Wedge Issue Research Articles

Another wedge issue

Another wedge issue

The China Card: Playing Politics with Sino-American Relations

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After the Culture War?: Shifts and Continuities in American Conservatism

Following the 2008 American election, some analysts concluded that the election had signalled an end to the polarization and culture wars that had typified American politics. To some, demographic changes would cause this demise. To others, the moderating of religious groups was crucial. As social conservatives came to grips with the 2008 electoral defeats, some argued for emphasis on culture-war issues to revive their role. Sin No More (John Dombrink and Daniel Hillyard, 2007) had argued that, despite conservative rhetoric, the tide was turning on the core legal and moral issues of the American culture war, moving them toward normalization. It challenged the representation of America as a "centre-right" country. This article analyzes enduring and shifting elements of the American culture war: the broadening of the role of religion, the reduced salience of wedge issues, and the paradox that some forms of polarization are increasing as others are receding. Après les élections américaines de 2008, certains analystes ont conclu que l'élection signifiait la fin de la polarisation et des guerres de culture typiques de la politique américaine. Selon certains, les changements démographiques causeraient cette fin. Selon d'autres, la surveillance de groupes religieux était cruciale. Alors que les conservateurs sociaux commençaient à comprendre la défaite électorale de 2008, certains voulaient mettre l'accent sur les questions de guerre de culture afin de faire revivre leur rôle. Sin No More (2007) a soutenu que, malgré la rhétorique conservatrice, il y avait des changements en ce qui concernait les questions fondamentales, tant légales que morales, de la guerre de culture américaine, et que ces questions se normalisaient. Le livre défiait la représentation des États-Unis en tant que pays du centre droit. Cet article analyse les éléments qui perdurent et les éléments qui changent de la guerre de culture américaine : l'élargissement du rôle de la religion, la perte d'importance de points de clivage et le paradoxe du fait que certaines formes de polarisation augmentent alors que d'autres diminuent.

After the Culture War? Shifts and Continuities in American Conservatism

Abstract: Following the 2008 American election, some analysts concluded that the election had signalled an end to the polarization and culture wars that had typified American politics. To some, demographic changes would cause this demise. To others, the moderating of religious groups was crucial. As social conservatives came to grips with the 2008 electoral defeats, some argued for emphasis on culture-war issues to revive their role. Sin No More (John Dombrink and Daniel Hillyard, 2007) had argued that, despite conservative rhetoric, the tide was turning on the core legal and moral issues of the American culture war, moving them toward normalization. It challenged the representation of America as a “centre-right” country. This article analyzes enduring and shifting elements of the American culture war: the broadening of the role of religion, the reduced salience of wedge issues, and the paradox that some forms of polarization are increasing as others are receding.

Direct Democracy on Election Day: Ballot Measures as Measures of American Democracy

Ballot Measures (or Propositions) are a form of Progressive Era direct democracy which has regained momentum in recent years. Re-energizing voters in the 38 U. S. states where they raise grassroots and often controversial “wedge issues”, they also have spill-over effects in other areas of politics and civil engagement. This introduction provides background information about their workings and an update on recent stakes in local political environments: it introduces in-depth studies published in this issue of Transatlantica.

Campaign Websites and Hypermedia Campaigning: Lessons from the Ed Balls Labour Leadership Campaign 2010

Political campaigns are increasingly making use of new media tools to both broadcast messages to and communicate with potential voters. Such use of a range of new and traditional media channels synergistically has been theorised to offer specific advantages to campaigns, leading some media scholars to attach the term ‘hypermedia’ to the practice. Features of hypermedia campaigning include flexible organisational structure, synergistic feedback of messages across multiple online and offline media channels, and the identification and targeting of key groups of undecided voters with wedge issues. Recently, the 2010 labour leadership contest afforded the opportunity to evaluate the use and effectiveness of these strategies in a live campaign. The authors analysed traffic and visitor behaviour on the Ed Balls labour leadership campaign website for 100 days leading up to the election. The hypermedia strategy was deemed partially successful: while the candidates website successfully attracted a large number of visitors, data suggest that the wedge issue strategy, while seen as desirable by the campaign managers, was less effective for the Balls campaign team in the context of the labour leadership race. The campaigns focus on social media platforms rather than search engines meant that the majority of visitors to the campaign website were already familiar with, or supportive of Ed Balls political platform.

"Spin Zones" in American Presidential Elections

"Spin Zones" in American Presidential Elections

Public Opinion, Organized Labor, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1936–1945

The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation by the U.S. federal government in the early-to-mid-1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong national unions, national health insurance, and full employment policies. Drawing upon rarely used early public opinion polls, we explore the dynamics of public opinion regarding New Deal liberalism during this pivotal era. We argue that a broadly based reaction against labor unions created a difficult backdrop for liberal programmatic advances. We find that this anti-labor reaction was especially virulent in the South but divided even Northern Democrats, thus creating an effective wedge issue for Republicans and their Southern conservative allies. More generally, we find that the mass public favored most of the specific programs created by the New Deal, but was hardly clamoring for major expansions of the national government's role in the late 1930s and 1940s. These findings illuminate the role played by the South in constraining New Deal liberalism while also highlighting the tenuousness of the liberal majority in the North.

The Legislative Process Is Not Fit for the Abortion Debate

In the wake of Republican gains in November 2010, anti-abortion bills were common and aggressive during the 2011 legislative sessions. (1) State general assemblies passed statutes that include provisions to (a) block abortions after twenty weeks of gestation, (b) require doctors to tell pregnant women that fetuses feel pain at or before twenty weeks of gestation, (c) prevent state or federal health care dollars from reaching clinics and physician groups that provide abortions as part of their services, (2) and (d) require doctors to describe the ultrasound images of the fetus and offer women the option to view the ultrasound and listen to the fetal heartbeat before an abortion. (3) These statutes are troubling for a number of reasons. Many of their provisions violate constitutional principles enunciated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. (4) For example, the Court has held that states must leave the determination of fetal viability to the medical judgment of physicians rather than defining viability at a specific point in pregnancy (like twenty weeks of gestation). (5) The Court also has insisted that when states mandate disclosures to patients, they may not prescribe information that is nontruthful or misleading. (6) The statements about fetal pain misrepresent medical understanding. (7) As for federal health care funding, states may choose how to allocate their own dollars, but their efforts to interfere with the implementation of federal spending decisions may run afoul of the supremacy clause principle that federal law takes priority over state law. (8) The state statutes also reveal flaws in the argument that divisive moral issues like abortion should be resolved through the political process rather than by courts. Some people, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, make this argument on the grounds that our democratic system is premised on majority rule and that elected representatives are more likely than unelected judges to reflect public sentiment. (9) To be sure, majorities cannot override constitutional principles, but champions of the political process believe that the text of the Constitution provides little support for fundamental rights like abortion and that judges who find such rights are relying more on their own preferences than the intentions of the constitutional framers. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others have argued that deciding public policy through judicial fiat short-circuits a deliberative political process that can allow for a public consensus to evolve over time and through a laboratory of state experimentation in which different states try different approaches. (10) But arguments in favor of the political process neglect the fact that many elected officials are not interested in finding common ground on divisive social issues like abortion. Indeed, candidates and public officials often prefer to exploit such controversies for electoral gain. By running on issues, candidates can attract voters who ordinarily would identify with the opposition. (11) From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, pro-life individuals were more likely to vote Democratic and pro-choice individuals more likely to vote Republican in presidential elections. (12) By adopting strong antiabortion positions, Republican candidates have been able to attract voters who previously aligned themselves with the Democratic Party. (13) When a political party has found a potent wedge issue, it may conclude that it has more to gain on election day by perpetuating the conflict than by resolving the issue. (14) As a result, policies that could reduce the demand for abortion may fail to gain support. Republicans often oppose funding for contraceptive education or products, and a bill to cut off funding for all of Planned Parenthood's family planning and reproductive health services was passed in Indiana this year. (15) If it survives legal challenge, the legislation may have profound implications for unwanted pregnancies. …

Cracks in the Opposition: Immigration as a Wedge Issue for the Reagan Coalition

The absence of a core means that a majority coalition can never choose a policy that will keep it safe from minority appeals to its pivotal members. In two dimensions, strategic minorities will always be able to offer pivotal voters attractive policy concessions. We argue that this instability of multidimensional politics explains why minorities raise wedge issues and how wedge issues result in partisan realignment in legislative politics. Applying agenda-constrained ideal point estimation techniques to immigration debates, we show that the Reagan coalition—pro-business and social conservatives—has been vulnerable on the wedge issue of immigration and that parties have switched their positions on immigration over the last three decades. We use the uncovered set as the best-fit theoretical solution concept in this legislative environment, to capture the limits of majority rule coalitional possibilities and policy change in the two-dimensional absence of a core.

Psychedelic Drugs, Hippie Counterculture, Speed and Phenobarbital Treatment of Sedative-Hypnotic Dependence: A Journey to the Haight Ashbury in the Sixties

The 1960s were a time of social upheaval, wars, vibrant creativity and missed opportunity. Mainstream culture and a psychedelic drug-using counterculture shared a belief in “better living through chemistry,” but they disagreed about the particular chemistry. The Vietnam war and the cold war with the Soviet Union, racial discrimination, and gender roles fueled political activism. “Yes we can” was not a slogan of the time but political activists clearly believed they could change the beliefs, attitudes and behavior of mainstream culture; and they did. Hippie counterculture on the other hand was largely alienated and strove primarily to develop a separate culture with its own mores, beliefs and lifestyles. Although there was some overlap between hippies and activists, hippies didn't generally have the same sense of political empowerment. Hippie enclaves developed in New York; Boston; Seattle; Austin, Texas and elsewhere; but the epicenter was arguably the Haight-Asbury District of San Francisco. Psychedelic drugs, marijuana and the Vietnam war were among many wedge issues. This paper conjures up a personal history related to the evolution of the hippie counterculture, changing drug use patterns in the Haight-Ashbury, and the origins of a technique of withdrawing patients from barbiturates and other sedative-hypnotics using phenobarbital variously known as the “Phenobarbital Withdrawal Protocol, or the “Smith and Wesson Protocol.”

Education, politics and opinions about climate change evidence for interaction effects

U.S. public opinion regarding climate change has become increasingly polarized in recent years, as partisan think tanks and others worked to recast an originally scientific topic into a political wedge issue. Nominally “scientific” arguments against taking anthropogenic climate change seriously have been publicized to reach informed but ideologically receptive audiences. Reflecting the success of such arguments, polls have noted that concern about climate change increased with education among Democrats, but decreased with education among Republicans. These observations lead to the hypothesis that there exist interaction (non-additive) effects between education or knowledge and political orientation, net of other background factors, in predicting public concern about climate change. Two regional telephone surveys, conducted in New Hampshire (n = 541) and Michigan (n = 1, 008) in 2008, included identical climate-change questions that provide opportunities to test this hypothesis. Multivariate analysis of both surveys finds significant interactions. These empirical results fit with theoretical interpretations and several other recent studies. They suggest that the classically identified social bases of concern about the environment in general, and climate in particular, have shifted in recent years. Narrowcast media, including the many Web sites devoted to discrediting climate-change concerns, provide ideal conduits for channeling contrarian arguments to an audience predisposed to believe and electronically spread them further. Active-response Web sites by climate scientists could prove critical to counterbalancing contrarian arguments.

Public Opinion, Organized Labor, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1936-1945

The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation of the early-to-mid 1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong national unions, national health insurance, and full employment policies. Drawing upon rarely used early public opinion polls, we explore the dynamics of public opinion regarding New Deal liberalism from this pivotal era. We argue that a broadly based reaction against labor unions created a difficult backdrop for liberal programmatic advances. We find that this anti-labor reaction was especially virulent in the South but divided even Northern Democrats, thus creating an effective wedge issue for Republicans and their Southern conservative allies. More generally, we find that the mass public generally favored the specific programs created by the New Deal, but was hardly clamoring for major expansions of the national government’s role in the late 1930s and 1940s. These findings illuminate the role played by the South in constraining New Deal liberalism while also highlighting the tenuousness of the liberal majority in the North.

Wedge-issue dynamics and party position shifts

Even when the stakes of party-building are high, political parties often find their members divided over a key policy position. In post-Reconstruction America, the hot-button issue of excluding Chinese immigrant workers strengthened Democratic cohesion while splitting the ‘party of Lincoln’. Previous research has not completely investigated the role of party competition and cohesiveness in paving the way for passage of the Chinese exclusion laws. In this investigation of the legislative politics of banning the Chinese from 1879 to 1882, it is found that cross-pressured members sometimes facilitate party transformation. The evidence demonstrates that partisan responses to potential wedge issues are a previously unnoticed source of explanation of eventual party position changes.

Place Effects on Environmental Views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people's environmental views depend not only on personal char- acteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource- based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual- level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences.

Polls and Elections: What's the Matter with the White Working Class? The Effects of Union Membership in the 2004 Presidential Election

Thomas Frank asserts that the Republican Party built a winning coalition in recent elections by convincing white working-class voters to cast their ballots on the basis of cultural wedge issues. Larry Bartels, conversely, argues that economic issues remain paramount to white working-class voters. The authors contend that the white working class is a more diverse bloc than both Frank's and Bartels's analyses suggest. Using data from the 2004 National Election Pool, their results show that there are significant political differences between white working-class voters in union households and those in nonunion households.

The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns - By D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields

The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns - By D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields

A Wedge Issue

A wedge slides down a frictionless inclined plane that makes angle θ with the horizontal. A small block is placed at the horizontal top side of the wedge. During the slide, the block does not move relative to the wedge. Find the minimum possible coefficient of static friction μs between the block and the wedge.

Redistribution, Pork and Elections

Why might citizens vote against redistributive policies from which they would seem to benefit? Many scholars focus on wedge issues such as religion or race, but another explanation might be geographically-based patronage or pork. We examine the tension between redistribution and patronage with a model that combines partisan elections across multiple districts with legislation in spatial and divide-the-dollar environments. The model yields a unique equilibrium that describes the circumstances under which poor voters support right-wing parties that favor low taxes and redistribution, and under which rich voters support left-wing parties that favor high taxes and redistribution. The model suggests that one reason standard tax and transfer models of redistribution often do not capture empirical reality is that redistributive transfers are a less efficient tool for attracting votes than are more targeted policy programs. The model also underlines the central importance of party discipline during legislative bargaining in shaping the importance of redistribution in voter behavior, and it describes why right-wing parties should have an advantage over left-wing ones in majoritarian systems.

How “Inconvenient” is Al Gore's Climate Message?

The release of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and his subsequent training of thousands of Climate Presenters marks a critical transition point in communication around climate change. This paper will show that key elements of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and the advice and training he gives to Climate Presenters are based on the results of research into marketing approaches to creating behavioural change. This paper will then consider the ultimate effectiveness of this approach to Climate change communication in the light of the critique of such marketing approaches to communicating on environmental issues in the 2008 WWF report, 'Weathercocks & signposts'.