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AbstractLocal governments benefit from nonelected committees that provide citizen input on important issues. Although these committees offer a valuable tool for policy makers, they suffer from low participation and tend to underrepresent economically disadvantaged citizens. This article reports the results of a randomized survey experiment that evaluated the relative effectiveness of offering social recognition or skills training. The findings show that entreaties to participate premised on gaining social recognition had no effect on willingness to participate and that offers to provide training actually decreased citizens' willingness to participate, especially among economically disadvantaged citizens. Even though these approaches may hold promise, this particular policy intervention did not live up to that promise. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of testing policy interventions before wide‐scale implementation and the utility of randomized experiments in this process.

We study how policymakers play public goods games, and how their behavior compares to the typical subjects we study, by conducting parallel experiments on college undergraduates and American state legislators. We find that the legislators play public goods games more cooperatively and more consistently than the undergraduates. Legislators are also less responsive to treatments that involve social elements but are more likely to respond to additional information that they receive. Further, legislators' fixed characteristics explain much of the variation in how legislators play the game. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how institutions affect the provision of public goods.

During the 2008 presidential election, the authors submitted letters to the editor at 100 major U.S. newspapers as part of a field experiment to test whether interest in the letter depended on which candidate the letter supported. The authors find, contrary to what charges of a liberal media bias would suggest, that newspapers expressed more interest in pro-McCain letters than pro-Obama letters. Furthermore, it was found that papers were most likely to be interested in letters supporting the candidate they did not endorse, a result that is consistent with the idea that editors seem to be using their gatekeeping powers to allow dissenting opinions to be heard.

Identifies obstacles to women's participation in political science education that contribute to gender discrimination in undergraduate teaching. Since girls are discouraged from pursuing math & science, the statistical aspects of political science create barriers for women. Three hypotheses regarding obstacles to female performance were tested in three years of data on the performance of more than 600 Political Inquiry students. The study found that the presence of women teaching assistants motivated women to complete difficult coursework, but the gender match between the assistant & student did not enhance performance otherwise. 3 Tables, 15 References. L. A. Hoffman

After the 2020 presidential election, some state-level officials endorsed antidemocratic rhetoric, and a smaller faction took action against the election results. To fortify American democracy, safeguarding election certification from politically motivated interference is imperative. We explore the potential of nonpartisan certification of elections for mitigating antidemocratic actions, arguing that such a practice would shield the certification process from political pressures that might compel politicians to attempt election overturns. Through an original survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of Americans, we analyze how nonpartisan certification impacts elected officials' public approval. The results indicate that our proposed reform is an incentive-compatible solution by which elites in government can maintain support without acting against the electoral process. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there is broad support among all segments of the public for empowering nonpartisan commissions to certify elections.

Many studies consider the effect of lobbying on the behavior of individual legislators, but few studies demonstrate a relationship between lobbying and the ultimate dispositions of bills by the legislature. One challenge to establishing this latter relationship is data scarcity, as few legislatures systematically collect and publish information on organized interests' lobbying activities on each bill. We provide new insights on lobbying by using data from Colorado, Nebraska, and Wisconsin that records the positions organized interests take on proposals in those states' legislatures. We find that organized interests' lobbying predicts outcomes, especially when lobbying is directed against a proposal. We also use our data to test whether lobbying succeeds by building support among legislators (i.e., vote buying) or by affecting a proposal's advancement through the legislative process (i.e., agenda control). We find that lobbying does not buy the votes of legislators on the committees of jurisdiction for each bill, but lobbying does strongly predict what bills make it onto the agenda. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions about money and politics, bias in representation, and legislator behavior.

Do Republican and Democratic politicians hold the same perceptions about the demographic composition of their district? We test this question by asking state legislators about the size of five key demographic groups in their district and compare their responses to the actual measures. We find that legislators hold misperceptions about some of their district demographics, but not those related to race and ethnicity. Significantly, legislators' perceptions of their district's demographics are not polarized along party lines. Misperceptions exist but these are not explained by party affiliation. On a positive note, these results suggest there can be a basis for common ground among politicians on factual matters.