Ryan E. Carlin

Verified

Ryan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Ryan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Professor at Georgia State University

The advent of nearly global estimates of democratic mood represents a genuine cause for optimism about identifying the linkages between the dynamics of public opinion and democracy. Yet the validity of extant measures of democratic mood rest on assumptions of dimensionality and measurement equivalence that largely remain untested. This study assess...

The advent of nearly global estimates of democratic mood represents a genuine cause for optimism about identifying the linkages between the dynamics of public opinion and democracy. Yet the validity of extant measures of democratic mood rest on assumptions of dimensionality and measurement equivalence that largely remain untested. This study assess...

The advent of nearly global estimates of democratic mood represents a genuine causefor optimism about identifying the linkages between the dynamics of public opinion anddemocracy. Yet the validity of extant measures of democratic mood rest on assumptionsof dimensionality and measurement equivalence that largely remain untested. This studyassesses t...

Existing studies suggest issue preferences move together – in parallel – over time. Although the existence of a “mood” is increasingly clear in various countries, the determinants of such parallel movement remain unexplained. We identify four mechanisms: (1) parallel movement in preferred policy levels across domains; (2) parallel movement in actua...

Despite governors’ crucial roles in shaping important policies, including abortion, education, and infrastructure, forecasters have paid little attention to gubernatorial elections. We posit that institutional idiosyncrasies and lack of public opinion data have exacerbated the classic problem facing all election forecasts: there are too many predic...

Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight component...

Does the type of democratic regime matter for public evaluations of leaders? We argue two characteristics intrinsic to presidential and parliamentary regimes lead to divergent patterns of executive approval. For presidents, direct elections foster more personal leader-voter linkages; for prime ministers, dependence on the legislature for survival c...

We advance a theory of pigmentocratic executive approval that accounts for both skin color-based group attachments and deviations in skin tone between citizens and leaders. We argue that such deviations will decrease approval most strongly for those lighter in complexion than the incumbent. We further argue that individuals will most strongly punis...

How do democratic attitudes map onto politic-economic context? We examine this question with a decade’s worth of high-quality data on public opinion and democratic quality in Brazil. From this empirical foundation, we analyze the observable implications of four theoretical perspectives – democratic culture, performance-based instrumentality, winner...

Representative democracy requires the consent of the governed. But what drives public support for government? This book provides the most comprehensive treatment of approval dynamics in the advanced democracies to date. Drawing on data from the Executive Approval Project (EAP), a cross-nationally comparable data set on leader popularity, authors ex...

Representative democracy requires the consent of the governed. But what drives public support for government? This book provides the most comprehensive treatment of approval dynamics in the advanced democracies to date. Drawing on data from the Executive Approval Project (EAP), a cross-nationally comparable data set on leader popularity, authors ex...

Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead in...

Attempting to buy votes is, in some cases, inefficient and damaging to a clientelistic party. To explain why, we propose the concept of electoral retaliation: sanctioning clientelistic parties by voting against them or intentionally invalidating the ballot. These forms of negative reciprocity are meant to uphold the democratic norms—equal participa...

A robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders’ standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries supports our pro-constituency m...

How do stances on public policies aimed at ethnic conflict resolution affect intergroup trust? Building on theories of pro-sociality, social identity, and intergroup bias, we expect redistributive policy preferences meant to resolve ethnic conflict to replace ethnicity as the main barrier to intergroup trust because their zero-sum nature raises int...

Public evaluations of the economy are key for understanding how citizens develop policy opinions and monitor government performance. But what drives economic evaluations? In this article, we argue the context in which information about the economy is distributed shapes economic perceptions. In high-quality information environments-where policies ar...

Transforming armed groups into legitimate political actors is often considered an ideal way to settle armed internal conflicts. In democracies, the efficacy of such approaches depends on the public legitimacy that the citizenry grants them. How does the prospect of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia's (FARC's) political participation influence...

After four years of negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC), a peace agreement was signed in 2016. This accord ended a five- decade-long conflict that has touched almost every Colombian in some way. Over these decades, the FARC has been an omni...

Public approval is a crucial source of executive power in presidential systems. Does the public support female and male presidents similarly? Combining insights from gender and politics research with psychological evidence, this study theorizes sex-based differentials in popularity based on more general expectations linking gender stereotypes to di...

How does single-party dominance influence interpersonal trust? We draw on evidence from trust games played by more than 2,000 subjects in South Africa, where, since Apartheid, race-based social enmity has persisted under democratic competition characterized by single-party dominance. We find that partisan-based trust discrimination is most pronounc...

Presidential approval tends to exhibit the dynamics of honeymoon, decline, and a rebound as elections near. But several presidential administrations and, indeed, some countries themselves, do not conform to this pattern. This introduction to the special issue identifies and classifies outliers to the typical dynamics of approval using a 12-category...

This essay reviews the following works: The Fates of Political Parties: Institutional Crisis, Continuity, and Change in Latin America. By Jennifer Cyr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v + 269. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107189799. Los sistemas de partidos en América Latina, 1978–2015. Tomo 1: México, América Central, y República Do...

How does single-party dominance influence interpersonal trust? We draw on evidence from trust games played by more than 2,000 subjects in South Africa, where, since Apartheid, race-based social enmity has persisted under democratic competition characterized by single-party dominance. We find that partisan-based trust discrimination is most pronounc...

The shifts from state-led development to neoliberalism in Latin America have prompted debates on the quality of democracy. Although most discussions focus on responsiveness, we examine how economic policy regimes influence accountability. How do policy regimes affect citizens’ ability to hold executives to accounts? This ability, we argue, strength...

The shifts from state-led development to neoliberalism in Latin America have prompted debates on the quality of democracy. While most discussions focus on responsiveness, we examine how economic policy regimes influence accountability. How do policy regimes affect citizens' ability to hold executives to accounts? This ability, we argue, strengthens...

In a recent Journal of Politics article, Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco argue that Latin American voters credit and blame presidents for economic outcomes unambiguously exogenous to their policy choices, a claim which undermines broadly-held understandings of how voters hold politicians accountable. While we concur on the importance of the global...

What characterizes the dynamics of presidential popularity? Research based on the United States of America finds popularity exhibits an almost law-like cyclicality over a president’s term: high post-election “honeymoon” approval rates deteriorate before experiencing an end-of-term boost as new elections approach. We contend that cyclical approval d...

POLICY BRIEF ON POPULISM IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS: WHAT, WHEN, WHO, AND SO WHAT?

Objective We test one untested influence on whether Hispanics will assimilate into American society in a “straight line” or remain “segmented.” The type of assimilation hinges on both how non‐Hispanics treat Hispanics and whether Hispanics desire assimilation. We argue that these behaviors depend on the social construction of Hispanics’ identity, w...

How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty comp...

Q2 17 Public approval is a crucial source of executive power in presidential systems. Does the public support 18 female and male presidents similarly? Combining insights from gender and politics research with 19 psychological evidence, this study theorizes sex-based differentials in popularity based on more general 20 expectations linking gender st...

Interpersonal trust (i.e. trust in other people) is an issue of high interest to both policy-makers and researchers seeking to understand what drives social and economic outcomes. However, for trust to usefully inform policy and analysis it is necessary to have valid and reliable measures of it. Despite a large body of evidence on the relationship...

This paper conducts an experimental test of the theory of ideational populism in a most-likely case: a well-known Chilean populist presidential candidate, Roxana Miranda. At the time of our study, Chile had the necessary conditions for ideational populism: corruption scandals and a crisis of political representation that lowered citizens’ trust in...

Support for democracy is crucial to democratic stability. Yet the nature and range of democratic belief systems, and whether these belief systems are idiosyncratic to specific individuals and polities or are more general, remain largely unknown. Such unknowns complicate an already daunting measurement task. Extant survey-based measures are fraught...

The importance of institutions in shaping citizens' ability to punish or reward politicians for economic outcomes is well established. Where institutions divide authority politicians can blame each other and citizens find it harder to assign responsibility for policy failures; where institutions clarify lines of authority, citizens can better hold...

La forma en que la opinión pública traduce la información económica en opiniones sobre sus líderes es un tema fundamental en la relación entre economía política y la política de masas. El famoso estudio de MacKuen, Erikson y Stimson (1992) demostró que existe un modelo de voto económico basado en expectativas racionales, donde el público no juzga a...

Do performance-based rewards and punishments vary with presidents’ legislative powers? Are presidents who frequently rule by decree held more accountable for outcomes? In this paper we theorize that accountability varies systematically with the powers presidents enjoy and how they use them. We test our expectations with survey data from 18 Latin Am...

Who do parties target for clientelistic vote buying? Existing research looks almost exclusively at individuals' socioeconomic and, especially, electoral profiles-which parties and candidates they support, professed ideological leanings, past voting turnout, and choice. We argue party brokers also consider democratic attitudinal profiles. Specifical...

How the public translates economic information into opinions about their leaders is a fundamental question at the intersection of political economy and mass politics. A prominent study by MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1992) found evidence in support of a rational-expectations model of economic voting, whereby the public judges the president not on...

In this volume, experts on Latin American public opinion and political behavior employ region–wide public opinion studies, elite surveys, experiments, and advanced statistical methods to reach several key conclusions about voting behavior in the region’s emerging democracies. In Latin America, to varying degrees the average voter grounds his or her...

Why do some presidents emerge from a scandal unscathed while for others it may lead to a crisis of legitimacy? This question is crucial to understanding the conditions under which elected leaders are held accountable. This study proposes a theory of conditional accountability by which the public most consistently punishes presidents for scandals wh...

Social capital is vital to disaster recovery, so how do natural disasters affect a country's social capital stockpile? The article addresses this question by focusing on interpersonal trust. We argue that the effects of natural disasters on interpersonal trust depend upon state capacity. States that manage to maintain law and order, deliver aid to...

Why do some presidents emerge from a scandal unscathed while for others it may lead to a crisis of legitimacy? This question is crucial to understanding the conditions under which elected leaders are held accountable. This study proposes a theory of conditional accountability by which the public most consistently punishes presidents for scandals wh...

Institutional and behavioral theories of democracy abound but rarely intersect. Do executive lawmaking power and prowess condition democratic regime support in presidential democracies? We develop theoretical expectations linking the lawmaking powers of the president and mass regime support and test them by analyzing survey data from eighteen Latin...

Turnout is theorized to reflect elections' policy stakes. All else equal, a highly constrained policymaking context is expected to lower the potential policy stakes of a given election. This study tests if such contexts, which are characterized by multiple veto players, reduce electoral participation. According to time-series cross-sectional autore...

Economic perceptions affect incumbent support, but debate persists over whether voters focus on past or future performance and whether they view the economy in primarily sociotropic or egotropic terms. We theorize the nature of economic voting depends on the context. Evidence from 18 Latin American countries (1995–2009) suggest prospective voting p...

Trust and reciprocity are theoretically essential to strong democracies and efficient markets. Working from the theoretical frameworks of social identity and cognitive heuristics, this study draws on dual-process models of decision making to expect (1) the trustor to infer trustworthiness from partisan stereotypes and thus to discriminate trust in...

Can natural disasters undermine democratic legitimacy? This article maps a causal pathway from natural disaster damage to shifts in opinion and behavioral tendencies in less established democracies. It theorizes citizens who suffer damage in such contexts will tend toward lower evaluations of democratic institutions, lower support for democratic va...

Do performance-based rewards and punishments vary with presidents’ legislative powers? Are presidents who frequently rule by decree held more accountable for outcomes? In this paper we theorize that accountability varies systematically with the powers presidents enjoy and how they use them. We test our expectations with survey data from 18 Latin Am...

Among Alfred Stepan's many contributions to the study of politics is his work on political institutions and, in particular, his research (in collaboration with Juan J. Linz and Cindy Skach) examining the differences in the institutional frameworks of parliamentarism and presidentialism and their effects on democratic survival. In what has been a lo...

Like many major targets of social inquiry, the rule of law seems to be an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956; Collier, Hidalgo, and Maciuceanu; 2007, Waldron, 2002). The literature teems with definitions of the rule of law, emphasizing attributes ranging from formal legality and checks and balances to order, democracy, and individual right...

In the last twenty years, the rule of law has undergone a revival in legal, academic, business, military, and development spheres. Yet we lack a clear understanding of the distinct forms the rule of law takes, and how and why they vary across states and over time. This study indicates one way to operationalize rule of law for analytic purposes whil...

Lipset and Rokkan’s (Party system and voter alignments: cross national perspectives, Lipset and Rokkan eds., New York: Free Press, pp. 1–64, 1967) sociological model of cleavages and the so-called “freezing hypothesis” dominate theorizing about party system formation. Torcal and Mainwaring (Br. J. Polit. Sci. 33:55–84, 2003) show the relevance of a...

This study measures support for the basic rights, liberties, and practices associated with polyarchy in 12 Latin American democracies. Specifically, it identifies five profiles of support for polyarchy’s core values and norms—public contestation, inclusive participation, limits on executive authority, and institutional checks and balances. Although...

No political institutions enjoy less public trust than political parties. Understanding the implications of this phenomenon for representative democracy requires theoretically informed conceptualizations of party trust and distrust and theories about their underlying cognitive processes. In this vein, the present study conceptualizes party trust an...

The Legitimacy Puzzle in Latin America: Political Support and Democracy in Eight Nations. By Booth John A. and Seligson Mitchell A.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 376p. $83.99 cloth, $24.99 paper. - Volume 8 Issue 3 - Ryan E. Carlin

In the last twenty years, the rule of law has undergone a revival in legal, academic, business, military, and development spheres. Yet we lack a clear understanding of the distinct forms the rule of law takes, and how and why they vary across states and over time. This study investigate profiles of rule of law in the 1990s. The analysis of these ru...

Distrusting democrats seek accountability and advocate reform in established democracies. Do they behave similarly in new democracies? Using AmericasBarometer survey data, cluster analysis identifies five profiles of democratic support in Chile: democrat, delegative, fair-weather, illiberal, and autocrat. Chilean distrusting democrats are more acti...

Turnout among registered voters remains high in post-authoritarian Chile, but valid votes as a percentage of the voting-age population have fallen significantly in the post-authoritarian period and blank/null voting, non-registration, and abstention are on the rise. Why? This article tests three rival explanations: (1) lack of political support; (2...

This article examines how socioeconomic context and status affect intrinsic and overt support for democracy among Latin American publics. The relationship is important since many theorists have long proposed that citizens' attitudes matter for democratic stability and, more recently, the quality of democracy. The empirical results indicate that edu...

Very little is known about whether voters’ perceptions of the economy affect government support in the same way in developing countries as they do in developed ones. Indeed, weak party systems and a lack of democratic experience may work against prospective voting, high levels of poverty may force voters to emphasize pocketbook concerns at the expe...

Strictly quantitative and qualitative approaches to measuring regime support en- tail strong assumptions. When these assumptions are violated, as they often are, such measures lose much of their validity. I propose a qualitative-quantitative measure of regime support that blends several approaches: interviews, focus groups, Q-sorts, and public opin...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Paper prepared for delivery at the 2004 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, NV, October 5-9. Chilean lawmakers and policy-shapers are worried about declining rates of electoral participation. The Lagos administration's solution is to install an automatic registration system and, eventually, to eliminate fines for not votin...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-18).