Practitioners and scholars are concerned that citizen surveys about community services are heavily influenced by respondents' opinions on other issues and by their sociodemographic backgrounds. We search for these biases by examining the extent to which citizen assessments of streets and parks in Iowa communities match the assessments of a nonresident. The citizens' ratings correlate significantly with the nonresident's ratings, indicating that citizen evaluations are not entirely the product of other influences. However, further analysis reveals some bias. In particular, streets are rated higher in wealthy towns, towns high in political efficacy, and towns where residents rate government services good overall. Parks are rated higher in towns where people come together to solve problems and in towns where people rate government services good overall. Even with these biases, our research indicates that citizen evaluations convey reasonably accurate information about the condition of community streets and parks. . Tom W. Rice is a professor of political science at the University of Iowa. His recent research has focused on social capital, the transmission of culture, and community politics.

This research compares a performance model to a racial model in explaining approval of a black mayor. The performance model emphasizes citizen evaluations of conditions in the city and the mayor's perceived effectiveness in dealing with urban problems. The racial model stipulates that approval of a black mayor is based primarily on racial identification or racism. A model of mayoral approval is tested with two surveys over different years of citizens in a city that has had 20 years' experience with black mayors. Findings indicate that performance matters when evaluating black mayors, indicating that the national performance models of presidential approval are generalizable to local settings with black executives. Implications for black officeholders are discussed. However, the racial model is alive and well, as indicated by its impact on approval and the finding that, in this context, performance matters more to white voters than to black voters. A final, highly tentative conclusion is offered that context conditions the relative power of these models. The performance model may explain more variation in approval of the black mayor than the racial model in a context of rapidly changing city conditions that focuses citizen attention on performance, but during a period of relative stability the two models are evenly matched.

Scholars have long been interested in the cultural differences between the southern United States and the rest of the nation. In this study we update and extend earlier work in this area by comparing and tracking the responses of southerners and non-southerners to over 75 questions from the 1972-2000 cumulative General Social Surveys. The analyses generate four conclusions. First, the attitudes and behaviors of southerners are more conservative than those of non-southerners in many areas, including race, gender, religion, sex, social capital, and tolerance. Second, the magnitude of these regional differences remains about the same regardless of whether we compare all southerners and non-southerners or just white southerners and non-southerners. This suggests that Southern culture is not just a “white” southern culture as many scholars have argued in the past. Third, the differences between southerners and non-southerners persist, although often to a lesser degree, after controlling for structural variables such as education, income, and urbanity. The implication is that southern distinctiveness is a product of both deep-seeded cultural differences and structural differences between regions. Fourth, there is very little evidence that regional differences have declined over the past quarter century, challenging those who contend that southern culture is in retreat.

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Biotechnology, specifically agricultural biotechnology, has been a seminal reference point in risk perception studies