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

Political Engagement and the “Obama Effect”
Conventional wisdom holds that political participation has waned in young Americans over the past decade. Yet many pundits see this as having changed with the 2008 presidential campaign and the “Obama effect.” According to a number of media accounts, Barack Obama has had a powerful impact on youth activism. Social policy professor Fay Lomax Cook and IPR graduate research assistant Meredith Bintz Czaplewski address that claim by using five large cross-sectional surveys of Americans interviewed during five presidential elections from 1992 to 2008. They are examining how various forms of political interest, participation, and civic engagement actually changed in 2008 from prior years and whether the change was greater for some groups—especially young people aged 18 to 29—than for older age groups. They also look at the factors promoting political interest, political participation, and civic engagement, such as education, ideology, media exposure, and Internet exposure, as well as the role of race.

Public Deliberation and Politics in America
Written by Cook, Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota, and Michael Delli Carpini of the University of Pennsylvania, their forthcoming book “Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Politics in America” (University of Chicago Press) challenges the conventional wisdom that Americans are less engaged than ever in national life and the democratic process. The authors draw on their original and extensive research—a national survey of 1,500 Americans—to illuminate how, when, and why citizens talk to each other about the issues of the day. They find that—in settings ranging from one-on-one conversations and e-mail exchanges to larger and more formal gatherings—80 percent of Americans regularly participate in public discussions about pressing issues of concern from the Iraq War to economic development and race relations. Pinpointing the real benefits of public discourse while considering arguments that question its importance, the authors offer an authoritative and clear-eyed assessment of deliberation’s function in American governance, as well as concrete recommendations for increasing the power of talk to foster political action.

Politics of Dissensus and Entitlement Programs
In a forthcoming chapter, Cook is also investigating the “politics of dissensus” that has come to surround Social Security and Medicare since the mid-1990s at the policy-elite level—despite the programs’ enduring popularity with the American people. At a time when possible reforms for Social Security and Medicare are under discussion, Cook and Czaplewski step back to assess the public’s views of the two programs and which reforms, if any, the public favors. Using dozens of public opinion polls from 1984 to 2006, they find that the public is highly committed to the two programs but expresses concerns about their financial stability. Members of the public have voiced support for a few incremental changes, such as lowering cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security, and opposition to a number of others, such as partial privatization of Social Security. The researchers encourage policymakers to take a careful look at where the public stands and build on that support to overcome the current politics of dissensus.

Developing a National Energy Policy
With a new head at the Department of Energy and President Obama’s pledge to increase renewable energy sources, U.S. energy policies of years past will undoubtedly change. Yet whether this will lead to a comprehensive national energy policy remains to be seen. In a Public Opinion Quarterly article, Cook and IPR graduate research assistant Toby Bolsen argue that part of developing a national energy policy hinges on what the public thinks. Cook and Bolsen reviewed trends in public opinion polls from 1974 to 2006 on traditional energy sources, alternative energy sources, and citizens’ priorities on energy alternatives. They find that public concern about the U.S. energy situation is as high as it was during the nation’s first energy crises in the 1970s. They also find rising support for nuclear energy and for conservation efforts through energy-efficient appliances, vehicles, homes, and offices rather than higher fuel taxes at the pump. Though these findings provide some indication of what Americans want in a national energy policy, Cook and Bolsen stress that much remains to be done to flesh out a more comprehensive understanding of their views.

Theory of Framing in Political Communication
Political scientists James Druckman and Dennis Chong have developed a theory of how citizens form political opinions and how political and media elites affect these views. Framing occurs when in the course of describing an issue or event, a speaker’s emphasis on a subset of potentially relevant considerations causes individuals to focus on these concerns when constructing their opinions. For example, if a speaker describes a hate-group rally in terms of free speech, then the audience will subsequently base their opinions about the rally on free speech considerations and support the right to rally. In contrast, if the speaker uses a public safety frame, the audience will base their opinions on public safety considerations and oppose the rally. Nearly all previous work examines situations where citizens receive either one frame or the other—despite the fact that most political situations involve competition between frames. The two researchers have completed the first part of their project exploring what makes a given frame successful in competitive environments.

Chong, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Political Science, and Druckman are now working on the second part of their project, which considers how these framing effects evolve over time in the presence of competing arguments, as happens in political campaigns and policy debates. In two novel studies, the two researchers find that how participants process and retain the information received, the amount of prior knowledge about a particular issue, the quality of the frame, and the passage of time all clearly matter. For example, participants who engage in memory-based processing, in which they recall recent events to form opinions, are strongly influenced by the latest messages, even if the frames are weak. Druckman and Chong’s findings emphasize the need for public opinion researchers to largely recast how they study framing effects—as a dynamic process unfolding over time.

Druckman is also working on two related projects.The first one centers on political debates and examines how opinions are shaped by two competing arguments over time, debates on issues, or candidates’ personalities versus political endorsements. The second explores the extent to which people’s initial opinions about new energy technologies shape how they process and interpret ensuing information.

Public Opinion and Presidential Decisions
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 public statements, private polls, memoranda, and other archival materials from presidents 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 information when making their decisions. For example, they show how groups of citizens such as religious conservatives influenced Reagan’s domestic policy agenda and contributed to the formation of a new, broader, and more enduring conservative coalition. The two are planning to write a book on the subject.

Experiments in Political Science
Over the past decade, randomized experiments have become one of the most notable methodological developments in political science, yet political scientists routinely face issues—in the design, implementation, and analysis of experiments—that they are not historically accustomed to addressing. Thus, Druckman and three other political scientists—Donald Green of Yale University, James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan—are working on the first “Handbook of Experimental Political Science.” It will include contributions from more than 30 leading political scientists. They hope that the handbook, to be published by Cambridge University Press, will set high intellectual standards for political science experiments, enabling political scientists to make more significant contributions to policy issues and debate. The National Science Foundation is providing support for the project.

Inequality and “Conservative Egalitarians”
In their new book, political scientists Benjamin Page, Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, and Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota draw on hundreds of opinion studies and their own national survey to show that Americans are not divided into two irreconcilable camps of free-market advocates and government interventionists when it comes to the question of economic inequality. In Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2009), they present evidence that most Americans favor free enterprise along with practical government programs to distribute wealth more equitably. The authors coin the term “conservative egalitarians” to describe the phenomenon. They find, for example, that across economic, geographical, and ideological lines, most Americans support higher minimum wages, improved public education, wider access to universal health insurance coverage, and the use of tax dollars to fund these programs.

American Attitudes Toward Income Inequality
Sociologist Leslie McCall has spent the year working on a book, tentatively titled “The Undeserving Rich,” as a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. McCall uses specific questions from the General Social Survey on income inequality to investigate Americans’ beliefs about inequality and their views on redistributive policies. She is finding that 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. The book will expand on perceptions of inequality through examination of the “undeserving rich,” a new look at processes of social distribution as barriers to opportunity, and situating American norms of equity in sociohistorical contexts.

Pension Reform
Political scientist Andrew Roberts is 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. It 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. Roberts finds support for these mechanisms in public opinion, the policy process in new democracies, and the attempted privatization of U.S. Social Security.

Roberts and Michelle Dion of Georgia Tech University have undertaken an analysis of a unique cross-cultural survey conducted in 20 countries of firms and individuals and their support for pension reform. This research will be the first to quantitatively show why firms in particular situations support or oppose certain pension reforms. It will also allow them to compare theories that predict class conflict with those that see distinct varieties of capitalism.

Neoliberal Policy and Taxation
Sociologist Monica Prasad continues her work on analyzing the development of neoliberal policies in the United States and other countries and studying the origins and development of systems of taxation from a comparative and historical perspective. She is finishing an edited volume on “The New Fiscal Sociology,” to be published by Cambridge University Press. The volume’s chapters came from papers presented at an interdisciplinary conference held in 2007 at Northwestern and co-sponsored by IPR. In the book, scholars in sociology, history, economics, law, and political science examine issues from the historical origins of the tax code to the social consequences of taxation, historical lessons, and fiscal sociology. Prasad is working on a related book manuscript, “Soaking the Rich,” that will take a comparative look at the political origins of progressive taxation and adversarial regulation in the United States.

Carbon Tax and Reducing Emissions
Rising awareness of global warming and its consequences have led many countries to consider implementing a carbon tax to curb industrial carbon dioxide emissions. While other European counties have such taxes on the books, only Denmark has been successful in levying the tax and reducing emissions, according to research by Prasad. In a March 25 New York Times editorial, she outlines the basic take-home lesson: Governments should impose but not collect such taxes. Instead, they should allocate the resulting proceeds to the industry in the form of environmental subsidies, thereby encouraging companies to reduce pollution and engage in environmental innovation and research. This policy has reduced carbon emissions in Denmark by 15 percent since 1990.

Neoliberalism and American Democracy
The contributors to New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America (SAR Press, 2008) challenge the presumption that capitalist-style “liberalization” will lead inevitably to market growth and optimal social ends. They examine the rise of neoliberal capitalism within the context of growing 21st-century problems such as endemic warfare, natural disasters, global epidemics, and climate change. Focusing on the United States, the contributors to this volume—including IPR faculty members anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo, who co-edited the book, historian Nancy MacLean, and law professor Dorothy Roberts—examine such controversial topics as how this policy agenda has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and how recurrent moral panics misrepresent class, race, gendered, and sexual realities on the ground.

In her chapter discussing the “neoliberalization of consciousness,” di Leonardo examines how neoliberalism has shifted views of self and society as private ventures take the place of public programs and funding. She talks about the case study of changing race and class dynamics in New Haven, Conn., and the strings attached to modern forms of activism and dissent, such as political talk radio on corporate-owned airwaves. Jane Collins of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Brett Williams of American University were co-editors of the volume.

Adaptive Social Planning for Drug Approvals
In the United States, the drug approval process of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the main mechanism through which the government influences the production and dissemination of information on drug treatments. To obtain approval for a new drug, a pharmaceutical firm must provide evidence on treatment response in randomized clinical trials that compare the new drug with an accepted treatment or a placebo. The FDA makes a binary approval decision after reviewing these trials’ empirical findings.

Economist Charles F. Manski considers the matter from the minimax-regret perspective and suggests an adaptive social planning process in which treatment with a new drug would vary as empirical evidence accumulates—instead of being either fully allowed or denied as in current practice. The stronger the evidence for positive health outcomes, then the more the drug could be used. The adaptive process would improve on the current one by stimulating production of stronger information on treatment response and by reducing the welfare losses that arise from errors in approval decisions. Manski is Board of Trustees Professor in Economics.

Institutional Change
“Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power,” a forthcoming volume edited by political scientists Kathleen Thelen and James Mahoney of Northwestern, adds to emerging debates in political science and sociology on institutional change. It first proposes a new framework for analyzing incremental change that is grounded in a power-distributional view of institutions and emphasizes ongoing struggles within—but also over—prevailing institutional arrangements. Five essays describe specific instances of incremental change, including the institutional development of U.S. Social Security, the rise and decline of land documentation in Kenya, and the evolution of healthcare reforms in Brazil. The book will be published by Cambridge University Press. Thelen is Payson S. Wild Professor in Political Science.

Stereotypes of Leaders
One of the impediments that women encounter as they make their way through the labyrinth to positions of power and authority is that, in general, leader roles are culturally masculine, making it seem like women lack “what it takes” to lead. But has our culture changed in a direction less prejudicial to women? Psychologist Alice Eagly conducted several meta-analyses to examine whether three popular research paradigms (agency-communion, “think manager, think male,” and masculinity-femininity paradigms) have established the cultural masculinity of leader roles and yielded any evidence of change. All three showed a masculine bias, albeit decreasing, and the “think manager, think male” paradigm provided direct evidence of the mismatch between the stereotypes of the female gender role and leader roles. This mismatch creates the perception that women are less suited to leadership than men and produces the “double-bind” problem for female leaders, whereby women leaders are buffeted by cross pressures and sanctioned for being “too masculine” or “too feminine.”

The Social Construction of Heroism
Starting with the well-known tale of Army private Jessica Lynch’s 2003 rescue and elevation to “hero,” Eagly and graduate student Lindsay Rankin probe how the social construction of heroism affects the representation of women and men as heroes. In the first of two studies, they asked 110 people to define and identify heroes. More men than women were named as public heroes; however, when identifying heroes they personally know, participants named women and men equally. This finding partially explains the male dominance in public heroes, as the most frequently cited social roles for these public heroes are ones to which women do not enjoy equal access (i.e., firefighters, civil rights leaders). The second study involved asking 222 college students to read about a heroic rescue. The scenario describes a male or female protagonist who confronted high or low risk in rescuing a child in a situation ultimately yielding a high or low benefit to the endangered child. Although participants perceived that men are more likely than women to perform heroic rescues, reading about a female protagonist caused the participants to perceive female heroism as increasingly likely.

Politics, Policies, and Maternal Employment
Sociologist Ann Orloff continues work on her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Farewell to Maternalism: State Policies, Social Politics, and Mothers’ Employment in the United States and Europe.” In it, she examines shifts in gendered policies and politics around parenthood, welfare, and employment in four countries: Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. Following welfare reform and other shifts toward employment for all, motherhood is no longer a basis for making entitlement claims in the U.S. welfare state. Orloff discusses the general movement of the social welfare system from one of supporting women as full-time caregivers to one pushing their move into the workforce. Yet across these nations, there are varying levels of support for childcare and other caregiver activities, as well as varying efforts to reduce poverty. Orloff plans to highlight the “roads not taken” by Americans to deepen understanding of the promise and problems of the distinctive U.S. policy approach.

Gender and Class Inequality
McCall is studying earnings inequality among women, a subject that has received scant scholarly attention. As part of the project, she is looking at changes in family demography and is developing new population-linked measures of economic dependency and gender inequality. To link marital status and men and women’s relative 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.

Quality of Democracy
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. Andrew Roberts aims to produce a workable concept of democratic quality and to find appropriate ways of studying quality. His forthcoming book, “The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Policy Reforms and Public Preferences” from Cambridge University Press, provides a comprehensive analysis of the quality of democracy via issues of electoral accountability, policy responsiveness, and the informativeness of political campaigns in 10 Eastern European countries. He argues that politicians of Eastern European democracies are far more responsive and accountable to the public than is often assumed.

Electoral Laws and Women’s Representation
Along with Northwestern political scientist Jason Seawright, Andrew Roberts is investigating the determinants of women’s representation in national legislatures. In particular, the two scholars probe conventional wisdom that proportional electoral rules increase the percentage of women elected to assemblies. Currently, women occupy only 18 percent of legislative seats around the world, with Rwanda (56.4 percent) and Sweden (47 percent) at the top, and Saudi Arabia, Belize, and Qatar having none at all. The United States ranks 69th in the world, with 17.4 percent of legislative seats held by women. Using new techniques, including within-country comparisons and matching methods, they find that electoral laws might not be a “magic bullet” for increasing women’s representation; effects are not as strong as in previous studies and vary across countries. While the researchers show evidence of social and cultural changes driving increases in female representation, they do not dismiss using electoral laws, such as quota laws under certain conditions, to increase representation. However, more research is needed to identify the possible background conditions that would promote the success of such laws.

Political Messages and Campaign Web Sites
How do campaigns work? What determines the messages candidates put forth? Political scientists Druckman, Michael Parkin of Oberlin College, and Martin Kifer of Mathematica Policy Research address these questions, with a particular focus on U.S. congressional campaigns. The researchers have developed a framework and are currently testing their predictions with a unique data set, coming from content analyses of more than 1,000 candidates’ Web sites from four election cycles between 2000 and 2006. The data also enable them to explore the evolution of new media in the context of campaigns.

One recent study looks at how candidates use advanced and interactive Web technologies, such as audio, video, and instant messaging. They find that in tight races candidates usually drop the bells and whistles of
interactive features, reasoning that doing so will preserve their campaign’s central message. In another study, the three researchers use data on congressional candidate Web sites between the 2000 and 2006 elections to show that close elections pushed more candidates to go negative against their opponents. Since virtually all candidates now have Web sites, the project is providing the researchers with a unique opportunity to test multiple campaign theories—from issue engagement to image ownership and position-taking—in addition to comparing strategies across different media.

The Digital Reproduction of Inequality
Alongside the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s arose speculation about its implications for social mobility and stratification. Communications researcher Eszter Hargittai recently reviewed the state of online inequality, suggesting that the concept of the digital divide should be shelved for the term digital inequality. She points to how the new term better encompasses the spectrum of differences associated with how information and communication technologies (ICT) are used, in addition to differences among users themselves. While all social classes have increased their presence online, serious disparities persist, and the most disadvantaged trail far behind the more privileged. Hargittai outlines how socioeconomic status influences access to, and use of, ICT for better and for worse. Advantages include being able to improve job skills, network with family and friends, and improve job productivity. Disadvantages include being duped by a phishing e-mail to release private information or a boorish online presence that might damage one’s reputation. So does ICT use have an independent effect on life outcomes? Hargittai’s preliminary findings suggest that ICTs reinforce inequalities rather than alleviate them.

Innovations, Information, and Inequality
Sociologist Jeremy Freese is interested in who stands to benefit most from changes in society, especially from technological or policy innovations. With respect to technology, he and his colleagues, including Hargittai, have studied who is more likely to use the Internet. They find a strong relationship between cognitive ability and Internet use. This finding connects to another project of Freese’s on the implemented Medicare prescription drug benefit (Part D). Freese is interested in whether cognitive differences lead some people to benefit more than others from such a program because it emphasizes individual choice in a very complicated decision making environment.

Big Ten Battleground Poll
Political scientist Victoria DeFrancesco Soto helped to design and analyze the Big Ten Battleground Poll, a survey of voters in the eight Midwestern battleground states that are home to the Big Ten universities. In the fall, pollsters conducted live telephone surveys of randomly selected registered voters in three phases. The first poll, in mid-September, indicated a statistical dead heat between presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. However, by late October, when the final survey was conducted, the poll foreshadowed the November 2 outcome, showing Obama with a double-digit lead. The poll was co-directed by University of Wisconsin–Madison political scientists Charles Franklin and Ken Goldstein. DeFrancesco Soto also appeared in two televised roundtable discussions of the poll results.

Ethnically Targeted Political Advertising
In heavily contested states with large Latino populations, such as Florida and Nevada, both of the 2008 presidential candidates courted Latino voters using English- and Spanish-language advertising and Latino spokespeople. DeFrancesco Soto asks if such strategies can effectively woo Latino voters—or backfire politically with non-Latinos. DeFrancesco Soto and her collaborators have launched a new survey to take stock of these ethnically targeted political ads. The project examines how different levels of Latino ethnic targeting influenced voting for Obama and McCain. Past research has disproved the assumption that all Latinos respond similarly to the same messages or even prefer such targeted messages in the first place. DeFrancesco Soto will continue this line of research, also considering whether ethnically angled advertising has led to “ricochet” or unintended effects.

Immigration and Assimilation
DeFrancesco Soto published an article on a project that considers the political opinions of Latino migrant workers on two issues that affect them directly: globalization and NAFTA. In the experiment, DeFrancesco Soto and her colleagues use pro and con free-trade messages to influence the migrants’ opinions. The researchers find that such messages directly affect highly sophisticated workers. Her ongoing research on assimilation considers how panethnic identities, such as Latino or Asian American, are alternative manifestations of assimilation and how these identities influence the political attitudes and behaviors of immigrant-rooted communities.

Accounting for Broadband’s Economic Impact
In September 2001, 45 million U.S. households accessed the Internet through a dial-up connection, while only 10 million used a broadband connection. By March 2006, the households using broadband had increased to 47 million, with 34 million using dial-up. In new research, management and strategy professor Shane Greenstein and Northwestern economist Ryan McDevitt examine broadband’s economic contribution to GDP as it surpasses dial-up Internet connections. They estimate that while broadband accounted for $28 billion of GDP in 2006—out of $39 billion total for Internet access—$20 to $22 billion of that was associated with household use, of which broadband deployment created between $8.3 and $10.6 billion in new GDP. In particular, the researchers find that the increased broadband use raised U.S. consumer surplus between $6.7 and $4.8 billion. (Consumer surplus is the benefit to consumers from purchasing a product at a price that is less than they would be willing to pay.) Their estimates are much lower than those typically quoted by Washington-based policy analysts and also differ from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Internet access. Their findings correct a historically inaccurate inference about the pricing of Internet access and lead to the conclusion that the official index’s timing of price decline is actually several years too late. Finally, their research also helps explain the puzzle of how changes in federal policy around 2000 led consumers to upgrade to broadband without a corresponding CPI-measured price drop when the new policy seemed to promote wire line-based broadband diffusion. The researchers show the CPI undervalued the gains to users, and these gains were what motivated many households to upgrade. Greenstein is Elinor and H. Wendell Hobbs Professor.

Imprisonment and Political Participation
By 2007, more than 2 million people were in prison in the United States. While sending people to prison obviously hinders their political participation, what about the people they leave behind? In this project, political scientist Traci Burch is exploring whether the removal and incarceration of individuals depresses voter registration and turnout not only among convicted offenders, but also among their families, friends, and neighbors. The study explores participation by individual offenders and communities in which residents were incarcerated in the months leading up to the 2008 general election. Using data from states’ departments of correction, boards of elections, and the U.S. Census Bureau, in addition to extensive new fieldwork, Burch is focusing primarily on short-term effects.

Private Politics and Global Commerce
Private politics refers to political and regulatory competition between firms and interest groups outside the realm of public institutions, such as governments, agencies, or courts. In private politics, activists target companies directly to influence the company’s business practices. Tools range from conducting boycotts to shareholder and divestment campaigns. Examples include the Rainforest Action Network’s calling out big-box retailers Home Depot and Lowe’s for using old-growth timber products and activists targeting Wal-Mart for its labor practices.

Combining diverse disciplinary traditions from management, sociology, and political science, management and strategy professor Daniel Diermeier and his colleagues are creating models and assembling data sets that might help answer how activist organizations choose their targets and the strategies they use. This study might also shed light on whether firms can avoid being a target and how they can fight activist campaigns once they become a target. Diermeier sees such activism growing alongside globalization, leading to more use of “private regulation” as a means of influencing market participants and practices. He is IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice at Kellogg.