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My paper will critically analyze the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations as it pertains to women in Egypt. It will then present the Alternative Human Development Index (AHDI) that was proposed by the Arab Human Development Report in 2002, which emphasized Democratic Theory. I will apply this too to the empowerment of Egyptian women. Then I will propose a new index of indicators. According to this 2002 Report “Average Income” Indicator of HDI is replaced by the “Acquisition of Freedom” Index in line with Democratic Theory. The Report emphasizes five types of general Freedoms: political, economic, social transparency guarantees, and protective security. I will utilize them, in particular, in terms of Egyptian women. The United Nations yearly Human Development Reports have a section on Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). This GEM report has three dimensions which include: income per capita for women, women’s percentage share of professional and technical positions, and women’s percentage share of parliamentary seats; whereas in the AHDI, freedom indexes are added and income per capita is left out. My paper will show that while these freedoms are important additions, personal income per capita should not be left out especially in a developing country like Egypt, where many Egyptian women value material possessions along with authoritarianism, privilege and position along family lines; whereas the writers of the Arab Human Development Report call for an ideal of Western democracy where values center along freedom, work, knowledge and collaboration. I will elaborate on these cultural values in terms of the criteria of rural/urban, social classes, and religious groupings. For example, the AHDI leaves out the religious cultural dimension, which involves women who are Islamic Fundamentalists or Moderate Islamists. Accordingly, I will revise the United Nations Development Index Indicators in terms of the empowerment of Islamic women in Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore conditions that contribute to a rare outcome in ethnic party systems: the election of a party with a moderate position on inter-ethnic relations. More specifically, I investigate why voters of the small, impoverished, and ethnically fragmented states of Bosnia and Macedonia, which share the same electoral system, elected parties with divergent positions on inter-ethnic relations in 2002. Theory on party competition that focuses on social cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) or the interaction of social cleavages and institutions in ethnically divided societies (Horowitz 1985) cannot explain why Macedonia elected a left party open to inter-ethnic cooperation. Research shows that ethnic party systems compel left parties to take up ethnic causes in order to remain viable (Horowitz 1985 and Mitchell 1995). While social democratic parties in Macedonia and Bosnia have done so, Macedonia’s social democratic party overcame ethnic outbidding by its rival party while Bosnia’s did not. Furthermore, Macedonia bucked Bosnia’s experience (Burg and Shoup 1999, Bose 2002) and a regional trend in which inter-ethnic violence radicalizes voters and encourages the election of ethnically chauvinistic parties. To understand campaign strategies and determinants of voting, I combine content analysis of 350 randomly selected articles on the elections from local newspapers; examination of electoral laws and survey data on mass attitudes about inter-ethnic relations; and statistical analysis of recent World Values Survey data on electoral preferences in Bosnia and Macedonia. Drawing on these data and research on party development in post-communist Europe (Lewis 2001) and party system change in India (Chhibber 1999), I demonstrate how ’founding’ elections, campaign strategies, and international intervention interact to allow Macedonia’s left party to downplay ethnic outbidding and influence the coalitions of voters that it can mobilize. This cross-national investigation makes two primary contributions. First, it sheds light on ethnic party systems in the post-communist states, which have received little attention. Second, it identifies factors that encourage inter-ethnic cooperation in ethnic party systems. This paper would fit well on panels on electoral competition in post-communist Europe, participation in post-communist Europe, ethnic party systems, and comparative ethnic conflict. Works Cited: Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Steven L. Burg, and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Armonk: ME. Sharpe, 1999. Pradeep K. Chhibber, Democracy without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Paul G. Lewis, ed., Party Development and Democratic Change in Post-Communist Europe: The First Decade, London: Frank Cass, 2001. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, New York: Free Press, 1967. Paul Mitchell, Party Competition in an Ethnic Dual Party System, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18, No. 4, October 1995, pp. 773-793. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political inclusion of minorities has rarely been studied cross nationally and when it has it is most often used as an independent variable. Most often political inclusion is assumed as a component of democracy. This paper explores those factors that increase the probability of minimal political inclusion for minorities. We aggregate the treatment of Minorities at Risk to the state level and examine the causes of minimal political inclusion at the state level. In this paper we examine the impact of democracy on both the international and domestic level on states minimal political inclusion of their minorities. Controlling for a countries wealth and the international security environment. We find that democracy both as an international norm and as a regime have a positive impact on a state having minimal political inclusion for its minorities. The other variables, were not significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have asserted that patterns of media ownership affect media coverage and the quality of political information, but it is difficult to measure the influence media owners have over their institutions. Owners, editors and reporters deny that owners intervene in news decisions. And scholarly studies have generally failed to find evidence of intervention, despite substantial conformity in newsrooms (Gans 1979). This paper seeks to look inside one media institution to determine the influence of ownership there The late owner and publisher of the New York Times Arthur Hays Sulzberger routinely wrote memos to his top editor, Turner Catledge, offering suggestions, instructions, complaints and orders. These memos are collected in Catledge’s private papers. This paper examines the publisher’s memos and the responses of his subordinates from 1952 to Sulzberger’s death in 1968. The memos indicate the frequency and pervasiveness of the publisher’s interventions; they reveal the publisher’s interests and political preferences; they highlight the pressures the publisher imposed on his subordinates. Next, the paper addresses the responses of editors and reporters. Did the editor humor the publisher but bury his advice? Or did he pass on the owner’s preferences as his own (making the publisher’s presence real but invisible)? Finally the paper measures the owner’s impact on news coverage: were the publisher’s private preferences reflected in the news pages? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are terrorist organizations more likely to take root in ?weak,? undemocratic, underdeveloped states? If so, why do we observe terrorist groups in democratic, developed countries? This paper provides a brief review of the state strength and origins of terrorism literatures. It suggests a combined definition of these concepts and presents a research design to determine the relationship between state weakness and the origins of terrorism. The paper then argues that permissive conditions existing during periods of political instability, particularly during times of transition, account for the development of terrorist organizations. Finally, the origins of terrorism in Indonesia are evaluated to illustrate the nature of this relationship. The paper concludes with a summary as well as implications of the results for policymakers and suggested paths for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional concept of justice is based on the ideals of neutrality and impartiality, the search for and adherence to universal or generalized principles, and rational expertise. Feminist scholars have provided a critique of this traditional concept of justice and have presented an alternative concept of justice that is based on the recognition of difference, particularities, contexts, emotions, and participation. I will refer to this perspective as the dialogue perspective. In addition to the theoretical critique of the traditional concept of justice, a review of the current criminal justice research seems to indicate that policies consistent with the dialogue perspective of justice are more effective than policies consistent with the traditional concept of justice. This leads us to an important question--is there a trade off between just policies and effective policies, or could a different concept of justice create more effective policies? This paper will first present a critique of the impartial perspective of justice and then offer a feminist perspective of justice as a positive alternative to the impartial perspective. Both the traditional and dialogue perspectives want to promote justice and fairness, which is giving people what they deserve. But what is under dispute is what people deserve and how to determine what people deserve. Although it may be possible through the use of the dialogue perspective for policy makers to use principles that will create both just and effective criminal justice policies, if the feminist critique is correct, the dialogue perspective may never be fully utilized because it will jeopardize those who benefit from their current power, and the status quo of the traditional perspective will be maintained regardless of its ineffectiveness. Therefore, the paper will then present the research methodology and findings from 30 in-depth, face-to-face interviews with Utah legislators who were presented with the feminist critique of the ideal of impartiality and its application to criminal justice policies to determine whether an alternative abstract theoretical perspective can inform or enlighten the practical process of making criminal justice policy. The findings presented in this paper will address both how the theoretical feminist perspective can and does inform or enlighten the practical process of making criminal justice policy, as well as how the practical process that legislators experience can inform or enlighten the feminist theoretical perspective. The theoretical feminist perspective enlightens the practical process of making criminal justice policy by providing: a set of criteria to evaluate criminal justice policy, an articulation and defense of the dialogue perspective for those who already operate under that perspective, concrete ways and strategies to encourage others to adopt the dialogue perspective, and an opportunity for those who have been staunch supporters of the ideal of impartiality to think about its ramifications. The practical process that legislators experience informs the feminist theoretical perspective by allowing us to see: a more complex concept of fairness; that it is not the instrumental use of power that maintains the status quo through the use of the ideal of impartiality, but rather it is the lack of personal experience with those who are different that perpetuates the status quo; the problems with and roadblocks to the dialogue perspective; and ways to increase the use of the dialogue perspective. In conclusion, the paper will suggest ways to: improve the feminist critique of the ideal of impartiality, to increase the application of the dialogue perspective to criminal justice policy making, and apply the dialogue perspective to other areas of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of global environmental standards argue that global trade liberalization creates a ?race to the bottom? where countries relax their air pollution standards in order to entice foreign investment. To test for a global race to the bottom, this paper examines foreign investment in a sample of 104 countries, controlling for the level of economic development and political regime in 1980. The contribution of this study is an examination of a global race to the bottom model on air pollution levels within countries, not performed in previous studies. The results of an OLS regression analysis indicate that countries do compete for foreign investment, and sidestep air quality, as they are byproducts of pollution havens. Ultimately, the results of this paper suggest that many countries are racing to the bottom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key puzzles about political legitimacy require answers grounded in empirical analysis of particular political systems: Does political legitimacy exist as an attitudinal among citizens, or is it just an invention of political scientists? And if legitimacy exists, how does it affect the behavior of citizens? This ?so what?? question about legitimacy has implications for political stability through its effects on levels and types of citizen political participation. In a companion paper, we have answered the first question in the affirmative, at least for one consolidated Third World democracy, Costa Rica, where we found seven distinct dimensions of legitimacy. In this paper we seek to resolve the second puzzle of legitimacy?s impact on citizen behavior. Empirical evidence from a 2002 national survey explores how legitimacy shapes citizens political participation and civil society activism. The relationships are complex, with some dimensions of legitimacy increasing some forms of participation while other dimensions reduce it. Belief in two dimensions of legitimacy, namely ?political community? and ?support for political actors,? encourages overall citizen engagement and local-level participation, while high levels of another dimension; ?system support? discourages them. Civil society activism overall is reduced by low ?support for regime institutions? but increased by ?support for local government.? Several legitimacy-participation relationships are curvilinear. We discuss these three relationship patterns for political stability and legitimacy theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Question: This paper is a case study of the relocation of the Boeing Co. corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001. In March 2001, Boeing announced that it had short-listed three regions-Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Denver-for its new headquarters location and planned to finalize its site selection process in a matter of weeks. This paper examines how each of the three regions responded to Boeing’s announcement, focusing in particular on questions of regional cohesion. We address three principal questions: How effectively did regions coordinate their recruitment efforts? What explains variations in the cohesiveness of regional recruitment efforts? What kind of regional learning took place in each city as a result of the recruitment process? Methodology: The paper relies principally on two data sources. First, semi-structured personal interviews were conducted with economic development practitioners active in the Boeing recruitment effort in each of the three cities. In addition, newspaper articles covering the recruitment process in each city were reviewed. Content analysis was used to determine how media sources in each city portrayed the cohesiveness of recruitment efforts, both in their home cities and in the other two locations. Key Findings: We found considerable variation in the culture of cooperation around economic development in the three regions. We conclude that regional recruitment efforts were most cohesive where regional cooperation around economic development was institutionalized and where the civic sector played a leadership role in fostering cooperation. Recruitment efforts were more fragmented where cooperation was largely ad-hoc and overseen principally by the public sector. Implications: The study contributes to the literatures on new regionalism and business location. It suggests that regional institution building and strong civic sector participation are important in facilitating regional cooperation around corporate recruitment efforts. Related Published Research: Pierce, N., with Johnson, C., & Hall, J.S. (1993). Citistates: How urban America can prosper in a competitive world. Washington, DC: Seven Locks Press. Dodge, W.R. (1996). Regional excellence: Governing together to compete globally and flourish locally. Washington, DC: National League of Cities. Hershberg, T. (1996). Regional cooperation: Strategies and incentives for global competitiveness and urban reform. National Civic Review, 85(2), 25-31. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are government macroeconomic forecasts unbiased? efficient? Observers of forecasts produced by the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office are often skeptical of the value of forecasts of future economic performance, presuming that these agencies present rosy scenarios of the immediate future. Recent research in macroeconomics has demonstrated that private sector forecasters also face incentives to rationally bias their forecasts of the future. Are public sector macroeconomic forecasts inferior to private sector forecast? This paper examines the performance of macroeconomic forecasts using tools developed in the macroeconomics literature -- tests for forecast bias and efficiency -- and, more importantly, offers explanations for why forecast performance varies across agencies. Presumptions of forecast bias imply that all agencies have homogenous cost functions -- agency managers weight the risks and rewards of accurate or biased forecasts in the same way. Given the different time horizons of forecast consumers -- the relatively short time horizon for Presidents, the longer time horizon of a representative member of Congress, and the long horizons of trustees of federal trust funds, we would expect that agency forecasts originating in the White House, the Congress, and, for instance, the Social Security Administration, may incorporate different types of inforation or weight information in distinctive ways. This paper offers a test of this expectation with data on forecasts of four macroeconomic indicators (unemplyoment, interest rates, inflation, and GDP growht) for three federal agencies. Can theoretically derived differences in agency cost functions explain variation in forecast performance? The project offers both substantive insights into the sources of bias in public sector forecasts and promises to inform broader research on how public sector managers cope with uncertainty -- when are forecasts likely to include ‘risky’ projections? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the content of the local media, looking for story frames, use of sources, and mobilizing information that may enable and empower citizens to participate in politics. To this end, the daily and weekly newspapers and local television news in Duluth, MN and Green Bay, WI are analyzed, with data collected in February and July 2003, respectively. These two cases were chosen because both cities have very high levels of participation relative to the national average. Recent research has demonstrated that perhaps there is more to the decision to participate in politics than socio-economic status and ideological commitment. In fact, communication scholars have found that media use, strength of community ties, and characteristics of a person’s social networks are better able to predict participation than the demographic models relied upon in political science. This paper builds on this recent line of inquiry, exploring the ways in which the media may contribute to participation in a community. The focus here is on local media as those are the media used by the majority of Americans as the primary sources of news. In addition, this paper explores ways in which the media vary as the local context varies, analyzing the differences across the two cases, and discussing ways these cases may vary from other locales. This study is important because it breaks new ground in exploring the content of media found to be positively related to political participation, and focuses on the local media and variations in media environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive discretion vis-à-vis the legislature varies extensively across time and countries. The literature on the topic abounds, yet it has not provided compelling explanations that can account for these wide empirical variations. This paper presents such a framework. This paper approaches executive discretion from the perspective of a comparative theory of the internal organization of legislatures. Based on an insight in Diermeier and Myerson (1999) it contends that the level of executive discretion is a direct result of the organizational choice conducted by a majority of legislators. This choice arises endogenously and is driven by a feature of the legislators? political careers: the frequency with which they switch between chambers. The paper tests the main empirical implications of this theory measuring executive discretion as the degree of detail in the budget legislation. This gets beyond the ?who does what implies who is powerful? perspective and brings a more analytic one of trying to see, in a complex interaction, who can influence whom to do what. The idea is that the lumpier the allocation of the public monies by the legislature is, the more discretion the executive has to influence policy outcomes. This approach generates an indicator that can be compared across polities. Empirical tests are conducted in the form of analytical narratives for a sample of Latin American countries and as a statistical test for the 50 US states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When language barriers prevent distinct language groups within a country’s population from meaningfully communicating with one another or with agents in a government purported to serve their interests, it can be difficult to understand how an open public realm of debate, contestation and democratic competition can be sustained. For scholars in sociolinguistics, the answer to the puzzle has by and large been “language planning.” The idea governing language planning is the notion that government policies directed at altering or shaping the linguistic behavior of its citizenry can also indirectly achieve other desirable social outcomes. This paper builds on work a theoretical framework advanced by Jonathan Pool (1990), who argued that political and language regimes mutually constrained one another – to empirically assess the manner and extent to which language regimes – the configuration of linguistic diversity in a given political environment – observably affect the practice of democratic politics. These claims have largely rested on assumptions about the negative consequences of linguistic diversity for social, political, and economic life. Empirical study assessing the effects of different language regimes on the political opinions and behaviors of different language groups is severely lacking. In South Africa, however, a natural laboratory has emerged; opportunities to rectify this shortage of empirical research now exist. The new post-apartheid South Africa is a multilingual country with a Constitution that embraces linguistic diversity. It is a democratic society with decisions made at all levels of government about language and language usage in the public realm; hence, it is characterized by high levels of intra-country variation in terms of the distribution of language groups and language regimes. Finally, it is characterized by a research infrastructure that has produced, since 1996, a great deal of survey data on individual political behaviors and attitudes throughout the country. Language barriers that might stand in the way of a single researcher gathering data on individuals in any of eleven official languages can be overcome. The paper proposed for MPSA presentation uses survey data generated by South African researchers to make inferences about the effect of different language environments on political competition in a new democracy. The first hypothesis tested is that the extent to which a language groups are linguistically included or “enfranchised” by a language regime is positively related to the quality and quantity of that groups democratic participation. The second hypothesis is that language groups linguistically included or “enfranchised” by a language regime are less likely to view ethno-linguistic cleavages salient political boundaries and more likely to exhibit political tolerance. Qualified support is found for both propositions, and “next steps” are outlined in terms of a plan for field research that will provide the basis of a Ph.D. dissertation. The results of the work presented and proposed in this paper have important implications not only for South Africa but for all democratizing countries struggling with an answer to the “language question.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the impact of individual attitudes on the relationship between presidential rhetoric and the public agenda. Extant research on presidential agenda setting relies almost exclusively on data collected at the aggregate level and, as a result, is incapable of capturing much of the variation in individual reactions to presidential speeches. The available evidence indicates that individual attitudes, such as presidential approval and partisan identification, can play a critical role in determining whether presidential speeches succeed in influencing the public’s policy preferences (e.g. Meernik and Ault 2001; Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey 1987; Page and Shapiro 1992). But it is much less clear whether such attitudes influence the dynamics of presidential agenda setting. Relying on individual-level survey data collected immediately following four State of the Union Addresses delivered by four different presidents, this paper estimates the relationship between presidential rhetoric and the public agenda as a function of exposure to the president’s speech, presidential support, political predispositions, and demographic characteristics. The results indicate that presidential rhetoric is an important determinant of the public agenda across all respondents, but an even more powerful determinant among those who voted for the president and approve of his performance, among those who share partisan and ideological predispositions consistent with the president’s, and among those who belong to demographic groups traditionally supportive of the president’s party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most controversial advisers to the Bush administration are second generation students of Leo Strauss. The paper traces a path from Strauss’s writings on classical and modern political philosophy into contemporary partisan policy and politics via the reinterpretation of the founding of the American regime by the first generation of Strauss’s students(Berns, Diamond, Jaffa, Bloom et al.). The Straussians insist that America is the first modern republic, founded on the Lockean natural rights philosophy, and are dismissive of alternative interpretations, whether scholarly (Progressives, Bailyn, Pocock) or political (Kirk, Kendall and other conservatives). Yet their critique of contemporary American politics arises from their admiration for classical political philosophy. The paper examines how their classically-derived ideas on the nature of the regime, political leadership, the role of government, and the meaning of equality mesh with the two great partisan traditions in American politics, and in particular the role Straussian ideas played in the revival of the minority Republican Party from the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional, cyclical, and "Skowronekian" approaches to political time recognize what may be problematic in focusing solely on the presidency as a unit of analysis and attempt to locate the regularities of circumstance from which causal inferences can be drawn for general presidential behavior and outcomes. The Ford presidency is a challenge to this search for pattern and is sometimes seen as pure anomaly and thus of little theoretical interest. The argument here differs. Ford’s unparalleled situation made his judgments of his own political time particularly crucial, and "Ford in Time" tests the applicability of political time concepts by using archival materials (from the Ford Library) to reconstruct how Ford developed a view of his own political time as the premise for his policy judgments and electoral hopes. The paper examines in detail how Ford was influenced in his views by the earliest days of the post-Nixon presidency, his prior congressional experience, the rapid development of budgetary policy, the evolving nature of his advisory system and the outcome of an intense struggle between advisors with rival views of political time as well as the "puzzle" of Ford’s view that mainstream Republicanism best fit a post-Watergate era. The usual approaches to political time, though heuristically useful, do not seem generally consistent with how Ford and his cohorts conceived of and acted within their own times. The paper concludes with a discussion of political time as more perceptual than objective, more contested than clear, and more constructed than given, while also examining the limits of "post-modern" approaches to understanding presidential judgments. Ford’s case may also be instructive about factors not clearly encompassed within most analyses of political time, in particular the ways in which the sequence of policy issues can shape presidential views of their own times, the importance of "framing moments" personal variations in how time is conceived and, crucially, the high transaction and opportunity costs of ascertaining the nature of one’s own political era. A part of this paper continues past discussions on the concept of political time in the presidency*, but "Ford in Time" seems relevant as well to both the traditional "presidency and executive politics" section and to the inaugural "politics and history" section. *Hoekstra, Douglas J. 1999. The Politics of Politics: Skowronek and Presidential Research; Comments on Theory and History, Structure and Agency. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29: 657-671, 682-684; Skowronek, Stephen. 1999. Theory and History, Structure and Agency. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29: 672-681. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper topic has emerged from preliminary research on African American women’s in politics. This analytic paper seeks to simultaneously catalogue and deconstruct the meanings and usages of the word political in the disciplines of political science, history and women’s studies. In the course of my preliminary research on Black women and politics the words political activism, political participation, and political agency have been invoked by scholars across disciplines to describe generally similar, but sometimes radically different kinds of behavior. I conclude the paper by pondering how conceptualizations of the political has prompted an explosion of studies of Black women in politics in the discipline of history while other disciplines (i.e. political science and women’s studies) have been much slower to generate a significant body of work on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 2003, announcements concerning demographic trends indicated that Latinos had become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Despite this emerging status, issues concerning Latinos have not received sustained attention from judicial scholars in the same manner as analyses that focus on African Americans, women, prisoners, and other political minorities. This paper will explore the implications of this demographic trend by reviewing the kinds of issues and cases that currently face the Supreme Court and will likely face the Court in the future. In addition, the paper will examine implications for decision making by judicial officers and relevant policy impacts from judicial policy making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose to examine Thomas Hobbes’s two works most closely associated with the English Revolution, Leviathan and Behemoth, in a somewhat non-traditional fashion. Leviathan and Behemoth are biblical creatures mentioned in the Book of Job. Behemoth is a land monster, as Leviathan is a sea creature (see Job 40, 15-24 and 41, 1-34). While Behemoth is clearly designed to be a history of the Revolution, Leviathan is rarely, if ever treated as one. However, I believe that useful and enlightening comparisons can be made between the two works. In this paper I will ask whether Hobbes’s analysis of the causes, effects and danger of civil strife remained the same in these two works or whether his views changed between the writing of Leviathan and Behemoth. I will consider what effect, if any, the changed political contexts between the writing of the two works (1651 and approximately 1668) affected Hobbes’s conclusions about the causes and effects of the English Revolution. I also ask whether or not, as Stephen Holmes suggested, Hobbes consistently applies the analytical framework for interpreting the breakdown of authority developed in Leviathan. I will also ask what effects any changes in Hobbes’s view might have for the larger enterprise of Hobbes scholarship. Area of expertise: Early modern political thought and American Political Thought [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper endeavors to answer the following question: to what extent does the Bolivian electoral system have an impact on executive-legislative dynamics? And how does the electoral system facilitate or undermine coalition building in this country? The study proposes that because the Bolivian mixed system of plurality and proportional representation (PR) for legislative elections, and the congressional election of the president due to the executive electoral formula, have categorically determined the allocation of power in the political system, the interaction between the executive and the legislative branches of government is profoundly influenced by it. The paper analyzes the period starting with the second half of the Quiroga administration until the resignation of President Sanchez de Lozada, and the coming to power of President Carlos Mesa in 2003 to 2004. The first part of the paper provides a brief assessment of the most significant electoral arrangements in Bolivia and of executive-legislative relations before 2000-2002. The second part deals with the period starting in 2000. This section specifically deals with (a) a brief analysis of the effects of the 1997 electoral reform on the ability of marginalized sectors of society to occupy prominent political spaces in subsequent electoral scenarios, and on the potential ability of legislators to better respond to social (local) demands and (b) the ability citizens had to openly question the status quo through the popular mobilization movements of 2000. An analysis of the President and Congress’ responsiveness to citizens’ demands in 2000 is provided. The third part of the paper analyzes the 2002-2004 period concentrating on the Sanchez de Lozada administration, and the electoral and governing coalition that temporarily helped sustain his regime. In this section, the impact of the electoral system on the formation of the coalition is analyzed. This is also evaluated against other factors that influenced the institutional interaction between Sanchez de Lozada and the 2002 Congress. This is done, starting in June 2002, using a model of executive-legislative relations that integrates a process-oriented approach along a confrontation-accommodation continuum. Similarly, the collapse of coalition governments and coalitional politics in Bolivia that took place in October 2003 is analyzed, as well as the first signs of the restructuring of the political system undertaken by President Mesa in the first part of 2004. The last section provides some conclusions and reflections based on the overall analysis provided through the paper. The project relies on research conducted by the author as a member of the Organization of American States (OAS) Electoral Observation Mission to Bolivia for the June 2002 elections. Data is also extracted from national and international newspapers and periodicals covering Bolivian current politics as well as the results of interviews with key political actors and experts in Washington, DC and La Paz, Bolivia. The paper also utilizes other secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past fifty years, England has become a multicultural, multiracial society. However, the geographic concentration of ethnic minority groups in London and a few other metropolitan areas means that whites in many parts of England still have little or no exposure to non-whites in their daily lives. This paper investigates the effect that variation in the neighborhood-level concentration of ethnic minority groups has on the racial attitudes of English whites. In particular, it explores the contact hypothesis, which predicts that, under certain conditions, interactions between whites and non-whites will cause whites? prejudice toward non-whites to decline. This paper analyzes survey questions relating to whites? racial attitudes drawn from recent years the British Social Attitudes Survey and British General Election Study. Census statistics on the racial composition and segregation of respondents? neighborhoods are employed as the measure of contact. A multilevel analysis is conducted to test the prediction that whites living in neighborhoods with relatively high concentrations of ethnic minorities would be more racially tolerant than whites living in neighborhoods with little exposure to non-whites. The results point to important differences between the effects of contact with the three largest non-white populations in England. Residential contact between whites and blacks, the most socially assimilated of the ethnic minority groups, is found to be consistent with the predictions of the contact hypothesis. However, residential proximity to Indians and, especially, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, groups that are less socially and spatially integrated, seems to result in heightened racial hostility among whites. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the future of race relations in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development practicioners have joined the academic community in affirming the constructive role of civil society, multilateral banks have embraced the norm of incorporating civil society representatives in consultations on loan requests and development projects. These processes increase the range of issues around which civil society organizations mobilize and the points at which civil society organizations can attempt to influence national governments and international actors. But this expanded terrain for civil society activism also raises questions about the representativeness of organizations invited to participate, the forms and quality of their engagement, and actual program consequences related to civil society consultations. This paper explores the civil society consultation process developed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), focusing on consultations surrounding Plan Puebla-Panamá, an IDB-financed regional development initiative covering southern Mexico and Central America. In 2002, the IDB organized a series of workshops on this plan in each of the Central American countries; these were followed in 2003 with follow-up consultations at the sectoral and departmental level. Drawing on IDB reports and survey data collected at these meetings, supplemented with information from the author’s interviews with consultation participants in Nicaragua, this paper analyzes the process from the standpoint of representativeness, engagement, and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most work on legislators concentrate on what determines their decisions on individual roll calls. This paper instead examines when major policy changes occur. For these changes to occur, the policy coalition that previously rejected the policy must have been altered, and a new coalition forms that passes the legislation. Following Brady and Sinclair (1984) and Asher and Weisberg (1978), I examine whether or not the changes in policy coalitions (and subsequently, policy) are the result of replacement or conversion. Replacement occurs when a new member is elected to Congress, and her preferences are different from the previous occupant of the seat. Conversion occurs when current legislators change their position on a particular issue. The answer to this question indicates whether legislators are responsive to policy demands of their constituents, or major policy change only occurs with substantial electoral turnover. Most previous research is restricted to cases studies on particular policies; this paper tries to generalize the study to examine overall legislative productivity (using measures from Mayhew’s Divided We Govern and subsequent studies). Based on Krehbiel’s critique of Mayhew, legislative productivity is modelled as a function of changes in the gridlock region. The gridlock region shifts when there are changes in the distribution of legislator preferences, which are the result of either replacement or conversion. The paper examines whether the gridlock region primarily changes due to replacement or conversion, and then subsequently examines whether policy changes substantially with changes in the gridlock region. The analysis, which covers the 95th to 107th Congresses, requires estimates of the ideal points of Congressmen and the President that are comparable over time, as well as across institutions (i.e., the the House, Senate, and President must all be on the same scale). These estimates also must be able to separate the conversion and replacement effects. Most ideal point estimates over time either assume legislator ideal points do not change or place strong restrictions how they change, implicitly assuming only replacement effects shift the distribution of preferences. This paper provides such estimates, using methods of ideal point estimation based on Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers (forthcoming). Cross-institutional comparability is established with common votes in the House and Senate and presidential positions on votes in both chambers. The ideal points are modelled over time with either overlapping generational equality constraints or by following some dynamic process, such as those proposed by Poole and Rosenthal (1997), or Martin and Quinn (2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy choices are first defined in the minds of ambivalent elite actors, often well before they reach the public. That is, elites must decide which mix of compromises and challenges to put on the table, as well as their initial reaction to proposals made by others. The themes and choices absorbed by the public will, to a large degree, reflect the posture of influential elites (Zaller 1992). Building on William Riker?s heresthetics, this paper suggests a model for how advocates try to frame ambiguous policy making moments at the elite level. Even given the most dramatic focusing event, policy actors must still assess the nature and duration of the resulting. As John Kingdon argues, the actors perceive and therefore often misperceive these windows. Using the 1997 fight over the EPA?s proposed tougher air standards as an illustration, this paper outlines a model for how advocates attempt to define an ambiguous choice. I argue that advocates try to shape the ambivalent actor?s perceptions of the eventual outcome of the conflict as well as its likely public meaning. They do this by influencing other elite actors who are well placed to influence the target. This influence can sometimes be quite subtle Lowering the enthusiasm level of an opponent may be as valuable as raising the volume of a supporter. Much hinges on the posture of key voices relative to their expected position. When ambivalent actors sense sufficient movement in one direction, they are more likely to shift in that direction, or at least temper their enthusiasm if staying put. I refer to this cohort-centered tactic as lateral framing. This paper addresses two interwoven questions. First, how do policy actors peer through this opaque window?what they do they look for, what do they see? Second, what tactics do advocates use to make them see things differently? This paper attempts at least a partial answer to both questions. In brief, my argument is as follows. Political and substantive opacity create a space that is filled through contested narrative. These are ?how and why? stories?explanations of how the world is, why it got that way, and how it will change if one path is chosen over another. The more complex and obscure the choice, the more its story will be defined by the elites who explain it (Zaller 1992; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). Thus, much hinges on which elite voices can be mobilized or deterred. Ambivalent actors are often unwilling to risk resources or reputations during the early stages of a policy contest, when policy details remain in flux and the public is unfocused. To a large extent, ambivalent actors find such clues through sidelong glances at the posture of other elites. This is true for two reasons. First, they see well-situated elites as reflecting and influencing currents of public opinion as they emerge. Second, the good opinion of other elites serves both social and career advancement goals. I argue that policy advocates play on this tendency toward crosschecking by attempting to orchestrate (or silence) elite voices to whom the targeted policy actor might respond. I call this tactic lateral framing. In simplest terms, I argue that advocates seek to leverage key elite voices to create a sense for an emerging narrative in the minds of other targeted elites. When this tactic succeeds, the targets tend to either mobilize or disengage, thereby bringing to fruition what they perceived as inevitable. Using the 1997 battle over the Environmental Protection Agency?s tough new air standards as a test case, this paper develops an advocacy model centered on lateral framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristotle’s Philia In Relation to Contemporary Theories of Human Cooperation Aristotle’s concept of friendship is important in the modern political context. For example, what I have in mind for this paper is the idea that friendship is an important political concept that is totally lost in that is totally lost in the modern political theorists such as Machiavelli and Hobbes. Although something like it is present in Rousseau with his notion that man is capable of natural pity toward others in the state of nature. It seems to me that today certain writers like Axelrod (i.e., Evolution of Cooperation) and Robert Frank (i.e., Passions within Reason) and Robert Solomon (i.e., Passion for Justice) are trying to get back to Aristotle’s political concepts, like friendship. For this paper, I will comment on these writers as their ideas relate to Aristotle’s idea of philia or friendship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the benefits of conceptualizing social movements and collective action as complex adaptive systems (CAS), in particular for movements in developing countries. By utilizing preliminary results of a CAS computer simulation that relaxes rational choice assumptions and incorporates multiple identities in agents’ decision-making, it is argued that the intricacies of social movement dynamics are better explained. The paper has two goals: to examine the rational choice assumptions made in collective action models and to better understand under which circumstances identities effect participation dynamics. The pros and cons of CAS modeling for studying social movements are considered, as well as avenues for bridging social movement theories in sociology and political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lively debate over the changing role of party leaders and restrictive rules in the postreform House has overlooked the behavior of committees in managing internal conflict that threatened their ability to command autonomy and deference from the chamber. This paper presents models of the conditions under which members will defect from the committee?s position and send mixed signals to the full House. It then explores a new measure of committee conflict based on the types of reports filed by members and demonstrates that defection was widespread in the postreform Congress and varied significantly within and across committees over the sixteen-year period. Such conflict appears strongly related to the type of rules that committees requested for their bills. Finally, the paper uses probit analysis to examine the extent to which outlier committees and polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties affected the probability of conflict on particular bills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature argues that post-communist publics, even those in the relatively consolidated democracies of East-Central Europe, are becoming disenchanted with politics: participation levels are low, parties, politicians and national political institutions rate poorly in opinion polls, while commitment to democratic values, while broad, is often quite shallow. However, disaffection with democracy is hardly an exclusively post-communist phenomenon: another large body of literature has documented increasing signs of disenchantment and withdrawal in Western democracies as well. Do these two sets of phenomena stem from similar sources, or is the post-communist variant of disaffection with democracy significantly different from its western counterpart? A part of a larger research project, this paper addresses this issue by testing two alternative explanations of disaffection and withdrawal in the post-communist region. The first explanation focuses on the sphere of values and political culture: it is sometimes argued post-communist publics share a syndrome of "civilizational incompetence" that is, a lack of cultural and intellectual preparedness for participation in pluralistic, democratic politics (e.g. a lack of respect for views different from own, a tendency to perceive politics in integristic rater pluralistic terms, a poorly developed sense of civic responsibility for the well-being of the political community as a whole). The second set of explanations has to do with the sphere of political institutions: the source of disaffection, it is said, lies in the manner in which the political system is set up to articulate demands, aggregate interests, provide representation of politically relevant identities, and serve as legitimate decision-making mechanism for a self-aware demos. The institutional structure, in other words, is somehow out of sync with how the general public conceptualizes politics (i.e. there is a mismatch between level of individual political identities and level of political institutions). The paper will test the explanatory power of these two hypotheses utilizing a specially commissioned mass opinion survey conducted in November 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas many studies argue that roll call voting in the House of Representatives is increasingly partisan, this paper focuses on the fact that Congressmen are casting their vote based on the position of both the president and leaders simultaneously. Another objective of this paper is to test whether the strength of presidential influence is different across the type of policy. The analyses, using a path model and the CQ key vote for the 1953-1996 period, demonstrate that 1) presidents are more likely to take their position in foreign and defense policy or a policy with a national constituency, 2) presidents? position taking generally makes voting results partisan, and 3) presidents wield a stronger positive influence on their party in bills having a national constituency than those without a national constituency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhanced political competition is a crucial element of the “resurgence of the states,” and many American states are significantly more competitive than they were a generation ago. What effects have these changes had on their political processes? Since V. O. Key examined the American South a half century ago, scholars have celebrated the positive effects of political party competition. Strategic politicians in competitive states are expected to mobilize new participants into politics, leading to more responsive outcomes. Furthermore, because these formerly passive citizens are generally of lower economic status than those who are already active, such mobilization is predicted to result in greater economic redistribution. A generation of scholars has challenged these expectations, however. First, empirical tests have been largely inconclusive and suffer from methodological and substantive limitations. Second, the logic of this classic argument excludes important political realities. This paper is part of a larger project that alters the terms of this debate in several important ways. Its first contribution is substantive. Many studies link enhanced inter-party competition to policy outcomes, such as increased welfare spending. Assertions about why such changes take place are implicit in these accounts but rarely examined. To construct a convincing account of why competition matters, it is essential to look at this missing link. Scholars often speculate that policy changes result from shifts in the amount of electoral participation, the types of individuals that are mobilized into the process, and the responses of political leaders to these changes. In this paper, we examine this last domain. We test the hypothesis implied by theories of party competition that state legislators from more competitive districts are more likely to be involved in redistributive legislative activity. The second contribution of our paper is methodological. With few exceptions, studies of inter-party competition look exclusively at cross-sectional variation. In contrast, our paper looks intensively at developments over time within three states that have differed considerably in trends in party competition since World War II: Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas. Texas represents a logical candidate for inclusion because the state has undergone a postwar transition from a state dominated by Democrats to one where Republicans hold the levers of power. In contrast, Massachusetts was once competitive but is now dominated by a very liberal Democratic Party. Maryland provides a control case, remaining solidly Democratic throughout the period. Therefore, at the state level, we assess if changes in competitiveness over time are linked to changes in redistributive legislative activity over time. This case selection allows us to account for two important challenges to hypotheses about the effects of party competition. First, many analyses fail to consider the role of race, a curious omission given the importance of the South in these discussions and the likely role of race in creating the new competitiveness within states. Second, the proponents of party competition often fail to address the nature of one-party states. The uncompetitive Southern states of the mid-twentieth century were ruled by conservative coalitions, and several studies link policy outcomes to liberal party control rather than competition. By looking at both Northern and Southern states that vary considerably in ideology and racial composition, we can account for these possibilities. Party competition plays a peculiar role in accounts of American politics. Textbooks note its desirable properties, and comparative politics scholars have incorporated these insights into their discussions of democratization. At the same time, the empirical record is actually quite ambiguous. This paper is a step toward the construction of a more compelling account of the role of inter-party competition in our political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have provided evidence that committees have played a critical role in the decision making activities of American state legislatures throughout history (e.g., Reinsch 1907; Winslow 1931; Zeller 1954; Jewell 1962; Rosenthal 1973, 1974; Francis 1989). However, very little research has addressed how committee systems in state legislatures have developed over time or how they specifically function in the state legislative process. There are two primary reasons for this lack of in-depth research – 1) absence of cross-sectional, historical data and 2) lack of a framework for studying committee systems at a level where great variability exists. Thus, before we can study and understand the historical development and functioning of committee systems in state legislatures, it is necessary to establish a framework within which to study them. The purpose of this paper is to present and establish one such framework. If the committee system is an important part of the legislative process then, we should expect state legislative chambers to provide them with institutional tools that will allow them to be active players in the legislative process. That is, if the work done in committees is meaningful and influences the final policies adopted by the legislature, we would expect that legislative chambers would formally provide committees particular rights and powers in the legislative process. Therefore, a first step in assessing whether or not committee systems are effective or powerful actors in the legislative process should be determining the extent to which legislative chambers provide their committees with the institutional tools for success. This paper will build a rules of procedure-based measure of committee system power based on the findings of Alan Rosenthal’s (1973) study of legislator perceptions of committee system effectiveness in state legislatures. Specifically, the formal state legislative chamber rules of procedure will be used to create an overall measure of institutional committee system power and effectiveness. This measure will then be used to explore committee system power and effectiveness in all 99 state legislative chambers for the 2001-02 legislative session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PocketBook Voting Revisited: Partisanship, Economic Interests and Congressional Elections, 1963 – 1992 by Jeffrey W Ladewig Economic interests and their effect on voting behavior in both Congressional and Presidential elections have been extensively studied. There are primarily two types of political effects - those based on the incumbency and the partisan models, and two types of economic effects - those based on the sociotropic and pocketbook models. Empirically, the least successful of these models have been the pocketbook effects on partisan or incumbent voting in congressional elections. In this paper, I develop a new theory of pocketbook voting for congressional partisans and test the theory in the 15 House elections from 1964 – 1992. Individuals will use partisan labels as electoral short-cuts when such labels are meaningful. Conversely, the parties will represent meaningful policy differences when there is an electoral benefit in doing so. Though a definitive resolution to the chicken and egg problem is not offered, the rational choice axioms are the foundation of the theory. In particular, constituent’s core economic interests predictably form either weak or strong coalitions. Core economic interests are defined as the structural position of the individuals in the economy; in other words, the position of an individual in the domestic economy vis-à-vis the domestic economy’s position in the international economy. This is operationalized by using current theories of international political economy that define individual preferences based on factor mobility and exposure to the global economy. To make the model relevant to partisan politics, I argue that the level of factor mobility (low or high) creates predictable levels of coalitional (and partisan) cohesion (Alt and Gilligan, 1994). As such, I argue that core economic interests provide a significantly better measure of individuals’ interests and are thus a better predictor of partisan vote choice. Since strong constituent coalitions provide the foundations for partisan voting, when weak constituent coalitions are present, partisan pocketbook voting is absent. Conversely, when strong constituent coalitions are present, partisan pocketbook voting is observed and in predictable directions. Unfortunately, there is a fundamental (and infamous) void in the ability of the N.E.S. and most other public opinion polls to accurately capture constituent economic interests. Consequently it is not surprising that the economic data and models that have been employed for congressional pocketbook voting (for partisans and incumbents) have generally not had as much empirical success as the aggregate sociotropic voting models. To accommodate this, I employ both the N.E.S studies and a newly constructed and extensive dataset of congressional district level economic information from 1963 – 1992. Though there is threat of ecological fallacy, the procedure is an empirical improvement. In the paper, I first test the appropriateness of the competing economic models (based on the assumption of low or high factor mobility). Second, I use the model-appropriate economic variables to predict partisan vote choice in congressional elections. In so doing, I offer a new theory and statistical evidence of pocketbook voting for congressional partisans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much comparative work has been done on societies’ responses to eras of political repression and human rights abuses (e.g., Nigel Biggar, ed., Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, Georgetown: 2001; Terence Roehrig,Prosecution of Former Military Leaders in Newly Democratic Nations: The Cases of Argentina, Greece, and South Korea , McFarland, 2001 and Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, Random House, 1990). Leigh Payne, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has directed a research project on the role torturers’ confessions play in post-authoritarian truth and reconciliation processes in Latin America, South Africa, Bosnia, and Rwanda. The Legacies of Authoritarianism Project at UW-Madison, also under Prof. Payne’s direction, has sponsored workshops on the production and transmission of collective memory across generations, through literature, art, theater, etc. The project focuses on three areas: the southern cone of Latin America (especially Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), South Asia, and South Africa. A number of scholars are engaged in efforts to analyze the ways in which film, in particular, has contributed to the construction of the memory of repression. Indeed, some filmmakers, such as Patricio Guzman, have assumed the role of creators of memory for particular societies. To my knowledge, however, the studies related specifically to films are limited to single cases or regions with common histories. This paper considers the role of film in a comparative context across regions, in an effort to contribute to the literature on the relationship between politics and culture in a comparative context. In this paper I analyze the comparative role that culture (here operationalized through films) has played in constructing the memory of repression I lived in Argentina during its initial transition to democracy, and did dissertation research on the relationship between politics and culture in Russia in the early post-Soviet period. Since then I have taught about and spent time in Spain and Russia. The questions I will address include the following: Why do some societies try to bury their pasts while others take the first opportunity to explore them through cultural texts? For example, why were Spanish intellectuals so slow to confront the “ghost of Franco,” while Russians were relatively quick to explore issues associated with the repression of the Stalin years after the fall of communism? (e.g., Mikhailov in Burnt by the Sun.) What role does film play in constructing the memories of periods of repression? Does film help to heal societies or does it serve to open old wounds and engender debates that otherwise may not occur? Does the role of film in constructing memory derive from its content, timing of release, the way in which it interacts with other cultural agents, or something else? In other words, to borrow from Michael Schudson, when does “culture work?” When do films play a significant role in the construction of the memory and legacy of repression? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of beliefs, the role of ideology as an influence on policy preferences, and the connections between foreign and domestic beliefs have motivated analyses of public and elite opinion. To this point the findings of empirical research in this area have been limited largely to American survey data. There has been little cross-country and cross-region comparative research to examine the generality of American findings. In this paper, we will report the findings of an analysis of foreign policy beliefs of technically sophisticated elite communities drawn from the member countries of the European Union and the United States. To what extent do elites in other countries display a similar organization of belief systems and arrive at similar policy preferences? Are policy preferences influenced by ideology and situational differences, even among a group internationalized by training, professional socialization, and to a large extent by language, and even within technically sophisticated issue areas? To answer these questions we administered an identical survey in sixteen different national settings (translated into French, German, and Italian) to scientific elite subsets of the population in 2002. The paper will explore the role of ideological constraints and geopolitical context in models of foreign and domestic policy preferences toward nuclear weapons and energy respectively. We examine the Atlantic divide and compare superpower United States with European Union responses. Second, we examine national samples for the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, and “other EU” countries. Preliminary analysis of the data suggests strong support for the general hierarchical pattern of beliefs, with important cross-country differences within a hierarchical pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In investigating protest activity, many scholars have focused on the costs and benefits of participation. In this paper, I am concerned with the characteristics of the individual that might enhance his/her probability of participating in protest activity. The literature on protest and collective action has pointed to interpersonal trust as an important factor influencing an individual?s propensity for protest activity. Theoretically, the influence of interpersonal trust on protest activity could be positive or negative: interpersonal trust can serve as a psychological signal to individuals that others will show up thereby enhancing the probability of successful collective action; or interpersonal trust can serve as a signal that others will participate and the individual can stay home without endangering the provision of the public good. Not only do I consider the specific influence of interpersonal trust on protest activity, but I also examine the potential influence of trust in government, generalized trust, and ethnic trust on protest behavior. In this paper, I test the various hypotheses about the effect of trust on an individual?s decision to engage in protest activity using data collected in the Russian republic of Sakha. Given the location of the study, I examine the varying levels of participation and trust of the two main ethnic groups?the Russians and the Sakha. In this paper, I find that there are important differences between the two groups in the factors that influence protest activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charter schools are increasingly being heralded as a solution to the dismal education condition of many schools and school districts across the United States. Despite the proliferation of charter schools and their supporters, the school choice debate remains contentious. This paper seeks to advance the school choice debate by shifting the discussion away from whether charter schools are positive or negative, to explaining why research has found evidence that supports both claims. I ask: what explains the variance in student achievement in different charter schools? To answer this question I analyzed data from all Texas open enrollment charter schools. The empirical analysis suggests that school expenditure has a moderating effect of student achievement. Increased expenditure predicts increased student performance on Texas Academic Achievement Tests. The model also helps explain variance in school expenditure. Private revenue, such as grants and donations, is shown to be highly correlated with educational expenditure. The data suggest that Texas charter schools with higher private revenue will be able to spend more on education expenses and, as a result, student achievement will be expected to increase. The paper concludes that Texas charter schools may indeed respond to competitive pressures, as the school choice advocates predict. However, funding appears to have a major impact on schools’ abilities to respond to pressures to increase student achievement. If schools are not properly funded, no amount of competitive market-like pressures can produce sufficient academic achievement. This finding has important implications for the school choice debate, as well as for state and local government. The model suggests that Texas school funding levels (when not supplemented by large grants or donations) are not sufficient to allow schools to respond to competitive market-like pressures for increased student achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the May 2002 Oklahoma State Plan for Tobacco Use Prevention and Cessation, tobacco use is the largest cause of annual deaths in Oklahoma. Tobacco use annually costs Oklahoma more than $2 billion and attracts 14,000 new tobacco users under age 18—one third of whom will die prematurely. The leading causes of death from tobacco use in Oklahoma are from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cardiovascular disease. In order to reverse this severe public health problem, the Oklahoma State Plan recommends a variety of policy proposals. These include restrictions on vending machine tobacco sales, self-service tobacco displays, free tobacco sampling, face-to-face tobacco sales, and Internet tobacco sales. The Oklahoma State Plan also recommends stiffer penalties for tobacco sales to minors, repealing state laws that preempt stricter local tobacco control laws, adopting clean indoor air laws in workplaces, and increasing state tobacco excise taxes. The Oklahoma State Plan also recommends the adoption of vigorous anti-tobacco counter marketing media efforts, cessation programs, and community education efforts as a means to counter tobacco use. So far, most of these public health proposals have not been adopted into laws and regulations. This paper will examine in detail the lobbying and political influence, tactics, and actions of the tobacco industry and its historic allies in Oklahoma in conflict with health advocates in terms of how tobacco control policy has developed from 1985 to the present. Particular focus in this paper will be an examination of the policy reasons why Oklahoma has not, so far, adopted the recent state public health recommendations for more vigorous tobacco control. Also included in this analysis will be a specific examination of how preemption of local tobacco control ordinances, like clean indoor air ordinances, effects tobacco control policy making and public health in Oklahoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the media cover political campaigns? We take a novel approach to this question that produces clear results on direct relationships between key variables. Using data from a content analysis of media coverage of Minnesota’s 2000 senate campaign, we explore different trends in television and newspaper coverage while holding potentially confounding variables constant, such as media market norms and election competitiveness. We begin by comparing the coverage provided by four local television affiliates with that of the two major newspapers in the Twin Cities area. Our results show that while newspapers include more coverage of the campaign, the content of the coverage is not substantially different from television. We then take advantage of an ideal opportunity to explore the possibility of biased coverage by looking at the reporting patterns of the two ideologically distinct newspapers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. We find that despite their clear partisan leanings, there is little evidence that either paper favored their endorsed candidate in their coverage of the campaign. We conclude by analyzing the impact of the media on public opinion with exit poll data collected on election day. This paper contributes to an on-going debate concerning the media’s role in campaign coverage by providing results from direct tests that are not confounded by factors such as election competitiveness, media market norms, and other effects generated by the temporal and geographic diversity inherent in multi-case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper substitutes variables for countries in analyzing attitudes toward democracy in six Asian nations: Korea, China (Mainland), Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, and Thailand. The working hypothesis of the paper is that national differences in attitudes and opinions reflect underlying socioeconomic variations across nations, rather than inherent cultures within the nations. According to this hypothesis, urban-rural configurations of the populations should dominate opinion orientations, rather than idiosyncratic characteristics of these nations. The fundamental rural-urban cleavage will explain attitudes toward traditionalism-modernism which, correspondingly, will contribute to an explanation of attitudes toward democracy. The data for the study come from probability samples across the selected nations in a multi-nayion study using the same questionnaire in 2001. The analysis shows that rural-urban cleavages, seldom used in cross-national comparisons, are significant explanatory factors within nations. This study examines whether these within-nation associations are also significant for explaining attitudes and opinions in a cross-national analysis. The essential issue is: Is within-nation variance greater than variance among nations on the issues of interest? The inclusion of both developed and developing Asian nations permits examination of whether levels of development contribute to national profiles of public attitudes toward elements of democracy such as preference for democracy over authoritarian forms of government, satisfaction with democracy, desire for democracy, and other indicators of democratic support and consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion has often played an important role in American society and American political behavior (Fowler, Hertzke, and Olson 1999; Kohut, Green, Keeter, and Toth 2000; Leege and Kellstedt 1993; Wuthnow 1988). Yet, while religion?s importance has waxed and waned over the last two centuries, it seems that especially since 1976 when Jimmy Carter announced that he is a ?born-again Christian,? that religion has become more salient in American politics. Indeed, today it is uncommon for presidential candidates not to highlight their religion in some manner. Yet recent studies have tended to focus on how religion is more important in determining political behavior and not why religion has become a more salient variable in determining political behavior. This paper will attempt to fill in that gap. In this paper, I will argue that over the last 40 years Americans have become more secular and less traditional in their religious beliefs and behavior and that increased secularity has had the paradoxical effect of making religion a more salient variable in determining political behavior. Additionally, I will argue that the effects of religion on American political culture will be seen in the relationships between religious belief and religious behavior and political behavior. In particular, people who show higher levels of traditional beliefs and behavior will tend to vote Republican in greater numbers just as those who are more secular will tend to move towards the Democratic party. Moreover, I will attempt to demonstrate that postmodernism, defined as a rejection not only of modernity but also of all attempts to provide a single overarching answer or narrative, works in the background defining the division that has taken place over the last 40 years. I will argue that the first two effects are a result of the effects of postmodernist thought whose influence as a philosophical paradigm has increased in importance over the last 40 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of legislative term limits on state government spending. Supporters of term limits argue that term limits will lower government spending by replacing career politicians with citizen-legislators who are more likely to favor a more limited government. Using fiscal data from 48 states from 1977 to 2001, this paper finds that term limits lead to an increase in expenditures per capita. Further, this paper shows that term limits do not facilitate the election of political amateurs to the state legislature. Using data from California, Colorado, and Maine from 1984 to 2001, this paper finds that term limits are more likely to encourage state legislators and city council members to run for higher officer rather than political novices. This paper concludes that term limits give legislators greater incentives to deviate from socially optimal fiscal policy by altering the costs and benefits associated with certain types of economic policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we evaluate the extent of wishful thinking in the 2000 presidential election. Wishful thinking is related to the concepts of motivated reasoning and cognitive dissonance. In the context of the election, wishful thinking occurs when individuals predict the outcome based not on objective information, such as public opinion polls, but instead on the basis of what they want to see happen. Building on our earlier work in this area (Political Psychology 2000) we will examine the extent to which political sophistication and need for cognition condition the level of wishful thinking For instance, among those with low levels of information or low need for cognition, we expect to see a strong connection between candidate affect and prediction of the election outcome. Among those with high levles of information or high need for cognition, the election prediction should be more strongly related to objective information, such as public opinion polls and less strongly related to candidate affect. We will use the 2000 NES as our primary data source for this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, and the larger dissertation project it is a part of, attempt to answer an important question regarding the judicial confirmation process: why do some confirmations become controversial? Or, put another way, what factors tend to produce objections to a particular nomination, and what circumstances contribute to these objections translating into a controversial and contentious confirmation process? In this paper, the judicial confirmation process is compared to a train following a track; at different points in its journey, the train has the ability to switch tracks. Similarly, at different “controversy points” in the judicial confirmation process, the nomination can “switch tracks,” thereby confronting a different political environment. It’s main argument is that the confirmation track which a nomination follows determines the types and levels of controversy a nomination will face, as well as affecting what actors in the confirmation process may influence the outcome of that nomination. More specifically, I argue that Senators and interest groups are each able to influence confirmation outcomes but only under certain circumstances, i.e., only when nominations follow specific tracks. My analysis finds that Senators are able to solely affect nominations that follow the senatorial courtesy and private partisan tracks while interest groups have great power to affect nominations that follow the public partisan track. This paper will first systematically outline the different political environments and controversy points a judicial confirmation might confront, focusing on the different tracks a judicial confirmation may follow. It will then examine the characteristics and implications of these possible confirmation tracks. Finally, it will assess how often each of these tracks occur and model which actors and what factors affect a nominee’s chances of confirmation when following each of these tracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I would like to present a paper, entitled “Policy and Coalition Patterns in the Scottish Parliament,” at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. For the first time since 1707, Scotland convened its own parliament, completing its first four-year session in early May 2003. This three-century hiatus was triggered by the 1707 Act of Union, which dissolved the Scottish Parliament and provided for Scottish representation in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, periodic expressions of nationalism kept the prospect of a Scottish Parliament alive, and once the Blair government embraced the concept of devolution, both Scotland and Wales opted to establish new parliaments. While Scots generally extended their support for a new parliament, many were skeptical. Some Scottish Nationals consider devolution to be a distraction from the real goal of independence, while others see it as a first step toward independence. In addition, Conservatives were almost always the strongest opponents of devolution, not to mention independence. Some even wonder whether or not a parliament is even necessary. After all, Scots are British, and political interests are certainly well represented at Westminster. However, politics in Scotland differs from that in England in at least two major ways. First, the Scots structured their electoral system for choosing MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) in a manner that deviates considerably from the Westminster model. A little more than half of the MSPs are elected in constituency districts, while the remainder is decided on the basis of a variation of proportional representation. As a result, four major parties have substantial representation in Parliament, and, for that matter, three parties elected one member each. Second, the presence of the Scottish National Party has no counterpart in the House of Commons. Its platform and vision for the future of Scotland makes the SNP unique in British politics, and the fact that it is the second largest party means it is a force to be reckoned with. At present there is a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition government, but the Scottish National Party stands ready to form a government if the present one falls, underscoring the fact that the Conservative Party is not much of a player in Scottish politics. What I propose to do in this analysis is (1) to identify major policy dimensions underpinning the multitude of roll call votes cast during the first session of the Scottish Parliament, and (2) to map the political parties in ideological/policy space. I plan to employ a combination of factor analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis to achieve these two goals. I have constructed a database consisting of the roll call votes cast by each member of the Parliament, and will use that data set for the proposed analysis. As far as I know, I’m the only one with a clean data set of 1999-2003 Scottish roll call votes. In addition to uncovering dimensions of conflict and parliamentary voting coalitions, I shall discuss the implications of these findings for Scottish politics and government. I hope you find this paper suitable for one of your panels. Thank you for your careful consideration of my proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the legislative victories of the civil rights movement, low-income African Americans have continued to face rising levels of poverty over the past three decades. Because of this ongoing relationship between civil rights and economic justice, and despite disincentives, civil rights organizations have all, at times during their history, chosen to advocate on behalf of low-income African Americans. Therefore, this paper examines the factors that contributed to organizations’ decisions to advocate on behalf of politically unpopular groups, such as welfare recipients. Welfare reform is not an explicitly racial issue, but one that disproportionately affects low-income African Americans. Depending on their incentives and ideologies, organizations can choose to either emphasize the racial significance of reform, or to substantially ignore the issue. In this paper, I examine the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s activities concerning the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) in 1964 and 1965. A comparison of the incentives responsible for this representation illustrates the importance of internal organizational structure, growth, and inter-group competition to an organization’s decision to prioritize anti-poverty policy and the representation of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the link between economic insecurity and voter transition. Individual-level subjective insecurity induces voter transition to a Left party in demands for social protection. In particular, a fraction of middle-of-road voters have incentives to make a transition to Left to bring about their preferred policy outcomes. This extended voter balancing argument is tested against the data. Estimation of a Markov chain voter transition model finds evidence that supports my arguments. Voters’ likelihood of transition to Labour increases in economic insecurity. Moreover, middle income voters are more likely to switch their electoral support toward Labour when faced with economic insecurity. The paper provides a theoretical framework and individual-level evidence of dynamic electoral consequences of economic insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can differences in welfare systems in industrialized countries explain the variations in consumer bankruptcy systems? This paper will attempt to address this question by examining the consumer bankruptcy/insolvency systems in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands and the role each plays in their respective welfare systems. This paper will examine institutional and political factors in the hopes of uncovering the nexus between welfare policies and consumer insolvency systems. It has long been suggested that domestic factors have a dramatic effect on policy development (Myles and Pierson, 1999, Giaimo 1999). In particular this paper will examine the effects of economic shocks, such as emergency medical treatment, on individual consumers in the various welfare systems in the countries examined. Two of the countries studied (Germany and the Netherlands) developed consumer insolvency systems only recently, while the other two, the United States and Great Britain, have some of the oldest consumer bankruptcy systems in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain how the level of electoral competition and the partisan composition of a district’s representation in the national legislature and government affect the allocation of industrial subsidies to the private sector in the case of Turkey. In doing so, I use district level data for the period between 1991 and 1997, a period in which subsidies were distributed through licenses by an agency of the central government. The number of such licenses received by each district in a given year constitutes the dependent variable of the analysis, and I control for factors such as the level of development, population, and private financial credits received by the private sector. Given the “count” nature of this variable, the model is estimated with the negative binomial distribution, using maximum likelihood methods. This paper addresses two trends of arguments in the political economy literature. The first, which concentrates most on the economic policies of industrialized countries, looks at how electoral competition and political institutions affect the choice of economic policies by the government. However, the main focus of these studies has been on fiscal, monetary and trade policies, leaving industrial policy understudied. The second line of works deals with industrial policy of the developing countries and emphasizes the importance of the “quality” of the government policies for reaching the desired goal of increasing investment and industrial production. One of the central components of the “quality” as suggested by these studies is the employment of universal criteria as opposed to particularism when the policies are implemented. In this study, I analyze whether electoral competition under certain political institutions leads some particular districts to receive more of the investment subsidies. The results lend no support to the hypothesis that the closeness of district elections increases the subsidies allocated to those districts. However, there is a positive relationship between the proportion of representatives from a district that are of the party that controls the distributing agency and the level of licenses received by that district. These results suggest that in developing countries with competitive elections, such as Turkey, if the politicians do not face costs for not abiding by the implementation of government policies universally, some constituencies might benefit unproportionally from governments’ support to the private sector for increasing investment and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about variation in the form and scope of international commitments. Traditional studies emphasize credibility as a solution to bargaining and enforcement dilemmas. Because flexibility is commonly thought to cut against credibility, it is often believed that commitments should be firm and transparent. Why then are states’ observed commitments often flexible in the sense that the terms are left ambiguous or unspecified, obligations are qualified and sometimes weak, and provisions often leave the possibility for escape? Recent studies explain commitment flexibility by focusing on transaction costs of unforeseen contingencies, domestic political and organizational pressures, and bounded rationality. This paper argues that under certain conditions flexibility is deliberately introduced into the form and scope of international commitments in order to improve states’ chances of benefiting from cooperation. Specifically, the study identifies three important factors that often give rise to the optimality of flexible commitments including multiple player dynamics, the relative increase in bargaining capability, and the verifiability of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have studied South Korea elections in terms of regionalism, economic development, and political elite leadership. But few of them has tried to find out the relationship between people’s religious affiliation and their political behavior. In this paper, I will shed some light on how people’s religious background affects people’s voting behavior as well as people’s political attitudes. In terms of religious role in politics, many scholars suggest that religion plays a prominent role in politics, operating along three important pathways. First, religious beliefs often influenced politics directly, particularly when articulated and applied to contemporary problems by religious leaders. Second, religious organizations often supplied vital resources to political movements and to more durable party organizations, mobilized and directed by religious activities. And third, religious identifications were often a crucial source of political allegiance in the mass public. Moreover, religion had its greatest impact on politics when the pronouncements of leaders, the resources of activists, and the identifications of believers operated in a mutually-reinforcing fashion. In this paper, I will find out what are the role of religion in South Korean politics by analyzing the survey data conducted in Spring, 2003. The survey questionaires composes of three parts: people’s political attitudes and voting choice in 2002 Presidential election, Poeple’s religious affiliation and activities, and general demographic questionaires. By using multiple regression with the data, I will try to shed some light on the relationship between religion and politics in South Korea. Futhermore, I wll assess what is the impact of religion on political development (democratization) in South Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]