Melissa J. Marschall

• PhD SUNY-Stony Brook
• Professor at Rice University

In this article, we explore how heightened repression and the consolidation of power by the executive branch in Turkey have allowed Erdoğan to take steps that further undermine the country’s democratic evolution. We argue that Erdoğan’s increasing pressure on the media, along with the state of emergency following the 2016 coup attempt, facilitated...

Though it is often assumed that U.S. local elections are uniformly low turnout events, there is actually considerable variation across space and time. Building on literature on local turnout and broader theories of political participation, this study examines more than 1,000 California mayoral elections held between 1995 and 2014. We analyze how tw...

How does place matter for participation in local politics and elections? To date, social scientists have largely ignored this question, in part because their focus has not been on local politics and elections. We think this is unfortunate given that 99% of all governments in the U.S. are local governments. Given stark differences in rates of turnou...

This study compares what schools are doing to engage parents and analyzes the efficacy of these initiatives across predominantly Black, Latino, and White schools. Using the National Center for Education Statistics’s (NCES) Schools and Staffing Surveys (SASS, 1999-2004), we specify a model that accounts both for factors associated with school polici...

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ye Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into. account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and tradition...

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and traditiona...

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing its success in local elections. Our examination of the durability of the AKP takes into account existing explanations of Turkish electoral politics such as economic voting, center-periphery relations, and traditiona...

A substantial thread of research on electoral politics in America focuses on questions regarding the candidates who seek elected office, the campaign strategies and platforms these candidates pursue, the money they raise, the advertisements they (or the political action committees) run, and the voters who are ultimately mobilized. A perennial quest...

This study applies insights from principal-agent models to examine whether and how the language assistance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Sections 203 and 4(f)(4), affect Latino representation. Using panel data from 1984–2012, we estimate two-stage models that consider the likelihood and extent of Latino board representation for a sample of 1...

In this paper we examine the rise and consolidation of the Justice and Development Party (Adelet ve Kalinma Partisi, AKP) by analyzing the AKP’s success in local elections from 2004-2014. To explain the durability of the AKP, we develop a theoretical framework that takes into account both the clientelistic tendencies of Turkish parties and the effe...

Sound evidence demonstrating what, if any, role the Voting Rights Act (VRA) has played in the impressive gains minorities have made in local office holding over the last 45 years remains in short supply. The present study is motivated by three crucial questions. First, where are gains in minority office holding most apparent, and how are these gain...

Objectives This study examines how schools situated in different “contexts of reception” go about the critical task of engaging and supporting immigrant parents.Methods Using data from the 2003–04 National Center for Educational Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Surveys, we estimate regression models to test the effects of cultural brokers, teacher...

Objectives. This study examines how schools situated in different “contexts of reception” go about the critical task of engaging and supporting immigrant parents. Methods. Using data from the 2003–04 National Center for Educational Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Surveys, we estimate regression models to test the effects of cultural brokers, teach...

This article examines racial and ethnic politics in towns and cities in the United States. It reviews the significant developments in the racial and ethnic composition of local places in the United States, and considers the implications of minority representation, both symbolically, as a precursor to psychological shifts in political efficacy and t...

This study examines how instrumental and symbolic messages embedded in state law shape the practices of “street-level” bureaucrats. Specifically, we investigate whether passage of state-level English Only laws influences the way English language learners are instructed in local public schools. Using data on state English Only laws from 1987 to 2004...

Given the large number of cases and considerable institutional and contextual variation across and within local governments, one might assume that the study of local elections is an area already well harvested by political scientists. The truth, however, is that this area of inquiry is relatively unexplored. In fact, to say that a field of study on...

In this study we revisit the question of black representation on city councils and school boards using a novel substantive and methodological approach and longitudinal data for a sample of over 300 boards and councils. Conceptualizing black representation as a two-stage process, we fit Mullahy's hurdle Poisson models to explain whether and to what...

This article reviews four explanations for why participation and urban politics scholars have largely ignored local elections and outlines the themes of volume and variation in describing the landscape of local government and local elections. The landscape of local governments and elections in the US is described. Research on local elections and lo...

Although trust in government has been declining for all Americans, Black Americans continue to be significantly less trusting than their White counterparts. Scholars have typically relied on the political reality model to explain this gap, arguing that lower trust among Blacks stems from their exclusion from power. Given contemporary gains in Black...

Traditional studies of minority incorporation focus on the redistribution of public resources that purportedly follows black gains in representation. The present study departs from this approach by focusing on the attitudinal effects of black leadership. Two research questions guide this study: To what extent do blacks' assessments of neighborhood...

Objectives. Although urban scholarship has come to better understand the dynamics of black political incorporation in the United States, to date scant empirical attention has been paid to an important element of minority representation in local politics—the rise of black mayors. The present study addresses this gap in the extant literature. Methods...

This study focuses on the determinants and effects of parent involvement in schools, in the context of urban school districts, and particularly with regard to the schools that serve Latino students. Three research questions are investigated in this article: (1) What are schools doing to support parents, foster involvement and engagement in their ch...

Do instruments of direct democracy affect policymaking and, if so, how? The political science literature is rife with increasingly sophisticated empirical efforts to answer these questions (Matsusaka 2004; Lupia and Matsusaka 2004). Having expended much energy over the past two decades studying the initiative's effects on state and local policy, Ma...

Several recent studies have investigated the relationship between direct democracy and public policy outcomes, with mixed findings. These inconsistencies may stem, in part, from researchers' failure to recognize that direct democracy institutions are distributed nonrandomly across the American states. That is, certain factors may lead a state to ad...

Building on the conceptual framework developed by the Civic Capacity and Urban Education Project, we investigate why sustained reform is so difficult in urban school systems. Our study addresses two questions: How does the concept of civic capacity relate to the policy change process and how do its various components relate to each other? And to wh...

Previous research has indicated that socio-economic and racial characteristics of an individual's environment influence not only group consciousness and solidarity, but also affect his or her views toward minority or majority groups. Missing from this research is a consideration of how context, social interaction, and interracial experiences combin...

In this article I examine citizen participation in the realm of local service delivery, addressing two fundamental questions. First, in what ways do individual- and neighborhood-level factors shape citizens’ perceptions of crime and education as serious problems? Second, what leads individuals to get involved in activities and organizations related...

The design and implementation of school choice programs have emerged as critical issues in debates about how to reform American schools. At the core of these debates are issues of equity and fairness. For example, does the introduction of school choice lead to greater stratification along racial and socio-economic dimensions? Do all parents have eq...

The authors investigate the central role that education policy played in the 2000 presidential election. They conducted content analyses of campaign messages to examine empirically the specific positions George W Bush and Al Gore staked out during the campaign and the strategies they employed to win over the electorate. They then explore the effect...

Despite the voluminous literature on participation, when it comes to the participatory behavior of racial and ethnic minorities and lower-income groups, many questions remain unanswered. The author tests the extent to which four theoretical models—socioeconomic status, psychological orientations, social context, and mobilization resource—explain th...

American education is undergoing rapid change. Concern over poor student performance, the ability and motivation of teachers, and the inefficiency of school bureaucracy have led to numerous recommendations for changing the structure of American education. These vary from small changes in the current structure to wholesale privatization of public sc...

The United States is in the midst of a reform movement empowering parents to choose among an expanded set of schools for their children. Inherent in these reforms is the idea that parents will gather the information necessary to make informed choices from among the set. Opponents of school choice argue that lower-income parents will not be able to...

Most current proposals for school reform seek to shift power to parents, thereby bringing new actors into the educational decision process. As these reforms proceed, concern is growing that different types of parents' values about education will lead to stratification and segregation in the schools. Using survey data (parents/decision makers with c...

Theory: Market-like reforms, such as school choice, can work effectively in spite of the low levels of information commonly found among citizen/consumers. Hypothesis: We hypothesize that (1) parental knowledge of school characteristics is a function of ability, incentives, and whether parents believe a particular school attribute to be important; (...

Theory: Public sector reforms expanding citizen choice are hypothesized to create many of the benefits of private markets, in part by increasing the incentives of citizens to search for information about the quality of public services. Social scientists have shown that networks can provide valuable shortcuts to the information necessary to particip...

While the possible decline in the level of social capital in the United States has received considerable attention by scholars such as Putnam and Fukuyama, less attention has been paid to the local activities of citizens that help define a nation's stock of social capital. Scholars have paid even less attention to how institutional arrangements aff...

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