In this Issue¹

Drafted by APSR editorial assistant Lee Michael.

The human genome is a biological magnum opus three billion letters long, a tiny portion of which adorns the cover of this issue. As an information storage device, DNA dwarfs human-made libraries and microchips. This remarkable code contains the instructions for producing living things from aardvarks to zebras and determines traits from sex to allergen sensitivity. Yet DNA does not determine many aspects of our lives, from the career paths we choose to the types of music we prefer. Thus assessments of the relative and joint effects of “nature” and “nurture” go on in a vast array of contexts, presenting new and ever-changing answers to the questions of who we are and why we are what we are—biologically and even, as the lead article in this issue suggests, politically. The genetic code on our cover, which is tinted green in honor of the month of May, could well have been shaded in the reds and blues of a map of presidential election results in honor of that article.

One often hears about long-separated twins who, upon meeting, discover that both like the same foods and drive the same make of car. But how about twins who vote for the same party and care about the same issues? Genetics meets political science in “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?” by John R. Alford, Carolyn L. Funk and John R. Hibbing. Drawing on databases compiled in Virginia and Australia, Hibbing, Alford, and Funk conclude that biology shapes ideological outlooks, even more than parental socialization does. Here, then, is intriguing evidence that genetic predispositions play a more prominent role than political scientists have recognized.

If our genes predispose us to take different positions on political issues, then electoral calculations may work rather differently than previously thought. Scott Basinger and Howard Lavine's “Ambivalence, Information and Electoral Choice” contributes to a rapidly developing subfield of electoral research that questions conventional wisdom about the determinants of vote choice. Voters use various cues to evaluate political candidates—party, ideology, economics, and specific issues, among others. Do they weight these factors equally? Basinger and Lavine suggest that they do not. By creatively synthesizing insights from research on information processing, congressional elections, and public opinion, Basinger and Lavine develop an ambivalence-centered model that depicts those who hold ambivalent partisan attitudes as distinctive in the cues they use to select their favorite candidate. Identifying these cues and examining how voters use them to home in on their preferred candidates are Basinger and Lavine's primary contributions in an analysis that advances our understanding of electoral decisionmaking.

Voters must not only consider the relative salience of different cues, but also devise voting strategies that make sense given the institutional context in which they find themselves. Of course, the ideas that voters act strategically and are influenced by policy outcomes are well established, but Orit Kedar (“When Moderate Voters Prefer Extreme Parties: Policy Balancing in Parliamentary Elections”) imparts some new twists to these ideas by probing the interplay of institutions and individual behavior. Using survey data from Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, and Canada, Kedar argues that voters in proportional representation systems often engage in “compensatory voting” and favor more extreme parties where there is considerable power-sharing among parties; by contrast, plurality-based systems are likely to motivate more ideologically sincere voting patterns. Kedar's analysis should interest a wide readership ranging from American scholars who study strategic voting and electoral systems to comparativists who are concerned with “bringing the state back in.”

Whether conducted in a New England town hall or a European-style proportional representation system, voting is the quintessential collective action activity—a modestly time-consuming task for most citizens, but not usually a dangerous one. Engaging in other forms of collective action, however, can occasion greater risk, from bearing the financial costs of an endeavor alone to being punished or even executed for challenging the status quo. Thus, in politics, fools may rush in where angels fear to tread only when they have company. Jacob K. Goeree and Charles A. Holt apply the concept of quantal response equilibrium to several important categories of political activity in “An Explanation of Anomalous Behavior in Models of Political Participation.” Their insights help account for failures of equilibrium-based models to explain what actually happens in real-world situations. For insights about situations ranging from the dynamics of anti-government demonstrations in Lebanon to the jockeying that goes on when incumbent senators announce their retirement, Goeree and Holt's analysis merits attention from a wide range of readers, including those who might ordinarily shy away from an article based on formal modeling.

Another ingredient in the collective action recipe is social capital. The creation of social capital through civic engagement is often cited as an important factor in “making democracy work,” but disagreement persists what form these civic engagements should take. In “Civic Engagement and Mass-Elite Policy Agenda Agreement in American Communities,” Kim Quaile Hill and Tetsuya Matsubayashi test whether bridging or bonding associations produce greater leader responsiveness. In addition to the novel findings they report of no connection between bridging associations and leader responsiveness and of a negative association between bonding associations and such responsiveness, Hill and Matsubayashi introduce innovative measures of policy concurrence and member participation. This article seems likely to excite both Americanists in the behavioral tradition and comparativists interested in democratization.

In the United States, policy outcomes are of course shaped by the provisions of the Constitution. Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught that the Father Of The Constitution was James Madison, who dominated the Constitutional Convention with his Virginia Plan and then pushed for ratification in the Federalist Papers. David B. Robertson challenges the textbook version of history in “Madison's Opponents and Constitutional Design.” Robertson argues that Madison's Virginia plan was successfully challenged on many fronts by a coherent and influential opposition led by Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman. Many of the prominent constitutional features we see today were the result of path-dependent compromises balancing state and national power. Madison lost important fights on issues such as federalism and states' rights, intra- and interstate commerce, separation of powers, and the composition, powers, and selection of the national legislature and executive. Madison may have been the Constitution's father, but he lost many a custody battle in its drafting stages. For an audience ranging from senior scholars down through beginning undergraduates, Robertson's analysis teaches some valuable lessons about American politics and the Constitution's origins.

A major component of American government not detailed in the Constitution is the bureaucracy—an administrative amalgam of executive, legislative, and even judicial functions and features that handles most citizen-government interactions. Just as the Founders were concerned about the ethics of elected officials, Sanford C. Gordon and Catherine Hafer (“Flexing Muscle: Corporate Political Expenditures as Signals to the Bureaucracy”) wonder whether private firms can buy favorable bureaucratic decisions. Gordon and Hafer focus on the influence of regulated industries, especially nuclear power companies, on enforcement decisions of agencies that are charged with regulating them. At the heart of corporate influence, Gordon and Hafer argue, are the political contributions that firms use to signal their willingness and ability to challenge unfavorable agency actions. In contrast to previous research, Gordon and Hafer see the motivation underlying political contributions as one of influencing the decisions of regulatory agencies rather than congressional enactments. The provocative findings of this analysis seem certain to add fuel to the already heated debate over the extent to which and the manner in which political contributions influence policy outcomes.

Like Gordon and Hafer, who obtain thought-provoking data from corporate lobbies, Michael Laver (“Policy and the Dynamics of Political Competition”) argues that political scientists can improve their theory by studying the “real world” of politics. Laver insists that political scientists must start treating parties as partisans do: as maelstroms of activity and change, not inert institutional fossils, especially when it comes to modeling multi-party competition. Political parties have access to much more information (such as opinion polls) than is generally recognized, and it is up to political scientists to begin to represent these policy environments more accurately in their models of politics. Laver develops different algorithms to allow for party adaptation in multi-party systems and applies his findings to the Irish party system in this insightful study.

In the September 2000 issue, the APSR published “The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment,” by Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green. Gerber and Green contended that face-to-face visits during the election campaigns they studied increased voter turnout substantially, that direct mail did so modestly, and that brief telephone calls were ineffective. In the “Forum” section of this issue, Kosuke Imai (“Do Get-Out-The-Vote Calls Reduce Turnout? The Importance of Statistical Methods for Field Experiments”) challenges the data, methodology, and substantive results of the Gerber-Green study. In response (“Correction to Gerber and Green, Replication of Disputed Findings, and Reply to Imai”), Gerber and Green concede and correct some data problems but vigorously dispute Imai's challenges to their methodology and substantive results. This exchange highlights the relationship between methods and results, and demonstrates how spirited debate can contribute to our understanding of political phenomena.

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