Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of 'knowing-wh' (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with 'knowing-that', the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that ('generalized intellectualism'), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition ('contrastivism about knowing-wh'), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon ('contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh').
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. In this paper we extend the research program on the seats-votes relationship to the U.S. electoral college. Borrowing liberally from the work of King and Browning (1987), we develop measures of representational form and partisan bias in the relationship between popular vote proportions and electoral vote proportions for each presidential election from 1872 to 1988. Two major findings emerge from our analysis: (1) the electoral college is dominated by a majoritarian representational form, with popular vote winners usually capturing a substantially higher proportion of the electoral vote than would be suggested by their popular vote proportion; and (2) contrary to the conventional wisdom of a Republican bias, the electoral college has a Democratic partisan bias for most of the years under study, particularly in the years since the end of World War II. for their assistance in data collection and graph construction; and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We are responsible for any errors that remain. paid to formalizing the degree to which popular votes for president are translated directly into electoral votes. Such formalizations have been the subject of intense scrutiny in the legislative politics subfield, where the degree to which aggregate legislative votes in single-member plurality systems are translated into aggregate legislative seats has spawned an extensive literature (Rae 1967; Tufte 1973; Taagepera 1973, 1986; Grofman 1983; King and Browning 1987; Niemi and Fett 1986). The seats-to-votes relationship, referred to in the legislative politics literature as the "swing ratio," has direct applicability to the electoral college, where aggregate popular and electoral vote proportions for each candidate can be observed coincidentally with a range of disaggregated patterns of popular and electoral votes found in each of the states.The abundant scholarly attention paid to the effects of legislative election rules and not to the effects of presidential election rules is understandable. In legislative elections, concerns over partisan gerrymandering and racial discrimination have given the legislative seats-to-votes controversy a sense of urgency. By contrast, presidential elections are single national elections, and slight variations in the translation of popular votes into electoral votes are not noticeable when the candidate with the popular majority is elected. Although calls for changes in the presidential selection process gain steam periodically, the reform efforts inevitably dissipate, lacking the case of a popular vote winner losing the election to motivate demand for change. Recently, however, with Republican presidential candidates winning five of the last s...
Objective This article utilizes national polling data to identify factors driving Tea Party membership. Methods First, in order to clearly define the Tea Party movement, the researchers will report Tea Party demographics drawn from the Blair‐Rockefeller Poll, which includes a national sample of 3,406 respondents. Second, the researchers will create a logit model to predict Tea Party membership. Results In addition to party identification and ideology, Tea Party membership (10.6 percent of the sample) is impacted both by fiscally conservative policy preferences and by presidential approval. To a lesser degree, age and a belief in biblical literalism are also significant indicators in the model. Conclusions The Tea Party is a distinct entity from the Republican Party and is triggered, not only by current economic attitudes, but, specifically, by opposition to President Obama.
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