2007 Conference Program - Midwest Political Science Association

Paper The Politics of Electoral System Choice in 19th Century
Democratizers
Amel F. Ahmed, Swarthmore College
Overview: I examine movements for voting system reform at the
time of suffrage expansion in France, the UK and the U.S. I argue
that elites used these reforms to undermine popular participation.
Outcomes vary with the degree of working class mobilization.
Paper Party Switching and Electoral Reform in New Zealand, Japan,
and Italy
Alex Chuan-hsien Chang, University of Iowa
Overview: In this paper, I construct a defection game to simulate
party-legislator relations and investigate how electoral reforms
affect intraparty politics in New Zealand, Italy and Japan,
respectively.
Paper Engineering Electoral Laws at the Roundtable Talks in
Eastern Europe: Elite Bargaining Games with Imperfect
Information
Ivailo M. Kotzev, University of Connecticut
Overview: By focusing on the bargaining process of electoral
system design, this paper attempts to answer why some electoral
laws have remained stable over time with little or no modification
while others have undergone major changes or even complete
overhaul.
Disc. Matt Evans, Northwestern University
25-14 INNOVATIONS IN SURVEY METHODS AND DATA
ANALYSIS (Co-sponsored Methodology, see 35-16)
Room Salon 9, 3 rd Floor, Sat at 4:25 pm
Chair Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Paper Bayesian Models of Campaign Dynamics
Paul J. Tran, University of Texas, Dallas
Harold D. Clarke, University of Texas, Dallas
Overview: Using state-space models for pooling campaign polls,
Bayesian MCMC analyses are undertaken to study the dynamics
of candidate and party support during the most recent American
(2004), British (2005) and Canadian (2006) national election
campaigns.
Paper To Branch or Not to Branch: Item Construction in Web
Surveys
Samantha Luks, Polimetrix
Ashley Grosse, Polimetrix
Douglas Rivers, Stanford University
Overview: This paper examines the effects of alternative designs
in web surveys on item response and nonresponse. Using an
experiment from the Polimetrix omnibus survey, we show how
question formats can increase or alleviate confusion among
respondents.
Paper Evaluating the Representativeness of an Internet Sample
Seth J. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles
James Lo, University of California, Los Angeles
Lynn Vavreck, University of California, Los Angeles
John Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles
Overview: Using the 2004 National Election Study as a baseline,
this paper evaluates whether voluntary respondents drawn from a
novel Internet sampling method are representative of the national
population in terms of their level of political information
Disc. Sean O. Hogan, RTI-International
J. Tobin Grant, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
26-3 MINORITY VOTING AND MINORITY
REPRESENTATION
Room Clark 9, 7 th Floor, Sat at 4:25 pm
Chair Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, University of Rochester
Paper The Turnout-Representation Disconnect: A Statistical Model
of Council Composition
Justin R. Grimmer, Harvard University
Clayton M. Nall, Harvard University
Overview: Introducing a compositional data model, we find that
even a dramatic rise in citywide turnout does not lead to increased
minority representation, contradicting existing findings obtained
using Least Squares (Hajnal and Trounstine, 2005).
Paper Black Votes for Black Republicans Running Statewide in
2006: Did It Make a Difference?
Michael K. Fauntroy, George Mason University
Overview: This paper reviews the November 2006 elections to
determine if Black voters turned out to support African American
Republican candidates.
Paper Does School Segregation Depress Black Political
Participation?
Michiko Ueda, California Institute of Technology
Overview: This paper tests whether going to racially segregated
schools affects political participation of blacks later in their lives.
It uses heterogeneity in the timing of desegregation orders to
identify the impact of school segregation on turnout.
Paper The Role of Political Participation in Expanding the Scope of
Conflict
Matthew B. Platt, University of Rochester
Overview: This paper examines how black participation is used to
garner white support for black policy issues. Using public opinion,
media, and legislative behavior, I show that participation is a vital
tool for problem definition and conflict expansion.
Disc. Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, University of Rochester
Eric McDaniel, University of Texas, Austin
27-15 MEDIA SYSTEMS AND EFFECTS ACROSS
REGIMES
Room Clark 1, 7 th Floor, Sat at 4:25 pm
Chair Stacy G. Ulbig, Missouri State University
Paper Citizens or Consumers? Political Culture and Media Policy in
the U.S. and UK
Mark Major, William Paterson University
Overview: This research uses a comparative and historical
analysis of elite political culture in the U.S. and UK to assess its
influence on media policy.
Paper Freedom of the Media in Autocracies and Democracies:
Theory and Empirics
Natan Sachs, Stanford University
Overview: The paper explores the role of the media, explaining
why some autocracies grant relative freedom while democracies
often censor. It presents evidence from cross-national data and
from fieldwork on Indonesian democratization and Israeli wartime
press.
Paper Media Use and the Survival of Political Disagreement: A
Simulation
Frank C. S. Liu, National Sun Yat-Sen University
Paul E. Johnson, University of Kansas
Overview: This paper presents an Agent-Based Model and its
simulation results about the influence of selective perception of
news sources, as well as the influence of communication
networks, on the level of political disagreement in a centralized
country.
Paper Media Exposure and Attitude Towards Democracy in China
Tianjian Shi, Duke University
Jie Lu, Duke University
Overview: This paper will use survey data collected in two cities
in China, with access to different mass media with varying levels
of government control, to scrutinize the role of mass media in
shaping people’s attitude towards democracy.
Disc. Claes H. DeVreese, University of Amsterdam
Oya Dursun-Ozkanca, University of Texas, Austin
28-102 ROUNDTABLE: THE GENDER GAP IN THE 2006
AND 2008 ELECTIONS
Room Adams, 6 th Floor, Sat at 4:25 pm
Panelist Kathleen Dolan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Susan McManus, University of South Florida
Karen Kaufmann, University of Maryland, College Park
Barbara Norrander, University of Arizona
Barbara Burrell, Northern Illinois University
Overview: Scholars on this roundtable will evaluate the role of the
gender gap in the 2006 elections and discuss its potential impact in
the 2008 elections.
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