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The era of globalization has created a context where state authority has been undercut and local forces have been empowered. In Africa, the reduction in authoritarian regimes and the emergence of globalization and democratization worked to reveal cleavages along ethnic and religious lines. At the same time, the global economy and structural adjustment reforms have created dramatic economic disparities between and within African nations that are historically linked in ethnic and cultural ways. West Africa experienced some of these tumultuous changes and some of them can be attributed to the instability associated with democratic reform in regions that have had very little experience with the concept. Regional integration in West Africa has been heavily debated topic due to the wide range of institutional, legal and infrastructural barriers that divide the countries that comprise the sub-region. Massive profit making opportunities are salient in instances where economic and political disparities between neighboring countries are present. It is oftentimes profit making opportunities by political elites that fuel opposition to the cause for regional integration. The application of Shari’a (Islamic law) in the Hausa region of Northern Nigeria has dramatically changed the quotidian life in the region. In an attempt to eliminate what is determined to be societal ills, some states have adopted Shari’a and subsequently outlawed activities such as drinking, prostitution and gambling in addition to less controversial habitudes such as praise singing and integration of the sexes in public places. The neighboring country of Niger, which has a large Hausa population as well, has, by contrast, been reticent to base its legal codes on Qur’anic law, which is due in large part to the political legacy of the French colonial government. Niger’s reluctance to mimic Northern Nigeria’s lead has rendered it a safe haven for Nigeria’s outlawed vices and as bars, brothels and informal casinos were shut down in Nigeria, the same establishments were opened in Niger. The activities that have been transferred across the border to Niger have provided a made a substantial economic impact on Niger’s border towns. The movement of illicit activities from Nigeria to Niger serves to demonstrate a case of counter regional integration. Rather than bringing together the two states it forces them further apart. Niger ostensibly uses its status as a secular state as a comparative economic advantage vis a vis a the religious reform carried out in Nigeria. This paper will examine how changes in regional Nigerian politics have had a profound on politics and the economy of Niger. The paper will also look at how the changes in Niger have brought about a strengthening of neo-patrimonialism in instances where rent-seeking possibilities arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is it possible to foster cooperation between nations having strong divides? Common mechanisms for cooperation and conflict resolution such as confidence-building measures or negotiations mediated by brokers are not always successful, as exemplified by the 2000 Camp David attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Environmental issues are often presented as causes for conflict. Thomas-Homer Dixon exemplifies the work in this research tradition, asserting that “environmental problems can trigger or exacerbate localized conflicts along existing social cleavages such as ethnicity, class, region, or relative deprivation, and that these conflicts can in turn spill over to more widespread violence” . However, a emergent contending view, environmental peacemaking, is suggesting that environmental concerns can serve as catalysts in conflict resolution. Many studies in the field of ecological security have been trying to predict conflict, assuming that chiefly conflict is predicted by environmental issues. In contrast, the present study argues that environmental issues can play a role in conflict resolution and thus proposes to predict a different dependent variable, conflict resolution, using environmental problems. This study investigates whether environmental concerns fostered cooperation and conflict resolution in the case of the 1994 Agreed Framework which aimed at easing nuclear tensions in the Korean peninsula. An international consortium negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, such that Pyongyang would no longer use its nuclear power plants and, in exchange, would receive two light-water reactors to account for the subsequent loss of power. Even though the consortium is currently in breach of the Agreed Framework, as the terms of the agreement have not been fulfilled, the focus of the paper is on the events, actors, negotiations, circumstances and motives preceding the signature of the Agreed Framework. After fleshing out the ecological security debate and the environmental peacemaking proposals, the paper will test two hypotheses concerning the manner in which environmental peacemaking could operate. The first hypothesis proposes that environmental issues change the strategic climate between contending parties, and the second hypothesis argues that the strengthening of a post-Westphalian governance involving transnational actors and civil societies is conducive to environmental peace-making. The paper will present a survey of the existing literature on ecological security as well as a case study, examining the relationship between conflict resolution and environmental concerns on the Korean peninsula. Individual statements as well as communiqués from the contending parties will be studied in order to extract environmental issues. A careful study of Korean and foreign nongovernmental organizations related to the Agreed Framework will also be undertaken. Notes: 1. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases. International Security, vol. 19, no. 1 (Summer 1994) pp 5 - 40. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary exploration into the intersection of economics, religion, and politics with regards to development issues in Indonesia. In specific, this paper’s hypothesis is that the Indonesian government often acts through and with religious organizations (and not as much or in the same ways as with secular civil society organizations) for economic and social development. The paper includes several sections: 1) Introduction and thesis. 2) Literature review: definition of civil society, how religious organizations fit into “civil society,” information about the political role of civil society, types of civil society organizations in Indonesia, and the extent to which civil society is really “outside” of governmental control (i.e., autonomy issues). 3) Background information about non-governmental organizations and information about their potential role in democratization processes. 4) Background for religious organizations: types of religious organizations in Indonesia and what they do. Special attention is given to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah (two of the largest and arguably most influential groups in Indonesia). 5) The nature of the relationship between the Indonesian government and civil society. 6) Information about religious organizations and economic development. Questions: a. Do religious organizations have a comparative advantage over secular organizations in supporting economic and social development? b. What does the government get in return for supporting (or controlling) religious organizations? c. Likewise, what do religious organizations obtain for supporting the government? 7) Conclusion and recommendations for future research. Each section by no means provides an exhaustive description or explanation of the topic, but rather instead serves to offer a general framework from which to start analyzing the aforementioned thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on comparing the justifications for the “Just War” tradition with the Islamic legal concept of “Jihad.” There are two primary objectives to this paper. The first is to discuss which goals and forms of political violence are considered legitimate within these traditions, and to critically review their grounds of justifications. Specifically this paper will examine the “Just War” tradition, as articulated by Thomas Aquinas and later elaborated by Carl Schmidt in “Nomos of the Earth,” and how the claim of “Just War” was used in Medieval Europe to validate certain violent conflicts while at same time invalidating other violent conflicts as unjust wars. It will also examine the evolution of the legal concept of “Jihad” and how certain acts of violence in public space would be rendered authentic “Jihads,” by Islamic legal jurists, while other episodes of violence would be rendered as acts of “Qat ‘al-tariq” (Acts of Rebellion) or “Hirabah” (Domestic Terrorism) within the Islamic Empire. The second objective is to relate this discussion to an analysis of recent justifications for political violence in the Arab World. Specifically, how various conflicts within the Middle East during the twentieth and twenty-first century have or have not been viewed as authentic or inauthentic “Jihads,” by various contemporary Islamic jurists, such as the Muftis of Al-Azhar (The oldest Islamic University in the World), and Muslim political ideologues such as Syed Qutb (The main ideologue of Egypt’s “Muslim Brotherhood”). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic voting has been one of the enduring themes of political science for several decades (Dorussen et al. 2002: xxiii). A lot of literature on economic voting has examined how macroeconomic conditions shape election outcomes in western democracies and evinces that incumbents are rewarded or punished for their economic performance. (Jacobson, 1991: 33). Surprisingly, however, very few studies have examined if electorates of new democracies also assign the responsibility of economic performance to incumbents. One reason for the limited scope of the research is related to a conventional belief that electorates in the Third World are not “highly informed, policy-oriented economic voters” (Dorussen et al. 2002: 2). This paper is one of very few cross-national macro level studies on economic voting in the Third World. Even though there have been a couple of case studies based on survey data, cross-national studies analyzing elections in new democracies are very rare. This paper analyzes 70 legislative elections and 50 presidential elections in 35 new democracies. Using Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs) estimation method, this paper tests three controversial hypotheses: first, that economic conditions shape election results in new democracies (the economic voting hypothesis); second, that the economic impact on the vote share of incumbent parties is constrained by the level of institutional clarity that affect electorates’ perception of incumbents’ responsibility for economic performance (the clarity hypothesis); third, the economic impact also depends on other economic and socio-political conditions that affect the relative importance of economic issues in elections of new democracies (the relative importance hypothesis). The expansion of the research on economic voting to new democracies provides us important clues to the features of transitional societies because “economic voting as a mechanism of democratic accountability” is a useful indicator of democratic consolidation (Dorussen et al. 2002: 2). As Richard Rose (1999) argued, a fully democratic regime “must be accountable to the electorate” (p. 35). Therefore, research on the conditions under which electorates realize democratic accountability through economic voting may improve our understanding of the democratization processes in the Third World. Analyzing an original dataset, this study shows that the economic voting function is not consistent in new democracies and is strongly constrained by economic and socio-political conditions. Except for some poor countries, voters did respond to economic performance of incumbents in presidential elections. Furthermore, this paper shows that political contexts, which influence voters’ perceptions of incumbents’ responsibility for economic performance, were also important determinants of the economic voting function in new democracies; the bicameral system and the proportional electoral system reduce economic voting function. Lastly, the relative importance of economic issues determined by the level of economic development, ethnic fractionalization and the level of democracy also affected the economic voting function. However, the effect of economic conditions on the voting share of incumbent parties in legislative elections was very limited. No robust evidence that corroborates economic voting theory was found in the analysis of legislative elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At UIC we began four years ago to restructure our graduate program to include Preparing Future Faculty as one of four model programs in the U.S. with a grant from the APSA. Since then we have created two new PFF courses, offerred workshops on teaching techniques, and developed teaching portfolios for our students. Thirty students have now gone through the program which is conducted with 10 partner universities and colleges in Illionis. This paper discusses the creation of such programs at any university, evaluates the results of our program, and discusses the problems of institutionalizing such programs in times of budget shortfalls. If desired papers can be obtained from two other PFF programs at Indiana Univ. and Uhiversity of Colorado at Boulder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial effort has been made by scholars of legislative behavior to discover what motivates members of Congress. This literature has evolved from conceptions of members as motivated by reelection interests (Mayhew 1974) to more expansive analyses of legislators? behavior (Parker 1992, Hall 1996, Sinclair 2002). Contemporary scholarship in the field now understands members as acting to maximize a variety of goals and interests, including personal policy objectives. However, few scholars sufficiently account for the influence of members? personal policy interests on their legislative activity, largely because of the methodological difficulties inherent in doing so. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this paper attempts to demonstrate the manner and extent to which personal policy interests are manifested in the legislative activities in which members engage. Informed by participant-observation, the paper relies on member interviews to reveal personal policy reasons for engaging in legislative activity in Congress. Findings suggest that a substantial amount of what members report are their top accomplishments and priorities are those issues that members have a personal interest in because of their previous occupation, experience, or identification with a group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper seeks to answer two major questions about the impact of grassroots political activity. Against what types of political targets can active communities expect to enjoy success? And are policy outcomes influenced by the racial / ethnic composition of the active community? I seek to answer these central questions in the context of the politics of environmental justice in California – specifically, the grassroots political activity directed against the siting, production, and management of federally regulated (RCRA) toxic wastes in or near residential communities. Principally, my analysis rests and builds upon the theoretical frameworks concerning the nature and scope of political struggles, economic theories of path dependence, and the dynamics of social and protest movements. With its roots in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Anti-Toxics Movement of the 1970s, and an increasing number of both national and local studies finding both race and then income to be the most powerful predictors of the presence of toxic wastes in a community, the Environmental Justice Movement emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a surge of grassroots momentum. Over the course of the last decade, the result was a loosely connected conglomeration of local, grassroots community organizations and their legal advocates, among whose primary objectives was and remains, to alleviate and/or eliminate the disproportionate burden of toxic wastes shouldered by communities of color and low-income populations. The subsequent journalist, activist, and scholarly attention devoted to these grassroots efforts often chose to highlight certain celebrated battlegrounds of Environmental Justice Movement success (e.g., Kettleman City, CA and the Mothers of East Los Angeles in Vernon, CA), in which heavily-burdened racial and ethnic minority communities successfully prevented the construction of additional toxic waste-burning facilities near their residential areas. These studies, however, have thus far failed to provide a clear understanding for how generalizable these triumphant examples were, and how they compare to majority white communities that faced comparable industry foes. Using an original data set of newspaper content analysis of grassroots political activity from 1988 – 1999 in the state of California created for my completed Ph.D. dissertation work, as well as Environmental Protection Agency data on the granting or denial of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) permits required by federal law to operate toxic waste facilities, this paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by providing a broad view of which communities shouldered a disproportionate share of the “toxic burden”, and which communities were indeed able to stifle the flow of toxins into their residential areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a great deal of debate in the realm of education regarding teaching styles, learning styles, and what can be done to enhance the classroom learning experience, for both student and instructor. The ultimate aim, for many, is significant learning, or critical thinking. One avenue of exploration has been cooperative learning. This paper examines some of the literature on the benefits of cooperative learning as a teaching tool, as well as provides some anecdotal information and evidence of its use from two different introductory political science courses: American Government and International Relations. It has been argued that to practice significant learning students need to participate in the discourse of the discipline. They need to think, speak, and be listened to as they participate in the discipline’s mode of inquiry. Supporters of such active learning strategies argue that students will not get enough practice just by talking to the instructor, and very little by just listening to the instructor in a strict lecture format. Students develop competency and become significant learners in classroom settings that provides opportunities for intensive, structured interaction among students. The most direct way to create classroom interaction is to adopt the principles of cooperative learning. In cooperative learning, the teacher designs a learning problem or task, and then assigns small groups of students to address the problem collaboratively. Cooperative learning moves beyond simply asking students to engage in group work. The purpose of cooperative learning is to enhance learning and achievement by encouraging peer-to-peer interaction and cooperation. Most researchers and practitioners stress the formal instructional aspects of cooperative learning, in which instructors design lessons that are suitable for use in group settings. A well designed active learning lesson gives students specific tasks to perform, as well as a set of instructions describing how students should work together [i.e. roles within a group setting]. Students engaged in structured group work are typically talking, rehearsing ideas, probing judgments, empathizing, listening, questioning, which are key to practicing the skills of significant learning. Research indicates that cooperative learning enhances mastery of content for most students. More so, cooperative learning improves students’ attitudes toward both the course discipline. They not only learn more, they like what they are learning more. This paper will explore how cooperative learning, as discussed above, can enhance the classroom setting. To that end, anecdotal information and data will be provided, as well as examples from courses in US Government and International Relations, which are offered through Valencia Community College. Valencia has adopted a learning-centered strategy to the educational process it provides. It is the mission of Valencia, and its educators, to “utilize diverse teaching and learning strategies that accommodate the learning styles of students and that promote both acquisition and applications of knowledge and understanding.” This is encouraged, in part, through the utilization of active learning techniques and cooperative learning strategies. Thus, this paper gives the perspective of one such Valencia educator, whose primary teaching approach before entering Valencia was primarily lecture driven, as they have integrated more learning-centered strategies into the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers and citizens alike pay a great deal of attention to government spending. They pay a lot less attention to government purchasing. This is surprising. The federal government alone procured over $200 billion in goods and services last year. Utilizing data from interviews with procurement lobbyists at all levels of government, this paper will illuminate the role of procurement lobbyists in government purchasing. Procurement lobbying is a multi-million dollar business that has been virtually ignored by academics. This paper will examine what procurement lobbyists do, what makes them effective, and ultimately, will examine the role of procurement lobbyists in the democratic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will investigate the role of political culture in the democratization process in three post-Soviet States. The paper is an extension of an earlier paper, written and researched over two semesters for graduate research seminars. This study used a most similar case approach involving Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. These three cases are similar in a variety of ways, but vary on the dependent variable, democratization success. The original hypothesis was based on the common argument that a democratic political culture in a state will improve that state’s democratization success The original study’s findings rejected the hypothesis of a positive connection between political culture and democratization, as no clear pattern emerged across the three states or even within them when the indicator questions were analyzed separately. One possible explanation for these findings involves the operationalization of political culture in the original study, as the questions used may have been capturing attitudes toward government policy performance rather than deeply held beliefs about democracy. The proposed paper will employ a different set of questions that arguably capture better the underlying values and beliefs of the population. Following an overview of the original findings, the paper will present an in-depth and critical analysis of the previous survey questions used. The responses of each state will be assessed and analyzed with the intent of finding a pattern within subsets of the original questions. It is not expected that such a pattern will emerge, thus showing the validity issues raised by poor operationalization choices. The paper will then present the results of a new analysis using different survey questions that are arguably more valid indicators of political culture as it is conceptualized in the existing literature. The expectation is that this new study will support the relationship between a democratic political culture and the democratization success of a state. In addition to providing findings important for the ongoing, broader examination of the relationship between political culture and democratization, the study will highlight the importance of question selection in the operationalization of political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is paper for panel #31033 on National Identity organized by Zachary Elkins This paper builds on the “being-to-doing” model of Miller and Rahn (2002) in the context of national identity. In this model, we argue that the psychological centrality of public identities affects public action through both normative conceptions about what it means to be a “good x,” the so-called “logic of appropriateness” and the emotional arousal that accompanies the extension of the self in processes of identification. In this paper, I present evidence from several different survey sources that public mood, “a diffuse affective state… that citizens experience because of their membership in a particular political community” (Rahn, Kroeger and Kite 1996), is a distinct emotional concomitant of American national identity that has direct and indirect motivational consequences for certain forms of political action that are as important, if not more important, than skills, resources, and mobilization, the typical levers of participation studied in the political science literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to employ the Data Warehousing Techniques advocated by Dr. Janet Delve of the University of Portsmouth (UK) in an evaluation of the personality traits, proposals and programs of mayors of large United States cities. Specifically, the paper proposes to use the text analysis capabilities of the ORACLE Database Management System to examine the State of the City addresses of mayors of sixty-five U.S. cities (slightly more than 25 percent of the total cities with populations greater than 100,000 as determined by the 2000 census), apply the Winter-Barth-Ferguson method of determining personality type through imagery in major political speeches, and cross-reference mayoral concerns and proposals with appropriations and ordinances actually enacted by the City Council. This proposal is possible because of the properties of the ORACLE relational database Text Information Management System (TIMS). TIMS possesses a long text field capability which can hold documents of varying—almost unlimited—length. TIMS also has the capacity to create for each document a concordance of the frequency and context of term use and to develop a thesaurus for terms employed. Thus the speed and efficiency of the process of imagery analysis of Power, Affiliation and Achievement can be increased and standardized. Key words for given programs can be cross referenced with City Council minutes to appraise the success of different personality types and the influence of events and environmental conditions on mayoral effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Hispanics now account for a greater proportion of the population than African Americans. What are the implications of this population shift to African Americans and Hispanics? The purpose of this paper is to examine the political relationship between African Americans and Hispanics in the United States. While African Americans have been politically active in America for over 50 years, Hispanics have only recently begun to make significant political strides. Two distinct issues have historically constrained their political impact. First of all, a sizable portion of the Hispanic population lack citizenship and therefore cannot participate in the political process. The second major constraint has been due to the multi-culture backgrounds of Hispanics. Since Hispanics come from many different counties and differ from one another in a number of ways, it has been difficult for them to build a broad-based political coalition in the way that African Americans have. This paper is explores three primary issues in order to determine the impact of the population shift on both groups and the country. First, the discussion begins with a brief history of both groups in the U.S. and how their experiences have shaped their political ideologies. Second, it analyzes grassroots movements and national organizations that specifically promote the African American and Hispanic agenda. Finally, there is an examination of the issues that unify and the conflicts that separate the two groups. The analysis seeks to examine whether the two groups will become the proverbial crabs in a barrel fighting to keep the other from rising to the top or whether they will forge a collaborative and supportive relationship. Recommendations are provided to increase the opportunity for the two groups to emerge as political allies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The defense of social order seems to lie at the heart of the just war traditions in all of the world’s major religions. Domestic stability is perceived as one of the highest values, for it is only within a well-ordered, stable society that human spirituality can reach its highest potential. Such domestic stability is predicated on two types of order. Order within society – in terms of a just socio-political system, usually unified under one legitimate ruler – is necessary so that the human community may flourish and so that the religion in question can be practiced most faithfully. Likewise, some sort of ordered relationship between societies (or states) is necessary to ensure the survival of the domestic community itself. This paper will consider the role played by this concern with order in the formulation of just war principles in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. While some previous work has already highlighted the need for order as central to the Hindu and Islamic worldviews, most Western just war theorists have underplayed this concern, emphasizing instead the aspects of just war theory that limit the destructiveness of war. Consequently, there is a large literature on the relevance of just war thinking to international law topics such as non-combatant immunity or to self-defense as the only justifiable cause for war. Drawing on insights from Hindu and Islamic conceptions of just war, as well as contemporary Western theorists such as Michael Walzer, this paper will go on to suggest that the normative logic behind just war’s concern with order – even in Christianity – is the idea, in Kant’s words, that war should be undertaken “for the sake of peace.” In other words, there is an intimate relationship between just war and justice as understood in the (peacetime) domestic social order. As a result, the paper implies that perhaps just causes for war are not limited to self-defense in the narrow sense (defending one’s self from presently occurring or immanent attack). Instead, just causes may be understood more broadly, as those that uphold justice and not simply peace. Therefore, emphasizing this concern with order suggests that humanitarian intervention -- and in some cases even regime change -- may be permissible in just war terms, if such missions serve the cause of creating a more just peace, by re-building the social order. Finally, the paper will comment on the normative implications of this re-examination of just war principles, and the possible risks inherent in stressing the role of order (as opposed to restraint) when considering the justness of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To obtain a clearer picture of the role Supreme Court rulings play in lower court consideration of cases, the proposed paper will explore types of responses by courts of appeals to Supreme Court cases, decided or pending, drawing examples principally from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Relations between lower courts and the Supreme Court have long attracted attention, from the bases on which the justices grant review to the effect of their rulings on the lower courts. Recently, the intuitively attractive principal - agent theory, developed in the study of bureaucracy, has led to renewed interest in the extent to which lower courts, acting as the Supreme Court?s agents, follow its rulings or whether they ?shirk? by taking positions not consonant with the Court?s doctrine. There is some valuable work on court of appeals? actions after Supreme Court rulings in particular policy areas such as obscenity, libel, and criminal procedure (see, e.g., Gruhl), but very little on remands (see Baum and Pacelle). Thus far studies have been focused on outcomes, that is, lower courts? rulings on the merits, and on citation of Supreme Court cases; that is, researchers have looked at results, not process. Because previous decisions may be used primarily for justification instead of directing the lower court to a particular result, further examination of citation in relation to outcome is needed. In addition to examining published opinions, we must turn to ?unpublished? memorandum dispositions and orders. Yet that is not all. The focus on published rulings on the merits also means that we lack information about other, and less visible, lower court actions in relation to Supreme Court decisions. These include deferring action until justices decide whether to grant review to a relevant case or actually issue their decisions, or, after the justices do rule, returning a case to the district court to consider the new decision. In addition, we know little about whether lower court judges and clerks grapple seriously with what the Supreme Court has handed them. This requires that we penetrate beyond results to judges? deliberations to see how they approach Supreme Court rulings potentially affecting the cases before them. In order to see the actual on-going use of Supreme Court rulings, we must draw on the contents of closed case files, which contain copies of e-mail communication among the judges and between judges and their clerks. Access to that material in the files of a senior circuit judge is available to the author. Because the extent of the fit of principal - agent theory to the judicial realm is not yet fully known, identifying and illustrating official court of appeals actions related to the Supreme Court will add to our understanding of the principal?s effects on its chief agents. The proposed study is not intended primarily to develop or refine theory but will provide additional basic material that, because it bears on principal-agent theory, could be used for that purpose, allowing refinement of its application to the world of the judiciary. To the extent it speaks to the effect of the Supreme Court on lower courts, the paper may also contribute to the debate over the role played by ideology or other matters, including ?law? (which includes Supreme Court rulings), in lower courts? decisions. Examination of how courts of appeals respond specifically to remands of their cases which the Supreme Court has decided on the merits or GVR?d in light of some other ruling is not the focus of the proposed paper, but will be examined in a separate study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an effort to understand the implications of the opposition strategies to Eastern European totalitarianism for our contemporary view of a democratic, free society. Vaclav Havel’s views are indispensable to any analysis of the Eastern European opposition to totalitarianism for at least one essential reason: the road he charted seems to have been the one taken by events in most of the 1989 revolutions. By elucidating the terms of the opposition strategy proposed by Vaclav Havel in the context of the post-totalitarian system” (the variety of totalitarianism specific to Eastern Europe until 1989) I endeavor to identify Havel’s profile of the independent individual - the necessary precondition for a free society. Havel’s insights are not only a map for opposition, they also contain valuable prescriptions for what should be, in his view, the authentic basis of society. It is thus necessary to correctly identify the foundation of his opposition strategy in order to truly understand the implications of his outlook for civic and political life. The main question this paper tries to answer is how can the condition of the introspective, moral individual can be reconciled, in Havel’s view, with the condition of citizen, of participant in collective political action? The thesis of this essay is that such reconciliation calls, in Havel’s perspective, for resurrecting individual freedom from within and projecting it into daily actions - by living within the truth. Havel’s strategy for effective opposition calls for individual self-emancipation that is both aimed at breaking the vicious circle of apathy and at avoiding the morally damning effect of violent action. Havel presents this strategy as one logically deducible from his particular understanding of the post-totalitarian system. This essay will subsequently endeavor: 1. to present Havel’s understanding of the unique features of the Eastern-European communist system, which he labels the post-totalitarian order; 2. to account for what Havel sees as their effect on individuals in the post-totalitarian society; 3. (and on these basis)to explain what Havel considers the only promising strategy for overturning the post-totalitarian system and 4. to explain how that leads to the necessary basis for a society of free individuals. Understanding all these elements rescues Havel’s view of opposition from the standard criticisms of idealism and philosophical speculation, and depicts it, for any “friend of civil society”, as a thoroughly consistent and convincing one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the political implications of language policy in Ethiopia. Clearly, language policy is not simply about administrative efficiency or pedagogical concerns. Language, since it is both the vehicle and subject itself of vital political goods for citizens, will always have a political nature. This work considers the types of political goods which language policy is meant to deliver in a multicultural society such as Ethiopia, as well as discusses the various ethical and institutional options available with respect to language policy, in particular assessing where Ethiopia’s current language policy fits. Finally, the paper includes a presentation of initial findings from a series of interviews and focus group sessions with government officials, school administrators, parents, teachers, and students in two Regional States of Ethiopia, particularly as these relate to the larger questions of language and ethnic identity. Attention is given to the theoretical issues which language identity and language choice have for our understanding of political culture and democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, where language choice in the multicultural, multiethnic polity is often a contentious policy issue. Despite what one might expect about the present language policy, there is surprisingly little of this type of assessment, from either Political Theory or Comparative Politics. Yet, the interesting thing is that most people in Ethiopia today will tell you right away that language choice is political. This is as opposed to purely pragmatic or pedagogical. Choices of language of instruction in education, for instance, are not only about what helps children learn best, but also about what their identity is, particularly what identity is recognized by the state. Therefore, in culturally diverse societies such as Ethiopia, language policy is a crucial indicator of the nature of the nation-state project, even when such a policy is informal or unspoken. However, political scientists and theorists have paid remarkably attention to the practical and normative dimensions of language policy itself, preferring instead to fold it into a more general discussion of federalism, ethnic conflict or multiculturalism. This gap in the literature means that our understanding of the role of language policy in the development of democratic political culture on the continent remains insufficient. Addressing this question requires careful attention not only to theories of language choice but also the specific political context in which language policy is executed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we measure the structure of the Washington interest group system to explain mobilization patterns across issue areas. Interest group scholars have traditionally studied mobilization by estimating the aggregate size of the interest group system and comparing the distribution of different types of organizations. They have, not surprisingly, found that the number of occupational interests far exceeds the number of non-occupational organizations, indicating a representational bias in favor of business interests (see, e.g., Schlozman and Tierney 1986, Walker 1991, Baumgartner and Leech 2001). Yet there is reason to believe that the issues on which non-occupational organizations lobby government officials are very different from the issues that mobilize business interests, suggesting that the degree of representational bias may vary across issue areas. This paper develops a theory to differentiate descriptive issue areas in order to explain the variable nature of group involvement. To demonstrate these points we make use of data from reports filed with the U.S. House and Senate under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. Our dataset includes more than 19,000 reports filed by 6,900 organizations in 1996. The reports are filed by interest organizations and hired lobbying firms on behalf of organizational clients. Each organization that registers to lobby indicates their interests by selecting from a governmentally defined list of 74 issue areas. Therefore each organization in the dataset has a registration profile indicating the areas in which they were active, and these profiles can be compared across groups to make inferences about the structure of policy subsystems. Our analysis will use profile dissimilarity measures—a multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique—to construct a geometric model of the 74 issue areas and the individual groups (Davison 1992). We expect the MDS analysis to yield a spatial configuration of the interest group system in two orthogonal dimensions: an economic-social policy dimension and distributive-benefits dimension (Jacoby and Schneider 2001). Because the resulting scale values will be interval-level measures of their locations on each of the dimensions, they can be correlated with measures of group activity levels in each issue area. We hypothesize that the business advantage will be more pronounced for economic policies than for social issues. Likewise, we expect the business interest bias to be greater for policies with particularized benefits than those with common goods. Thus, assessing the structure of the Washington group system gives us insight into the variable nature of mobilization bias in a way that measures of aggregate size and scope cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One feature of thinking about dimensions of constitutionalism that are not captured by conventional legal and political abstractions or by a focus on winning or losing is the extent to which the Constitution, and legal argumentation, can be understood outside of lawyerly or law school terms. One way to justify such a non-exclusive way of thinking is by making the distinction between a “juridic Constitution” (i.e., the one that belongs to lawyers, judges, and legal and political scholars who follow in their wake) and “civic Constitutions” (i.e., ones that arise from political contests between citizens, and between citizens and institutions, as expressions of political interests and values) (Finnis). A companion justification for such a non-exclusive way of thinking comes from a “constitutive approach to the law” that focuses on how legal conventions are inherently ambiguous, indeterminate, and contestable,” and therefore “subject to multiple constructions and contests about their meaning” beyond the meanings articulated within and through courts. A constitutive approach also focuses on the “performative” functions of the law (e.g., how legal constructions shape and are shaped by shared cultural and political understandings, symbols, and activities (Brigham, McCann, Gillman and Clayton). Together, civic Constitutions and constitutive approaches to the law encourage the idea that constitutional and legal argumentation should be understood not only from the “top-down” (i.e., from the perspectives of a privileged few of intellectual and political power) but also from the “bottom-up” (i.e., from the perspectives of publics of lesser intellectual and political power). They also encourage the idea that privileged legal ideas and official practices ought to be challenged and criticized. The purpose of this paper is to use the distinction between juridic and civic Constitutions and a constitutive approach to the law to address the strengths and weaknesses of claims about television coverage of oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court. Recent high profile issues (e.g., affirmative action and campaign finance law) have instigated, at least among journalists, a renewed interest in claims for televising USSC oral arguments, primarily from the perspectives of democratization, freedom of speech, and civic education. The paper’s main argument, blending conceptual and social scientific considerations, is that, on balance, and despite the “bottom-up” orientation of civic Constitutions and a constitutive approach to the law, the strengths and weaknesses of claims for and against televising oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court virtually cancel each other out. Thus, this paper raises the substantive question of whether the issue of television coverage of USSC oral arguments is “much ado about nothing,” and it casts some measure of skepticism about any necessary or sufficient fit between civic Constitutions, a constitutive approach to the law, and “bottom-up” perspectives about the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For five seasons, The West Wing has remained one of the most popular dramas on television. For a show that features no sex, little violence, and lots of fast-paced dialogue about arcane political issues of the day, the appeal of the show appears obscure. In this paper, we will see how TWW taps into particular American ideological narratives regarding duty, power, and their interrelation. TWW offers the viewer an idea of what duty means in the particular context of an American political ideology; furthermore, it attempts to work out how Americans demonstrate a commitment to their duties, and to whom or what that sense of duty is owed. Since the show exists within the scenery of the American presidency and politics more generally, it also addresses (albeit indirectly) the allure of power in public service, acknowledging that a sense of duty often proves insufficient to motivate individuals. But American attitudes and ideas of power, as American political figures from Washington to Lincoln to Lyndon Johnson have noted, contain much nuance and appreciation for the good of power, contrary to our popular (and perhaps populist) notions of the human corruptibility that comes from power. Such being the case, the paper unwinds the interweaving of duty and power, demonstrating how TWW’s creators and cast propound a theory of American politics that has deep roots in the history of our political ideology and that emphasizes familiar rhetoric while pointing to little remembered components of our shared ideological heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the conceptualization and use of efficiency in recent public administration and management literature. The literature identifies efficiency as an explanatory variable for increasing privatization of the public sector. Unfortunately, conceptualization and use of efficiency in this literature appears inconsistent at times because of a lack of precision concerning two similar but distinct meanings. First, there is allocative efficiency—the marginal utility of a good or service is equal to its marginal cost of production. Second, there is economic efficiency—the manufacturing costs involved with produce of a good or service. This paper untangles and clarifies these conceptualizations and uses of efficiency in the public administration and management literature by providing the following analysis. First is a discussion of why conceptualization and use of efficiency in the public sector is important regarding its study, practice, and democracy. Second is a review of classic and contemporary public administration literature that highlights the evolution of efficiency as a meaningful concept. Third is an overview of three conceptualizations of efficiency—Pareto efficiency, cost-benefit (Kaldor-Hicks) efficiency, and x-efficiency. Fourth is an analysis of selected recent publications and how they individually and collectively address the issue of efficiency in the public sector. Fifth is a discussion of the benefits for the discipline and democracy from developing a more consistent approach toward discussing and analyzing efficiency. Finally, concluding remarks summarize the findings of this paper and offer suggestions for additional clarity of importance of concepts in public administration and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the nature of citizens’ perceptions of political parties, focusing on those who consider themselves political independents, or unaffiliated with the two major parties. I will attend to the following outstanding questions in the literature: (1) Is there a temporal component to this self definition (Blais et al. 2001; Timpone and Neely 1997)? (2) Is this disposition largely cognitive or affective (Burden and Klofstad 2003)? (3) To what degree do independents form a sense of belonging to that group (Greene 2002; Weisberg and Greene forthcoming; Neely 1997)? (4) To what extent is political party independence gendered (Norrander 1997)? (5) Are most independent identifiers merely closet partisans (Keith et al. 1992)? In addition, I examine the dimensions of an independent identification: autonomy, anti-partyism, variability, and neutrality (Dennis 1988). The research on party affiliation has relied largely on quantitative data from secondary survey sources and more recently from experimental designs. I make a modest first step at complementing those studies with a qualitative approach. I ran six focus groups in the spring of 2003 in order to gather data on this topic. Those participants were grouped by gender (men, women) and party disposition (true independent, Republican leaners, Democratic leaners). This paper will report the focus group results focusing on the above points of inquiry. This is the first stage of a larger project in which I hope to employ survey and experimental methods on the same topic. Therefore, this paper will also provide some comment on future empirical designs, both quantitative and qualitative, that may shed more light on the nature of political independents. I hope this work contributes to the academic literature by (1) extending and developing a theory of party affiliation and identity, and (2) testing hypotheses related to the points of inquiry above. Practically speaking, parties of all types stand to benefit from the application of this research. Understanding the orientations of political independents is a prerequisite for appealing to that group, and it informs the strategic deployment of party resources. If some independents are perennially pushed away from the concept of a party, then it is not apparent why parties would court them. On the other hand, if some independents find the current party choices lacking, identifying the missing ingredients could benefit both major and minor parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking It to the Next Level: the Elevation of District Judges to the US Courts of Appeals Much of the study of public law is dedicated to the investigation of judicial selection to the federal courts. In the US, as in many common law countries, a large number of appellate court vacancies are filled by elevating a judge from the court below. Therefore, an interesting question arises: how can we predict the likelihood that any given judge will be elevated when such a vacancy occurs? In other words, are there systematic patterns associated in elevating federal judges to a higher court? Our paper explores this compelling and important question. In his extensive evaluation of nominations and appointments to the lower federal courts, Goldman (1997) shows us that presidents are most often committed to agendas steered by policy, partisan, and/or personal interests. Most interesting is Goldman’s articulation of policy-influenced goals in nominating and appointing persons to the federal courts. Moreover, partisan and personal interests are also apparent in judicial selection events, as presidents blatantly choose close friends and political party allies for judicial posts in the hopes of paying off debts or bolstering support for his party. Elevation of sitting judges may be an attractive alternative to presidents seeking to further their policy agenda as the prior judicial record of a nominee may provide useful cues of their legal policy orientation. Recent work by Kaheny and Songer provides tentative support for this hypothesis. Their analysis provides preliminary evidence that when presidents choose to elevate judges associated with their own party they select judges whose district court records are consistent with the president’s preferences. Also, they find evidence that when choosing to elevate a judge from the opposite party, these judges are deviant from their party’s policy goals (ex. Democratic presidents elevate the more liberal Republicans). Goldman’s theory of judicial selection and the findings of Kaheny and Songer pave the way for this study of judicial elevation by invoking all three agendas, policy, partisan and personal, into the politics of elevation. In this paper, we examine judicial selection in elevating judges from district courts to the courts of appeals. We will examine patterns in selection strategies shaped by policy, partisan, and personal concerns. Does a judge’s opinion writing record influence his chances of elevation, especially in civil rights and criminal cases? Does the possibility of elevation decrease once a new president takes office? Do party considerations carry over into elevation events? Does the ABA’s evaluation of a judge help or hurt a judge’s chance for elevation? Are former US Attorneys more likely to be the judges chosen for elevation? Do race and gender increase a judge’s likelihood for elevation? Finally, how much of an effect do the policy preferences of home state senators have in the elevation choice? We will attempt to answer these questions by examining all elevations of district court judges since 1960. Construction of two logit models, accounting for elevation by same party presidents in the first model and elevation by opposite party presidents in the second model, will assist in providing answers to the above questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Given the recent history of scandals involving financial intermediaries, governing officials have increased scrutiny of rating agencies, such as Moody’s and S&P, to ensure that they are providing accurate information to investors, the public and governing officials. This paper argues that rating agencies have incentives to assign ratings based, in part, upon positive network externalities accruing to both raters and states. Rating agencies seek a reputation of competence and credibility at least equal to that of their rivals or else they will be at a competitive disadvantage. This suggests that there should be significant convergence in the bond ratings by different agencies. We theorize that the level of convergence between ratings agencies is contingent upon the consensus to use joint credit ratings from the dominant firms. First, we hypothesize that additional rivals in a small market create a stronger incentive for firms to protect their reputation, and thus make ratings that tend to converge with those of their rivals. This paper uses data from Moody’s and S&P state government general obligation bond ratings from 1970 to 2002. Unlike most other bond rating research, we use an interval indicator of bond ratings, average yield spread, to test several propositions. We use a variety of time series techniques to test the hypotheses that competitive pressures in financial intermediary markets result in converging ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the neoconservative argument for a type of federalism that promotes decentralization of government functions and urges close government cooperation with some segments of the private sector. We demonstrate that the type of federalism envisioned by neoconservatives increases social and economic inequality. Neoconservatives argue that such inequality is not only acceptable but essential for democracy and social progress. The paper is divided into four parts: First, we examine the neoconservative conception of federalism relying primarily on the public choice literature, in particular the work of Buchanan and Tullock (1962), Riker (1982), and Riker and Weingast (1988), and show how conservatives such as Marvin Olasky (1991) have used this literature to argue for a specific vision of American government. Public choice theory focuses on two adverse consequences of majority rule: disequilibrium and “rent-seeking.” According to Buchanan (1975), the worst effects of disequilibrium, including for example, the expansion of the federal budget brought about through “log-rolling,” can be mitigated by reducing the size of the decision making unit. Smaller decision making units can create conditions that, over time, can approximate unanimity in decision making. Furthermore, smaller decision making units are more receptive to civic groups, thus reducing the possibilities for opportunistic behavior that leads to “rent seeking.” Smaller units facilitate the expression of political preferences through voice. When voice fails, individuals will exit to communities that provide their desired package of goods and services. Second, we examine whether or not there is any evidence to suggest that the transfer of government functions to local governments and civic groups will result in greater equity in distribution, or to use neoconservative terms, whether such arrangements are pareto-superior to more centralization. We question whether or not any decision making unit greater than three people can ever arrive at outcomes, particularly distributional outcomes, to which all parties will agree and on which an equitable distribution of resources can be made. Third, public choice analysis has stimulated a debate over the costs of centralization. Riker (1975) has argued that federalism permits minorities to impose high external costs on members of the majority through federal policy. Thus, for neoconservatives the devolution of government functions is seen as a way to protect the property rights of the wealthy from regulations imposed at the local level by the federal government. In practice, the problem is that local government has been recognized as most likely attentive to business and economic development interests (Rivlin, 1992; Peterson, 1995a; Walker, 2000; Peterson, Rabe, and Wong, 1996 ) and least likely to meet the needs of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Finally, we employ the example of welfare reform to demonstrate that the neoconservative view is non-sustainable over time precisely because it leads to less, not more, democracy. Widely hailed as the greatest success of the 1995 “devolution revolution,” welfare reform transformed a sixty year old safety net entitlement for the poor into a temporary, block grant, work-first policy intended to retract the long-standing obligations of society for its neediest members. This neoconservative policy was advanced and became federal law in 1996 regardless of the fact that economists and political scientists for years have argued that redistributive policy is most efficiently administered at the federal level (Peterson, 1980; Ladd and Doolittle, 1982; Peterson and Rom, 1989; Peterson, 1995a, 1995b; Quigley and Rubinfeld, 1996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voting, Early Voting and Party Mobilization: Is Timing Everything? The adoption of many electoral reforms (e.g., election day registration, early voting and motor-voter registration) have been designed and justified in terms of increasing voter participation. Research has shown that the promise of these reforms has fallen far short of expectations in two particular ways. First, the effect of electoral reforms has had a limited direct effect on overall turnout levels. And, second, the effects appear to be concentrated among likely voters: the reforms simply enable election day voters to vote by mail or to vote early (thus not increasing the size of the electorate nor changing its composition as reformers argue is the case). We have demonstrated in previous research that one explanation for these findings is that scholars have ignored the important role of partisan campaign mobilization in linking the reform to overall turnout levels. That is, we find that early voting is associated with greater turnout when party elites use early voting as part of their campaign strategy. And we conclude that previous research has misspecified the basic causal factors in predicting overall turnout, resulting in incorrect estimates of the effect of electoral reforms on voter turnout. In this paper we extend this research agenda by exploring in greater detail whether reconceptualizing the dependent variable provides more leverage on the question of the impact of electoral reforms. More specifically, we test whether the availability of early voting increases the likelihood that a voter will vote early (as opposed to voting on election day or abstaining) and what types of voters are so affected. We explore the conditions under which candidates and party officials use early voting in Texas to mobilize voters to support their party’s candidates for Governor and U.S. Senator in the 2002 midterm election and whether such efforts yield a substantial effect on election day and early voting turnout. We draw upon a unique database that studies a panel of registered voters and matches their reported and validated voting behavior with partisan campaign activities in each voter’s respective county. Our measure of validated voting also includes the method of balloting for each voter: in-person early balloting, mail-in balloting and, in-person election day balloting. To measure county-level campaign activities we interviewed Texas county party chairs in all 254 Texas counties about the level and nature of their campaign activities. Specific questions are asked about how the party and their candidates emphasize early voting among target populations relative to other types or targets of campaign mobilization. We believe this paper will be an important second step in more accurately assessing the importance of electoral reforms to voter turnout in contemporary American elections. It should be of interest to scholars of electoral procedures and reform, voter turnout and party politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will revisit the existing international sanctions literature, offering new answers to outstanding questions. The paper will propose a new game theoretic treatment of the sanctioning game and probe its empirical relevance on a dataset. The outstanding questions are whether sanctions work, whether positive incentives work better than sanctions proper, and when is war preferable to sanctioning. The new answer is the contractual theory approach to adverse selection, which, to my knowledge, has not been applied to the study of sanctions, or to any IR topic at large. The paper begins justifying the assumption that most sanction situations can be analyzed as games of information asymmetry, in which the sanctioner does not know the target’s resolve. Information asymmetry is a cause of inefficiency in standard sanction models, as the sanctioner has to guess the type and will sometimes guess it wrong. I characterize such models as models in which sanctions are modeled as a reservation value. Instead, I offer to think of sanctions as contracts along the ways of contractual theory. In this game, the sanctioner confronts the target with a menu of contracts, as many as there are different possible “types” of target. The alternative to the menu—if the target turns down every contract—is war. The menu is structured so that each “type” participates and selects the contract that is destined to its type, thereby leading to the revelation of all private information and removing the main source of inefficiency. Assuming two types, the “pragmatic” type takes the contract with the positive incentive, whereas the “rogue” type takes the sanction contract. The advantage of this formulation is that it allows us to identify the conditions in which sanctioners will prefer to threaten war rather than provide positive inducements to target states. It is the case when the sanctioner’s expected value for offering a full menu (featuring a contract with a positive incentive for the pragmatic type and another with a sanction for the rogue type) is lower to the sanctioner’s expected value of offering a “menu with shutdown,” featuring a single, zero-incentive, contract for the pragmatic type and war for the rogue type. In a second part, I will use the comparative statics of the model to test the empirical relevance of the model. I will use a variation of the now-standard Hufbauer, Schott and Elliot’s dataset expanded to include cases of war, such as the recent US-Iraq war. The test will involve creating new variables coding the type of the menu—the presence of positive incentives, the threat of sanctions, the threat of war—and testing if the variation in these variables correlates or not with the parameters of the model (distribution of types, sanctioner’s cost of war, degree of dissimilarity between types, etc). I do not have the results as of yet (October 2003). The paper would easily fit in two categories of panel: a panel on international sanctions or a panel on new developments in applications of game theory to IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem-based learning allows students to learn disciplinary knowledge while strengthening critical-thinking, problem-solving, and research skills. In this paper, we describe two experiences with problem-based learning in an introduction to American public policy course, from both a professor?s and undergraduate student?s perspective. The professor?s perspective includes discussing the nature of the problem presented to students, learning objectives, methods of assessment, and student reactions to the projects. This paper also provides strategies for easing the transition of students into more self-directed learning, as well as overcoming resistance to group work. The undergraduate student?s perspective is based on her experience with problem-based learning as both a student and a researcher. Her insights into how students actually work together to develop learning issues and seek solutions to the problem adds a dimension that is often missing from articles on teaching and learning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper models state tobacco control and public health agency implementation of laws restricting youth access to tobacco, and the resultant effectiveness of those laws. It does so with a three-step process, first examining the determinants of enforcement of these laws, then analyzing the effectiveness of agency enforcement and other policies on compliance rates, and finally assessing the impacts of that compliance (and other regulatory efforts) on youth smoking. Since agencies have a great deal of discretion over enforcement activities, studies of policy implementation and effectiveness need to examine what occurs when different resources and policy environments are available. In general, existing literature on the effectiveness of regulatory policy has found that the strength of government needs to be behind a policy for it to work. Understanding the determinants of agency enforcement is therefore of utmost concern for researchers in policy implementation. Policy implementation literature identifies two issues that need to be addressed. This first research question is: what factors stimulate enforcement activities? Here, the literature on bureaucratic policymaking and power can be informative. Meier and Rourke among others identify factors both external and internal to the agency at hand will be influential. Bureaucratic discretion, organization, political (and/or clientele) support, policy environment, and cohesion of personnel are just a few factors that this literature identifies as important. The second question is: do these actions by agencies translate into outputs and outcomes that are in line with the goals of the policy? Many studies of policy effectiveness simply focus on the strength (or simply presence) of policy instruments. However, it will often matter how the policy is implemented. For example, Meier’s (1994) analysis of drug and alcohol policy examined issues of agency enforcement as well as the presence or absence of specific policies. Thus, this is a paper that uses the policy area of tobacco to address the two questions outlined above: what stimulates agency implementation efforts, and are those efforts successful? As a result, this paper should fit nicely in either the Public Policy or Public Administration sections. I already have a rough draft with preliminary data finished, and I am in the process of updating and completing the data set. I therefore will have no problems meeting any conference deadlines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This paper argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal forces on the development of the state. The paper demonstrates the utility of this approach through several time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we challenge convention wisdom that bemoans the perceived deterioration of the presidential election information environment in the U.S. We begin by acknowledging the much lamented decline in both news quality and news viewership, but argue that the rise in paid political advertising has served as a substitute information source for many Americans. As a consequence, presidential voting decisions are as firmly based on the candidates’ policy stances and personal characteristics today as they were 50 years ago. Moreover (and also contrary to conventional wisdom) the shift toward paid advertising as an information source has led to an increase in the extent to which Americans draw upon policy-related as opposed to character-related considerations in making their presidential vote decisions. The proposed paper will be our first presentation of findings form this ongoing project. Our analyses combine three kinds of data: measures of the public’s knowledge and perceptions of presidential candidates from the National Election Studies, records of political advertising by media market from the CMAG data, and our own coding of presidential election news coverage, candidate speeches, and paid advertising. To date, our analyses show that (1) the total number of reasons Americans offer to vote for or against the major party candidates (their candidate likes and dislikes) as been remarkably steady over the pat 50 years; (2) there is a slight trend toward more policy-oriented and less character-oriented likes and dislikes; (3) the variation from election to election in the ratio of policy- to character-oriented likes and dislikes tracks quite closely with the ratio of policy- to character-oriented content in candidates’ paid advertising but not with the ratio of policy- to character-oriented content in news coverage of the elections; and (4) NES respondents living in media markets with more presidential campaign advertising offer more policy-oriented likes and dislikes than those living in media markets with less advertising (net of education, partisan identification, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationwide, the Medicaid financing crisis is well-documented as federal and state governments struggle with increasing caseloads and skyrocketing health care costs. New York State is one of only two states that require local governments to make significant contributions to financing Medicaid. In New York State, the federal government match is 50 percent , while the state pays for 25 percent and the counties must contribute the remainder of total Medicaid costs. (Medicaid long-term care services have a different State/local share.) The combination of expanded eligibility through Child Health Plus and Family Health Plus, increased traditional Medicaid caseloads as a result of the recession, reduced local revenue and rapidly increasing health care costs has resulted in a Medicaid crisis. County governments are responding to this crisis by reducing other county-funded programs and by raising local property taxes. While counties contribute approximately 25 percent of the financing, they have essentially no control over eligibility requirements, what services are covered, or the pricing of Medicaid services. All of these are regulated by State (and federal) requirements. As a result, counties exert most of their discretion over Medicaid cost management through their organizational structure and program administration. Advocates of devolution argue that this type of local discretion results in improved policy outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the diversity in Medicaid program organization and administration in several counties in Upstate New York and to test whether or not policy implementation is improved as the result of greater county discretion. This paper employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches to examining the differences among counties. The authors made numerous site visits to each county, conducting interviews and collecting quantitative data. In addition, the paper uses publicly available data from the NYS Department of Health and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to provide both intrastate and interstate comparisons. The research finds that despite the limits imposed by New York State’s version of Medicaid devolution, counties can exert some control over costs at the margins, thus reducing a portion of the Medicaid burden on local taxpayers. Diversity among counties in department organization and program administration results in considerable variations in average Medicaid expenditures in counties. The research for this project was completed this summer and an executive summary was released in September. Interim findings were presented at the New York State Association of Counties annual conference last spring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a tendency in the public policy literatures to treat the processes of policymaking and policy implementation separately. This paper employs a case-study analysis of the passage, implementation and resistance to the Navajo Hopi Land Resettlement Act of 1974 (PL 93-531) to illustrate the utility of examining (and conducting) the processes together. The paper examines the way policymakers in 1974 gained successful passage of their preferred policy solution (partition and relocation) by redefining the policy problem they confronted (Navajo overgrazing and range depletion becomes threats of violence and Navajo intransigence). While the political climate at the time (Red Power movement, Trail of Broken Treaties and BIA takeover in 1972, Wounded Knee II in 1973) supported this redefinition of the policy problem, this redefinition produced contradictory actions from implementing institutions and ironically shaped and empowered Navajo resistance. The case study analysis draws on approximately 60 original interviews with Navajo resisters and relocatees. Interview data suggests that Navajos’ understanding of PL 93-531 was shaped by their interactions with ground level government agencies (both agencies mandated with implementing PL 93-531 and those whose actions the law had made peripheral). Interviews also suggest that, receiving conflicted messages from the implementing agencies, Navajos employed their own cultural lens to produce an understanding of PL 93-531 quite different than lawmakers intended. Furthermore, it was based on this understanding of the law (not the one intended by lawmakers) that affected Navajos shaped their resistance and compliance. The lack of congruence in understanding at the top and bottom had implications for resistance and policy success and failure which are beyond the scope of this paper. However, the findings of this case study point to the utility of a kind of backward mapping approach to policymaking in which policymaking and implementation are intertwined. In order to deal with continued resistance, in the 1990’s the US government arguably found it necessary to take this approach to amending the law. Earlier utilization of the approach might have produced better, more successful and more humane policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters acquire preferences for particular parties and candidates? What causes a citizen or political actor to prefer one policy proposal over another? These questions, of central concern in contemporary political science, are variations on the more general question of Where do preferences come from? that has propelled much theorizing and research in the social sciences (Druckman and Lupia 2000). Within political science, three competing theoretical approaches – rational-choice, contextual/institutional, and cultural – offer different accounts of the formation of preferences. All three approaches have contributed to the accumulated knowledge of preference formation, but there have been few attempts to objectively assess and compare the validity of explanations derived from each approach. This paper will test hypotheses drawn from the three approaches with data gathered by the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, which has conducted surveys of representative samples of the Russian population from 1991 to the present. The political preferences of Russians the ideal data for the study because a natural experiment in preference formation has taken place in their nation over the last decade. With the collapse of communism in 1991, Russian citizens acquired civil liberties and for the first time in their lives they were able to make genuine choices in competitive elections, to openly support or disagree with government policy, and even to consider what type of political order post-communist Russia should have. After ten years of making such choices, most citizens now possess a more or less stable political party preference, if not a firm party identification (Remington 1999). By exploring how individuals acquired their party preferences in the critical Russian case, the paper intends to establish the foundation for an empirically grounded model of political preference formation with considerable explanatory and predictive power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses contending theoretical claims regarding state responses to globalization through empirical analysis of nonproliferatione export controls. Globalization theorists claim that technological advances and increased interdependence are bringing about the end of the Westphalian world order of sovereign states. Transgovernmentalists counter that states are disaggregating into their functional components and developing international governance through transnational networks of government regulators. Traditionalists assert the continued relevance and vitality of the state. Export controls lie at the center of this debate, and are a concrete manifestation of states’ efforts to reassert control over borders and boundaries in the face of transnational flows and technological diffusion. Export control regulations face precisely the challenges highlighted by theorists of globalization and world order, and offer a window into the capacity of states to respond to the challenges of globalization. They also constitute a strong test of contending theories. If neomedievalists are correct and the state is being displaced by networks of international institutions and non-state actors, then national export controls should be increasingly inadequate to deal with global technological flows. Export control cooperation occurs through the transgovernmental networks heralded as the basis of the real new world order. And as a policy response to the threat of WMD proliferation, export controls are a crucial test case for realist claims of the continued efficacy of states in managing security threats. This paper will interrogate the claims of these contending theories regarding twenty-first century world order through an empirical analysis of national export control systems and post-Cold War cooperation in multilateral nonproliferation export control regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper expands the notion of the ‘right to choose’ and views it as a two-dimensional concept, one which involves not only the choice to prevent and terminate pregnancies, but also the choice to become a mother regardless of social and economic circumstances. The paper focuses on a particularly vulnerable social group: single women/mothers. The first dimension includes access to information on and reproductive health services. The second dimension includes analysis of the extent to which a woman’s economic well-being is curtailed by the choice to become a mother. I have collected preliminary data on both indicators across a group of advanced countries and a group of Latin American countries, and theorize the major independent variables that affect both dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1970s, the second wave of the women?s rights movement spread globally, transcending national borders. In the following decades, almost every country has responded with some type of women?s rights policy. However, most of this change has been largely symbolic. What makes some policies harder to implement than others? Why are some countries more successful with their implementation? In this paper I propose a policy process framework with two models for the better understanding of both policy formation and implementation. In both models I start from a dimension addressing how a given policy resonates with societal values. In the first model, a second dimension focuses on the different actors and mechanism necessary for policy formation. In the second model, the second dimension focuses on the potential strategies and resources possible for various women?s rights advocates acting and interacting to ensure implementation within their institutional environments. This paper presents the theory behind this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of America’s increasing diversity, research into the impact of community heterogeneity on civic and political participation has burgeoned in recent years. To date, the literature on the subject has revealed an intriguing inconsistency about the participatory consequences of heterogeneity In his recent book Democracy in Suburbia, Oliver finds that people who live in communities with greater economic diversity have higher levels of engagement in localized political action, like voting in local elections and contacting local elected officials. Likewise, a forthcoming book by Gimpel et al argues that heterogeneity leads to greater political engagement. In contrast, a number of economists have found that economic, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity all lead to a decrease in participation. However, in a recent review essay surveying this literature, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn note that fifteen recent papers by economists on the subject of community heterogeneity all conclude that heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. While at first glance the economic and political science literatures appear to be empirically incompatible, a closer look reveals that they are actually theoretically consistent with one another. It is important to note that these apparently divergent studies have examined different forms of participation. Mistakenly, the literature on participation often indiscriminately groups disparate activities together, notwithstanding considerable evidence that various forms of participation are qualitatively different from one another. Recently, Scott Keeter and his colleagues have conducted a massive study of participation in the United States, and upon analyzing an array of different activitiesconcluded that there are essentially three participatory dimensions (Jenkins et al. 2003). “Civic” activity, by which they mean non-political efforts like volunteering in the community, is a different dimension of participation than activity that communicates political preferences. This paper reconciles the seeming contradiction regarding the effect of heterogeneity on participation. It shows that civic activity, like volunteering, is facilitated in homogeneous places, while people are more likely to express political voice in communities that are heterogeneous. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most theoretically coherent and analytically consistent type of heterogeneity is not racial or economic (the focus of the current literature). Instead, it is ideological heterogeneity. The analysis employs the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which consists of representative samples drawn in 40 communities across the U.S. Because of the study’s hierarchical design, it is possible to construct aggregate measures of heterogeneity for each community in the sample, including the dispersion of political ideology (operationalized simply as the standard deviation of political ideology within the community). These data, however, also require attention to the statistical complexities of hierarchical data, and are thus modeled using hierarchical linear modeling. This method of estimation simultaneously accounts for individual- and contextual-level variables, ensuring that each of the model’s parameters is measured with the appropriate standard errors. In sum, this paper offers a theoretically-grounded explanation for an apparent contradiction in the literature on community heterogeneity and participation, thus helping to illuminate the impact of diversity on America’s civic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative Politics: Cooperatives as an Institutional Vehicle for Social Transformation The purpose of this paper is to consider whether, and in what form, the cooperative movement has political salience as a vehicle for transformative social change. Currently, cooperatives, with some 750 million members in over 100 countries worldwide, comprise the largest and most extensive existing alternative to traditional capitalism. But while cooperative principles embody such central theoretical concerns as utility and democracy, cooperatives have received very little attention within the discipline, especially in the U.S. This paper is an attempt to begin to address that lack. The central question of this paper is whether the theoretical basis for cooperatives is such that they may be considered a vehicle for fundamental social change. Indeed, from a theoretical perspective, the basic premises of cooperatives?common interest and common property?are attractive to ideological approaches that seek to extend democracy into economic and social realms, and that are opposed to the individualistic and inegalitarian tendencies of capitalism. By definition, a cooperative is an organization that ?has for its object the economic and social betterment of its members by means of an enterprise based on mutual aid . . . an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.? Cooperatives in their modern form developed out of the cooperative socialist movement in Britain that was active in the first third of the 19th century. This paper focuses on the work of William Thompson, who has been recognized (by those who recognize him at all) as the principal theorist of cooperative socialism. Thompson was a friend and associate of Jeremy Bentham, and while Thompson asserts that utility?the greatest good for the greatest number?is the fundamental normative principle on which his work is based, the implications which he draws from it are fundamentally different from Bentham?s. Whereas Bentham assumes an opposition between security (as he refers to liberty) and equality, Thompson attempts to reconcile them. His conclusion?the ?natural laws of distribution??leads him to assert that the only rational economic system, that unites security and equality and that affords the distribution of wealth most in conformity with the principle of utility, is one that is based on mutual cooperation. Besides examining the theory of cooperative socialism as articulated by Thompson, the paper seeks to make connections between Thompson?s theory and cooperatives today. While many aspects of the cooperative movement have assimilated themselves within capitalism, the fundamental principles to which all cooperatives must agree (in order to be members of the International Cooperative Alliance) retain at least the flavor of cooperative socialism, and therefore rest on a base that is antithetical to traditional capitalism. This paper seeks to identify an ideological approach to cooperatives that would allow us to politicize them in such a way that they may be engaged in a project of fundamental social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second World War killed approximately fifty million people, while it led policies and institutions to improve people’s health. This paper will ask why and how these events occur ironically at the same time and rethink the development of health insurance policy. This paper will also examine how war mobilization formed and consolidated the Japanese and American health insurance systems. It is through an examination of the Japanese war experience, the fifteen-year war, that we understand how and why Japan reached a nearly comprehensive national health insurance system with a unique structure. On the other hand, the American war experience, what people call "Big One," largely shaped the subsequent policy path that relied largely on the private health insurance. This paper takes the United Kingdom and Germany as shadow cases to illuminate the Japan-US comparison. Richard Titmuss pointed out a half century ago that total war would lead to the development of social welfare policy. More recently, Jytte Klausen argues that war creates a new notion of what the state can and should do in economic and social policy (see also Kasza, Kryder, Skocpol, and Sparrow). However, historical and comparative political scientists have made only limited efforts to theorize the effect of war experiences on welfare state development. War, like any other single variable, cannot explain such development alone. Nonetheless, war prompts the state to intervene in promoting policies and institutions to improve people’s health. Most simply, state leaders who seek victory at the international level must attempt to improve people’s health to produce good soldiers and good munitions and to control or stabilize social demands. Titmuss saw how the events in the United Kingdom and its war experiences led to the expansion of social policies, including the Beveridge Report released in 1942 and the establishment of the National Health Insurance in 1946. However, his work did not prompt further comparative study as scholars turned their attention to other variables in the discussion of welfare state development, such as industrialization, labor power, culture, and policy and institutional path dependence. When scholars do study the impact of war, they tend to treat it as a simple and identical exogenous shock and do not address how variations in war experiences affect policies and institutions. In contrast, this paper puts forward an argument about how a war’s duration, depth of mobilization, casualties, battle sequence, and war-fighting regime influence health policy development. Thus, this paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of those factors that influence the formation and the consolidation of health insurance systems in various countries by incorporating the Japanese and American cases into comparative study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1974 and 1990, the international system experienced what Samuel Huntington has termed “the third wave of democratization in the modern world” (Huntington 1991). During this sixteen-year period, approximately thirty countries, from southern and Eastern Europe to Latin America to Asia, transitioned to democracy while a handful of other countries significantly liberalized their political systems. In the years following, states continued to democratize, including even apartheid-weary South Africa. Indeed, much of the transition literature touts the peaceful nature of the third wave. The result is that there is a dearth of information regarding political violence and the role it plays in democratic transitions. This paper seeks to explore the issue of political violence as it relates to the transition process. Specifically, does political violence hinder the democratic transition process? Instances of political violence that occur during the transition period are as important to study as instances of peaceful transition; to understand only one type of transition is to misunderstand the idiosyncratic nature of transitions. The gap in the literature that currently fails to address the role of political violence in countries moving toward democratic rule has mistakenly resulted in broad generalizations that violence is only detrimental to the prospect of democracy. Instead, political violence should be understood to be one of many factors affecting the process, sometimes creating problems for the success of the transition but other times emerging as the only option. What this paper finds is that, first, while violence may act as a hindrance to the transition process, other aspects of the transition can be just as much of a barrier. Second, the degrees of obstruction should be qualified – while political violence may be a hindrance, it is by no means detrimental to the transition process. Democratic transitions can successfully occur in the presence of political violence. Finally, democratic transitions should be studied as idiosyncratic phenomena as broad generalizations often do not apply. This paper will explore these three arguments and will also briefly discuss five transitions in which violence occurred– Portugal, El Salvador, South Africa, Romania, and East Timor (Timor Leste). This research will have implications for the sub-fields of comparative politics, international relations, and political violence. How we study democratic transitions and the presence or absence of political violence will be altered as we address the explanatory value of broad generalizations. These “formulae for democratization” have deemed violent transitions as inherently dangerous to the subsequent success of the democratic state. However, the research shows that democracy can indeed arise alongside political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan does not have any official relation with its neighbor North-Korea. With the end of the Cold War Japan has started to assume a greater political role in East Asia has started to engage in a foreign policy approach that is more independent from the security ties Japan has with the United States. North-Korea does play an important role in Japanese Foreign Policy and Security making. North Korea’s likely possession of nuclear weapons and its willingness to use them poses a big security threat to Japan that cannot be ignored. Several Missile tests in 1993, 1994, 1998 and 2003 have demonstrated to the Japanese government that North Korea is a problem that needs to be taken seriously. During the same time (1990-present) Japan has undergone major political changes on the domestic level. In1993 the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ended and was succeeded by differing coalition governments, that put the LDP first into opposition and then into the status of a coalition partner. The Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), a former major opposition to a more independent approach to foreign policy has collapsed completely after it had provided the Prime Minister from 1994-1996. This opened up the possibility for a turn towards a more militaristic, nationalistic driven foreign policy approach that is more independent from the United States. This has gone as far as Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba announcing that he did not rule out a pre-emptive strike if Japan felt that North Korea was about to launch a missile at Japan. This author argues that this change in foreign policy has been significantly caused by the domestic changes mentioned above. This paper hence wishes to contribute to the research of the influence of domestic factors on foreign policy making and rejects the realist assumption that changes in the International System cause change of foreign policy approaches. Realist theory is not able to explain the change of Japanese foreign policy sufficiently. In its analysis the paper will look at the issues that have influenced the relations between Japan and North Korea. The two most dominant issues will be the Security issue and the abduction issue. The security issue is important as it demonstrates how the different administrations reacted to missile tests by North Koreas. Since those tests happened at different points of time (1993, 1997, 1998, 2003) they are effective in demonstrating the different reactions of Japanese policy makers. The abduction issue is important because it demonstrates that the changes on the domestic level, namely the end of the dominance by the LDP and the need to engage in coalition governments have made the Japanese governments more dependent to public opinion. Due to that, issues like the abduction issue, that raises emotional responses by the Japanese public, cannot be ignored or dealt with silently by the Japanese government. It may require a strong response instead. This then demonstrates, that the domestic factors (changing government set-up, dependence on public opinion) influences Japanese Foreign Policy making towards North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a population of a billion people, a rich diversity of religious, linguistic and caste identities and a federal system with 28 states, India represents only one case or observation point in cross-national research yet one that is full of potential for within-case variation analysis. As Kohli (1987) describes it, India is a virtual laboratory for a comparative political scientist. My paper exploits this variation to explore the important and interesting question of if and how political regime type is connected to economic growth. The paper is divided into three broad parts. In the first part, I review the literature on political regimes and develop a typology of democratic regimes that is both theoretically grounded and empirically driven. More specifically, I use statistical cluster-analysis techniques to analyze electoral data from state assembly elections from 1967 to 1996. For each state in each election year we have data on four dimensions: party fractionalization by votes, political participation, representation of underprivileged groups and women. Since each state had an average of 6 elections during this period, the analysis is based on approximately 110 observations. One noteworthy feature that emerges from the classification of 15 major Indian states into types of democratic regimes along these four dimensions is that most of the states stay in the same regime type during the 30 year period examined. The analysis in this part of the paper thus suggests that not only is there something intrinsically different between groups of Indian states in terms of their democratic functioning but also that these differences have persisted over a long period In the second part, I establish that state political regime type is strongly correlated with economic growth and will then go on to examine the ways in which differences in various aspects of regime types affect economic growth. In the third part, I will discuss the implications of my findings for both cross-national studies of growth and political regimes as well as those that focus on particular areas of the world, thus situating my research within the broader literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral institutions in democratic states produce incentives for politicians to manipulate economic policy for electoral gain. A growing literature on political institutions in non-democratic states has begun to focus on the effects of these institutions on political and economic systems. Recently, Gandhi and Przeworski (2001) have argued that democratic institutions function by giving support to the autocratic regimes in which they are embedded. If non-democratic institutions are functional, the natural question is whether or not they are consequential. Do democratic institutions have political and economic consequences in non-democratic states that are analogous to those of democratic institutions in democratic states? I argue that the answer to this question is yes, and build on the literature on political business cycles (PBCs) to explain how. Elections in non-democratic regimes bestow legitimacy on the ruling government by purportedly demonstrating its widespread popular support. Ruling parties in non-democratic regimes are interested in maximizing their perceived legitimacy among the population, as such legitimacy gives them free reign to pursue their policy objectives with a minimal amount of domestic opposition. Whereas some authoritarian regimes with a tight control over the press and the exchange of information can create the illusion of a wide popular mandate, other non-democratic regimes must resort to more subtle political means to garner high levels of popular support. I focus on the latter group, which Levitsky and Way (2002:53) refer to as “competitive authoritarian regimes,” where conditions are ideal for the manipulation of economic policy for electoral gain. With the significant informational asymmetry regarding macroeconomic policy in the government’s favor, I predict that non-democratic regimes manipulate fiscal policy to create popular support for the incumbent regime. I demonstrate the applicability of this reasoning with a study of fiscal decision-making accompanying the 1982 presidential elections in Mexico. Turning to a longitudinal study, I develop a more rigorous test of the hypothesis through a time-series analyses of the political and economic correlates of national account balances in Malaysia. Employing an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and adjusting for seasonal effects, I find a robust association between elections and lower quarterly budgetary surpluses from the years 1967 to 1997. At least in Malaysia, non-democratic regimes are characterized not simply by an unresponsive government, but rather by a dynamic political process. This paper contributes to comparative politics in two ways. By focusing on some of the more observable implications of economic policy manipulation in a well-defined population of states, this model lends itself to empirical verification, often difficult in the study of non-democratic states. My study also demonstrates ways in which researchers might conceive of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and the populations that they govern, illuminating directions in which the study of non-democratic governance might proceed in the future. References Gandhi, Jennifer, and Adam Przeworski. 2001. “Dictatorial Institutions and the Survival of Dictators.” Paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13(2). pp. 51-65. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the proliferation of nuclear weapons and a malevolent strategic shift in the future are impossible to predict with guaranteed accuracy, the capability to threaten the use of nuclear weapons remains an intricate component of the new US deterrence approach and will continue to be integrated into the security interests of the United States for years to come. In the post-Cold War era, the means by which states and non-state actors define their national interests has become more acute as the demarcation of bipolarity has propagated the rise of nationalistic tendencies. The upsurge of ethnocentrism and rigidly defined identities has prompted a frenzy of countries once sequestered under the ‘nuclear umbrella’ of the two superpowers to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a means of defending their newly discovered interests. The United States, like any other rational actor, cannot count on the interests of other actors to always be symmetrical with their own interests. Therefore, successful and credible deterrence in the latent chaos of myriad interests becomes increasingly important. Hence, the United States in the post-9/11 international security environment has adopted a unilateralist approach to strategic arms control, as evidenced by the withdrawal from the venerable ABM Treaty and the introduction of the 2002 SORT Treaty. However, it is the contention of this paper that the historical node of bilateral strategic negotiation, which focused primarily on the categorization and subsequent limitation of certain weapon types as a means of reinforcing a graded ladder of escalation, needs to be re-defined and revitalized in a multi-lateral setting in the age of fourth-generation low-yield nuclear weapons. Arms control becomes exceedingly important in the presence of low-yield nuclear weapons, primarily because they add a rung in the ladder of escalation in a conflict which makes their potential employment on the battlefield dangerous if escalation cannot be controlled. However, because the political and physical consequences of their employment are diminished relative to their high-yield counterparts, it then becomes necessary to conceptualize limiting that employment to ensure that the incumbent high-yield nuclear threshold is not crossed. Therefore, the categorization of nuclear weapons into different types assumes enhanced significance in the presence of low-yield nuclear weapons, and may prompt the US to make more unilateral cuts in its high-yield strategic arsenal as more effective weapons are introduced. New definitions are needed to categorize the characteristics of new fourth-generation nuclear weapons, which exhibit qualities similar to that of ‘second-generation’ neutron bombs, but on much a smaller, and potentially less dangerous scale because of real and potential advancements in nuclear design capabilities. Hence, any comparison between new and pre-existing nuclear weapons will invariably lead to the conclusion that fourth-generation nuclear weapons are ‘taboo’, and would unnecessarily lump them together with high-yield or even ‘low-yield’ fissionable tactical nuclear weapons, which are distinct from pure-fusion low-yield nuclear weapons. It is this type of weapon that is likely to be fielded by the United States, and a definition of these weapons and their characteristics will be discussed in this paper as a means to establish the global scope of the interest and research that is focused on developing pure-fusion technology, which underscores the need for multi-lateral arms control. The end-goal that strategic arms control could and should have in the new strategic environment would be to continue to decrease the importance and relevance of high-yield nuclear weapons as new technologies may replace these weapons of mass destruction with weapons of mass effectiveness. Therefore, the threat or the use of discriminate, fusion-based low-yield nuclear weapons may prove to be essential in securing US interests against a multiplicity of unpredictable threats in the twenty-first century. The purpose of this paper is to define what fourth-generation nuclear weapons are, why their development may coincide with US and ultimately global security interests, and finally how strategic arms control could play an important role in positively shaping the international security environment of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent conservative jurists such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork contend that the U.S. Supreme Court has undermined basic democratic principles by infusing the Constitution with meaning not traceable to the original understanding of its language. When judges depart from the original meaning of the Constitution, or so the argument goes, they inevitably enshrine their own policy preferences into law and thereby usurp authority properly belonging to legislators and other politically accountable actors. These critics consider the equal protection component of the Fourteenth Amendment as one of the primary vehicles for illegitimate judicial encroachment upon issues appropriately decided in the democratic arena. If we accept the originalist premise that the interpretation of the equal protection clause should be confined to matters relating to race, invalidations based on nonracial classifications establish rights that lack adequate constitutional moorings. In this paper—part of a larger project on unenumerated rights—I ask whether the Court’s recognition of nonracial suspect classifications has skewed the proper distribution of power between the federal judiciary on the one hand and elected representatives on the other. Has the Court actually behaved in the manner decried by its critics? With respect to suspect classifications, has it used the ambiguous language of the equal protection clause to accumulate excessive policymaking power at the expense of nonjudicial political actors? Using John Hart Ely’s concept of “participation review,” I argue that the answer to this question is a qualified no. For the purposes of this paper, participation review refers to cases wherein the Court adopts the following principle: if the state opts to provide benefit X, it must ensure that A receives X on the same terms as B. For example, a state cannot distinguish between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children in the award of state welfare benefits (New Jersey Welfare Rights Organization v. Cahill [1973]). Most of the suspect classification decisions reflect this form of participation review, which tends to impose only limited restrictions on the policymaking process. Such decisions neither restrict choices as to the level of the good or benefit in question nor do they mandate or prohibit the delivery of the good in any particular manner. As underscored by the far-reaching 1996 overhaul of the nation’s welfare system, participation review typically leaves both the ends and the means of public policy in the hands of elected officials. This study is based on a systematic analysis of all suspect-classification decisions handed down between 1965 and 2003. I find little support for the proposition that the Court has behaved as an aggrandizing “super-legislature.” Alternatively, I argue that the Court’s suspect classification jurisprudence has, for the most part, placed only modest judicial constraints on the democratic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a thirty year old policy whose implementation continues to be debated today among all three institutions of government in the United States. Although the focus of these current Title IX debates surrounds the issue of gender equity in athletics, Title IX legislation as originally written and debated did not reference sport. Title IX states that: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subject to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. (P.L. 92-318 sec. 901) Title IX arrived on the agenda as a means of combating sex discrimination in education. In particular, those who fought for Title IX’s passage focused on issues such as equal pay, tenure track opportunities, and sex bias in school texts. So how and when was it that Title IX’s focus shifted from gender equity in education to gender equity in sport? What factors led to this shift in the agenda? Some would argue that Title IX’s policy focus shifted to sport because that’s where outside interest groups and lobbyists chose to focus their attention. This may be true to a certain extent, as there is a plethora of evidence that illustrates that interest groups were in fact focusing their arguments on gender inequity in athletics when Title IX’s proposed regulations were released; however, the question concerning agenda change is still left unanswered. Why did these groups shift and narrow their focus from larger issues of gender discrimination in education to gender equity in athletics at that particular time? Some would argue that discrimination in athletics was more easily quantifiable than discrimination in education in general; therefore, those groups fighting for equity in education used sport as a focal point. This paper, however, argues that Title IX’s history reveals the importance of political timing among all three institutions of government in understanding policy agenda change. As John Kingdon argues in his work, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, policy change is most likely to occur when problems, solutions and political events align themselves to open policy windows, which create opportunities for change. This paper goes a step beyond Kingdon by discussing the importance of all three institutions of government and their institutional processes for understanding policy change. Title IX’s history also reveals that the policy agenda within the institutions of government shifted to athletics within a political and social context that enhanced thed development of this policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first in a series of papers that investigate whether certain patterns of elite interaction reinforce or undermine democracy. In this paper, we compare actors bargaining across series of crises in stable democracies and new democracies. Do actors learn to cooperate across time, as the crisis unfolds? How can elite interaction lead to crisis resolution and a stronger democracy? We began our investigation by focusing on elite behavior in four countries: two stable democracies (Italy and India) and two countries that successfully transition from autocracy to democracy (Mali and Portugal). In particular, we followed actors bargaining during crises where the government has incomplete information and the opposition is working to change the political system from within, rather than trying to overthrow it. We found that crises are more likely to be resolved if the government shows its willingness to negotiate with the opposition, in two ways. First, the crisis is more likely to be resolved to the extent that the government makes a non-zero offer to its opponent. Any concession, no matter how small, shows the opposition that the government is willing to enter into negotiations. Second, the government learns with which type of opponent it is negotiating, based on whether the opposition accepts or rejects its offer. If the government?s offer is rejected, the crisis is more likely to be resolved if the government counters by increasing its offer, even by a small amount. Again, this action shows the opposition that the government is willing to continue to negotiate. In future papers, we will expand our research from four to twelve countries. First, this widening of the sample will allow us to compare across five types of countries: stable democracies, cases that experience a transition to democracy, unstable countries, cases that experience a transition to autocracy, and stable autocracies. Second, we will compare actors bargaining during crises not only within the system, where elites are demanding reforms, but also crises against the system, where the opposition is trying to overthrow the government. The final paper in this series will give us a fuller understanding to how elite interaction can reinforce or undermine democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks impacted the United States as a nation, but also had implications for local government. In an earlier paper, I analyzed the impact of the terrorist attacks on the 2001 New York City Mayoral election. While proximity to the terrorist attacks increased the probability of voters expressing uneasiness about new mayoral leadership, voters were not willing to overturn term-limits and continue with Giuliani as mayor. Partisan identification remained an important indicator analyzing favorability for Giuliani and the new mayoral candidates. Many questions remain to be answered in the realm of public opinion on local government, particularly during a time of crisis. In 2001, despite heavy Democratic Party identification in New York City, the Republican candidate for mayor, Michael Bloomberg won with just over 50 percent of the vote. Public support for Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was very high following the September 11 terrorist attacks. As a co-partisan of Giuliani, did Bloomberg benefit from the rally of support for the Republican incumbent? In this paper, I ask did the September 11 terrorist attacks increase the probability of cross-over voting in the 2001 New York City mayoral election? Alternately, did individual-level perceptions of the ideological positions of the candidates influence cross-over? Are Democratic Party identifiers who perceive Bloomberg as a moderate more likely to offer him their vote? Are candidate-specific characteristics, such as a “business” versus “political” background important in the analysis of cross-over? To study cross-over voting and the impact of the terrorist attacks on local elections, New York Times survey data on deposit with the ICPSR will be used. A poll of New York City residents conducted from October 27 through 31, 2001 provides the data necessary for this inquiry. I anticipate that concern about terrorist attacks and security will have a positive impact on the probability of voting for Bloomberg. Democratic voters impacted by the terrorist attacks will have a higher probability of issuing a cross-over vote. Further, Democratic Party identifiers with a history of voting support for Mayor Giuliani will also be more likely to support Bloomberg. In other words, in the context of a large city local election, cross-over should be a function of prior cross-over voting behavior. The presence of crisis should have an added effect. The co-partisan of the incumbent mayor will gain support from those impacted by crisis and by those concerned about additional attacks. This study will advance our understanding of how crisis impacts public opinion about local government and how local electorates behave immediately following a terrorist attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]