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This paper addresses the functioning of the governing system of the United States by analyzing distributional outcomes from 1947-2000. The key question of this paper is whether public policy influences distributional outcomes. The macro politics model of the U.S. governing system (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002) and the power resources theory of welfare policy (Huber, Ragan, and Stephens 1993) suggest that left policies should equalize the distribution of income. I utilize single equation error correction models to assess the impact of policy on income inequality through two mechanisms ? market distortions and redistribution. Since nearly every government action influences markets in some way, I examine policy in the aggregate rather than focusing only on policies explicitly designed to redistribute income. The analysis indicates that policy influences inequality through both mechanisms, with left policy producing more equality. The results are consistent with power resources theory and strongly support the macro politics model by demonstrating that political choices are an important determinant of distributional outcomes. Furthermore, I find that market distortion is as important as, and works in tandem with, explicit redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assist a larger project on the rightward shift in American public policy over the last three decades, this paper charts the development of intellectual conservatism from the 1930s to the present. Formerly lacking an infrastructure to support intellectual work, the right created and sustained a large network of publications, networks, and institutions. Political magazines allowed conservatives to express intellectually coherent principles and programs, and later the founding and growth of think tanks facilitated the exposition, nurturing, and advocacy of conservative ideas. When it comes to shaping policy and politics, the presence of academia--where most professors self-identify as liberals--does not fully offset the intellectual advantages of the right within think tanks. Researchers at think tanks strive for influence over policymakers and the public sphere, whereas academics are rewarded for contributing to specialized knowledge within their disciplines. The importance of the intellectual climate is underscored by examining conservative reactions to the New Deal, a period when the right lacked an articulate case, now familiar, equating free markets with prosperity and government action with stagnation. This limitation, the paper argues, steered opponents of the New Deal away from what otherwise would have been potent grounds to challenge unwanted programs--namely, that such policies would only make a bad economic situation worse. Four decades later, conservative ideas were well-developed intellectually. When a slowdown in productivity and wage growth began in the 1970s, conservative writers and thinkers were available to pin the blame on government and to offer solutions of tax cuts, deregulation, and curtailments of social programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine and assess the development of national energy policy in the United States during the Bush administration. The paper reviews the evolution of energy policy between the spring of 2001 and the summer of 2002 and assesses it in light of the expectations for energy policy suggested by the idea of ecological sustainability. I argue that this effort to devise a national policy that primarily relies on expanding the use of fossil fuels is unsustainable. Its goal is to continue to meet energy demand at the lowest possible price, using the least expensive fuels possible, but while the price may be low, the environmental and national security costs are high. An alternative energy policy that relies on increased conservation, efficiency, and renewable energy sources will likely result in higher prices, but the total costs of energy production will decline. Given the lack of progress in developing an ecologically sustainable energy policy at the national level, the paper suggests that recent state energy policy making is a much more promising forum for innovative energy policy, and briefly examines the experience of innovative states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has the U.S. developed policies that are largely inadequate in alleviating the difficulties many people have balancing work and family? I argue it is essentially because traditional assumptions about men’s and women’s separate roles in the areas of work and family persist in public policy in spite of women’s, particularly mothers’, dramatically increased labor force participation. Over the last half century, women’s acceptance as breadwinners, a status entailing recognition of the need to provide for a family, has been slow and incomplete. This incomplete acceptance, I theorize, then carried over into more recent public policy debates on the work-family nexus. This carryover, if it emerges, would then help to account for the otherwise puzzling persistence of traditional assumptions about gender roles in current work-family policy. In this paper, I build on previous research I conducted showing that relative to men, women have had less, but growing access to private-sector employer-provided benefits over the previous fifty years. To see if the slow and incomplete acceptance of a breadwinning role for women suggested by this association emerges, I examine women’s and men’s relative treatment in policy debates concerning the regulation of employer-provided benefits. I identify and track gendered and non-gendered statements in U.S. Congressional hearing testimony discussing workers and family-oriented employer-provided benefits. Overall the results here indicate increased acceptance of equal breadwinning roles for women and men, but with a still prominent place in the debate for traditional gender-role conceptions. The final linkage, beyond the scope of this paper, similarly involves comparing women’s and men’s treatment in congressional debates concerning explicitly work-family benefits. The idea is that consistent findings, across both sets of debates, of a relatively prominent place for traditional gender-role conceptions would lend support to the theory set forth here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US interrogation policy continues to be an important subject of public policy debate in the United States. A number of Republicans criticized President Obama for restricting the questioning of suspected terrorists to the noncoercive techniques listed in the US Army Field Manual. The most important policy question about enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) is not what did happen or even what should have happened in the past, but what the policy of the United States should be with regard to interrogation. This paper will address three questions about EITs: 1) are they torture? 2) are they justified? and 3) are they effective? In answering these questions, the paper will contrast the opinions of defenders of coercive interrogations with the judgments of actual interrogators during the war on terror, the latter rejecting the efficacy and morality of EITs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mayhew's publication of Divided We Govern set off a spirited debate among Congress scholars about the influence of divided government on the legislative process and on relations between Congress and the president. In considering nonlegislative functions of Congress, what influence does divided government have on the public strategies that members of Congress use to influence the president's foreign policy during times of war? Through content analysis of the New York Times, for selected periods of unified and divided government during the Vietnam and Iraq wars, this paper examines who in Congress went public to try to influence the course and content of the president's war policies. The paper finds evidence that unified and divided government have different effects on majority and minority party behavior.The paper also finds, contrary to expectations, that the form of party government has no impact on the amount of press coverage devoted to criticism of the president's war policies by his own party in Congress. Finally, the paper finds that whereas the form of party government seems to have had an impact on the public strategies employed by members of Congress during the Vietnam war, no such impact is evident during the Iraq war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American Public policy is cloaked in many myths. Encompassing such issues as public subsidies to sports stadia, enterprise zones, and welfare migration, there are many ideas recycled from government to government over time with little thought given to the evidence supporting their empirical assumptions or their prospects for success. Drawing upon the diffusion literature and the belief that states are laboratories of innovation his paper examines several of the leading ideas and myths dominating American policy making, exploring the reasons for their repetition and the evidence for their failures. Overall, the paper questions both how innovative policy making is and what can be learned about the replication of failed policy ideas across borders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies (Patterson 1996, Groeling and Kernell 1998, Groeling 2001) have shown that messages of intra-party harmony tend to be ignored by the news media, while internal disputes, especially those erupting within the governing party, will generally receive prominent coverage. This study builds on these prior results by examining exactly how messages of party conflict (and cooperation) affect public opinion, and whether the reputation of "new media" outlets affects these results. The paper begins by presenting a typology of partisan messages in the news,determining the likely effects of these messages based on the characteristics of the speaker, listener, and the valence of the message itself. Specifically, partisan messages should be more credible to a viewer when a) the speaker shares the viewer's party affiliation; and b) the message imposes some cost upon the speaker (all else equal). We further argue that messages damaging to the president (favorable to the president) appearing on news outlets believed to be conservative (liberal) should be especially damaging (beneficial) to the president's standing. Following from this logic, the paper hypothesizes that presidential party criticism of the president should be exceptionally damaging to the president (especially if that criticism appears on a "conservative" network), while non-presidential party praise of the president should be the most helpful to the president's standing with the public (especially if that praise appears on a "liberal" network).To test for these effects, individual-level data was drawn from an online experiment. In this experiment, subjects first answered a series of questions about the news media. They were then randomly assigned to view Republican/Democratic praise/criticism embedded into mocked-up online news sources attributed to two differentcable networks (Fox and CNN). Finally, subjects were surveyed to determine the effects of these treatments on their approval of the president's job performance, as well as other attitudes regarding politics. These experimental results provide evidence that credible communication, particularly "costly" communication that damages a party, is more influential than "cheap talk" in moving public opinion. We also confirm that, ironically, news media outlets that are viewed as politically biased can actually enhance the credibility of certain messages versus neutral news sources. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term "presidential advance" refers to the advanced planning and preparations that take place, in support of the President of the United States, in order to ensure that presidential trips and public events are political, visual, media and public relations successes. Presidential advance is important because presidential events that are preceded by good presidential advance may enhance the president's power (in keeping with the 2006 meeting theme.) Conversely, poor presidential advance work may result in a disastrous public presidential event, hurting the president's power. In this paper I explore how the presidencies of Andrew Johnson through Herbert Hoover dealth with planning and preparing presidential trips. Using presidential biographies as primary sources, this paper explores who, if anyone, was involved in preparing presidential events outside of Washington, what they did, and how successful they were at accomplishing it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes an empirical examination and theoretical analysis of President Bush?s USA Freedom Corps?a citizen service initiative created after 9/11 to harness the American people?s spirit of shared sacrifice and ?promote a culture of responsibility, service, and citizenship.? This case-study is analyzed from three distinct perspectives?civic engagement, public policy, and the modern presidency?to consider larger questions that it raises about contemporary American politics. The key controversies that define these larger questions concern philosophical arguments about the obligations of citizenship and the value of citizen service; public policy-based arguments regarding the means by which social problems can be addressed most efficiently and effectively; political/ideological arguments about the nature of the relationship between government and civil society; and institutional arguments concerning the influence and capacity of the executive branch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December of 2002, Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) resigned his position of Senate Majority Leader under pressure from the media, his own caucus and the White House. This pressure was the result of comments Lott made at a birthday party for retiring Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in which Lott seemed to wax nostalgic about segregation. But that’s not the whole story. Coming on a busy news day, the story was pushed aside by other news and not initially covered by the mainstream media. Kept alive, promoted, linked and sourced, among on-line "bloggers" - writers of weblogs, or frequently updated web sites with links and commentary - the mainstream media eventually came on board too. In this paper I use the Lott incident as an example of growing blogger influence in American politics and political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large and growing body of research demonstrates a correspondence between public opinion and policy behavior. Almost all of this research has focused on the US, however. Do similar patterns obtain in other countries? Or is the US unique? This paper represents one step towards answering these questions. We extend previous research on the dynamics of spending preferences and budgetary policy in the US, using comparable longitudinal measures of public preferences and government spending in the US, UK, and Canada. The nature and magnitude of opinion-policy connections vary across both policy functions and countries. We explore this variance here, and suggest several possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the policy proposals for improving life in U.S. metropolitan areas come from non-academic groups yet, collectively, these organizations have received little scholarly attention. Using approximately two hundred reports by citizens groups in Cleveland, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and St. Louis as well as on-site interviews with key participants in each group, this paper examines the issues they address, the policy cycle stages they emphasize, the processes they use, the geographic scale they cover, the units they seek to influence, the values they stress, the implementation tools they favor, the advocacy strategies they employ, and the impact they have had. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are strong theoretical reasons for expecting interest groups and social movement organizations to have a substantial impact on public policy, but it has been quite difficult to find convincing evidence of such a relationship. This paper begins with an argument that one reason for this disparity is a particular gap between theory and research: theory suggests that elected officials should be strongly influenced by information provided to them by interest groups and SMOs, but there have been no systematic studies of the impact of such information. We examine what is arguably a particularly important source of information for members of the U.S. Congress-testimony at committee hearings-to ascertain whether it influences congressional action on policy proposals on a sample of issues. The analysis focuses on information about the importance of the problem being addressed, the likely effectiveness of proposed legislation, possible electoral consequences of congressional action, and the possible reframing of issues. There is little evidence that information has the hypothesized effect. Possible reasons for this are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One contribution that political scientists can make to public policy is to assess the extent to which public life is informed by what is important about the political process. One policy area in which the importance of public knowledge has been dramatically and intentionally increased is the approval of prescription drugs. The 1997 legal sanctioning of Direct-to-Consumer advertising by drug manufacturers is based in part on the assumption that the public will have the knowledge to contemplate claims about the value of prescription drugs to overall health. Media coverage of the formal approval of a drug by the Food and Drug Administration is one important source of non-advertising information for the public. Examining print media coverage of drug approvals, the paper finds that media coverage of prescription drugs routinely lacks the basic elements of costs, side effects, and summaries of the quantitative results of the clinical trials. In the modern era, however, the shortcomings of the traditional media appear to be alleviated by the new medium of the Internet. On the Internet, consumers can quickly locate information about prescription drugs from a variety of sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, students of the welfare state have produced a sizable body of research on welfare state reform, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few systems of social protection have experienced fundamental shifts. In this paper, I question this now-conventional wisdom by reexamining the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of policy stability in the face of conservative attack. Examining the broad framework of risk protection in health and pension policy, I argue that while public social policies have not been radically scaled back, their ability to achieve the goals embodied in their programmatic architecture has noticeably weakened, creating a growing mismatch between the risks that citizens confront and the public and private social protections they enjoy. Much of this disjuncture, it turns out, is rooted in the very institutional and political stickiness that retrenchment studies argue has protected the welfare state against radical retrenchment-stickiness that, in an era of major changes in economic and family structure, has prevented social policies from smoothly tracking evolving social risks. Yet the retrenchment scholarship remains incomplete. The view of the welfare state, path dependence, and institutional change that it embodies, as well as the types of evidence it has offered, have all obscured important ways in which welfare states are evolving, in many cases despite relative stability in policy rules. Examining these forms of policy "drift" alongside the changing risks that families confront suggests that the role of the welfare state is in fact changing quite substantially. And it suggests that these changes are in important respects an outgrowth of political struggles over social policy, not simply the consequences of exogenous social shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000 when I started my dissertation on the role of family in public policy, I have been haunted by a dogged conceptual misunderstanding: family is not political. I heard this comment at the same time Republicans were aggressively asserting that they were the party of "family values;" during the heated debates over same-sex marriage (from the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to the landmark 2013 ruling in US v. Windsor); throughout immigration and tax reforms where family status had huge consequences for policy outcomes; and all the while scholars were producing rich theoretical and empirical work on the place of family in American politics. In this paper, I summarize what I have learned from this body of scholarship as it applies to the concept of state capacity. I show in what ways family promotes state capacity and the limitations of relying on this seemingly private institution for public ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines homogeneity and heterogeneity in preferences for public policy, across income and education levels and party identification, and across policy domains in the US, UK and Canada. Do preferences differ across segments of the public at particular points in time? What about over time - do we observe a uniform swing across different groups (parallel publics), or does the flow of opinion differ across party, income, and education? Our data on public preferences for government spending show cross-sectional heterogeneity across sub-aggregates, but very high levels of over-time homogeneity in trends across subgroups. The structure of preference change across subgroups is fairly similar; most notably, thermostatic responsiveness to policy holds generally across the subgroups. This is especially true for broad domestic aggregates of opinion and policy. There still are some differences in feedback, particularly across education levels, as the highly educated are significantly more responsive to spending change over time. People with low and middling levels of education still do change their preferences for spending in response to what policymakers do, just to a lesser extent, at least in certain policy domains. This fits with the large and growing literature that demonstrates real differences owing to information levels. There also are significant differences across partisan subgroupings in various domains. The implications of these findings are considered in the concluding section. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous explanations of the causes of shifts in national policy mood, conceived of on a left-right dimension, have been mostly economic. In this paper, we attempt to move beyond economic factors affecting policy mood of the citizens in Western democracies. Specifically, we analyze the relationships between public policy moods and national economies, governmental ideology, previous public policy moods, and social and military spending. We further investigate how these relationships are conditioned/modified by the ideology of the incumbent governments. Our analysis includes 21 industrialized, well established democracies for the period of 1950 through 1998. We find that the national policy mood is negatively related to the current government ideology, confirming the "reaction hypothesis" primarily shown in American politics literature previously. We also conclude that improving (declining) national economy tends to cause a leftward (rightward) shift in policy mood. Additionally, the direction of this effect is influenced by the ideology of the incumbent government. Testing for our hypothesis that increasing social spending causes a rightward movement in national policy mood and a decrease in social spending sends policy mood to the left yields only "weak" support. Even so, we find no evidence that these influences are conditioned by government ideology. Conversely, we find strong evidence that an increase in military spending swings policy mood to the left, while a decrease moves it back to the right. And, as is the case with economic variables, military spending is conditioned by government ideology. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of what seem to be insurmountable differences on one issue after another such as immigration, global climate change, homeland security, and health care, confidence in conventional categories for capturing what is at stake and processes for negotiating agreement are eroding. Analytical formulations fail to adequately comprehend the entirety of differences that divide opposing parties and strategies for forging agreements fall short. The purpose of this paper is to explore what is meant by "ways of knowing" and how ways of knowing can assist in identifying the roots of contemporary conflict and difficulties in designing public policy that can produce effective action. We join numerous other scholars in moving beyond self interest as the fundamental motivator of political action, and beyond bounded rationality as the primary mode of reasoning. Ways of knowing is an inclusive and flexible concept that embraces many alternative formulations of political motivations and analysis styles. Advantages of this broadened conception include the possibility of more effective mechanisms for avoiding, transcending or bridging disagreements that threaten gridlock or that produce ineffective or damaging policies. To advance this argument, we first provide a practical description of what we mean by "ways of knowing," as it might be applied to analysis of policy issues. We then explore the various attempts to understand the multiple dimensions in ways of knowing, drawing on a broad literature from philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, physics, cognitive psychology, and other fields. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During periods of divided government, presidents commonly enlist veto threats in an effort to alter the policy content of legislation in Congress. Whether such rhetoric can achieve its intended purpose is far from clear. Indeed, theory, classifying threats as "cheap talk," judges the president's potential influence to be minimal. In this paper we search for effects of veto threats directed at legislation that has passed one chamber and will be subsequently voted on in the second chamber. Based on previous research we suspect that when the second chamber is the Senate its action is critical in determining whether Congress responds to the president's threat. We find that compared to unthreatened legislation, presidential threats elicit a more partisan response in roll call voting, both on final passage in the Senate as well as on the adoption of the conference report in the House. Specifically patterns of vote-switching by members of the president's party between rounds of voting are far more consistent with and predictable along the axis of interparty competition-the estimated primary policy dimension in Congress-in presence of threat. This is consistent with Congress making concessions in policy in response to veto threats, while peddling nonpartisan fluff in their absence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do differences in institutional and social contexts affect press-government relations and political journalism in the U.S.? Despite a widespread recognition that journalists and the stories they write affect the public agenda, policy options, and the frames through which people understand public policy, we know precious little about how political reporters do their jobs or patterns of press/government relations. Even with recent interest in press relations in Congress, little research has compared political reporters' behavior across institutional and social contexts. In this paper, we examine how institutions affect the politics of newsgathering in American statehouse journalism. We focus on the presence or absence of term limits for lawmakers, the level of professionalization of state legislative bodies, and the overall size of the press corps. Using the comparative method, we carefully selected four state capitals: Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois. We find that the attributes of legislative and press corps organization influence how journalists cover the story of government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many policy options have been proposed for slowing or halting the spread of nuclear weapons; yet all rely on sound intelligence on the progress of nuclear aspirants. Historically, the United States has had an uneven record of estimating weapons programs, overestimating the progress that some proliferators have made, while underestimating others. A comparative historical cataloging and evaluation of intelligence failures on nuclear weapons can therefore contribute major insights to public policy. This paper seeks to detail the circumstances and intelligence work surrounding sixteen of the twenty-five states that are thought to have attempted to develop nuclear weapons and derive conclusions about the political causes of distorted nuclear intelligence estimations. In particular, we evaluate specific hypotheses related to policy, culture, organizations, and institutions. We find that the US has overestimated much more frequently than it has underestimated or correctly estimated states' programs, and that this is primarily due to policy-related causes, although cultural, organizational, and institutional biases also make significant contributions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the connection between the Rehnquist Court's criminal justice decisions and the New Right political regime is presented. It discusses the political determinants of the exercise of judicial power. It examines some of the cases that shaped the course and contours of public policy in the U.S.

This paper explores how the congressional committee system shapes the dynamics of issue attention. Consisting of what I refer to as a congressional opportunity structure, the multiple and overlapping structures of authority of committee jurisdictions provides an important institutional context for the appearance of new items on the policy agenda and the level of attention paid to new issues in congressional proceedings. I illustrate this through an examination of congressional attention to biotechnology issues over a thirty-year period. I find that committees with broader jurisdictions were more active in biotechnology than committees with a narrow policy remit. These effects were most pronounced in the area of biomedical research, such as stem cells, cloning, and access to genetic information. The findings suggest how institutions provide a dynamic environment for the entrepreneurial pursuit of political goals. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, there is wide variation from state to state in the institutional arrangements that structure the environment in which citizens decide whether or not to vote and parties decide whom to mobilize. This has consequences for the types of candidates that get elected, which policies they enact, and the health of democracy in the U.S. I argue that to understand how these institutional arrangements affect outcomes, one has to understand the interactions between social and political context and these institutions. Previous research fails to account for these interactions and makes assumptions that do not withstand scrutiny. I find that election day registration has come up short, and shorter than suggested by previous work, on the promise of delivering higher rates of turnout. Furthermore, I show that the effect of registration laws is not uniform across contexts. In states that adopted reform as a result of federal intervention, the laws have little if any effect. The results of this project have implications for public policy as well as policy evaluation studies. Those seeking to boost turnout will have to turn to longer term strategies that seek to address the motivation to vote. The research design developed in this project serves as a model that can be applied to the analysis of other election reforms, such as those that will result from the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of my analysis suggest that most Americans support tax cuts not because they are indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely fail to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people say that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them add that that is a bad thing--but most of these people still support Bush’s tax cuts and the repeal of the estate tax. People who want to spend more money on a variety of government programs are more likely to support tax cuts than those who do not, other things being equal. And people’s opinions about tax cuts are strongly shaped by their attitudes about their own tax burdens but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden of the rich--even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Some of these peculiarities appear to be mitigated by political information, but others seem perversely resilient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative survey of activist mobilizing to secure recognition of sexual diversity in Canadian and American public school systems, and of the extent to which public policy and schooling practice have responded. Until the 1990s, only scattered jurisdictions effected any significant change, often starting with ‘safe schools’ measures. Such change, and particularly in the area of anti-gay bullying, appears more widespread in the U.S. than Canada, not at all the pattern in other sexual diversity issues. Differences arise from religious, cultural, and institutional factors, and from Canadian-American contrasts in the extent to which sexual diversity provokes high stakes debates over other issues. As on all sexual diversity fronts, dramatic variation persists across U.S. regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the circumstances under which states influence private actors in order to achieve their policy goals in 2003. Role of state-private actor relationships in situations where states are negatively affected by interdependence; Examination of case studies drawn from European Union-U.S. disagreements over the governance of information flows; Relationship between communications technologies and international affairs.

A comparative survey of activist mobilizing to secure recognition of gay and lesbian relationships in Canada and the United States, and of the extent to which public policy, law, and institutional policy among private employers has moved in directions sought by such activism. Such movement as has occurred depends on developments at national, regional, and local levels of government, as well as in the courts. Shifts toward equity have come faster and more uniformly in Canada than in the U.S.. A few American states and several localities have seen marked progress, but are hampered by the relative absence of change at the federal level. Variation in outcome depends on constitutional, legal, and institutional context, on party configerations, on labour union support, and to some extent on public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this essay is to assess and compare the influence of voters? own policy-related attitudes in the three most recent Presidential elections and the initial year of the new Bush administration. Results are presented concerning the apparent influence of a wide variety of specific policy-related controversies, and the combined influence for all such attitudes. Results are also summarized concerning the role of: stable social and economic characteristics, partisan identifications, perceptions of national conditions, evaluations of presidential and candidate ?performance, and evaluations of the candidates? personal qualities. Based on survey data from the American National Election Studies (NES) and a separate survey, the Public Agendas and Citizen Engagement Survey (PACES), the authors emphasize 4 major conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing policy responsiveness, the degree to which public policies correspond to citizen preferences, is a central challenge to political scientists. Despite extensive study, one aspect of policy responsiveness remains largely unexplored: the degree to which policy responsiveness is enhanced or diminished by various institutional arrangements. We examine how the correspondence between local educational spending levels and citizen preferences varies by three aspects of institutional design: fiscal independence, referendum requirements, and rules of electoral representation. Using data on over 9000 US school districts we show that reforms resulting from Civil Rights Movement challenges to electoral systems were successful in improving the policy responsiveness of districts with even small minority populations. In addition, we show that one innovation championed by the Progressives - fiscal independence - lessens policy responsiveness while another such reform - the referendum - strengthens the opinion-policy linkage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining Mayhew’s data set of important legislative enactments with Royed’s data set on fulfillment of US party pledges, we create an index of the partisan content of major legislation enacted between 1977 and 1996. The provisions of each enactment during this period are compared with the specific substantive promises made in the most recent party platforms, enabling us to gauge the relative influence of each party’s ideas in the final legislative product. We use our measure, first, as a dependent variable in an analysis of the impact of party control of institutions on policy content. We then use it as an independent variable in an analysis of party voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the role of the neoliberal order in American political development as of October 2014. Topics discussed include of the American political economy and its implications for the country's citizens, impact of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 on the U.S. politics, and use of neoliberalism in policy prescriptions and institutional designs.

On March 17, 2010, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin described President Obama's health care reform plan as "undemocratic" and "un-American" to a Fox News audience. Previous research has established that attitudes toward the 2010 health care reform law were affected by a variety of factors, including socioeconomic status (Brady and Kessler 2010; Gelman, Lee, and Ghitza 2010) and even racial prejudice (Knowles, Lowery, and Schaumberg 2010; Tesler 2012). This study investigates the relationship between support for health care reform and nativism, the perception that a traditional American culture and way of life is being threatened by foreign influence. In other words, this study describes and analyzes the extent to which the health care reform bill was perceived by the American public as somehow "un-American", or a threat to traditional American values. Data for this study are drawn from two distinct national public opinion samples fielded in 2010 and 2011. Results demonstrate that nativism was an independent and significant predictor of opposition to health care reform, and that this effect held for both Republicans as well as Democrats (although the relationship is stronger among Republicans). This is substantively important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that certain sub-groups of the American public evaluate public policy proposals on the basis of their perceived "foreignness". Second, it demonstrates that while nativism is traditionally associated with immigration and other race/ethnic-based policy preferences, it also affects attitudes toward other seemingly non-racial policies in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do lawmakers think in cognitively complex ways about the legislation they face? While much scholarship demonstrates that political leaders' thinking in decision making is relatively shallow, the motivated tactician model suggests that they can be stimulated to apply more cognitive effort to certain decisions (Showers and Cantor 1985; Fiske 1993; Tetlock 1985). To test this hypothesis in legislative cognition, I use data from 334 explanations of legislation by members of the Illinois General Assembly collected in personal interviews. I find that the major force influencing the complexity of a lawmaker's thinking on a bill is his/her personal and institutional responsibility for it. In particular, sponsors and cosponsors display significantly more differentiated thought on their bills and use information from more, and more distant, sources than do other members; on the other hand, lawmakers with no institutional responsibility for a bill display limited differentiation and information search in their deliberations, with committee members falling in a middle range. This example of "distributed cognition" both supports the motivated tactician model and has positive and negative implications for public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of political innumeracy-or ignorance of politically relevant numbers-is well-documented. However, little is known about its consequences. We report on three original survey experiments in which respondents were randomly assigned to see correct information about the racial composition of the U.S. population, median income and educational attainment, and the unemployment and poverty rates. Although estimates of these quantities were frequently far from the truth, providing correct information had little effect on attitudes toward relevant public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policymaking in Congress is mired in political gridlock. Reforms are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and the path forward is unclear. To reach such conclusions, scholars of health politics tend to analyze major reform proposals one by one to determine why they succeeded or failed and what lessons could be drawn for the future. Taking a different approach, we examine all health policies proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1973 and 2002. We analyze these bills' fates and the effectiveness of their sponsors in guiding their proposals through Congress. Set against a baseline of policy advancements in other policy areas, we demonstrate that health policymaking is indeed far more gridlocked than policymaking in most other areas. We then isolate some of the causes of this gridlock, as well as the more promising paths forward to health policy reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the changes regarding the structure, approaches, and behaviors of presidents between the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the U.S. First postmodern president Richard Nixon's public policy approach is examined. It is noted that a great deal of change in the 1960s and early 1970s has been experienced by the presidency.

The article discusses the impact of recent immigrants on American ethno-racial politics. The author says that immigrants have been used successfully to score rhetorical political points helping to de-legitimize policies aimed at increasing ethno-racial equality in the U.S, but argues that it is wrong to explain the relative weakness of a racially egalitarian public policy agenda by seeing increased immigration as a primary causal factor.

We find that a synergistic discourse about the public interest and the commons in assessments of the administrative state is ordinary, meaningful, and expresses common understandings of values of the Constitution. We include a case study assessing the public interest and the commons under the FCC "public interest standard." We also include historical assessment of the values within US constitutionalism, especially the Founder's experience, and what this says about the public interest and the commons. Critics have asserted the public interest and the commons are non-referential concepts, thus, meaningless "hot air." But in our empirical study we find significant shared meanings, from consensus on the disjunctions of bureau-pathologies, to attempts to formulate these general interests, to dispute resolutions by the FCC. From close empirical tracking of the ordinary usage and pragmatic meaning as perceived by participants, we find that both the public interest and the commons are used together in a "duality" to identify distinct, synergistic approaches that are congruent with constitutionalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes that the extent to which external factors influence state policy adoption depends, in part, on internal state characteristics, with external factors consisting of other states and the federal government and internal factors consisting of a particular state's political, economic, and programmatic circumstances. This insight is grounded in the study of program implementation, which suggests that policy necessarily evolves and adapts to local conditions, and in the study of institutions in sociology, which suggests that intra-organizational factors condition organizational responses to institutional pressures. The relevance of this insight for comparative state policy research is examined by applying mixed modeling techniques to data describing adoption of annual percentage reductions in Medicaid nursing facility per diem rates from 1981-1998. Results indicate that internal conditions favorable to adoption tend to magnify the effects of external influences, whereas internal conditions unfavorable to adoption tend to diminish their effects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious organizations maintain offices in the nation's capital because they have concrete policy concerns on the routine legislative calendar. Paradoxically, however, their authority and influence in Washington depends largely on the perception that they are "above" politics. If religious organizations are seen as "just another interest group" rather than as "representatives of religious communities of believers", then they are likely to experience diminished influence. In light of this dilemma, how do religious organizations achieve a delicate balance between advancing their earthly policy interests and harnessing their heavenly authority to influence public policy? We argue that religious organizations attempt to walk this line by maintaining an intentionally multivocal posture - adjusting their rhetorical strategy depending on the venue in which they are speaking. We hypothesize that three factors contribute to organizational decisions to modulate their rhetoric across venues: organizational identity, frame alignment, and institutional context. Using content analyses of the testimonies of three religious organizations (the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American Jewish Committee, and the National Council of Churches), we test these hypotheses with data from 70 appearances between 1994 and 2006. Our very preliminary results support the conclusion that religious organizations using identity, framing, and context to guide their multivocality. These findings suggest the desirability of further investigations into the rhetorical choices made by organizations across political venues and media outlets. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging consensus argues that that policy makers pay attention to citizen preferences when building public policies. But do legislators respond more to their constituent's global public orientations, such as ideology, or to their constituents' opinion on the specific issue at hand? Whether legislators respond to global or specific constituency opinion has implications for democracy and the ability of the public to hold its policy makers accountable. Lack of data has kept researchers from assessing which type of responsiveness more strongly figures into legislator decision making. Using newly available surveys across the 50 states, which ask respondents about specific attitudes towards immigration as well as global political orientations, we test for the comparative impact of specific versus global attitudes on Senate roll call voting on immigration. We find that both types of opinion affect senator roll call behavior about equally. Our conclusion discusses the conditions under which specific attitudes about policies might affect legislative policy making decisions and implications for democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the attacks on September 11, 2001 (9/11), the moribund public policy of "civilian defense" got a new name: "homeland security"; although the semantic change had its supporters and detractors (the Orwellian ring did not sit well with many), it did not translate into an efficient national policy. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has endured public ridicule since it was established, but why does it seem so inept? My question is: why the push for a highly centralization of civilian defense/homeland security bureaucracy in the face of sixty years of failure in this particular policy arena? I contend that, given the structure of the American state, a massive, centralized, and growing bureaucracy that is primarily a policing entity is a problematic institution for the implementation of a comprehensive national civilian defense policy. This essay has three parts: In the first section, the DHS is considered in historical perspective. What came before and how did it affect the organizational structure of the homeland security apparatus? In a sense, the DHS is a bureaucratic institution that was born to fail; that is, it is pastiche of emergency management agencies that seemingly are not equipped to handle a variety of civil defense policies. This ad hoc approach to state-building is not, for the most part, a result of incompetent professionals or legislators (most of whom are trying to do good); instead, it is a consequence of an enigma related to American political development (APD): the American state has proven supremely adept at war mobilization and war-fighting, but not at creating long-term internal security bureaucracies. The second part of the essay examines a particular kind of policy (an old strategy): deterrence by denial as one possible way to define civilian defense/homeland security policy. Finally, the third section of the essay concludes with some ideas of possible ways to re-conceptualize a public policy of homeland security. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of sustainability in one form or another has taken on great appeal on many fronts since the commencement of the Earth Summit in Río de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. In the contemporary period there are many actors and institutions working to reduce the ecological footprints of humanity at global, multi-lateral, bilateral, national, regional, bioregional, state/provincial, county, and most importantly, the municipal and watershed level. Here I focus on a bioregion where the idea of sustainability has been institutionalized in one form or another since at least the early 1970s: the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence ecosystem. The bioregion is all the more relevant because it is situated in the heart of traditional industrial North America, so any efforts in the area of sustainability, whatever its form, are of special importance. Before turning to this specific North American bioregion, I examine some communicative trends at the national level (USA), making a case for why it is important to view sustainability discourses at local-level scales of analysis. There is currently a fairly aggressive effort to institute large scale indicators and macro-approaches to sustainability (so-called 'national level standards'), and here I offer an alternative perspective that situates sustainability as best articulated at the local or bioregional level of governance (as suggested by Lipschutz, 2004 and many others). These differing forms of sustainability in urban North America can be understood on communicative terms, adding to the pastiche of narratives pertaining to sustainability in the city in the early 21st century.Departing from traditional 'hard' measures of sustainability, I take a discursive or communicative approach to the topic through examination of select newsprint media. Such an approach; which is essentially a 'crude' measure of one particular way to conceptualize environmental sustainability, sustainable development, and other linked green ecological perspectives, may provide help to practitioners and citizens but is really only a measure of what has happened, not what will or could happen. Linking this discursive method to actual implementation brings together an empirical and theoretical approach that can deepen our understanding of the capacity of cities and bioregions to engage in sustainability initiatives, along with re-engaging conceptions of power, broadly considered, in the city.Such discursive measures can be a proxy for the degree to which "hard" scientific knowledge generated at the research and practitioner level is transmitted to the mass public. It is a crude attempt to measure how cities have understood and discussed the city as an ecosystem, an idea advocated by many who acknowledge the heavy ecological footprint a city exerts in history but who still push for the idea of eco-cities. The measure is crude however, because it only measures frequencies of allegedly important terms and terminology that I argue should be in place at the popular level to create the conditions or prerequisites of sustainability initiatives, successful or otherwise. It does not translate into a measure which can actually tell us how seriously a city or watershed is taking sustainability, but it does give us a crude measure of power, as indicated by what news print has decided to print in the first place. It is a baby step towards considering to what degree mass publics may be participating in sustainability initiatives, beginning with a look at how news media present sustainability issues. Toronto is speaking a discourse of sustainability of sorts, while a communicative vacuum exists in Detroit. Nonetheless two models of sustainability in the city are presented by the pairing of the two cities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay articulates some key aspects of the processes through which sexual identities are formed in the United States. I first discuss identity and identity politics as social and political processes intricately related to the concepts of mobility, positionality, and embodiment. Then I draw connections between these processes and the concepts of sexual identity and queer political action by demonstrating how queers have long worked to come together as a movement to engage in a complicated process of positive sexual identity formation. I show how this is particularly challenging for queers in the face of negative social constructions in two critical venues: public policy and science. By discussing the allocation of public policy values to sexual identities in terms of democratic norms, I examine the consequences of the negative construction of queers produced by majoritarian institutions, namely the electoral branches of government. The judicial branch, as a protector of minority rights, is able to provide a small amount of power for queers, however, and queers have mobilized to build alliances in some state and local venues, as well. Considering the allocation of scientific values to sexual identities in terms of scientific method norms, I question scientific knowledge and the pure objectivity of scientific analysis. I demonstrate how science, like public policy, categorizes the populace and contributes to queer marginalization by determining sexual normalcy. But, just as with the public policy venue, the scientific venue also provides some important examples of queer acceptance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories involving coattails, surge and decline, presidential popularity, and the economy ascribe little importance to presidential efforts to influence congressional elections. Given that such efforts take place, we ask what happens when a president actively campaigns for some fellow partisans. We examine President Bush's decisions to campaign for certain House candidates in 2002, and we assess the impact of his visits on Republican candidates' electoral successes. Both the competitiveness of a race and the president's electoral self-interest increase the likelihood of a presidential visit, but neither party loyalty nor presidential support in Congress has an impact. We also find that presidential campaign visits significantly enhance candidates' prospects for success. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the decline in Americans' levels of political trust since the 1960s has been viewed with alarm by some scholars, others maintain that the trend reflects growing skepticism (rather than genuine cynicism) about government's capacity to deal effectively with important social problems - and that this development poses relatively little threat to the overall health of the polity. We extend the argument by hypothesizing that many citizens are, in fact, ambivalent in that they simultaneously hold positive and negative feelings about government and the role that it should play in society today. Based on our analysis of data from a 2004 telephone survey of Florida residents, we conclude that (a) ambivalence about the federal, state, and local levels of government in the United States is fairly common; (b) ambivalence has consequences for people's opinions on matters of public policy, specifically, those with conflicted feelings are less likely to endorse progressive action in the social welfare realm; (c) self-identified conservatives are more ambivalent about government than liberals; and (d) the negative relationship between ambivalence and social welfare liberalism is especially pronounced among conservatives. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women-friendly and even feminist public policy is a common aspiration of many women's organizations, citizen groups and female legislators. But what constitutes women-friendly public policy is not clear, in part because women's issues are not homogenous and are difficult to define precisely. However, if there is women-friendly public policy, it should be a consistent set of specific policies that are systematically related to one another. Using the policy agenda of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, which is derived from the widely-cited UN 4th World Conference on Women, we examine whether this agenda represents a consistent policy dimension or domain that can be characterized as "women-friendly" in the output of the 50 US states. We conclude that women-friendly policies do not represent a consistent policy domain. They appear neither consistently "women-friendly" nor "liberal." We tentatively conclude that, despite numerous studies about women's policy, it is not clear that women's policy is a coherent policy domain. While policies may be seen by advocates to be friendly to women, they do not seem to be consistently arrayed on a single dimension among U.S state legislatures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]