Guest Speakers
Winter 2008 Guest Speakers:
Friday, March 14
Friday, April 18
Past Speakers:
Fall 2007
Friday, December 7
Dr. John Aldrich, Duke
Title of the talk: Issue Salience and The Dynamics of Party Systems
Abstract: This presentation demonstrates a similarity between the conditions for an issue evolution or
even a partisan realignment (put substantively by Carmines-Stimson and by Sundquist, respectively, and shown more formally by Aldrich) and Duverger's Law (put more or less substantively by Duverger [quelle surprise] and formally by Palfrey). In particular, exogenously varying issue salience is sufficient to generate these dynamics, by changing the nature of partisan positions in equilibrium.
In the archetypical cases, the major events noted as the partisan dynamics are, as it happens, exactly at the same point in the two cases.
Friday, November 9
Dr. Cindy Kam, UCDavis
Title of the talk: Regard for Others and the Paradox of Participation
Abstract: Altruism refers to a willingness to pay a personal cost to make others better off. Past research has established a link between altruism and political participation, primarily among college students. We show that dictator game behavior predicts support for humanitarian norms and donations to Hurricane Katrina victims, suggesting that dictator game allocations are valid measures of altruism. Moreover, we show that this measure of altruism predicts participation in politics, suggesting that past results with students can be generalized to a broader population. Finally, consistent with the argument that altruists only participate when they think doing so will make everyone better off, we show that there is no relationship between altruism and voter turnout in an election where the outcome is distributive and where it is not clear that either political outcome will produce a net societal gain.
Winter 2007
Dr. Jamie Druckman, Northwestern University
TItle of Talk: Democratic Competition and Public Opinion
Brief Description: What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues – the management of urban growth, and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination, and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.
Dr. Martin Gilens, Princeton University
Title of Talk: Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness
Brief Description: This project examines inequalities in the response of federal government policy to the preferences of the governed. I ask whether better-off Americans exert greater influence over federal policy, to what degree, on what sorts of policies, and with what variation over time and across periods of Democratic and Republican party control. My data consist of about 1800 survey questions regarding proposed government policy changes asked between 1981 and 2002 and corresponding data on whether or not each proposed change was adopted. Results to date indicate vast disparities in democratic responsiveness with only modest variation across policy domain and party control.