Jeffrey W Ladewig

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Connecticut

The theory that television, and in particular television violence, cultivates beliefs, attitudes, and actions in viewers, particularly heavy viewers, has long been a mainstay of media studies. Some critiques of the more recent empirical literature, however, argue that the current literature has lost some connection to the original theoretical formu...

In the past few years, there has much discussion about two of the most important recent trends in American politics: the increase in income inequality in the United States and the development of ideological and partisan polarization, particularly in the U.S. House. It is commonly assumed that these two national-level trends are positively related....

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor famously declared in Shaw v. Reno that "appearances do matter" when it comes to the shape of congressional districts. Although there are no definitive legal requirements for districts' geographical appearances, the argument is widely posited that more compact districts are better. The reasoning often assert...

Despite the increased importance of and attention to renewable energy, its share in the overall energy mix has varied significantly across countries and over time. There are many determinants of clean energy transitions; this study focuses on political constraints. Here it is argued that political systems that have fewer political constraints have...

Ever since the Supreme Court instituted the one person, one vote principle in congressional elections based on its decision in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), intrastate deviations from equal district populations have become smaller and smaller after each decennial reapportionment. Relying on equal total population as the standard to meet the Court’s p...

The 109th Congress commenced with a huge ethical cloud hanging over the Capitol. In January 2005, prominent Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff admitted conspiring to defraud Native American tribes and corrupt public officials. As a result, the Democratic Party chose to adopt corruption as a central theme of their 2006 congressional campaign. They ar...

Las asunciones que los niveles más altos de la confianza en el gobierno siempre son beneficiosos para la democracia pueden ser inadecuadas, y el grado de confianza en el gobierno que tienen los residentes de los Estados Unidos (EE.UU) a menudo se subestima debido a interpretaciones comunes de datos de opinión pública. Reexaminando los datos de Amer...

The extensive literature on the recent ideological polarization in the U.S. Congress has not provided much in the way of incremental and member-specific explanations. I develop such a theory; I posit that members’ past electoral performance can influence their ideological extremity. This link requires a reexamination of congress members’ roll-call...

Since the emergence of the Internet as an outlet for mass political participation, there has been considerable disagreement over whether political activities can be performed reliably and securely online. In this paper, we consider one aspect of this debate, assessing whether the general public perceives differential risk in participating in politi...

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court drew attention to and made considerable efforts toward eliminating intrastate malapportionment among U.S. House districts with the one-person, one-vote rule. Today, this rule is significantly, and more severely, violated by a rarely discussed or analyzed form of malapportionment, interstate malapportionment. We id...

The political business cycle (PBC) literature has, generally, been characterized by a relatively narrow set of economic variables and by unidirectional causal analysis. I challenge both of these traditional constructions. First, I expand the search by examining a surprisingly understudied component of the political economy: the housing market. As a...

In this study, we theoretically refine and empirically test the presumed links between the level of democracy in a country and the amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) it receives in the global economy. We argue that both consolidated democracies and authoritarian regimes have institutional advantages for investors and that both are relatively...

This paper seeks to better understand the complex relationship between financial globalization and democratization. We do so by distinguishing among four types of foreign capital and discussing their possible implications for democratic development. An analysis of the aggregate financial and democratic trends for 92 developing countries from 1970 t...

The constituent influences on congressional voting patterns for trade policy have long been an important field of study. A central theoretical component (explicitly or implicitly) of all these studies is the level of factor mobility that defines which constituent coalitions will form and how they will be affected. Yet the recent literature offers c...

Objectives. Partisanship should affect evaluations of Congress just as it affects evaluations of the president, and these institutional evaluations should affect political trust. We argue that the relationship between partisanship and trust is dependent on partisan control of Congress and that much of party identification's influence on trust occur...

In recent years, surveillance has become an increasingly salient political issue in the United States. In this article we present data on public opinion about privacy invasions and surveillance techniques since 1990. Generally speaking, the polls show that concern about threats to personal privacy has been growing in recent years. Although the publ...

The conditional party government (CPG) theory posits that political par-ties will be strong when they are polarized and homogeneous. The homogeneity of the parties is generated from the homogeneity of constituent coalitions. However, these root causes of constituent interests have remained largely untested. By focusing on trade policy issues, we ca...

The conditional party government (CPG) theory posits that political parties will be strong when they are polarized and homogeneous. The homogeneity of the parties is generated from the homogeneity of constituent coalitions. However, these root causes of constituent interests have remained largely untested. By focusing on trade policy issues, we can...

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