Presidential Election Year Research Articles

THE U.S.-CHINA TRADE WAR DURING THE JOE BIDEN PRESIDENCY: STANDSTILL OR CONTINUATION?

The author's objective is to briefly outline and discuss the Joe Biden administration's trade moves towards China and attempt to answer the question to what extent the Biden administration is continuing the Trump administration's policy on this issue. The text briefly and succinctly outlines the similarities and differences between the approaches and policies of these two U.S. presidents, who fiercely compete in a presidential election year.

Economic Impact of United States Presidential Election Years: A Comparative Analysis

The United States Presidential elections are held every four years, and they bring a time of economic uncertainty that raises many questions domestically and internationally. In this essay, the relationship between the economy and the presidential election years will be analyzed. Some of those include changes in the investment markets like stocks and real estate, the expectation of the president's policies and how they will affect the economy, what the consumers should expect, how each presidential candidate (Donald Trump and Kamala Harris) has different policies, and how those policies will affect the economy of the US and internationally. By looking at stats from past elections and trends, the confusing connection between the economy and the years that have a presidential election can be further understood, showing how the outcome of United States presidential elections impacts the growth and the power of the economy.

Beyond Ellis Island: Unpacking the Negativity Around Contemporary Migration

The year 2024 is the 100th anniversary of the end of Ellis Island as the welcoming gateway to and for millions of international migrants to the United States. It is also a presidential election year in the same country, where migrants and migration are lambasted, even as the economy cannot have enough of them. This behaviour pattern is not unique. By focusing mainly on the United States, this paper proposes a set of inter-related explanations as to why immigration can become – and persist in being seen – as a negative policy issue in the public eye. First, anti-immigration rhetoric is adopted as a rallying call by at least one mainstream political party. Second, the country’s migration policies are enacted via executive order; and thus, they unwittingly become a proxy scorecard of alleged government inefficiency and incompetence, which, in turn, are projected as risks to national security. Third, in countries with either a relatively short history of independence, or with strong nativist cultures, nourished by a discourse of identity, patriotism, and a proto-ethnic sense of ‘the nation’, immigrants are seen to pose an existential threat; at best, any migrants have an obligation to ‘fit in’ via assimilation into their host community.

Plowshares or swords? End-of-the-world rhetoric in a politically divided world

A presidential election year, when apocalyptic rhetorical bombast can be at its most cutting and binary, provides an ideal socio-political setting to assess and challenge the standard accounts of political realism. Insofar as appeals to end-of-the-world rhetoric in Scripture are often enough used by politicians backed by their various religious constituencies in making their opposing cases, opposing apocalypses in the Bible provide an ideal literary context to assess and challenge the standard accounts and efforts to unify texts in Scripture that are on-their-face contradictory. Since preachers in pulpits are often the primary interpreters of Scripture to their church-going publics, how might a preacher preach the famous contradictory “plowshare” passages in the Bible (Isa 2:2-4 and Joel 3:9-12) in a season of heightened political tension, indeed, any time when faced with contradictions in the Bible? This article argues for a nonviolent political realism as a political theology for addressing such end-of-the-world binaries that have and continue to threaten real and unleashed violence upon the world.

State Resident Handedness, Ideology, and Political Party Preference: U.S. Presidential Election Outcomes Over the Past 60 Years.

Pearson correlation, partial correlation, and multiple regression strategies determined the degree to which estimates of the level of left-handedness in each of the 48 contiguous American states related to citizen political ideology and to Democratic-Republican presidential popular vote over the past 60years. Higher state levels of left-handedness were associated significantly with liberal ideology in each of the presidential election years from 1964 to 2016. Comparable ideology data were not available for 2020. Higher state levels of left-handedness also were associated with a greater degree of Democratic candidate popular vote support in each of the presidential election years from 1964 to 2020 except for 1976. The mean size of these 28 significant Pearson correlations involving the two political criteria was .62 (SD = .12) with a range of .38-.80, indicating handedness alone could account for a mean of 40.1% (SD = 14.9) of the variance in the two political preference variables. Corresponding multiple regressions showed that when state-level Big Five personality, White population percent, urbanization, and income variables were given the opportunity to enter the equations, handedness still emerged with a significant regression coefficient in 26 of the 28 equations. The two exceptions occurred for 1968 with either political preference criterion. It is speculated that such relations are grounded in hypothesized but poorly understood genetic links between handedness, personality, and political beliefs and attitudes, and, that a foundational genetic predisposition to left-handedness in a population may have much greater impact on correlates than overt levels of left-handedness.

Incerteza política e gerenciamento de resultados: Evidências de países da América Latina

Abstract Purpose: This article aims to examine whether political uncertainty affects the accounting choices of firms’ managers in the sense of practicing earnings management through discretionary accruals. Originality/value: The research is original for providing evidence on the direction of earnings management practice following periods of political uncertainty and considering emerging countries in Latin America. The study helps signal to capital market agents in those countries the impact of political uncertainty on the quality of accounting aggregates. Design/methodology/approach: The final sample comprised 352 firms (3,005 observations-year), considering the period 1998-2018. Political uncertainty was a proxy for the countries’ presidential election years. At the same time, earnings management was captured by discretionary accruals estimated according to the Jones’ model (1991) modified by Dechow et al. (2012). Multiple linear regression with estimation by System Generalized Method of Moments (Sys-GMM) guided the tests. Findings: It was found that presidential election periods are associated with managers’ decisions to increase earnings by positive discretionary accruals, allowing us to infer that political uncertainty impacts managers’ accounting choices regarding earnings management. The results proved to be robust to different test alternatives. The findings have practical implications for agents who use accounting information as an informational signal in their decisions, whether from the perspective of investors (current shareholders or potential shareholders) or the perspective of other stakeholders associated with the firm (employees, suppliers etc.).

Economic Impact of United States Presidential Election Years: A Comparative Analysis

Economic Impact of United States Presidential Election Years: A Comparative Analysis

Effects of time-varying political connections on loan contracts

PurposeThe authors construct two time-varying political connection (PC) indexes to measure a firm's political tendencies toward ruling and opposing parties and analyze whether a firm with ruling party tendencies obtains better bank loan contracts compared to the contracts obtained by a firm with opposing party tendencies and a firm with fixed PC tendencies.Design/methodology/approachLinguistic text mining is used to construct the two time-varying PC indexes from news sources that reflect the tone and frequencies of characteristic texts to determine a firm's tendencies to favor the ruling or opposing parties.FindingsThe results show that varying PC firms connected to the ruling party receive preferential loan contracts when their political tendencies increase but varying PC firms connected to the opposition party do not. In contrast, fixed PC firms gain similar benefits only when the connection is determined in the presidential election year but not in other years. Firms supporting two parties receive minimal financial rewards in terms of loan terms.Originality/valueIn past studies, once a firm is identified as having a connection with a political party, it is assumed to have PC throughout the sample period (i.e. fixed PC firms). The authors lift this assumption and examine how varying PC affect bank loan contracts. The two time-varying PC indexes can identify a firm's more immediate party tendencies and more precise effects of a firm's party tendencies on bank loan contracts.

Presidential particularism, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and the Biden administration

AbstractFederal spending has been a strong governing instrument for the president and governing party, who have pursued their political and electoral benefits by strategically allocating federal grants, procurements, and loans to subnational governments. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), in which the federal government issued almost $1 trillion in loans over three rounds between April 2020 and May 2021 to support small businesses' operations in response to the COVID‐19 crisis, was no different. I build on previous research in distributive politics by examining the third round of PPP loans, in which $277 billion was allocated in the first months of the Biden administration. I find significant evidence of presidential particularism, as the Biden administration issued a large amount of PPP lending to Pro‐Biden and core Democratic counties as well as to congressional districts with copartisan (Democratic) house members. Furthermore, the magnitude of these presidential particularism findings immediately following the presidential election year is considerably larger compared to previous studies.

An Analysis of Political Contributions by Urologists in the United States: 2003-2022.

We sought to better understand the amounts and distribution of political contributions made by urologists in the United States. The Federal Election Commission was analyzed for political contributions from 2003 to 2022 using the search terms "urology," "urologist," or "urologic surgeon." Contributions were classified by political party (Democratic, Republican, or Independent) and were analyzed for temporal, geographic, and demographic trends. There were a total of 26,441 unique contributions that resulted in $9,943,205 after adjusting for inflation. The total amount of political contributions increased significantly over time, with higher numbers during presidential election years. The Republican party received the highest proportion of donations (69.1%). Importantly, women urologists and urologists working in academic centers were significantly more likely to contribute to Democratic committees (P < .001 for both). Texas had the highest total amount of contributions ($395,152). Overall contributions to urology political action committees have steadily decreased since 2011, while contributions to individual campaigns and nonurology political action committees have increased. Urologists have been increasingly contributing to political campaigns over the past 19 years, with most of their individual and political action committee contributions going to Republican committees and candidates. Future research evaluating how growing political engagement by urologists affects the development of new health care policy will be important as a new generation of urologists begins to enter practice.

Rethinking Religion and Political Participation: The Case of Voting Among Religiously Unaffiliated Americans

Abstract Is civic disengagement correlated across institutions? One case of this question is a long-observed “secular voting gap” where religiously unaffiliated Americans are less likely to vote than their affiliated counterparts. This work often uses self-reports or exit polls that cannot measure variation within the unaffiliated. Using an improved measure of validated voter turnout in four presidential election years (2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020), I find estimates of the secular voting gap are attenuated by demographic controls. More importantly, the mechanism that explains this finding is that more frequent church attendance associates with a lower probability of turnout among respondents who are unaffiliated, and results vary by voting method. These results support a theory of civic disengagement as a domain-specific process and demonstrate the substantive value of revisiting classic findings about religion and political behavior amid social change.

Pseudo-events: Tracking mediatization with machine learning over 40 years

Using automated content analysis, this research explores the phenomenon of pseudo-events coverage in The New York Times (N = 70,370 articles) from 1980 to 2019. By clarifying the operationalization of pseudo-events, this study introduces pseudo-events as a valuable tool to index how different social subsystems perpetuate mediatization (which is when institutions absorb and abide by media logic). Machine-learning classifiers were constructed to measure pseudo-events, which provides historicity, specificity, and measurability — three tasks set forth for new mediatization research. We found a significant increase in pseudo-event coverage, expressing a more positive tone than genuine event coverage. Moreover, political pseudo-event coverage shows quadrennial cycles with peaks in each presidential election year. Our findings reveal the expansion of mediatization since 1980 and show how media logic has been internalized in different ways by the social subsystems of politics, culture, and economics. Institutions and their social actors need efficient tools to abide by media logic in seeking publicity and commanding authority, and pseudo-events have matured into one of the most dominant tools, especially for political actors. This study offers an innovative approach to capture complex phenomena and shows promises of broader application of machine learning to empirically quantify and identify patterns using theoretical concepts.

The disastrous business of presidential campaigns: The effect of disaster declarations on presidential elections in FEMA Region 3.

The issuance of disaster declarations has become a politicized matter. Prior research has demonstrated that presidents are more generous in awarding disaster relief in federal election years, and that there is a prevalence to award governors from the opposing political party. Additionally, voters tend to reward presidents seeking re-election to a greater degree for disaster response assistance rather than funding preparedness. The original research for this paper explores the impact of natural disasters on re-election rates and analyzes voter trends during presidential election years in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region 3 states for congruence with existing literature covering a national scope. Evaluations of the behaviors and (re)election margins of Presidents Bush and Obama are explored, and implications for President Trump's re-election effort are based on quantitative data and qualitative comparisons.

Politics Go “Viral”: A Computational Text Analysis of the Public Attribution and Attitude Regarding the COVID-19 Crisis and Governmental Responses on Twitter

The U.S. confronts an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, in the presidential election year in 2020. In such a compound situation, a real-time dynamic examination of how the general public ascribe the crisis responsibilities taking account to their political ideologies is helpful for developing effective strategies to manage the crisis and diminish hostility toward particular groups caused by polarization. Social media, such as Twitter, provide platforms for the public’s COVID-related discourse to form, accumulate, and visibly present. Meanwhile, those features also make social media a window to monitor the public responses in real-time. This research conducted a computational text analysis of 2,918,376 tweets sent by 829,686 different U.S. users regarding COVID-19 from January 24 to May 25, 2020. Results indicate that the public’s crisis attribution and attitude toward governmental crisis responses are driven by their political identities. One crisis factor identified by this study (i.e., threat level) also affects the public’s attribution and attitude polarization. Additionally, we note that pandemic fatigue was identified in our findings as early as in March 2020. This study has theoretical, practical, and methodological implications informing further health communication in a heated political environment.

Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick

Reviewed by: Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick Hettie V. Williams Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election. By Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick. ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Pp. xii, 352. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-250-15570-2.) Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, coauthors of Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008) and Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality [End Page 193] Changed America (Boston, 2004), is a vivid narrative of the nine days in October 1960 when Martin Luther King Jr. remained in a Georgia jail. King had been arrested for participating in an Atlanta sit-in at Rich's department store as part of a massive wave of protests against the Atlanta business establishment over the issue of segregation. It was the first time King remained in jail for more than one night, described by the authors as a time when King's family "most feared for his life" (p. 5). It was a presidential election year, as the authors note, and the arrest of King, who was increasingly becoming a national figure on civil rights, was "a crisis that would help … determine the victor of the 1960 election" (p. 5). While the majority of the protesters were released, King languished in jail and was kept on a twenty-five-dollar traffic ticket. Refusing to pay bail, King was subsequently sentenced to four months of hard labor, to be served out at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, where Black prisoners worked on chain gangs supervised by vicious white guards. Presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were forced to make a choice on Black civil rights issues on the national stage. Nine Days is the story of how the arrest of King prompted the candidates and their campaigns to grapple with the question of Black civil rights and how their responses ultimately helped determine the outcome of the 1960 presidential race. Mainly it is the story of how the Civil Rights Section (CRS) of the Kennedy campaign, including Black journalist Louis E. Martin, Harris Wofford, and Sargent Shriver, convinced Kennedy to intervene in the situation in King's behalf. Shriver in particular, in his campaign role in charge of outreach to Black voters, pressured for King's release beyond the authority of Kennedy. In terms of organization, the text contains a prologue, fourteen chapters structured around the nine days that King spent in jail, and an epilogue. The prologue and the first two chapters, "In Trouble" and "You Can't Lead from the Back," lay the foundation of the larger story. The series of protests taking place in Atlanta at the time were largely organized and led by students such as Morehouse College student Lonnie King (no relation to Martin Luther King Jr.) in the downtown section of the city. As a result of conversations with student leaders, MLK was compelled to lend his voice to the cause and participate. According to the authors, "the students had timed the protest to affect a close national contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon" (p. 3). These first three sections discuss the events that led up to the Kennedy campaign's greater involvement, including some discussion of the development of the CRS under Harris Wofford, upon the release of most of the students and King's retention after refusing to pay bail. The remaining sections delve deeper into the machinations of the CRS. Nine Days is cogently written and is supported with a wealth of primary sources, including interviews conducted by the authors with eyewitnesses to the events covered in the text, archival collections such as the John F. Kennedy Papers, E. Frederic Morrow Papers, and the NAACP Papers, newspapers, oral history collections, and television and film resources. The authors conducted more...

Gay Politics Goes Mainstream: Democrats, Republicans and Same‐sex Relationships

Attitudes towards same‐sex relationships in the USA have changed radically over a relatively short period of time. After remaining fairly constant for over two decades, opinions became more favourable starting in 1992—a presidential election year in which the Democratic and Republican Parties took opposing stands over the status of gay people in society. What roles did political parties and their leaders play in this process of cultural change? Using a variety of techniques, including machine learning, we show that the partisan opinion gap emerged substantially prior to 1992—in the mid to late 1980s—and did not increase as a result of the political debates in 1992–3. Furthermore, we identify people with a college‐and‐above education as the potential ‘leaders’ of the process of partisan divergence.

Supreme Court Confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett: A “Blatant Act of Bad Faith”?

In the Senate proceedings on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats (and at least two Republicans) claimed that a confirmation of Supreme Court Justice in a presidential election year would be a break with Senate tradition—a violation of the mythologized “Thurmond Rule.” Named for Senator Strom Thurmond, the scope of the rule and its origins are murky. The rule likely originated in Thurmond’s campaign against President Jimmy Carter’s judicial nominees of 1980, when Thurmond served as ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This article discusses the Supreme Court confirmation process, Barrett’s background and nomination, the speed with which she was confirmed to the nation’s highest Court, and the conclusion of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service on whether the Thurmond Rule truly exists. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer declared the Barrett confirmation a “blatant act of bad faith” by the Republican majority in the Senate, which in 2016 invoked the Thurmond Rule to defer Senate action on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. As detailed by the Congressional Research Service, the Thurmond Rule has been invoked inconsistently by both parties at politically convenient times.

Elastic Relations: Looking to both Sides of the Atlantic in the 2020 US Presidential Election Year

Elastic Relations: Looking to both Sides of the Atlantic in the 2020 US Presidential Election Year

On the relationship between policy uncertainty and sustainable investing

PurposeIn recent times, sustainable investment gaining much attention within the investors’ community and it is broadly driven by environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. This study aims to examine the ESG-based sustainability index and economic policy uncertainty (EPU).Design/methodology/approachCorporate sustainability assessment procedure yields Dow Jones sustainability indexes (DJSIUS) and ESG compliant firms become a member of such indexes. To uncover the effects of policy uncertainty as follows: the study considers EPU index, equity market policy uncertainty index, economic and political events for the period 2000–2017. The authors present the study using a conditional volatility framework.FindingsThe correlation between the DJSIUS and policy uncertainty appears to be negative and statistically significant. It is apparent from the results that policy uncertainty does contain important ESG factors that explain the sustainable investment in US firms. Moreover, the stock market boom, credit crunch, Lehman collapse and fiscal crises have shown significant adverse effects on the sustainability index. More importantly, it is seen that investors’ sustainable investing considers presidential election years for portfolio planning; the uncertainty associated with the election years has also shown a negative impact on the sustainable returns.Practical implicationsFirst, sustainability is essential for the long-term stakeholders’ wealth maximization under governments’ policy uncertainty such as constrained resources, demographic and climate-change-policy, societal expectations, public-policies, regulatory structure. Second, EPU creates new opportunities and risks for sustainable firms and sustainable investing.Originality/valueThe study is novel in which the authors present the effects of uncertainty on socially responsible investing.

Changing channels? A comparison of Fox and MSNBC in 2012, 2016, and 2020

AbstractWe compare the contents of Fox and MSNBC weekday evening telecasts using natural language analysis with Linguistic Inventory Word Count (LIWC) and sociopolitical dictionaries tapping into moral foundations, values, grievances, and personality. Across time, the two networks differed substantially across many constructs, particularly those from LIWC. The core of the difference between the networks was captured by a four‐component measure which we labeled Personalizing versus Formal speech. Scores on this measure were particularly volatile during 2019 and 2020, a period which included Trump's first impeachment, the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and the 2020 presidential campaign. In comparison with prior presidential election years, only MSNBC showed a drop in positive emotions in 2020, while both networks increased in the use of communal and analytic language. Contrary to our expectations, the language style of the two networks did not demonstrate increasing divergence over time.