Social Networks, Mass Publics, and Democratic Politics

The study of social networks as they relate to mass political behavior has roots in foundational social scientific works (e.g., Lazarsfeld, et al. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944). Huckfeldt and Sprague ushered in the contemporary era of political networks research (e.g., “Networks in Context: The Social Flow of Political Information” in American Political Science Review 81.4 (1987): 1197–1216, and Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), picking up on the Columbia scholars’ early efforts to measure interpersonal influence and the consequences of group memberships in the United States. Drawing theoretical and conceptual distinctions between networks and contexts, Huckfeldt and Sprague popularized survey techniques for measuring individuals’ core discussion networks via name generators, and demonstrated relationships between individuals’ social networks and their opinions and perceptions. Subsequent works by these and other scholars have moved beyond community study designs, examining network effects in the areas of vote choice, attitude formation, and political participation. Major debates have focused on the extent to which individuals are exposed to disagreeable information via their social contacts (e.g., Mutz. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006); questions about causality (e.g., McClurg, et al. “Discussion Networks” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and the identification of mechanisms of influence (e.g., Sinclair. The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Scholars have studied the role of social networks in mass publics around the world (e.g., Gunther, et al. Voting in Old and New Democracies. New York: Routledge, 2016), and how family networks and processes of socialization shape political attitudes. Current work is documenting how factors like gender, personality, emotion, and geography facilitate or hinder social influence; how online and offline worlds intersect; and how scholars can better measure broader patterns of social exposure and interaction.

How Gendered Is the Peer-Review Process? A Mixed-Design Analysis of Reviewer Feedback

ABSTRACT A fair peer-review process is essential for the integrity of a discipline’s scholarly standards. However, underrepresentation of scholarly groups casts doubt on fairness, which currently is raising concerns about a gender bias in the peer-review process of premier scholarly journals such as the American Political Science Review (APSR). This study examines gender differences in APSR reviewing during the period 2007–2020. Our explorative analysis suggests that male reviewers privilege male authors and female reviewers privilege female authors, whereas manuscripts reviewed by both male and female reviewers indicate less gender bias. Using within-manuscript variation to address confounding effects, we then show that manuscripts reviewed by both male and female reviewers receive a more positive evaluation by female reviewers in terms of recommendation and sentiment, but they experience a marginally longer duration. Because these effects are not specific for type of authorship, we recommend that invitations to review should reflect mixed compositions of peers, which also may avoid overburdening an underrepresented group with review workload.

Piled Modifiers, Buried Verbs, and Other Turgid Prose in the American Political Science Review

ABSTRACT Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.

Estimating logit models with small samples

In small samples, maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of logit model coefficients have substantial bias away from zero. As a solution, we remind political scientists of Firth's (1993, Biometrika, 80, 27–38) penalized maximum likelihood (PML) estimator. Prior research has described and used PML, especially in the context of separation, but its small sample properties remain under-appreciated. The PML estimator eliminates most of the bias and, perhaps more importantly, greatly reduces the variance of the usual ML estimator. Thus, researchers do not face a bias-variance tradeoff when choosing between the ML and PML estimators—the PML estimator has a smaller bias and a smaller variance. We use Monte Carlo simulations and a re-analysis of George and Epstein (1992, American Political Science Review, 86, 323–337) to show that the PML estimator offers a substantial improvement in small samples (e.g., 50 observations) and noticeable improvement even in larger samples (e.g., 1000 observations).

The Changing Politics of American Men, Updated

This analysis updates through 2016 the gender gap analysis in voting and party identification published by Kaufmann and Petrocik 20 years ago. Some, e.g., Box-Steffensmeier, J. M., S. DeBoef, and T. M. Lin. 2004. “The Dynamics of the Partisan Gender Gap.” American Political Science Review 98 (3): 515–28 suggested that the original findings would diminish in magnitude, but the updated data show that the gender gap continues to reflect male-only changes in party identification. Public officials, political operatives, and the media misstate, sometimes specifically but often only by implication, the nature of the gap. Commentary highlights the lower level of support among women for the Republican Party in both the vote and party identification. Their support for the GOP is considerably lower than it is among men as this paper reaffirms. However, as Kaufmann, K. M., and J. R. Petrocik. 1999. “The Changing Politics of American Men: Understanding the Sources of the Gender Gap.” American Journal of Political Science 43 (3): 864–87 noted, the gap emerged and has continued to grow because of changed attitudes and behavior among men.

Adam Smith’s view of economic inequality

Adam Smith has usually been seen as an economist who had a positive view of economic inequalities and who was more concerned with diminishing absolute poverty rather than inequalities. Recently though, Rasmussen (2016; ‘Adam smith on what is wrong with economic inequality, American Political Science Review, vol. 110, no. 2, 342–52’) argued that Smith worried about the effects of extreme inequalities on the morality and happiness of commercial societies. While we do not deny Smith’s worries on this front and provide new evidence here, the aim of this paper was to show that Smith cared more about the causes of inequalities than their level per se, or independently of the former. Interestingly, Smith seems to reconcile fairness with economic efficiency in his plea for the system of natural liberty in which inequalities arise from the efforts, talents and risk-taking of individuals and ultimately benefit the least well-off. Moreover, and contrary to what Rasmussen claims, Smith addresses several contemporary issues such as the links between inequalities, economic growth, social mobility and politics.

‘Firing cannons to kill mosquitoes’: Controlling ‘virtual streets’ and the ‘image of the state’ in Bangladesh

This article examines the historical, social and political legacies of the Information and Communication Technology Act (ICT Act) (2006–2018, amended in 2013) and the Digital Security Act (DSA) (2018–) in the Bangladeshi state’s attempt to control the ‘virtual streets’ of Bangladesh. The application of ICT and DSA has become an increasingly visible and controversial means to provide the spectacle of a state that extends disciplinary power and governmentality into proliferating online spaces—akin to ‘firing cannons to kill mosquitoes’. We use the lens of Tim Mitchell’s structural-effect (1991, The American Political Science Review 85(1), 77–96) to understand the state beyond the frameworks of its salience or elusiveness, arguing that the criminalisation of online speech has enabled the creation of ‘digital vigilantes’ who are predominantly the powerful, the sycophants, and the multitude of attention seekers who are driven by their personal contestations and ambitions. The legal outcomes, however, have been more ambiguous and uncertain—but the effect is to produce fear as an ‘environment’ (Virilio 2012, The Administration of Fear. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press) through frozen/suspended charges with the potential to be redeployed in different contexts.

A Teoria da Modernização aplica-se à América Latina? Um estudo do século XIX ao XXI

RESUMO Introdução: Investigamos a relação entre desenvolvimento econômico, medido pelo PIB real per capita, e níveis de democracia dos países da América Latina de 1870 até 2010 testando empiricamente a hipótese de Seymour M. Lipset proposta em “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political”, publicado em 1959 na The American Political Science Review. Materiais e Métodos: Estimou-se um modelo econométrico conhecido como probit ordenado. Dados sobre democracia foram obtidos a partir da mensuração feita pelo Polity IV. Para o PIB per capita foi utilizada a base de dados do Projeto Angus Maddison. As proxies para capital humano foram construídas por Morrisson e Murtin e estão descritas no artigo “The Century of Education” (2009). Resultados: A Teoria da Modernização é válida para os países com nível intermediário de democracia. Para esse conjunto de nações, notou-se também um efeito não linear; isto é, aqueles países mais pobres, quando diante de aumento do PIB per capita, têm maior probabilidade de apresentar um nível de democracia mais baixo. Porém, essa probabilidade se inverte à medida que o PIB per capita se expande. Discussão: O trabalho preenche simultaneamente três lacunas presentes nos trabalhos publicados sobre o tema: i) ao contrário da forma como a maioria deles usa a proxy para democracia, em nosso estudo ela não é uma variável binária; ii) o horizonte temporal é mais amplo, pois trabalhamos com dados desde o final do século XIX; e iii) a amplitude regional, posto que levamos em conta as particularidades da América Latina. Nossos resultados comprovam parcialmente a teoria da modernização nos países latino-americanos, além de identificar quais seriam os níveis de democracia mais prováveis diante de um nível de renda elevado.