This article provides a new measure of voting costs by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to calculate the distance between the residence and polling place for registered voters in the city of Atlanta. Using this measure to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small differences in distance from the polls can have a significant impact on voter turnout. We also find that moving a polling place can affect the decision to vote. In addition to providing a better understanding of the costs of voting, our findings have important implications regarding the location of polling places and the effects of altering precinct boundaries.
Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens’ willingness to cede policy‐making power to government. This article tests theories about political trust and citizen competence using the case of zoning. Trust in local government is found to be an important predictor of support for zoning, but trust in state government and trust in national government have no effect. These findings suggest that trust affects policy choice and helps determine how much power citizens grant to local administrators.
Objective. Existing research suggests that conservative racial attitudes are one of the strongest factors explaining support for the Confederate flag, but this conclusion has been reached by examining the attitudes of only white southerners. We provide a more complete understanding of this issue, focusing on both white and black opinion from across the country. Methods. We use a rolling cross-sectional survey with a large sample size to model support for the South Carolina Confederate flag nationally and then among two groups: southerners and nonsoutherners. Results. Although racial attitudes are important among both southerners and nonsoutherners, region and race also influence support for the Confederate flag. Southern whites have the greatest support for the flag followed by nonsouthern whites, nonsouthern blacks, and southern blacks. Conclusions. Support for the Confederate flag is not simply about racial attitudes, but a more complex phenomenon where region and race exert important influences.
Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information contained in a state voterfile.
Are political candidates perceived differently based on the presence or absence of a southern accent? To address this question, we employ an experimental design that explores reactions to political candidates with a southern accent and a regionally neutral accent. We focus on perceptions of three general categories of candidate characteristics: candidate traits, candidate affect, and candidate issue positions. Overall, we discover that candidates with a southern accent are viewed more negatively, and they are thought to hold more conservative policy positions, than candidates with no discernible accent. Our findings suggest that the southern accent provides a heuristic that affects how voters perceive candidates.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.