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1. The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution.

Author:
Robert Y. Shapiro
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Income inequality was a major issue in the 2012 presidential election. While the Occupy Wall Street movement may fade into history, the substantial media coverage it received drew national attention to the unequal distribution of income between the top 1 percent versus the bottom 99 percent of Americans after years of increasing inequality. This and the Republican nomination of Mitt Romney, the poster child for the top 1 percent (even before the videotape of him claiming that 47 percent of Barack Obama\'s base of support were people who paid no taxes and believed that the government should take care of them), enabled Obama to use inequality—and redistribution—as a major campaign issue. He used it along with an array of other domestic issues that divided the parties in an election in which the Democrats focused on mobilizing their ideological partisan base, abandoning a centrist campaign. In the context of existing public opinion and other research, the resonance of the income inequality issue was in fact surprising—a puzzle. Although completed and drawing on data well before the 2012 election, The Undeserving Rich—and with its title—provides an explanation.
Political Geography:
Germany

2. Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice, Martin Johnson and Kevin Arceneaux

Author:
Robert Y. Shapiro
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
This is a study of "media effects" on American public opinion. It begins with a clear‐headed review of the debate about the "hypodermic model" of strong persuasive effects versus "minimal effects," of the shift of interest to agenda setting, priming, and framing effects. What it misses, however, is what we know from regular media reports of survey results and the history, for example, in Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro's The Rational Public (1992), that aggregate public opinion changes for understandable reasons, even in cases of short‐term fluctuations, in a manner related to new information typically found in the news media. John Zaller emphasizes in The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) that this news impact is most likely to occur when it reflects elite‐level agreement, in contrast to ideological or partisan disagreement that would lead the opinions of Democrats and Republicans in the mass public to diverge. Though originating from leaders, these are media effects that have changed in recent years in the sense that there has been increasing partisan divergence among the public across a full array of policy issues. This divergence has followed ideological polarization at the elite level since the 1970s, and it is the motivation for Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson's excellent book.

3. Free Hand Abroad, Divide And Rule At Home

Author:
Jack Snyder, Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
Abstract:
Under unipolarity, the immediate costs and risks of war are more likely to seem manageable for a militarily dominant power like the U.S. This does not necessarily make the use of force cheap or wise, but it means that the costs and risks of the use of force are comparatively indirect, long-term, and thus highly subject to interpretation. Unipolarity, combined with the opportunity created by September 11, opened a space for interpretation that tempted a highly ideological foreign policy cohort to seize on international terrorism as an issue to transform the balance of power in both the international system and American party politics. This cohort's response to the terrorist attack was grounded in ideological sincerity, but also in the routine practice of wedge issue politics, which had been honed on domestic issues during three decades of partisan ideological polarization and then extended into foreign policy.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Government, International Political Economy, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
United States and America

4. On To the Convention!

Author:
Jason Bello and Robert Y. Shapiro
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
The 2008 primary campaigns started earlier than ever before. The focus of the press, pundits, and academics was on how the candidates were going out early to gain support, to raise money, and to build momentum. At the start, and even by late summer (six months after most candidates announced their intentions to run), no commentators—or anyone—spoke or wrote about the rules regarding delegate selection or their implications for the campaign. This is not surprising, given that it has been 80 years since an election with no incumbent or early front-runner in either major party and that the last primary contest to make it to the convention undecided was the 1976 Republican race. Even more striking, there has not been a primary with multiple balloting at the convention since the 1952 Democratic contest. Nonetheless, because we noticed that both major parties had several strong candidates emerge early on, we wanted to see if the rules could help us predict the likelihood of going to the convention with the results undecided (which only occurs when no candidate has secured a majority of the available delegates—1,191 delegates on the Republican side and 2,025 delegates on the Democratic side). Simply getting hold of the data to answer this question was extremely difficult at that time. When we called states looking for their delegate selection plans in August, most party leaders that we spoke with told us that the plans had not been written yet, while several others were surprised that anyone was asking about them, and a handful did not know how their states apportioned their delegates at all. Everyone was happy to tell us how to become a delegate (beginning by filling out a form of intention), but few were able to tell us what that meant (are the delegates bound to the primary or caucus results and in what way?).
Political Geography:
New York