UCLA Political Science

A Theory of Vagueness Relevant to Prestige and Moral Taboos
2018-03-21 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
A Theory of Vagueness Relevant to Prestige and Moral Taboos
DateMarch 19, 2014
Time8:00am to 10:00am
Location
4276 Bunche Hall
Contact
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REP Workshop - Melissa Michelson, Menlo College
2018-03-19 00:00
REP Workshop – Melissa Michelson, Menlo College
DateMarch 13, 2017
Time3:00pm to 4:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
The speaker, Melissa Michelson will be presenting from her new book. Click here for a preview of the book. It describes three of the 17 experiments in the book, focusing on football fan identity.
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CP Workshop - Cyrus Samii, New York University
2018-03-19 00:00
CP Workshop – Cyrus Samii, New York University
DateMarch 13, 2017
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:We use a cluster-randomized field experiment to study two strategies to promote free democratic expression among rural voters in Liberia’s 2011 general election. The context is one of a fragile state in which destructive legacies of Liberia’s 1989-2003 civil war continue to dominate people’s lives. A nine-month civic education intervention administered by Liberian civil society organization partners provided training on election procedures and a forum for monthly discussion of governance issues. A nine-month security committee intervention administered in partnership with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Liberia provided a forum for villagers and international peacekeepers to discuss security threats and develop violence early warning and reaction procedures, with the aim of improving citizens’ perceptions of security during the election. We evaluate these programs’ effects on actual voter behavior in addition to surveyed attitudes. We find that civic education increased enthusiasm for electoral participation, produced a coordinated shift from parochial to national candidates, and increased willingness to report on manipulation. A program combining the two interventions had similar effects. The security committees produced a modest reduction in parochial voting. The policy implications are that third party actors can play a productive role in helping to overcome barriers to information, voter coordination, and security.Full paper can be found here
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Lecture - Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
2018-03-15 00:00
Lecture – Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
DateMarch 10, 2016
Time7:30pm
Location
UCLA Law School Building, Room 1447
Contact
Professor Putnam’s lecture is free and open to all. No RSVP is required.Light refreshments will be available.
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U HEARD IT HERE
2018-03-13 00:00
U HEARD IT HERE
DateMarch 13, 2018
Time6:30pm to 9:00pm
Location
Fowler Museum at UCLA, Lenart Auditorium Self-pay parking available in Structure 4
Contact
Barbara Geddes Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Political Science invites you to attend The Rise and Fall of Trump’s PopulismJoshua Green Author of Devil’s Bargain and senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek in conversation with Sasha Issenberg UC Regents’ Professor and author of The Victory Lab hosted byLynn Vavreck Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics Professor, UCLA Department of Political Science Tuesday, March 13, 2018 6:30 p.m.Fowler Museum at UCLA, Lenart Auditorium Self-pay parking available in Structure 4Click to RSVPAbout the Series The UCLA Department of Political Science is proud to present the series “U Heard it Here.” The series is dedicated to exploring a deeper understanding of politics and contemporary issues.
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REP Workshop - Traci Burch, Northwestern University
2018-03-12 00:00
REP Workshop – Traci Burch, Northwestern University
DateMarch 6, 2017
Time3:00pm to 4:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:This article explores the effects of policing (measured by police- and citizen-initiated stops of pedestrians and cars) on voter turnout for the 2012 general election in St. Louis, Missouri. This is the first paper of its kind to explore the effects of policing at the precinct level using administrative data on both pedestrian and traffic stops and using administrative data on voting and vote choice. The analysis shows that more frequent contact with police is associated with decreased voter turnout in the precinct: voter turnout is lower in precincts where greater numbers of citizens are checked by police even after controlling for other potentially confounding characteristics like racial and socioeconomic demographics of the community, crime rates, and the presence of mobilizing organizations like churches.
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CP Workshop - Dorothy Kronick, University of Pennsylvania
2018-03-12 00:00
CP Workshop – Dorothy Kronick, University of Pennsylvania
DateMarch 6, 2017
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:What is the political logic of dual exchange rates? Governments often invoke a populist justification, arguing that dual exchange rates protect the prices of imported consumer goods. But critics charge that dual exchange rates do little to protect consumer prices, instead creating arbitrage opportunities for powerful elites. We develop a model of the government’s tradeoff between these two constituencies (consumers vs. arbitrageurs). We then estimate the parameters of the model with an original firm-level data set from Venezuela, where, between 2003 and 2012, the government used dual exchange rates to subsidize approximately 215 billion dollars of imports at a fiscal cost of more than 100 billion. We find that the government rationed access to official-rate currency as if it valued importers nearly as much as consumers. Together with qualitative evidence, we interpret these findings as evidence that importers provided the government with essential political support.Full paper can be found here
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American Politics Workshop with Justin Grimmer
2018-03-12 00:00
American Politics Workshop with Justin Grimmer
DateMarch 9, 2015
Time3:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Justin Grimmer, Stanford UniversityTitle: “The Impression of Influence”About the Speaker:Justin Grimmer (Ph.D. 2010, Harvard) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford. His research uses new statistical methods to examine how representation occurs in American politics. His first book, Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2013) shows how senators define the type of representation they provide to constituents and how this affects constituents’ evaluations. A second book examining legislators’ credit-taking communications use is forthcoming. Prof. Grimmer’s work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and others. During the 2013-2014 academic year he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institute.Abstract:Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions — even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, The Impression of Influence (Princeton Univ. Press, 2014) demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic communication and how this facilitates or undermines accountability. Using a massive collection of congressional texts and innovative experiments and methods, the book shows how legislators create an impression of influence through credit claiming messages.
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International Relations Workshop with Emily Ritter
2018-03-12 00:00
International Relations Workshop with Emily Ritter
DateMarch 9, 2015
Time12:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Emily Ritter, UC MercedTitle: “State Cooperation with International Criminal Tribunals: An Investigation of International Warrant Enforcement”About the Speaker:Emily Ritter (Ph.D. 2010, Emory Univ.) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Merced. Her research and teaching interests include international human rights institutions, law, and practice; domestic conflict between the state and citizen groups; international governance and legal institutions; and institutional solutions to bargaining and cooperation problems. Prof. Ritter’s methodological approaches include game theoretic modeling as well as quantitative and qualitative methodology. Prior to joining UC Merced, she was a member of the faculty at Univ. of Alabama for three years. Her work has appeared in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, and others.Abstract: International criminal tribunals (ICTs) cannot apprehend suspects, and states hesitate to put forth costly effort to arrest those indicted for war crimes. Yet many suspects have been arrested or surrendered to ICTs of their own accord. Understanding why some suspects are arrested and others are not can illuminate why states wil cooperate with international justice more generally. We present a formal model of a suspect who surrenders or evades arrest and a state that devotes some level of effort to apprehension. We draw on this theory as well as interviews conducted at ICTs in the Hague to present international-, state-, and suspect-level expectations over when and how suspects are likely to surrender or be captured. We use these insights to model the time until capture or surrender in an event history framework, utilizing newly collected data on all individuals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).Paper:Click here to download.
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Seminar - Francois Furet on the Revolutionary Passion
2018-03-10 00:00
Seminar – Francois Furet on the Revolutionary Passion
DateMarch 5, 2016
Time10:30am to 12:30pm
Location
Haines Hall, Room 110
Contact
Matthew Crawford is the author of the heavily praised books Shop Class as Soulcraftand The World Beyond Your Head. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Virginia and he fabricates parts for custom motorcycles in Richmond, Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in ancient political thought from the University of Chicago.———————People in the seminar will be sent and asked to read a chapter from Francois Furet’s celebrated book, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, and to be ready to participate in the conversation. A pizza lunch will be delivered following the seminar.The seminar is free and open to all, but you must enroll in advance. To do so, send an email to Professor Lowenstein: lowenstein@law.ucla.edu
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Energy, War, and Peace
2018-03-09 00:00
Energy, War, and Peace
DateMarch 7, 2014
Time7:00am to 8:30am
Location
11377 Bunche Hall
Contact
Is the Long Peace following 1945 a general decline of international war, and if so, what caused it? This paper explores how the shift to fossil fuel consumption following the Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed the political economy of war. I focus on what I call the Energy Revolution 1945-1973, which was the greatest period of energy consumption growth in human history. In effect, THE Energy Revolution divided the world into a gradually expanding set of states that are energy-modern and the rest that are energy-primitive. After 1945, wars between energy-modern states virtually disappeared, while wars within or involving energy-primitive states continued and even grew in severity. I seek to evaluate an energy-based explanation for these changes in the patterns of war against various competing and complementary explanations, including the democratic peace, selectorate theory, and the nuclear revolution.
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Irony and Its Politics in Civil Rights Historiography
2018-03-09 00:00
Irony and Its Politics in Civil Rights Historiography
DateMarch 7, 2014
Time8:00am to 9:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
This paper is a draft section of my larger project, which is an attempt to excavate and reconstruct the philosophical foundations of the recent historiographical debate over how to periodize and understand the civil rights movement. Drawing inspiration from narrativist philosophers of history, including Hayden White, I argue that attention to the ways in which histories are narratively emplotted, using the insights of genre criticism, is indispensible for the task of disclosing the evaluative, ethical, explanatory, and aesthetic dimensions of historical narratives, as they are constructed and circulated in history, political theory, public philosophy, and the wider public. The exemplary stature of the civil rights movement in contemporary political thought draws largely, I argue, from romantic narrative tropes, but these are being increasingly contested by counterveiling narrative forms. Here, specifically, I focus on what I call “ironic” emplotments of civil rights and African-American history and attempt to give an account of their emergence, core explanatory and evaluative claims, and imaginings of politics and political action. I then offer some criticisms of this form of historical imagination and its implications for politics.
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Lecture - Attention as a Cultural Problem
2018-03-08 00:00
Lecture – Attention as a Cultural Problem
DateMarch 3, 2016
Time7:30pm
Location
UCLA Law School Building, Room 1447
Contact
Matthew Crawford’s lecture is free and open to all. No RSVP is required.Light refreshments will be available.
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PT Workshop - Clarissa Hayward
2018-03-06 00:00
PT Workshop – Clarissa Hayward
DateMarch 1, 2016
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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CP Workshop - Dominik Hangartner, London School of Economics
2018-03-05 00:00
CP Workshop – Dominik Hangartner, London School of Economics
DateFebruary 27, 2017
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Abstract:Does exposure to the refugee crisis fuel anti-immigrant sentiment among natives and increase voting for extreme-right parties? Despite heated debates about the political repercussions of the refugee crisis in Europe, there exists very little, and sometimes conflicting, evidence with which to assess the impact of a sudden and large influx of refugees on natives’ political attitudes and behavior. We provide new causal evidence from a natural experiment in Greece, where some Aegean islands close to the Turkish border have experienced drastic increases in the number of Syrian and Iraqi refugees while other islands slightly farther away—but with otherwise similar institutional and socioeconomic characteristics—did not. Placebo tests suggest that pre-crisis trends in vote shares for exposed and non-exposed islands were virtually identical. This allows us to obtain unbiased estimates of the electoral consequences of the refugee crisis. Our study shows that among islands that faced a large inflow of refugees, vote shares for Golden Dawn, the most extreme-right party in Europe, increased by 2 percentage points (a more than 40 percent increase at the average). This increase came at the expense of the main center-right party and by mobilizing additional voters. Our findings have implications for the theoretical understanding of the drivers of anti-immigrant sentiment and for the management of refugee flows.
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CP Workshop - Avidit Acharya
2018-03-05 00:00
CP Workshop – Avidit Acharya
DateFebruary 29, 2016
Time12:30pm to 2:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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AP Workshop - Daniel Butler
2018-03-05 00:00
AP Workshop – Daniel Butler
DateFebruary 29, 2016
Time3:00pm to 5:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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Comparative Politics Workshop with Edmund Malesky
2018-03-05 00:00
Comparative Politics Workshop with Edmund Malesky
DateMarch 2, 2015
Time12:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Edmund Malesky, Duke UniversityTitle: “Participation in Legal Drafting and Compliance with Business Regulation: Evidence from Vietnam” About the Speaker:Edmund Malesky is Associate Professor of political economy, and a specialist on Southeast Asia — particularly Vietnam. Currently, his research agenda falls into three major categories: 1) authoritarian political institutions and their consequences; 2) the political influence of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations; and 3) political institutions, private business development, and formalization. Prof Malesky has published in leading political science and economic journals, including the American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics, He also serves as the lead researcher for the Vietnam Provincial Competitiveness Index.Abstract:International development organizations invest millions of dollars each year into legislative participation campaigns in an effort to foster improved governance. This work has been undergirded theoretically by political scientists in the “deliberative democracy” tradition, who argue that participation in the drafting of new rules, through public comment periods, provides information about citizens’ needs and preferences to government. Governments can then use this information, they argue, to make laws and regulations that will enjoy wider societal compliance. Relatedly, studies in psychology and organizational behavior indicate that individuals are more likely to follow rules they have had the opportunity to influence. We propose that a similar dynamic between participation and compliance applies among businesses as well. In this paper, we first test this theory using survey data from an emerging economy, where we find that a firm is more likely to comply with business regulations when it has participated in the design of the regulatory framework. Importantly, however, we find evidence that this relationship only holds when the firm sees government to be attentive to its input, and that participation may actually be associated with less compliance when government is seen to be disinterested. We note that our effort to test theory in this space still faces significant issues of selection bias, and therefore discuss the design and preliminary results of our ongoing field experiment, where we randomized opportunities for participation by small businesses in Vietnam to a forthcoming regulation on storage of hazardous chemicals.Pre-analysis Plan:Click here to download.Provincial Competitive Index:Click here to download.
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Do Legislator Positions Affect Constituent Voting Decisions in U.S. House Elections?
2018-03-05 00:00
Do Legislator Positions Affect Constituent Voting Decisions in U.S. House Elections?
DateMarch 3, 2014
Time4:00am to 5:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
The theory of spatial voting has dominated recent scholarship on voting and elections. The spatial voting theory’s most important implication is that candidates’ ideological positions should influence voters’ decisions at the ballot box. However, existing evidence shows a weak electoral connection between legislators and their constituents. We explain this puzzle using a new dataset with the policy ideal points and voting behavior of over 100,000 Americans. We show that the spatial positions of legislators in the House of Representatives have a negligible impact on the decisions of most voters. Our results suggest that incumbent legislators face few electoral consequences for ideologically extreme positions. Legislators can take any spatial position that their partisan colleagues take with little electoral penalty in general elections. This paper provides an individual-level explanation for the lack of accountability we observe in the contemporary Congress, a phenomenon that political science theory has had little success in explaining.
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Seminar - Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale
2018-03-03 00:00
Seminar – Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale
DateFebruary 27, 2016
Time10:30am to 12:30pm
Location
Room to be announced
Contact
Enrollees in the seminar will be asked to read Shakespeare’s play and be ready to participate in the conversation. A pizza lunch will be delivered following the seminar.The seminar is free and open to all, but you must enroll in advance. To do so, send an email to Professor Lowenstein: lowenstein@law.ucla.edu
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PT Workshop - Farah Godrej, UC Riverside
2018-03-02 00:00
PT Workshop – Farah Godrej, UC Riverside
DateFebruary 24, 2017
Time4:00pm to 6:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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International Law/IR Workshop with Karen Alter
2018-03-02 00:00
International Law/IR Workshop with Karen Alter
DateFebruary 27, 2015
Time2:00pm to 3:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Karen Alter, Northwestern Universitywith co-author Laurence Helfer, Duke UniversityTitle: “Backlash Against International Courts in West, East, and Southern Africa: Causes and Consequences”Abstract:This paper discusses three efforts to restrict the jurisdiction of sub-regional courts by African governments in response to unwelcomed international judicial rulings. In West Africa, the ECOWAS Court upheld allegations of torture by opposition journalists in the Gambia, spurring an effort by the Gambia’s political leaders to restrict the Court’s power to review human rights complaints. In East Africa, Kenya’s government attempted to eliminate the EACJ and to remove some of its judges after a decision challenging an election to a sub-regional legislature. In Southern Africa, Zimbabwe sought to suspend the SADC Tribunal and strip private access rights after the Tribunal ruled in favor of white farmers in disputes over land seizures. We argue that variations in the mobilization efforts of community secretariats, civil society groups and sub-regional parliaments explain why efforts to eliminate the three courts or narrow their jurisdiction were defeated in ECOWAS, scaled back in the EAC, and largely succeeded in SADC.
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Deliver the Vote! Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud
2018-03-02 00:00
Deliver the Vote! Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud
DateFebruary 28, 2014
Time6:00am to 7:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Most election fraud is not conducted centrally by incumbents but rather locally by a machinery consisting of hundreds of political operatives. How does an incumbent ensure that his local agents deliver fraud when needed and as much as is needed? We address this and related puzzles in the political organization of election fraud by studying the perverse consequences of two distinct incentive problems: the principal-agent problem between an incumbent and his local agents, and the collective action problem among the agents. Using the global game methodology, we show that these incentive problems result in a herd dynamic among the agents that tends to either oversupply or undersupply fraud, rarely delivering the amount of fraud that would be optimal from the incumbent’s point of view. This equilibrium dynamic predicts overwhelming victories for incumbents that are punctuated by his rare but resounding defeats and it explains why incumbents who enjoy genuine popularity often engage in seemingly unnecessary fraud. An empirical analysis of precinct-level election results from Mexico (2000-2012), Ukraine (2004), and Russia (2011-2012) supports our key claims.
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Adam Berinsky - Rumors, Truths and Reality: A Study of Political Misinformation
2018-03-01 00:00
Adam Berinsky – Rumors, Truths and Reality: A Study of Political Misinformation
DateFebruary 25, 2016
Time12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
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Lecture - The Prince, the Fat Man, and the Staff: Shakespeare’s Henry IV
2018-03-01 00:00
Lecture – The Prince, the Fat Man, and the Staff: Shakespeare’s Henry IV
DateFebruary 25, 2016
Time7:30pm
Location
UCLA Law School Building, Room 1447
Contact
Professor Allen’s lecture is free and open to all. No RSVP is required.Light refreshments will be available.
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REP Workshop with Cristina Beltrán
2018-03-01 00:00
REP Workshop with Cristina Beltrán
DateFebruary 26, 2015
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Presenter:Cristina Beltrán, New York UniversityTitle: “Undocumented and Acting Up: Queering Sovereignty in the Immigrant Rights Movement”Abstract:[I draw] on the insights of queer theory to analyze the political practices of undocumented activists, particularly those who identify now or in the past as DREAM activists. Rejecting the politics of shame and stigma, DREAM activists (particularly queer DREAM activists) challenged the logic of secrecy surrounding sexuality and illegality by “coming out” and identifying themselves “undocumented and unafraid.” While the practice of coming out has prompted various scholars to note the connections between immigration and LGBT politics, I argue that what is most powerfully queer about undocumented youth activism has to do with its dual critiques of sovereignty, state action, and preventable death. Turning to writings on AIDS by Gil Cuadros and Douglas Crimp, I explore the resonances between ACT UP’s critique of unnecessary fatalities due to government inaction and indifference to the AIDS crisis and the mass deaths occurring along the U.S.-Mexico border. At times characterized as less than human, both “homosexuals with HIV/AIDS” and “illegals” are populations whose death and suffering are disregarded since the communities in question “brought this on themselves.” Faced with a dehumanizing logic that blames them for their own suffering, gay and undocumented subjects must challenge a political culture more interested in simplistic accounts of individual action than complex analyses of global capitalism, human desire, and government failure. Both AIDS activists and the movement for undocumented rights have an ambivalent relationship to the state that seeks to expose government failure while trying to enlist the state’s resources. Analyzing achievements as well as setbacks, I explore activists’ queer account of sovereignty, particularly their efforts to gain state resources while simultaneously expressing ambivalence and despair regarding the state, its leaders, ideals, and institutions.Co-sponsored by the Political Theory Workshop
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Life After Degree Series
2018-02-28 00:00
Life After Degree Series
DateFebruary 26, 2014
Time10:00am to 12:00pm
Location
Career Center, 3rd Floor, Conference Room
Contact
Looking to explore ways to apply your degree to the professional world? Meet UCLA Political Science graduates and hear stories of how they leveraged their degree to launch a successful career in the law, entertainment, marketing, finance, education, and non-profit industries! Looking to explore ways to apply your degree to the professional world? Meet UCLA Political Science graduates and hear stories of how they leveraged their degree to launch a successful career in the law, entertainment, marketing, finance, education, and non-profit industries!
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Choosing (All) Together
2018-02-28 00:00
Choosing (All) Together
DateFebruary 26, 2014
Time7:00am to 9:00am
Location
4276 Bunche Hall
Contact
This article provides a game theoretic analysis of group decision making, investigating how agents’ communication behavior is affected by different voting systems. We show that in an ideal state where communication is noisy but agents can communicate without opportunity costs, agents will always reach unanimous consensus regardless of which voting system governs the deliberative process. This is because agents anticipate their future agreement and hence, in equilibrium, communicate truthfully and vote sincerely. As a result, the agents’ private information is aggregated efficiently, making the deliberative process optimal. We further show that under the more realistic case in which communication involves opportunity costs, voting systems shape agents’ communication behavior. Specifically, when the opportunity costs of communication are low, a voting system based on unanimity approximates the results of the ideal state. Conversely, when communication involves high opportunity costs, a voting system based on majority is more desirable. These results shed some lights on the rationale of institutions such as juries, committees, and large deliberative assemblies.
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Benjamin Lessing's Talk
2018-02-26 00:00
Benjamin Lessing’s Talk
DateFebruary 26, 2018
Time12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone (310)206-7558bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu
Paper
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Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters? Evidence from the Spatial Allocation of Constituency Development Fund Spending in Kenya
2018-02-26 00:00
Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters? Evidence from the Spatial Allocation of Constituency Development Fund Spending in Kenya
DateFebruary 24, 2014
Time4:00am to 5:30am
Location
4357 Bunche Hall
Contact
We draw on data on the spatial allocation of more than 50,000 constituency development fund projects in more than 200 electoral constituencies in Kenya to test leading theories of distributive politics.
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