This article examines nonincumbent fundraising through the lens of two theories that have not been applied in other studies of fundraising-strategic candidate entry and ambitious amateur candidates-to test whether candidates with prior office experience are advantaged in raising funds for U.S. House campaigns. A selection model that takes into account the strategic entry of strong candidates demonstrates that electoral experience matters for only a select subset of experienced candidates. In contrast to previous research, the results show that much of the fundraising difference between amateurs and experienced candidates can be attributed to a selection process where the strongest candidates seek the best races. The results have implications for how we understand the relative importance of various conditions that shape fundraising. Competitive local or national conditions that encourage strong candidacies also allow nonincumbents to accumulate sufficient funds to mount credible campaigns.

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Using a large national sample of U.S. cities the authors create an environmental policy index to explore the factors that explain the adoption and implementation of environmental policies at the local level. Using univariate, bivariate, and multivariate methods, these data indicate that cities with higher populations, more highly educated citizens, higher percentages of Hispanic residents, located in the West (and more specifically California), and that are central cities are more likely to engage in environmental policies. Furthermore, this article finds evidence of differences in engagement based upon the subarea of environmental protection examined.

Public opinion matters in environmental policy making. This study examines how individuals form opinions on three distinct environmental topics-climate change, the importance of environmental protection relative to job creation, and wilderness protection. Previous research focusing on environmental concern has yielded conflicting or inconclusive results. We argue that how citizens form attitudes within the environmental domain varies across environmental dimensions and that high information costs cause citizens to engage in heuristic processing to form their opinions. We empirically test our hypothesis by analyzing original data collected from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. We find that with more complex issues, citizens rely on familiar shortcuts such as party identification, ideology, and the media. With less complex issues, demographic factors are predictors of attitudes, lending support to arguments that citizens use familiar shortcuts when processing political and policy information.

States and the federal government have initiated reforms designed to increase voting participation. Research has focused on the effects of these reforms-specifically, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA)-on voter turnout, but little research has focused directly on voter registration. Moving beyond the question of whether the NVRA increased registration, we ask: Did its implementation diminish the influence of core demographic variables on registration, producing a more representative pool of registered citizens? Relying on data from Current Population Surveys, our analyses provide limited affirmative support. The NVRA attenuated the influence of income in the states with no previous Motor Voter laws. It also reduced the on-year influence of age and the off-year influence of residential stability in these states and those that had prior passive Motor Voter laws. It did not have a similar effect on the influence of other core characteristics.