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Wednesday, December 9th (7:00 p.m.) Abstract: While media are the primary sources of information about foreign events, we know very little about how local television news, the most frequently watched news in America, cover foreign events and how their coverage relate to public attitudes. In this paper we examine public attitudes about Israel and show that Americans who watch local news were more likely to support Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War. This difference is strong even when we apply conventional demographic controls. We suggest that the attitudinal gap can be explained by the nature of the local news coverage of foreign events. We test this by applying Entman's framing functions to the local and network coverage of the Lebanon War and show that coverage of the war in the local newsrooms was significantly more supportive of the Israeli position. We propose that the difference in coverage is explained by economic and institutional constraints, as well as newsroom routines, which result in a tendency of the local media to comply with authorities' position.
Thursday, November 12th (7:00 p.m.) Abstract: Though education is central to the study of civic engagement, political scientists have not made much progress toward understanding the connections between them. Are more educated individuals more likely to engage in civic and political affairs because of the human capital they have gained through schooling, or just because education has sorted them into advantaged social positions? Or, is the perennial effect of education on engagement spurious - does education merely function as a proxy for unmeasured pre-adult advantages? Here, I argue that one reason the field has not made more progress toward understanding the effect of education is that most studies rely on a theoretically questionable and unnecessarily restrictive measurement of education - focusing on attainment, civics instruction, or a vocabulary test administered in adulthood. I present an altrenative method of measuring one form of human capital gained in school - communication skills gained in high school. I test the effect of these skills on adult civic engagement and find that they have a strong, positive effect on most forms of civic engagement.
Tuesday, October 27th (7:00 p.m.) Abstract: In spite of decades of research on the effects of legal barriers on voter turnout, we believe that this study is the first to measure the impact of the registration requirement itself. Previous examinations have focused not on registration per se but rather aspects or dimensions of the registration process. With this study, however, we take advantage of a natural experiment in the state of Wisconsin in order to estimate the pure effects of voter registration on turnout, absent the confounding influences of closing dates and other regulations. Prior to 2006, Wisconsin had a dual system of voter registration wherein voters in over 80 percent of the state’s 1,851 municipalities were not required to register before they could cast a ballot. When voter registration was implemented statewide, voters who had not previously been required to register were able to do so on the day of the election, owing to Wisconsin’s adoption of Election Day Registration (EDR) in the mid 1970s. Contrary to those who have argued that same-day registration eliminates all barriers to voting that are associated with the registration requirement, though, we find that the imposition of voter registration in all Wisconsin municipalities reduced turnout by one to two percent on average.
Abstract: Policy makers and scholars alike commonly claim that engaging religious nationalist and fundamentalist groups in the democratic game will lead to their moderation. While, historically, Israeli politics have borne out this assumption, recent events suggest that it may no longer hold. The 2009 elections in Israel show that the radical wing of the religious nationalists in Israel is overtaking the relatively moderate religious nationalists. This may reflect a "squeeze" of relatively moderate religious nationalists between the mainstream (secular) right in Israel and the more radical religious nationalists. The radicalization of moderate religiousZionists on one hand, and their increasing decision to vote for the mainstream center-right Likud, on the other, mean that radical religious nationalists will increasingly take the political and organizational leadership of this group in Israeli society. As a result, the relevance of moderate religious nationalism is likely to wane while that of the radicals grows. To the extent that this trend continues, the causal link between democratic engagement and political moderation would be undermined.
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