How important are social incentives for turnout?
Bhatti, Y., Fieldhouse, E., & Hansen, K. M. (2020). It’s a Group Thing: How Voters Go to the Polls Together. Political Behavior, 42(1), 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9484-2
Bhatti, Y., Fieldhouse, E., & Hansen, K. M. (2020). It’s a Group Thing: How Voters Go to the Polls Together. Political Behavior, 42(1), 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9484-2
Gender gaps are everywhere, but there are some places where they are less likely. According to the authors, young Germans represent a least likely case for gender differences in political activity: female levels of educational attainment are actually higher than male ones, and adolescence is a time (for many) before those aspects of family life kick in that tend hold women back.
But as it turns out, “least likely” is actually “not determinstically likely, but very likely”. The authors find substantial differences in the socialisation of young men and women, which are linked to rather dramatic differences in internal efficacy and self esteem. They also uncover evidence that men benefit more from factors that contribute to political activity, particularly in institutional settings. Intriguing, depressing, hardly surprising.
Pfanzelt, H., & Spies, D. C. (2019). The Gender Gap in Youth Political Participation: Evidence from Germany. Political Research Quarterly, 72(1), 34–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1065912918775249
Students were over the moon. They praised the clear structure, the strength of the theoretical argument, the clear exposition and the empirical strategy. Also (for once), this was about something that they actually deemed relevant. According to them, this was easily the best paper that we read all winter. I agree.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Nothing to declare.
Conventional wisdom says that electoral campaigns remind voters who they are and what they want. So they do not change much, but still matter, because the outcome could be very different without all the reminders. This little gem here is a bit unusual, because it tracks a referendum campaign in Denmark, not a normal electoral race. Also, there is detailed information on the timing of information.
Beach, D., & Finke, D. (2020). The long shadow of attitudes: differential campaign effects and issue voting in eu referendums. West European Politics, (online first), . http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2020.1780829
Ordered logit regression comes with problems of its own (hello parallel regressions assumption). We were not convinced that OLR is really necessary or even justified in this application. We also found some of the graphs a bit confusing. And like last week, students said that the summary (and even the presentation of the findings) were a bit too concise.
Somewhat predictably, I fell off the seminar-blogging wagon shortly after the break. But hey, this is a digital semester, so we have actual archived notes of our virtual meetings.
One of the first texts we read in the new year was this one: a specimen of the meta-analytic approach that is becoming more and more popular in Political Science. In this one, the authors want to find out if cross-cutting exposure (i.e. escaping from the filter bubble) has any positive or negative effects on political participation. Turns out that there is insufficient evidence for either.
Matthes, J., Knoll, J., Valenzuela, S., Hopmann, D. N., & Sikorski, C. v. (2019). A meta-analysis of the effects of cross-cutting exposure on political participation. Political Communication, 36(4), 523–542. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1619638
Most students had never heard of meta-analyses and were quite intrigued. They found the idea of pooling evidence from several published studies “stimulating” (their words) and were particularly happy that the authors had carefully documented each of their steps. They also liked the presentation of research questions and hypotheses.
Photo by LoboStudioHamburg on Pixabay
Finally, some students had previously heard of publication bias. They were impressed that the authors applied a test for that, and were even more impressed that a journal had the guts to publish null results.
Some students were disappointed that the authors did not conduct any primary analysis, but (wait for it!), that’s the whole point of a meta analysis, right? A more serious criticism (levelled more at the journal and its page limit than at the authors) was that at least two interesting graphs were relegated to the appendices. And finally, students said that the summary & outlook section was too short. While I agree, I can also relate to the authors: you do all the work, you write it up, why should you have to summarise it again?