The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (4) ◽  
pp. 917-940 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEFFREY R. LAX ◽  
JUSTIN H. PHILLIPS ◽  
ADAM ZELIZER
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
Do So

Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion—partisan biases in responsiveness—has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so using 49 Senate roll-call votes from 2001 to 2015. We find that affluent influence is overstated and itself contingent on partisanship—party trumps the purse when senators have to take sides. The poor get what they want more often from Democrats. The rich get what they want more often from Republicans, but only if Republican constituents side with the rich. Thus, partisanship induces, shapes, and constrains affluent influence.

scholarly journals Invisible inequality leads to punishing the poor and rewarding the rich

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLIVER P. HAUSER ◽  
GORDON T. KRAFT-TODD ◽  
DAVID G. RAND ◽  
MARTIN A. NOWAK ◽  
MICHAEL I. NORTON
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Education ◽  
School Districts ◽  
New York School ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractFour experiments examine how lack of awareness of inequality affect behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to rewarding the poor. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants who played a public goods game – and were assigned incomes reflective of the US income distribution either at random or on merit – punished the poor (for small absolute contributions) and rewarded the rich (for large absolute contributions) when incomes were unknown; when incomes were revealed, participants punished the rich (for their low percentage of income contributed) and rewarded the poor (for their high percentage of income contributed). In Experiment 4, participants provided with public education contributions for five New York school districts levied additional taxes on mostly poorer school districts when incomes were unknown, but targeted wealthier districts when incomes were revealed. These results shed light on how income transparency shapes preferences for equity and redistribution. We discuss implications for policy-makers.

Public Opinion and International Policy Choices: Global Commitments for Japan and Its Peers?

2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davis B. Bobrow ◽  
Mark A. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Global Order ◽  
International Policy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Political Incentives ◽  
International Public Goods ◽  
The Us ◽  
Actual Contribution ◽  
Do So

To understand the prospects for global order and progress in the coming years, we explore the joint implications of three premises: (1) states advantaged by the current international order have stakes in its regularity and predictability, and thus in moving to counter or prevent threats to those stakes; (2) along impure public and club goods lines, they are more likely to make efforts to do so when some private or club benefits result; and (3) public opinion provides a bounded policy acceptance envelope offering incentives and disincentives to national political elites to act as envisioned by the first two premises. We present a mosaic of public opinion in major OECD countries (the US, Japan, and major EU members) on three policy areas – foreign aid, UN peace-keeping operations, and environmental quality – that contain international public goods elements. Actual contribution tendencies in those areas found in our previous work largely conform to the public opinion patterns reported here. Within the limits of available data, domestic political incentives as represented by public opinion warrant neither extreme optimism nor pessimism about the prospects for continuing contributions by OECD states to sustaining orderly functioning of the current world system.

‘They Take Our Houses’: Benefit Competition and the Erosion of Support for Immigrants' Social Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Gerda Hooijer
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

Abstract Does benefit competition affect voters' support for immigrants' social rights? While scholars in political economy expect that benefit competition lowers support among the poor, the evidence is limited. This seems to be largely due to the reliance on highly aggregated analyses and the neglect of the institutional context in which individuals form their preferences. This article argues that lower-income voters are more likely to reduce their support due to competition when benefit eligibility depends on income. Using individual-level panel data from the Netherlands and a novel way to measure benefit competition, the study shows that lower-middle-income voters become less supportive of immigrants' social rights when more social housing in their municipality is allocated to refugees. By contrast, competition does not reduce support among the rich or the very poor. The findings suggest that benefit competition can erode support for immigrants' social rights and influence electoral politics.

Mr. Rhee Goes to Washington

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-107
Author(s):  
David P. Fields
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
American Mission

Chapter 3 examines how Rhee and the Korean independence movement utilized this constituency to place pressure on American policymakers during the fight over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty and during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922. The chapter pays special attention to the common cause the Korean activists and their American supporters made with the so-called Irreconcilables in the US Senate. The Korean independence movement provided these senators with an “internationalist” justification for opposing the treaty and thus an answer to the charge that they were advocating isolationism. The Koreans in return received an airing of their views in the US Senate and even a vote on a Korean reservation to the Versailles Treaty. While scholars have examined the importance of the issue of the Shantung Peninsula to the case against the Versailles Treaty in the Senate, few have realized that it was the brutal Japanese suppression of the March First Movement that injected such passion into the debate over the Shantung. While Korean activists’ passionate invocations of the American mission during both the fight over the Versailles Treaty and the Washington Naval Conference did not result in any official policy changes toward Korea, they significantly shifted American perceptions of the Japanese colonization of Korea and brought much of informed American public opinion on the situation into sympathy with the Koreans.

scholarly journals Simultaneous and sequential voting under general decision rules

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedel Bolle
Keyword(s):  
Pure Strategy ◽  
Decision Rules ◽  
Subgame Perfect Equilibrium ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Perfect Equilibrium ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
General Rules ◽  
The Us ◽  
Sequential Voting ◽  
Us Senate

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the ‘true majority’ . If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the ‘true majority’ prevails. It is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders), with multiple necessary majorities (European Union decision-making), or even more general rules. Simultaneous voting in the general model has more differentiated results.

scholarly journals Estimating Spatial Preferences from Votes and Text

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
In Song Kim ◽  
John Londregan ◽  
Marc Ratkovic
Keyword(s):  
Factor Model ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gaussian Copula ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
Reliable Preference

We introduce a model that extends the standard vote choice model to encompass text. In our model, votes and speech are generated from a common set of underlying preference parameters. We estimate the parameters with a sparse Gaussian copula factor model that estimates the number of latent dimensions, is robust to outliers, and accounts for zero inflation in the data. To illustrate its workings, we apply our estimator to roll call votes and floor speech from recent sessions of the US Senate. We uncover two stable dimensions: one ideological and the other reflecting to Senators’ leadership roles. We then show how the method can leverage common speech in order to impute missing data, recovering reliable preference estimates for rank-and-file Senators given only leadership votes.

scholarly journals Motives to Assist and Reasons to Assist: the Case of Global Poverty

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Keller
Keyword(s):  
Marked Effect ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

The principle of assistance says that the global rich should help the global poor because they are able to do so, and at little cost. The principle of contribution says that the rich should help the poor because the rich are partly to blame for the plight of the poor. this paper explores the relationship between the two principles and offers support for one version of the principle of assistance. The principle of assistance is most plausible, the paper argues, when formulated so as to identify obligations that arise from the needs of particular identifiable members of the global poor, not from impersonal rules or values. Under that formulation, the principle can explain why knowledge of the circumstances faced by individual members of the global poor can have such a marked effect upon the willingness of the global rich to provide help, and can offer a better grounded motivational basis for helping the global poor. These are real advantages, the paper argues, and ones that cannot be matched by stories that focus upon the ways in which the global rich contribute to global poverty.<br>

scholarly journals Public opinion on coronavirus vaccination 1: A majority of Americans would take the existing Russian vaccine and believe that they ought to be allowed to buy it

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Kelley ◽  
MDR Evans ◽  
Charlotte Corday
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Approval Process ◽  
National Surveys ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
Considerable Period ◽  
New Vaccines ◽  
Do So

In the US new vaccines are banned until shown to be safe and effective. But the approval process is slow and cautious and no vaccine has yet been approved. The faster but perhaps riskier Russian system produced an approved coronavirus vaccine months more quickly, leaving Americans at risk of dying for months longer than Russians. Our data from two national surveys in September show that a majority of Americans would willingly take the existing Russian vaccine and that a two-to-one majority – rich and poor, young and old, Democrat and Republican alike – believe that they ought to be allowed to do so. We estimate that making the Russian vaccine immediately available would save approximately 40 to 100 American lives each day after the first month and many more subsequently, To put the matter bluntly, current US government policy will kill some 40 to 100 people each day for a considerable period later this year and early next. To put those deaths in context, all American murderers combined kill only 45 people each day – not a record the US government should wish to emulate. There are also implications for the 2020 election; Since feelings about the Russian coronavirus vaccine are strongly favorable, and the benefits of allowing it in the US are large, making it available should be attractive politically. The Republican government has the power to adopt that policy and gain the credit. Alternatively, the Democratic opposition has the opportunity to advocate that policy, and claim the credit.

The American Senator

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Trollope
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
The Us ◽  
Country Life ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
The Church

Arabella Trefoil, the beautiful anti-heroine of The American Senator, was described by Trollope one of the ‘women who run down husbands’. Her actions are seen through the eyes of The American senator of the title, Elias Gotobed, who sits in the US Senate for the fictional state of Mikewa. The guest of John Morton (Arabella’s betrothed), Senator Gotobed learns about the English over one winter in England. He witnesses intrigue and romance (as Arabella stalks the rich but elusive Lord Rufford), and English country life in all aspects from the richest of peers and the poorest of farmers. Through his often-tactless remarks in conversation, through his letters to a friend in America, and through a lecture in London titled “The Irrationality of Englishmen”, he comments on British justice and government, the Church of England, and other aspects of English life.

Adam Smith Would Be Spinning in His Grave

The Forum ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Carnes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
The People ◽  
The Us ◽  
Female Politicians ◽  
Hard Evidence ◽  
Do So

AbstractPoliticians in the US tend to be vastly better off than the people they represent. But why, and does it matter? In the last decade, scholar of US politics have revived an old line of inquiry into the causes and consequences of government by the privileged, or what I call white-collar government. This article briefly reviews what scholars have learned, and what we still need to know. Most research to date has focused on the effects of government by the privileged; just as the shortage of female politicians seems to bias policy on gender issues, the shortage of politicians from lower-income and working-class backgrounds appears to tilt economic policy in favor of the more conservative positions typically favored by more affluent Americans. Why, then, do so few lower-income and working-class Americans go on to become politicians? On this point, scholars have more hunches than hard evidence.

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