Diverse Research but a Common Interest
Workshop forges connections between social and political scientists

Winter, 2008, Volume 30, Number 1

From left: IPR Faculty Associate Benjamin Page talks about black-white views on the death penalty with Mark Peffley of the University of Kentucky and Reuel Rogers of Northwestern University.

More than 40 social scientists and graduate students from around the Midwest came together for a workshop, co-sponsored by IPR, which explored diverse topics from examining the black-white race gap in death penalty support to linking political rhetoric and ideology.

“Our underlying motivation in organizing the workshop was to foster connections between social scientists at different universities with common interests in political and social behavior,” said IPR Faculty Fellow James Druckman, who organized the May 11 workshop. He is associate professor of political science and chair of IPR’s Politics, Institutions, and Public Policy Program.

Mark Peffley of the University of Kentucky dug deeper into understanding the interracial gap in death penalty support. After randomly assigning respondents in a national survey to one of several arguments against the death penalty, he and Jon Hurwitz of the University of Pittsburgh found that arguments based on unfairness or racial bias were more persuasive for blacks. Whites, on the other hand, were practically immune to such arguments and even became more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks. Peffley partially explained the gap by attributing it to how one views the criminal justice system: Blacks view it as more racially and generally unfair than whites, who believe that the system is fair and the reason blacks are imprisoned more is that blacks commit more crimes.

	Workshop organizer James Druckman speaks with a participant about the ideological positions of U.S. senators.

William Howell of the University of Chicago showed that public elites possess sizable influence in shaping public views about matters involving war. He and Douglas Kriner of Boston University linked more than 5,000 congressional speeches about the Iraq war to trends in public support for the war, and then followed up with a series of survey experiments. Howell and Kriner found that political elites exerted substantial influence on public opinion via public declarations made on the floors of the House and Senate. They also demonstrated that the most influential messages come from either co-partisan, trusted sources or from “costly sources,” where the message conflicts with a political elite’s self-interest or ideological beliefs.

IPR Faculty Associate Daniel Diermeier and his colleagues made novel use of a text classification algorithm to pinpoint congressional members’ political leanings. They extracted the terms most indicative of ideological positions from all Senate floor speeches in the 101st to 108th Congresses (1989-2005). From it, the researchers achieved a 94 percent accuracy rate in predicting senators’ ideological positions (extreme conservative, moderate conservative, moderate liberal, or extreme liberal) in the 108th Congress. Their finding indicates that roll-call votes and floor debates are different but correlated expressions of underlying ideological belief systems—and are not simply the result of institutional factors such as the influence of party leadership or agenda control. Diermeier is IBM Distinguished Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Jason Reifler of Georgia State University and his colleagues are examining how citizens in advanced democracies structure their foreign policy beliefs. Though political scientists tend to dismiss foreign policy beliefs as ineffectual, volatile, and incoherent, their study of Canadian citizens’ beliefs adds to growing evidence that citizens can and do hold well-formed attitudes on international matters. In reviewing a nationally representative survey of Canadian voters’ foreign policy attitudes in 2004, they found that their attitudes were structured along three key dimensions: their level of support for a strong military for homeland defense, the amount of deference given to international organizations in using force abroad, and the level of engagement with the international community (e.g., preferences on immigration or peacekeeping missions).

The workshop also served as an opportunity for graduate students to pair with a professor for a mentoring session and critique of their research projects. The next Chicago Area Behavior Workshop will take place on May 9 at Northwestern University. For more information, visit www.northwestern.edu/ipr/events/workshops/cab.htm.