Politics, Institutions, and Public Policy Program

This broad multidisciplinary program looks at the ways in which social, political, and institutional dynamics shape and constrain national policymaking in the United States and in comparison with other advanced industrial societies. Directed by political scientist James Druckman, scholars in the program are researching various topics such as:

Overview of Activities

Public Opinion and Policy Decision-Making
Together with Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Michael Delli Carpini of the University of Pennsylvania, IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook is writing a book manuscript titled “Talking Together: Discursive Participation in America,” which examines the extent, nature, and impact of the ways Americans come together to discuss policy issues.

The research is based on a national survey conducted by the three authors—the first ever to examine the various ways that Americans deliberate together about policy issues. Much contemporary analysis of American democracy sounds the alarm that citizens are retreating from the tasks of electing government officials, influencing the legislative process, and engaging in other forms of political life. Although civic deliberation is receiving growing attention from scholars and other political observers, relatively little is known about its extent and nature. The researchers expect their work to correct this imbalance and to expand the notion of public deliberation to include what they call “discursive participation.”

Despite an abundance of rhetoric on energy policy from both political parties, critics maintain that the United States lacks a national energy strategy. Part of developing such a strategy lies in understanding public attitudes about different sources of energy, whether those opinions change as the public becomes more informed about energy alternatives, which types of energy policies the public is willing to support and which lifestyle changes the public is willing to make to meet the long-term energy demands of our society. Along with political scientist James Druckman and IPR graduate research assistant Toby Bolsen, Cook is working to forward this understanding by examining Americans’ changing knowledge and attitudes about traditional energy sources, alternative sources of energy, and lifestyle choices that affect energy production and consumption.

Sociologist Jeff Manza with Clem Brooks of Indiana University analyzed public opinion data from 16 countries in Why Welfare States Persist: The Importance of Public Opinion in Democracies (University of Chicago Press). Their research shows that citizens’ expressed preferences do profoundly influence the welfare policies of their governments and politicians. Shaped by slow-moving forces such as social institutions and collective memories, these preferences have counteracted global pressures that many commentators assumed would lead to the welfare state’s demise. Moreover, Brooks and Manza show that cross-national differences in popular support help to explain why Scandinavian social democracies offer so much more than liberal democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

Political scientists James Druckman and Dennis Chong have developed a theory of how the framing of communications influences public opinion on political issues. Framing occurs when a message affects the public’s interpretation and evaluation of an issue by emphasizing certain elements of the issue over others. The researchers are particularly interested in examining the effects of framing under varying conditions of political competition.

They recently conducted two experiments around the issues of regulating urban growth and tolerance of a hate group rally. Both experiments showed consistently that framing effects depended more on individual evaluations of the strength or quality of frames than on the frequency with which they were received. Given a properly developed frame, it was possible to move public opinion on the issues examined in both competitive and noncompetitive contexts. They also found that the competitive context affects how people process information. In noncompetitive political environments, individuals—especially those who are unmotivated—are prone to use whatever considerations are made accessible by the messages they receive.

In contrast, competing frames tend to motivate individuals to deliberate on the merits of alternative interpretations. Motivation and competition, therefore, offer complementary protections against arbitrary framing effects. Both factors increase the chance that people will evaluate the applicability of frames and respond favorably only to strong frames. These results show that the quality of the electorate’s judgments depends on the nature of political competition and more generally, on political institutions such as the party system and the media that shape political debate. Their paper, “Competitive Framing,” received the 2006 award for best paper in political psychology from the American Political Science Association. Chong is John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor. Druckman is AT&T Research Scholar.

In a project with Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota, Druckman is studying the strategic collection and use of public opinion information by three American presidents. Using the public statements, private polls, memoranda, and other archival materials from Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, they are exploring the impact of public opinion on American policymakers by demonstrating how politicians conceive of and use public opinion when making their decisions.

Political scientist Benjamin Page, Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, is working on a new project on inequality and acquiescence with Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota. They are currently conducting a national survey to explore various hypotheses about U.S. citizens’ reactions to economic inequality. In particular they are looking at whether citizens perceive its growth and extent, whether they want to reduce inequality or think incentives are necessary to do so, whether they favor or oppose various government policies with redistributive impact as in Social Security, national health insurance, education, and progressive taxes. The two researchers plan to test many political science theories, including some going back to Louis Hartz, about American exceptionalism. They anticipate that some of these theories, which have become ensconced as conventional wisdom, will turn out to be mistaken.

Social Security
Social policy professor Fay Lomax Cook worked with IPR graduate research assistant Amy DeSantis on a project called “How George W. Bush’s Grand Plans for Social Security Failed: Did Public Opinion, Organized Interests, and Policy Feedback Matter?” Following a proposal in his 2005 State of the Union Address to partially privatize Social Security, Bush set out on a 60-day, 60-city tour to promote it. By late fall 2005, however, various commentators on the Left and the Right had pronounced his proposal dead. Cook and DeSantis are examining how the proposal’s fate played out through public opinion (polls), interest groups (media coverage), and recommendations by policy elites (congressional testimony). Their analysis suggests that a combination of these factors acted to push Bush’s Social Security proposal off the agenda.

Political scientist Andrew Roberts is also looking at Social Security through the lens of pension privatization around the world. A growing number of countries are trying to escape the financial pressures of aging populations by either fully or partially privatizing their pension systems. This project explores the politics behind these switches, investigating why and when privatization takes place. This project specifies a number of conditions in which privatization becomes politically palatable—specifically, a loss of trust in the public system and relative confidence in financial markets. He finds support for these mechanisms in public opinion, the policy process in new democracies, and the attempted privatization of Social Security in the United States.

Politics and Political Parties
Why did neoliberal policies of tax cuts, reduced social spending, deregulation, and privatization gain prominence in the United States under Ronald Reagan and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, but not in similarly industrialized Western countries such as France or Germany? In The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (University of Chicago Press), sociologist Monica Prasad undertakes a comparative-historical analysis of the development of neoliberal policies in these four countries. She argues that neoliberalism was made possible in the United States and Britain not because the Left in these countries was too weak, but because it was, in some respects, too strong.

Taxation
Prasad is also studying the origins and development of systems of taxation from a comparative and historical perspective. She and IPR graduate research assistant Yingying Deng are conducting a cross-national analysis of tax progressivity and the interactions between taxation and the welfare state. They are developing an innovative cross-national method to compare taxation data across all the major types of taxes.

Prasad is working on a related book manuscript, “Adversarial America,” that will take a comparative look at the political origins of progressive taxation and adversarial regulation in the United States. Additionally, it will investigate whether the adversarial nature of taxation and regulation established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries can help to explain the exceptional nature of the American welfare state—particularly, the absence of national-level health insurance and the reliance on the private sector for welfare benefits.

Historical Studies of Congress
Political scientist Jeffery Jenkins investigates the ways in which historical events shape how Congress operates. He and IPR colleague Sean Gailmard have been examining both majority and minority control in Congress. In one study, they compared majority party roll rates across Senate bills, confirmation votes, and conference reports across chambers of Congress. They find evidence that the majority party in the Senate exercises “negative agenda control” or significant control in preventing bills it finds objectionable from reaching the Senate floor, mirroring the same control by the majority party in House.

In another project, Jenkins and Timothy Nokken of the University of Houston observed regular and lame-duck sessions between 1877 and 1933 to disentangle the extent of constituent and partisan influences in Congress. In comparing the differences between pre- and post-20th Amendment lame-duck sessions, they find that lame-duck sessions in the modern era are simply extensions of regular sessions due to the low turnover of congressional representatives, and thus sustained high party influence.

Felon Disenfranchisement
More than 5 million Americans are affected by laws barring felons and some ex-felons from voting. In their book Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford University Press), sociologist Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota consider the origins and development of these state laws and the impact of these regulations on political outcomes and on the civic reintegration of ex-offenders. They show overwhelming public support (as high as 80 percent in one poll) for returning the right to vote to ex-felons who have fully served their sentences. Policymakers’ and advocates’ debates over the right of criminal offenders to vote in a number of states, including Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, and New Mexico, have drawn on Manza’s and Uggen’s research in considering the impact of allowing former or nonincarcerated offenders to vote.

Institutional Development
Political scientist Kathleen Thelen, Payson S. Wild Professor in Political Science, is currently addressing the impact of globalization on labor politics and industrial relations in Western European democracies. She is comparing recent trends, in particular in Germany to those in Japan and Denmark, in several areas such as industrial relations, labor market dynamics, vocational education, and training. She is focusing on how contemporary German trends fit into a broader historical canvas. This will allow her to explore how complementarities across institutional arenas are con-structed and how they evolve and interact over time.

In a paper with Cathie Jo Martin of Boston University, Thelen explores “Varieties of Coordination and Trajectories of Change: Social Policy and Economic Adjustment in Coordinated Market Economies.” The paper explores why some countries manage to sustain market coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. The two researchers seek to explain how the public sector can affect the balance of power and political outcomes in a post-industrial economy. They review the case of Denmark and Germany, the two countries that diverge the most in terms of the balance of power between state and society. They demonstrate how the Danish state acts as a facilitator for economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination—a finding contrary to a core neoliberal belief that it acts as a brake to growth and market flexibility.

Gender and Comparative Studies
Psychologist Alice Eagly, James Padilla Chair in Arts and Sciences, is examining the content of stereotypes about social groups, the “gender gap” in social and political attitudes, and the impact of gender on leadership. She and Linda Carli of Wellesley College have finished a book on gender and leadership, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, which will be published by Harvard Business School Press in fall 2007. In examining why it still remains difficult for women to advance to positions of power, the authors liken women’s trajectories to the top to traversing a labyrinth rather than encountering a glass ceiling. Interweaving their interdisciplinary research and data with personal accounts and anecdotes, they examine questions of how far women have come as leaders, whether stereotypes and prejudices still limit women’s opportunities, whether people resist women’s leadership more than men’s, and whether organizations create obstacles to women who would be leaders. Eagly is also working on a meta-analysis of stereotypes of leaders and managers that focuses on the extent to which leadership roles are perceived in feminine or masculine terms.

Eagly is working with graduate student Anne Koenig on understanding how stereotypes come to have the content they do. They conducted several studies using correlational and experimental methods to test the relations of typical roles and intergroup relations in social group stereotypes. They found that both social roles and intergroup relations play a role in predicting stereotype content, and these findings led them to unify the two prevalent models for thinking about group stereotype content.

Sociologist Ann Orloff continues to work on her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Farewell to Maternalism,” examining shifts in the gendered logics of welfare and employment policies in the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and Hungary.

Orloff’s interests in social theory, comparative analysis, gender studies and modernity have also coalesced into a research theme around gender politics and modernity with Julia Adams of Yale University. Worried by the absence of gender analysis from “high politics,” especially in a post-9/11 world marked by the struggle between Western and Islamic cultures, the two argue that gender scholars must continue to push forward the “gendering” of mainstream politics. Instead of abandoning the concept of modernity, they find that the best hope for gender equality lies in pursuing modernity.

Social demographer Leslie McCall studies social inequality, economic and political sociology, methods, and social theory. In a recent paper, “Women’s and Men’s Position in the Income Distribution: The Changing Roles of Own Earnings and Other Family Income, 1970-2000,” she develops a new way of analyzing men’s and women’s dependence on family income. She correlates a person’s earnings to his or her total family income, calculating the figures separately for men and women and decomposing them into elements related to family composition, assortative mating, and earnings inequality. Her findings show that the correlation for white women increased substantially between 1970 and 2000, from 27 to 62 percent of white men’s correlation. Perhaps surprisingly given the wives’ increasing earnings, the men’s correlation barely budged, likely due to a number of factors, particularly family composition, offsetting one another. While the results indicate a definite increase in women’s levels of independence, men have not experienced a similar increase in family dependence.

In another project, McCall investigates the political consequences of rising inequality in terms of Americans’ awareness of, and opposition to, inequality and preferences for redistributive policies. She finds Americans clearly want a more equal society, but the perceived lack of viable alternatives pushes them to choose economic growth as the best means to the end. Today’s economic growth, however, does not possess the same equalizing power as that of old, she reasons, creating only an illusion that it will efface inequality. McCall’s latest findings show that Americans concerned about inequality are more likely to turn to increased spending on education as a solution, rather than to traditional redistributive politices such as progressive taxation and welfare.

As more of the world turns democratic, scholars have begun to worry about the quality of new democracies. Many suffer from weak rule of law, low government accountability, and high rates of corruption. Political scientist Andrew Roberts’ project aims to produce a workable concept of democratic quality and to find appropriate ways of studying quality. He has recently completed a book manuscript, “The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Policy Reforms and Public Preferences.” In it, he looks at the issues of electoral accountability, policy responsiveness, and the informativeness of political campaigns in 10 Eastern European countries.

Information Technology and the Internet
Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies and sociology, is currently working with several data sets to explore differences in people’s digital literacy and online behavior. She has started data collection on her new longitudinal project examining young people’s online abilities. This project looks at how young people incorporate technology into their everyday lives and whether these new digital media are leveling the playing field for youth or increasing the digital divide. Hargittai is working on a conceptual framework that accounts for these differences. She is also collecting a unique data set about a diverse group of young people’s Internet uses to illustrate existing differences. Funding for the project has been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Hargittai is also looking at Internet use among older adults with Jeremy Freese and Salvador Rivas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Investigating the link between cognition and Internet use, the three researchers find strong evidence that people with higher IQs (cognitive skills) are best able to take advantage of online tools that help older adults to navigate social benefits and ultimately make complicated decisions.

Despite the importance of technological standards in driving economic growth, there has been little research on the role of public policy in the development of standards. Leading researchers in public policy standards address this research gap in Standards and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press), edited by strategy and management professor Shane Greenstein and Victor Stango of Dartmouth College. In it, they examine whether markets choose efficient standards, the effect of standards organizations on the development of standards, and appropriate public policy on the issue of standards. Greenstein is Elinor and Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and Strategy.

In a project on how candidates use the Web to win elections, James Druckman and two colleagues developed a theoretical framework for studying politicians’ campaigns on the Web that accounts for politically strategic aspects of Web-based campaigns and novel technical elements. They then conducted a content analysis of more than 700 candidates’ Web sites over three election cycles. They included additional data on candidate and district characteristics, permitting them to study how candidates campaign on the Web, how Web campaign strategies differ from other types of media campaigns, why candidates’ Web sites differ from one another, how campaign Web sites have changed over time, and what effect Web campaigns might have in the future. Some of their findings have centered on showing the conditions under which campaigns “go negative” against their opponents and those technological features that candidates use or avoid and why.

While historians of American urban development have documented how powerful actors from mayors to developers shaped the history of American cities, the men and women whose technical and technological models laid out basic assumptions about the nature of city life to guide many urban decisions have been at most minor characters in these accounts. Jennifer Light, a historian of information systems, has begun a new research project that is using geographical information systems (GIS) in an analysis of the urban renewal program. In particular, she is looking at how the maps that were central to federal and local policy decisions about urban redevelopment, and the mapmakers who created them, shaped the fate of several U.S. cities. Light wants to show how historians can employ GIS and quantitative data to complement qualitative, archivally-based inquiry in their field of study.