where effects may be compared with those of other similar countries in similar scenarios.