Although the Trump Administration has been decidedly unfriendly to transgender Americans, there is no question that transgender people have made substantial policy, political, and societal gains in recent years. These gains are the result partially of the activities of political organizations that advocate on behalf of transgender Americans. As of 2019, there were approximately 20 nationally active transgender rights interest groups in the United States, including several relatively well-resourced professional organizations. There are also dozens of active state, local, and regional transgender rights organizations.
What have we learned about transgender rights interest groups? First, transgender rights organizing began in the mid-1960s but did not really get off the ground until the mid-1990s. Second, there are probably more transgender rights interest groups operating in the United States today than there ever have been. Third, as the number of stand-alone transgender rights groups has grown, so has the number of broad-based LGB groups who have “added the T,” that is, added advocacy for transgender rights to their missions. Although the scholarly literature on transgender rights interest groups is severely limited, a number of sources, including primary source materials available through transgender and LGBT archives, historical treatments of transgender politics, and the writings and works of transgender activists, shed light on the history and activities of these groups.
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Transgender Rights Interest Groups in the United States
Anthony J. Nownes
Article
Using Experiments to Understand How Agency Influences Media Effects
Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson
Students of public opinion tend to focus on how exposure to political media, such as news coverage and political advertisements, influences the political choices that people make. However, the expansion of news and entertainment choices on television and via the Internet makes the decisions that people make about what to consume from various media outlets a political choice in its own right. While the current day hyperchoice media landscape opens new avenues of research, it also complicates how we should approach, conduct, and interpret this research. More choices means greater ability to choose media content based on one’s political preferences, exacerbating the severity of selection bias and endogeneity inherent in observational studies. Traditional randomized experiments offer compelling ways to obviate these challenges to making valid causal inferences, but at the cost of minimizing the role that agency plays in how people make media choices.
Resent research modifies the traditional experimental design for studying media effects in ways that incorporate agency over media content. These modifications require researchers to consider different trade-offs when choosing among different design features, creating both advantages and disadvantages. Nonetheless, this emerging line of research offers a fresh perspective on how people’s media choices shapes their reaction to media content and political decisions.
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Using Online Experiments to Study Political Decision Making
Yotam Shmargad and Samara Klar
The field of political science is experiencing a new proliferation of experimental work, thanks to a growth in online experiments. Administering traditional experimental methods over the Internet allows for larger and more accessible samples, quick response times, and new methods for treating subjects and measuring outcomes. As we show in this chapter, a rapidly growing proportion of published experiments in political science take advantage of an array of sophisticated online tools. Indeed, during a relatively short period of time, political scientists have already made huge gains in the sophistication of what can be done with just a simple online survey experiment, particularly in realms of inquiry that have traditionally been logistically difficult to study. One such area is the important topic of social interaction. Whereas experimentalists once relied on resource- and labor-intensive face-to-face designs for manipulating social settings, creative online efforts and accessible platforms are making it increasingly easy for political scientists to study the influence of social settings and social interactions on political decision-making. In this chapter, we review the onset of online tools for carrying out experiments and we turn our focus toward cost-effective and user-friendly strategies that online experiments offer to scholars who wish to not only understand political decision-making in isolated settings but also in the company of others. We review existing work and provide guidance on how scholars with even limited resources and technical skills can exploit online settings to better understand how social factors change the way individuals think about politicians, politics, and policies.
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Violence, Politics, and Gender
Gabrielle S. Bardall
This article presents a conceptual orientation to the intersection of gender, politics, and violence. The first part of the article will introduce the subject by reviewing the primary conceptual framework and empirical knowledge on the topic to date and discussing the theoretical heritage of the concept. Establishing a key distinction between gender-motivated and gender differentiated violence, this article will discuss the gender dimensions of political violence and the political dimensions of gender-based violence. The latter half of the article reviews a number of the key questions driving research and dialogue in the field in the 21st century.
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Violent Regime Change: Causes and Consequences
Dov Levin and Carmela Lutmar
The practice of foreign imposed regime change (FIRCs) is old, multicausal, and multifaceted. FIRCs have two main characteristics: they include some form of violent use of force to execute them (either covert or overt in nature), and their consequence is a change in the leadership of the polity in which they take place. FIRCs are frequently claimed to have major effects on their targets, such as inducing shifts towards the regime type preferred by the intervener, inducing intra-state violence, increasing cooperation with the target, and improving the economic welfare of the intervener. A review of the literature on the causes and effects of such interventions as well as the main existing datasets of FIRCs shows that significant progress has been made in our understanding of these phenomena with research on some aspects of FIRCs, such as their utility as a tool of inducing democratization, reaching a near scholarly consensus in this regard. Scholars studying this topic can adjust their current approaches (such as agreement upon a list of FIRCs, and the avoidance of conceptual over-stretching) in order to enable continued progress.
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Voter Behavior in Latin America
Matthew M. Singer and Gabriela Ramalho Tafoya
Voter choices in Latin America have structural roots that are similar to what is observed in other regions, but these structures are weaker and more fluid than in more established democracies. In particular, while cleavages emerge in the average Latin American country and voters’ choices vary across demographic traits, issues, ideologies, and partisanship, these cleavages are weaker than in Western Europe and the United States. These cleavages are particularly weak in countries where parties do not take ideologically distinct positions from each other and instead emphasize clientelism, which suggests that the overall weakness of these cleavages in the hemisphere reflects the weak commitment of political parties to programmatic competition. Elections in Latin America are strongly shaped by government performance, especially economic trends, but these forms of accountability are weakened in countries where the party system makes it hard to identify the degree to which any specific party is able to dominate the policy process or where identifying a credible alternative to the incumbent is difficult. Thus, while voters are trying to use elections to hold politicians accountable and to ensure that their policy preferences are represented, the weaknesses of Latin America’s party systems often make this difficult.
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Voter Information Processing and Political Decision Making
Alessandro Nai
Contemporary political information processing and the subsequent decision making mechanisms are suboptimal. Average voters usually have but vague notions of politics and cannot be said to be motivated to invest considerable amount of times to make up their minds about political affairs; furthermore, political information is not only complex and virtually infinite but also often explicitly designed to deceive and persuade by triggering unconscious mechanisms in those exposed to it. In this context, how can voters sample, process, and transform the political information they receive into reliable political choices? Two broad set of dynamics are at play. On the one hand, individual differences determine how information is accessed and processed: different personality traits set incentives (and hurdles) for information processing, the availability of information heuristics and the motivation to treat complex information determine the preference between easy and good decisions, and partisan preferences establish boundaries for information processing and selective exposure. On the other hand, and beyond these individual differences, the content of political information available to citizens drives decision making: the alleged “declining quality” of news information poses threats for comprehensive and systematic reasoning; excessive negativity in electoral campaigns drives cynicism (but also attention); and the use of emotional appeals increases information processing (anxiety), decreases interest and attention (rage), and strengthens the reliance on individual predispositions (enthusiasm).
At the other end of the decisional process, the quality of the choices made (Was the decision supported by “ambivalent” opinions? And to what extent was the decision “correct”?) is equally hard to assess, and fundamental normative questions come into play.
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Voting Advice Applications
Diego Garzia and Stefan Marschall
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that assist citizens with their voting decisions. They are offered to voters before elections in many countries and have experienced remarkable success. Recently flourishing research on VAAs addresses this phenomenon and provides explanations for the dissemination and popularity of these tools. Moreover, VAAs have been analyzed regarding their effects on political parties, candidates, and on voters in regard to their electoral behavior. Research shows that using a VAA indeed makes a difference, while the effect depends strongly on the way a VAA is designed and by whom it is used. The abundance of data generated by VAAs bears potential for comparative studies of public opinion and party systems over time and across countries, and thereby bridges research on VAAs to general questions of political science research.
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Voting Choice and Rational Choice
Anthony McGann
Rational choice theory may seem like a separate theoretical approach with its own forbidding mathematics. However, the central assumptions of rational choice theory are very similar to those in mainstream political behavior and even interpretive sociology. Indeed, many of the statistical methods used in empirical political behavior assume axiomatic models of voter choice. When we consider individual voting behavior, the contribution of rational choice has been to formalize what empirical political scientists do anyway, and provide some new tools. However, it is when we consider collective voting choice—what elections mean and what kind of policy outcomes result—that rational choice leads to new, counterintuitive insights. Rational choice also has a normative dimension. Without voter rationality the traditional understanding of democracy as popular choice makes little sense.
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Voting in European Union Politics
Monika Mühlböck
Together, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the European Union form the bicameral legislature of the European Union (EU). However, as the analysis of voting behavior shows, decision-making is structured differently in the two institutions. In the EP, competition takes place between European party groups along a left-right and a rising pro-anti EU integration dimension. In the Council, ideology and party politics play a minor role. Voting behavior of ministers is determined by different national interests on an issue-by-issue basis. Furthermore, voting in the Council is dominated by the so-called culture of consensus. Despite the extension of qualified majority voting (QMV) to most areas of EU decision-making, many legislative proposals are adopted unanimously. Even if there is dissent, it is usually only one or two member states voting against the proposal. This makes it difficult to discover patterns of conflict and coalition formation through Council voting data. At the same time, consensus-seeking is something the Council and the EP have in common. In the EP, voting cohesion is high not only within groups but also in the EP plenary as a whole, with a grand coalition between Social Democrats and Conservatives forming frequently, often including the Liberals as well as parties on the left side of the political spectrum. Notwithstanding signs of a decline in consensual decision-making in the wake of the financial and the migration crisis, voting cohesion dominates within the Council and the EP, as well as across institutions in bicameral decision-making.
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Welfare Politics in Africa
Jeremy Seekings
The emerging literature on the politics of social protection in Africa provides insights into the ways in which the unevenly changing character of representative democracy shapes processes of public policymaking in practice. Reforms are widely on the agenda, in part as a result of their advocacy by diverse international organizations and aid donors. But there are many obstacles between the policy agenda and policymaking (and implementation). In many countries, political elites hold conservative views on cash transfer programs. The institutionalization of regular and nominally contested elections has rarely resulted in significant pressures from below for pro-poor programmatic social policy reforms. In some countries, “democratic” politics continues to revolve around competition for patronage rather than programmatic reform. In others, voters themselves seem to prioritize other programs (especially agricultural subsidies) ahead of social protection. Nonetheless, a growing number of competitively elected governments have introduced reforms, as have some semi-democratic or authoritarian regimes. For both more and less democratic governments, regime legitimation through apparently more inclusive development seems to be a more powerful factor than voter pressure.
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What Is Political Participation?
Jan W. van Deth
Vibrant democracies are characterized by a continuous expansion of the available forms of participation. This expansion has confronted many researchers with the dilemma of using either a dated conceptualization of participation and excluding many new modes of political action or stretching their concept to cover almost everything. Many newer, “creative,” “personalized,” and “individualized” modes of participation such as political consumption, street parties, or guerrilla gardening, are hard to define because they basically concern nonpolitical activities used for political purposes. Especially using internet-based technologies for these activities (“connective action”) makes it very difficult to recognize political participation. Social, societal, and political developments in democratic societies have made the search for a single encompassing definition of political participation obsolete. Therefore, an alternative approach is to integrate the core features of political participation in a conceptual map. Five modes cover the whole range of political participation systematically and efficiently, based on the locus (polity), targeting (government area or community problems), and circumstance (context or motivations) of these activities. While especially the rise of expressive modes of participation requires the inclusion of contextual information or the aims and goals of participants, attention is paid to the (dis)advantages of including these aspects as defining criteria for political participation. A conceptual map of political participation offers a comprehensive answer to the question “What is political participation?” without excluding future participatory innovations that are the hallmark of a vibrant democracy.
