How do people translate their personal experiences into political attitudes? It has been difficult to explore this question using observational data, because individuals are typically exposed to experiences in a selective fashion, and self-reports of exposure may be biased and unreliable. In this study, we identify one experience to which Americans are exposed nearly at random-their local weather-and show that weather patterns have a significant effect on people's beliefs about the evidence for global warming.

A review of research findings and polling data about Americans' attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans' attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideological polarization enhanced by communications from elites. But features of the climate change problem elicit some distinctive determinants of opinion, including individuals' trust in science, risk processing, and personal experience. Although our review of the literature and data leaves us skeptical that majority opinion will spur elected officials anytime soon to undertake the costly solutions necessary to tackle this problem comprehensively at the national level, we identify several avenues by which attitudes might promote less substantial but nevertheless consequential policy action.

What are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making? This study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice. Previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts. The findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems. Objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts; thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem. The result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions.

This paper examines how the growth in vote-by-mail and changes in voting technologies led to changes in the residual vote rate in California from 1990 to 2010. We find that in California's presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of optical scanning enjoyed a significant improvement in the residual vote rate. However, these findings do not always translate to other races. For instance, find that the InkaVote system in Los Angeles has been a mixed success, performing very well in presidential and gubernatorial races, fairly well for ballot propositions, and poorly in Senate races. We also conduct the first analysis of the effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the race, increased use of the mails to cast ballots is robustly associated with a rise in the residual vote rate. The effect is so strong that the rise of voting by mail in California has mostly wiped out all the reductions in residual votes that were due to improved voting technologies since the early 1990s. A decade ago, the nation became aware that voting machines are not simple ciphers through which voters cast their ballots. Palm Beach County, Florida provided the best illustration of how machine malfunction-exemplified by "hanging" and "pregnant" chad-and poor ballot design-exemplified by the "butterfly ballot"-could result in a vote being miscounted, if counted at all (e.g., Sinclair et al. 2000; Smith 2002; Wand et al. 2001). The Florida fiasco resulted in a strong public demand for improved voting technology, and led to a flurry of new research into the causes of "lost votes" due to voting technologies. 1 Within political science, this research has focused on explaining the residual vote rate in presidential elections as a function of the type of voting technology used by voters. (The residual vote rate is the percentage of ballots cast that either contain an over-or undervote for a particular race.) Making this research particularly important was the simultaneous emergence of public demand for improved voting technology to reduce the residual vote rate. This was made explicit by the Help America Vote Act which mandated retirement of older technologies and resulted in billions of state and federal dollars being spent to retire old voting machines.