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Scholars have debated the importance of declining political trust to the American political system. By primarily treating trust as a dependent variable, however, scholars have systematically underestimated its relevance. This study establishes the importance of trust by demonstrating that it is simultaneously related to measures of both specific and diffuse support. In fact, trust's effect on feelings about the incumbent president, a measure of specific support, is even stronger than the reverse. This provides a fundamentally different understanding of the importance of declining political trust in recent years. Rather than simply a reflection of dissatisfaction with political leaders, declining trust is a powerful cause of this dissatisfaction. Low trust helps create a political environment in which it is more difficult for leaders to succeed.

Social capital is the web of cooperative relationships between citizens that facilitates resolution of collection action problems (Coleman 1990; Putnam 1993). Although normally conceived as a property of communities, the reciprocal relationship between community involvement and trust in others is a demonstration of social capital in individual behavior and attitudes. Variation in social capital can be explained by citizens' psychological involvement with their communities, cognitive abilities, economic resources, and general life satisfaction. This variation affects citizens' confidence in national institutions, beyond specific controls for measures of actual performance. We analyze the pooled General Social Surveys from 1972 to 1994 in a latent variables framework incorporating aggregate contextual data. Civic engagement and interpersonal trust are in a tight reciprocal relationship, where the connection is stronger from participation to interpersonal trust, rather than the reverse.

Using data gathered in 25 Mexican communities, the authors link individual acts of migration to 41 theoretically defined individual-, household-, community-, and macroeconomic-level predictors. The indicators vary through time to yield a discrete-time event-history analysis. Over the past 25 years, probabilities of first, repeat, and return migration have been linked more to the forces identified by social capital theory and the new economics of migration than to the cost-benefit calculations assumed by the neoclassical model. The authors find that Mexico-U.S. migration stems from three mutually reinforcing processes: social capital formation, human capital formation, and market consolidation.

Many observers have asserted with little evidence that Americans' social opinions have become polarized. Using General Social Survey and National Election Survey social attitude items that have been repeated regularly over 20 years, the authors ask (1) Have Americans' opinions become more dispersed (higher variance)? (2) Have distributions become flatter or more bimodal (declining kurtosis)? (3) Have opinions become more ideologically constrained within and across opinion domains? (4) Have paired social groups become more different in their opinions? The authors find little evidence of polarization over the past two decades, with attitudes toward abortion and opinion differences between Republican and Democratic party identifiers the exceptional cases.

Hopf discusses the constructivist challenge to neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism and offers a constructivist research agenda that seeks a middle ground between mainstream international relations and critical theory.

Recent findings show an apparent erosion in the United States over the post-war years of ‘social capital’ understood as the propensity of individuals to associate together on a regular basis, to trust one another, and to engage in community affairs. This article examines the British case for similar trends, finding no equivalent erosion. It proposes explanations for the resilience of social capital in Britain, rooted in educational reform, the transformation of the class structure, and government policy. It concludes by drawing some general lessons from the British case that stress the importance of the distributive dimensions of social capital and the impact that governments can have on it.

The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal policy has revolutionized employment rights. Equal employment opportunity law, occupational safety and health legislation, and fringe benefits regulation were designed to create employee rights to equal protection, to health and safety, and to the benefits employers promise.

Using Carmines and Stimson's issue evolution model of partisan change, I argue that the abortion issue has transformed the two major United States political parties and that this process follows a predictable pattern, as outlined by Carmines and Stimson. By applying the theory of issue evolution to abortion, I develop three hypotheses: 1) The reputation for each party's stance on abortion among party elites has grown clearer and more distinct over the last 20 years; 2) At the mass level, people have changed their party identification in a manner consistent with their attitudes on abortion; 3) The changes among party elites and masses are causally connected, with elite-level changes producing mass-level responses. Simple time series analyses are used on two datasets, roll call votes on abortion in the United States Congress and public opinion polls from General Social Surveys, 1972-94. Democrats and Republicans shift dramatically on the abortion issue at both the elite and mass levels. Moreover, this change closely follows with the issue evolution model. The process unfolds gradually, and causality appears to run from elites to masses, rather than from masses to elites.