C an men and women have equal levels of voice and authority in deliberation or does deliberation exacerbate gender inequality? Does increasing women's descriptive representation in deliberation increase their voice and authority? We answer these questions and move beyond the debate by hypothesizing that the group's gender composition interacts with its decision rule to exacerbate or erase the inequalities. We test this hypothesis and various alternatives, using experimental data with many groups and links between individuals' attitudes and speech. We find a substantial gender gap in voice and authority, but as hypothesized, it disappears under unanimous rule and few women, or under majority rule and many women. Deliberative design can avoid inequality by fitting institutional procedure to the social context of the situation.

LEE SHAKERUsing data from the 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) For generations, scholars (de Tocqueville, 2001;Janowitz, 1968;Kaniss, 1997;Tarde, 1903) have asserted that newspapers provide critical information to citizens and serve as vital watchdogs of public officials. Today, as newspapers struggle through a rocky transition from an analog past toward a digital future, the question of newspapers' importance is especially pressing. In Paul Starr's (2011) words, "More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt." So, as newspaper circulation dwindles and the very future of the print product is questioned, there is scholarly and public attention upon their plight. But how important are newspapers to their communities, and how concerned should we be as they decline?Using data from the 2008 and 2009 November supplements of the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article examines the civic engagement of citizens in the largest American metropolitan areas. The analysis compares the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in cities that lost a newspaper in the intervening year-namely, Denver and Seattle-and cities that did not lose a newspaper over the same time period. The contrast over time and across cities provides unique Lee Shaker leverage to address the questions raised above, and the CPS data indicate that civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009. This decline is not consistently replicated in the other cities examined, even after controlling for several other alternative explanations. Though the causality of the decline in civic engagement cannot be definitively established with the CPS data, the findings of this article lend additional empirical support to what many already believed: Newspapers are vital institutions in our democracy, and their decline warrants our concern.

This article contrasts the national and local political knowledge of a random sample of 1001 Philadelphians with the aim of enhancing the scholarly understanding of citizen competence. Empirical study of citizen competence extends back more than 50 years, but the survey data that have been brought to bear upon the topic are almost exclusively focused on national-level politics. Consequently, sweeping conclusions about the competence of the American public have often been grounded in a fairly narrow empirical trench. The comparison in this article depicts a slew of differences in the distribution of knowledge across national and local politics, many of which challenge established notions of who is politically knowledgeable. This, in turn, has implications for which members of society are seen as politically competent and how competent the public as a whole is thought to be.

A growing body of work suggests that exposure to subtle racial cues prompts white voters to penalize black candidates, and that the effects of these cues may influence outcomes indirectly via perceptions of candidate ideology. We test hypotheses related to these ideas using two experiments based on national samples. In one experiment, we manipulated the race of a candidate (Barack Obama vs. John Edwards) accused of sexual impropriety. We found that while both candidates suffered from the accusation, the scandal led respondents to view Obama as more liberal than Edwards, especially among resentful and engaged whites. Second, overall evaluations of Obama declined more sharply than for Edwards. In the other experiment, we manipulated the explicitness of the scandal, and found that implicit cues were more damaging for Obama than explicit ones.

This study looks at the effect of news images and race on the attribution of responsibility for the consequences of Hurricane Katrina. Participants, Black and White, read the same news story about the hurricane and its aftermath, manipulated to include images of White victims, Black victims, or no images at all. Participants were then asked who they felt was responsible for the humanitarian disaster after the storm. White respondents expressed less sense of government responsibility when the story included victims' images. For Black respondents this effect did not occur. Images did not affect attribution of responsibility to New Orleans' residents themselves. These findings are interpreted to support the expectations of framing theory with the images serving as episodic framing mechanisms.