Ten Examples of Abstracts
Example One
By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy
orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape
policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to
provide the foundation that links government policy to the
preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to
which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of
high-income Americans. Using an original data set of almost two
thousand survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981
and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the
public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias
toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with
different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual
policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most
affluent but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of
poor or middle-income Americans. The vast discrepancy I find in
government responsiveness to citizens with different incomes stands
in stark contrast to the ideal of political equality that Americans
hold dear. Although perfect political equality is an unrealistic
goal, representational biases of this magnitude call into question
the very democratic character of our society.
--Martin
Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic
Responsiveness,” Public Opinion Quarterly
2005 69(5):778-796.
Example Two
We address the role of racial antagonism in whites’ opposition to
racially-targeted policies. The data come from four surveys selected for their
unusually rich measurement of both policy preferences and other racial
attitudes: the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies, the 1994 General Social
Survey, and the 1995 Los Angeles County Social Survey. They indicate that such
opposition is more strongly rooted in racial antagonism than in non-racial
conservatism, that whites tend to respond to quite different racial policies in
similar fashion, that racial attitudes affect evaluations of black and
ethnocentric white presidential candidates, and that their effects are just as
strong among college graduates as among those with no college education.
Second, we present evidence that symbolic racism is consistently more powerful
than older forms of racial antagonism, and its greater strength does not
diminish with controls on non-racial ideology, partisanship, and values. The origins of symbolic racism lie partly in both anti-black antagonism
and non-racial conservative attitudes and values, and so mediates their
effects on policy preferences, but it explains substantial additional variance
by itself, suggesting that it does represent a new form of racism independent
of older racial and political attitudes. The findings are each replicated
several times with different measures, in different surveys conducted at
different times. We also provide new evidence in response to earlier critiques
of research on symbolic racism.
--David O. Sears, Colette Van Laar, Mary Carrillo, and Rick Kosterman,
“Is It Really Racism? The
Origins of White Americans` Opposition to Race-Targeted Policies,” Public
Opinion Quarterly, 1997; 61 (1): 15-63.
Example Three
A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysis
of voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election. Twenty-two
percent of voters picked "moral values" from a list of
"issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, more than
selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpreted this
single data point to conclude that moral values are an ascendant
political issue and to credit conservative Christian groups with
turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeat in 2000 into his three
million–vote margin of victory in 2004. We suggest, rather, that
while morals and values are critical in informing political
judgments, they represent personal characteristics and ill-defined
policy preferences far more than any discrete political issue. First
by conflating morals and values and then by further conflating
characteristics and issues, the exit poll’s "issues" list
distorted our understanding of the 2004 election. In this article,
we examine the flaws in the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s
"most important issue" question and explore the presumed
rising electoral importance of moral values and the conservative
Christians who overwhelmingly selected this item. Using national
exit poll data from 1980 through 2004 and other national surveys, we
find that the moral values item on the issues list cannot properly be
viewed as a discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that
its importance to voters has not grown over time; and that when
controlled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues list in
predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll data also
show that the voting behavior of conservative Christians is
relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarily responsible
for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.
--Gary
Langer and Jon Cohen, “Voters and Values in the 2004 Election,”
Public Opinion Quarterly 2005
69(5):744-759
Example Four
In Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind
Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States,
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva examines how whites use color-blindness as a tool to
perpetuate racial inequality without themselves sounding racist. He asserts
that white
Keith R. Walsh, “Color-Blind Racism in Grutter
and Gratz: Racism without Racists,” 24
Example Five
This
essay explores the ethics of how the press covers presidential nomination
campaigns. It considers the implications of a predictive model that
demonstrates how the nomination process limits voters’ choices. Nominees may be
predicted with a high degree of success before voting begins. Horse-race press
coverage of the pre-primary period dramatically characterizes the process as
unstable and up for grabs. By doing so, the press paradoxically contributes to
the stability and, therefore, is complicit in limiting voter choice. The essay
argues for telling the story of the impact of policy and governance on
citizens’ lives.
--Andrew R. Cline, “Primary
Instability Paradox: The Ethics of Media Coverage in Presidential Nominations,”
The Forum Volume 3, Issue 4 (2006)
Article 5.
Example Six
This article reports the
results of several field experiments designed to measure campaign effects in
partisan contests. The findings suggest incumbent campaigns failed to increase
incumbent vote share, whereas the challenger campaign was effective. To
understand these and other results, the incumbent’s optimal spending strategy
was analyzed theoretically. The analysis reveals that if incumbents maximize
their probability of victory rather than vote share, campaigns by typical
incumbents are expected
to produce only minimal improvement in
incumbent vote share. The analysis also explains how returns to campaign
spending vary with the competitiveness of the election, how incumbent spending
can improve the incumbent’s probability of victory yet have only minimal effect
on incumbent vote share, and why rational spending plans might decrease the sponsor’s expected vote. This article
demonstrates the wide scope of application for field experiments and provides
an example of how experimental findings can serve as a catalyst for generating
theories.
--Alan
S. Gerber, “Does Campaign
Spending Work? Field Experiments Provide Evidence and Suggest New Theory,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 47
No. 5, January 2004 541-574
Example Seven
Analyses of the persuasive effects of media exposure outside the
laboratory have generally produced negative results. I attribute such nonfindings
in part to carelessness regarding the inferential consequences of measurement
error and in part to limitations of research design. In an analysis of opinion change during the
19809 presidential campaign, adjusting for measurement
error produces several strong media exposure effects, especially for network
television news. Adjusting for
measurement error also makes preexisting opinions look much more stable, suggesting that the new information absorbed via
media exposure must be about three times as distinctive as has generally been
supposed in order to account for observed patterns of opinion change.
--Larry M. Bartels, “Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media
Exposure,” APSR 87 (June 1993) 2:
267-285.
Example Eight
There is a burgeoning literature on the aetiology,
performance and consequences of violence.
Research straddles a variety of disciplines including law, sociology,
psychology, anthropology, criminology, military history, and theology. The ‘violentization
theory’ of Lonnie Athens is seldom encountered in the literature, although it
provides an interesting way of re-framing traditional questions about violence
as a process. This article serves as a
critical introduction to violentization and draws on
a range of source material not usually found in criminological research to test
the limits of Athen’s approach.
--Ian O’Donnel, “A New Paradigm for
Understanding Violence? Testing the Limits of Lonnie Athen’s
Theory,” Brit. J. Criminol.
(2003) 43, 750-771.
Example Nine
Longitudinal studies suggest that law school has a
corrosive effect on the well-being, values, and motivation of students, ostensibly
because of its problematic institutional culture. In a 3-year study of two
different law schools, the authors applied self-determination theory’s (SDT)
dynamic process model of thriving to explain such findings. Students at both
schools declined in psychological need satisfaction and well-being over the 3
years. However, student reports of greater perceived autonomy support by
faculty predicted less radical declines in need satisfaction, which in turn
predicted better well-being in the 3rd year and also a higher grade point
average, better bar exam results, and more selfdetermined
motivation for the first job after graduation. Institution-level analyses
showed that although students at both schools suffered, one school was
perceived as more controlling than the other, predicting greater difficulties
for its students. Implications for SDT and for legal education are discussed.
--Kennon M. Sheldon and
Example Ten
Most people
are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy
plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become
numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are “one of many” in a much
greater problem. Why does this occur? The answer to this question will help us
answer a related question that is the topic of this paper: Why, over the past
century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide? Every
episode of mass murder is unique and raises unique obstacles to intervention.
But the repetitiveness of such atrocities, ignored by powerful people and na-tions, and by the general public, calls for explanations
that may reflect some fundamental deficiency in our humanity—a deficiency that,
once identified, might possibly be overcome. One fundamental mechanism that may
play a role in many, if not all, episodes of mass-murder neglect involves the
capacity to experience affect, the positive and negative feelings that
combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions.
I shall draw from psychological research to show how the statistics of mass
murder or genocide, no matter how large the numbers,
fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The reported numbers of
deaths represent dry statistics, “human beings with the tears dried off,” that
fail to spark emotion or feeling and thus fail to motivate action. Recognizing
that we cannot rely only upon our moral feelings to motivate proper action
against genocide, we must look to moral argument and international law. The
1948 Genocide Convention was supposed to meet this need, but it has not been effec-tive. It is time to examine this failure in light of
the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and
institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and
other forms of mass murder.
--Paul Slovic ,
“If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act”: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” Judgment
and Decision Making, 2, 79-95.