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AbstractThe theory that television, and in particular television violence, cultivates beliefs, attitudes, and actions in viewers, particularly heavy viewers, has long been a mainstay of media studies. Some critiques of the more recent empirical literature, however, argue that the current literature has lost some connection to the original theoretical formulations. This study attempts to answer some of these critiques by reengaging with the original conceptualization of cultivation analyses (i.e., institutional processes, message systems, and cultivation) as well as reaching out to find broader societal and political effects. Specifically, I argue and demonstrate that the rate of murder as funneled through the local television news cultivates voters in specific media markets, increasingly so in markets of resonance, toward a greater probability of voting for Republican presidential candidates.

Over the past twenty years, there has been much discussion about two of the most important recent trends in American politics: the increase in income inequality in the United States and the increase in ideological and partisan polarization, particularly in the U.S. House. These two national-level trends are commonly thought to be positively related. But, there are few tested theoretical connections between them, and it is potentially problematic to infer individual-level behavior from these aggregate-level trends. In fact, an examination of the literature reveals, at least, three different theoretical outcomes for district-level income inequality on voter and congressional ideological positions. I explore these district-level theoretical and empirical possibilities as well as test them over decades with three different measures of income inequality. I argue and demonstrate that higher district levels of income inequality are related to higher levels of ideological liberalism in the U.S. House. This stands in contrast to the national-level trends, but it tracks closely to traditional understandings of congressional behavior.

The authors employ one of the most important and consequential interpretive techniques in the study of American politics: ideal point estimates (also known as NOMINATE scores) that locate all members of Congress on a consistent and comparable ideological spectrum. The authors' findings dovetail with and reinforce the conclusions of Hare and Poole, including finding very high levels of polarization alongside some intraparty divisions. These differences in agenda priorities have been relatively stable over the past twenty years. Adapted from the source document.

The extensive literature on the recent ideological polarization in the U.S. Congress has not provided much in the way of incremental and member-specific explanations. I develop such a theory; I posit that members' past electoral performance can influence their ideological extremity. This link requires a reexamination of congress members' roll-call vote calculus. To do so, I adapt the theory of citizen retrospective voting to congress members' roll-call voting. This new theory also provides a missing link in many studies of ideological shirking and democratic accountability. I test and confirm the theory of retrospective roll-call voting for the current period of ideological polarization, 1970 to 2008. As such, I argue that the recent trend of vanishing marginals has been a contributing cause in the recent trend of ideological polarization in the U.S. House. Adapted from the source document.

"Trade: Neoclassical Liberal Views on Impacts" published on by Oxford University Press.

The political business cycle (PBC) literature has, generally, been characterized by a relatively narrow set of economic variables and by unidirectional causal analysis. I challenge both of these traditional constructions. First, I expand the search by examining a surprisingly understudied component of the political economy: the housing market. As a vital component of the American macroeconomy, housing is an uncharacteristically powerful tool for politicians and political analyses alike. Second, I use vector autoregression to more accurately model the dynamic and reciprocal nature of the economic and political interrelations found in PBCs. I find significant evidence of PBCs in the U.S. housing market from 1959 to 2005.