A variety of measures indicate that income inequality has grown significantly in the United States during the last three decades (APSA 2004; Brandolini and Smeeding 2006). In a flurry of recent research, scholars have attributed this trend to the failure of the national government to represent the preferences of ordinary citizens in general and less wealthy citizens in particular (APSA 2004; Bartels 2004; 2006; Gilens 2005), who participate in politics less consistently and contribute fewer resources to political candidates than their wealthier peers (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). The American Political Science Association's (APSA) Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy summarizes thisrepresentative failure hypothesis: “disparities in participation ensure that ordinary Americans speak in a whisper while the most advantaged roar” (2004, 2).
This article is a first attempt to develop and assess the competing predictions of the thermostatic model of public opinion and legitimation theory for the responses of public mood to Supreme Court decisions. While the thermostatic model predicts a negative relationship between the ideological direction of Supreme Court decisions and changes in public mood, legitimation theory predicts that changes in mood should be positively associated with the ideological content of the Court's actions. I assess these rival expectations by modeling the dynamic relationship between mood and cumulative judicial liberalism. The model estimates indicate a complex interaction between the Court and the mass public characterized by short-term backlash against Supreme Court decisions in mood followed by long-run movement toward the ideological positions taken by the Court. The results emphasize the legitimacy of the Court in American politics and point to a unique role for the Court in shaping public opinion.
Inquiry into the origins of partisan polarization has generally treated polarization as a simple, symmetric phenomenon-the degree to which the worldviews of the mass Democratic and Republican parties have or have not diverged from one another. In this article, we disaggregate polarization into its constituent parts, the dynamic preferences of the mass Democratic and Republican Parties. This approach allows for the possibility that intraparty dynamics may influence interparty differences and for the integration of studies of polarization with literatures addressing other dynamics in aggregate public opinion. Building on individual-level research on partisan identities and macrolevel research on public mood, we argue that party polarization may be catalyzed, in part, by the mass parties' differential responsiveness to changes in the macro political-economic context. We find support for this position, showing asymmetries in the dynamics of polarization that are associated with differential partisan responsiveness to domestic policy choices.
For decades, constitutional theorists have confronted the normative problems associated with judicial review by an unelected judiciary; yet, some political scientists contend that judicial review actually tends to promote majoritarian interests. We evaluate the majoritarian nature of judicial review and test the political foundations that shape this process. To do so, we construct a statute-centered data set of every important federal law enacted from 1949 through 2008 and estimate the probability of a law being challenged and subsequently invalidated by the Supreme Court. Our methodological approach overcomes problems of selection bias and facilitates a test of judicial majoritarianism and the mechanisms that drive that behavior. We find that the Court tends to invalidate laws with little support from elected officials, and this pattern is primarily driven by the justices' concern for congressional constraint during the certiorari stage.
A growing body of work examines the consequences of unequal participation in American democracy for electoral outcomes. However, this scholarship has ignored the potential impact of unequal voting for the quality of dynamic representation in the American political system. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), we examine the dynamic relationship between the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters in the American electorate. Further, we assess how unequal participation—and the incentives that it may give to policymaking elites—may moderate the relationship between the mass public and policy outcomes. Our analysis reveals that the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters respond in similar ways to the political and economic environment. In addition, we find no evidence that national policymaking elites are differentially responsive to changes in the preferences of voters and nonvoters.
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.