Search

Although I. Bernard Cohen has shown that the American founders were not appropriating the terms of Newtonian physics when using words such as "balance" and "equilibrium" to describe the institutional relationships delineated in the Constitution, it remains unclear why these terms recur throughout their writings. Following Cohen, it is the argument of this paper that the founders drew these and similar expressions from the organismic analogy of the state as a "corpus politicum" or a "body politic." In particular, I argue that James Madison's Federalist 10 relies upon an eighteenth-century medical metaphor that has been overlooked due to the transformation in the science of medicine that occurred between Federalist 10's initial publication and its rediscovery by Charles Beard in 1913. While Madison's invocation of the ancient analogy of the state as a body politic has occasionally been noted, what has thus far gone unnoticed is Madison's use of this analogy as a foundation for a more historically bounded biomedical metaphor integral to his argument. Relying upon an analogous relationship between health and justice traceable to the writings of Plato, Madison contends in Federalist 10 that the democratic analogue to sound bodily health - conceived by Hippocrates as the "krasis," or the proportionate mixture, of the humors - is obtainable only in an extended republic. Just as the krasis of the humors within the corpus humanum is the definition of health, the self-equilibrating balance of factions within the corpus politicum of an extended republic becomes the definition of political justice. Madison's use of the analogy of the state as a corpus politicum, implicit in his efforts to offer his readers a "remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government," is thus highly purposive, providing rhetorical support for his theoretical argument and a carefully chosen rhetorical frame for the ongoing debate over the proposed Constitution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional understandings of policymaking as a state-centric process are being challenged by the appearance of a variety of new private, voluntary governance mechanisms. Institutions such as certification institutions are emerging in which civil society groups interact directly with other non-state actors like corporations to develop new sets of rules—rules which are neither created nor enforced by the state. The emergence of these private regimes raises interesting questions about the power of non-governmental advocacy groups in the policy arena. Without using the power of the state for leverage, how do advocacy groups encourage behavioral change among corporations? To what extent are corporations driven to comply with the demands of civil society groups? This paper addresses these questions by considering the extent to which pressure from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) drives company participation in environmental certification programs. Using the U.S. forest products sector as an example, the paper considers why firm responses to NGO pressures have been variable. Some firms have chosen to participate in the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which is the program preferred by the NGOs. Other firms have joined the American Forest and Paper Association’s Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the chief competitor program which is not endorsed by NGOs. Examining the evidence from four firm-level case studies, the paper argues that generalized NGO pressure against the sector does prompt firms to participate in some type of certification program. Surprisingly, however, an intense, direct NGO campaign against a particular firm actually drives that firm away from the certification option most preferred by NGOs. Thus instead of complying with NGO demands, directly targeted firms are more likely to resist civil society pressure and adopt the industry-sponsored certification program. Using a process tracing methodology, the paper demonstrates that other important independent variables such as high internal commitment to the environment, low transactions costs, and the presence of stringent and non-discretionary regulations on forest practices may encourage firm compliance with NGO demands; however, the addition of direct campaigns against the firm causes resistance and/or compromise. The paper explores the reasons behind this reaction, arguing that direct targeting by NGOs has critical, negative effects on policy network relations. Moreover, these effects are not confined to targeted firms, but spill over to impact the decisions of other firms in the industry. Thus while NGO campaigns may be effective in encouraging a general behavioral shift among U.S. forest products firms, NGOs will have more difficulty in provoking the particular behavioral response (participation in the FSC) that they most desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

and gender differences in who is asked for identification. Using data from a 50-state study, we can determine variations in implementation across states with different identification requirements and also the ability of various populationsâ€"such as the elderly and the poorâ€"to produce readily such identification. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much scholarly research has been devoted to explaining why judges retire. Building upon research regarding the United States Congress, the existing literature suggests several reasons why judges might voluntarily depart the federal bench. These inc ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addressees several questions about what the states spend on higher education, looking at the actual amounts spent in FY 03-04, the change in state budgets for the one, two and five years before FY 03-04, and the amount spent per capita in each state on higher education. The methodology compares the states graphically and in a multiple regression context, with standard state variables being used to explain the distribution of expenditures. In the case of the amount spent on higher education in FY 03-04, the study finds that expenditures closely accord with state populations, although states with highly professionalized (full-time) legislatures tend to spend an average of $200 million less than what their populations alone would predict. In the case of the change in state budgets over the last few years, the paper focuses on the two year change, from FY 2001-02 to FY 2003-04, finding per capita income and the percent growth in the 18-24 year old population seem to have no effect on the budget changes, but that the estimated deficit in the state is significantly related to the budget changes. The several political variables tested seem to have no effect on changes in the state budgets. In the case of per capita higher education expenses, the hypotheses were that these would relate to per capita incomes in the state and the percent increase in the 18-24 year old population; neither of these hypotheses receives any support. One of the several political variables is significant, but only barely so. In our next analyses we will be refining these models and examining other measures to help explain the conundrum of state spending on higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we contrast the long-term consequences of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. We test what the impact of each of these types of policy change is on long-term budgetary outcomes for the American states. Policy scholars have applied both theoretical approaches to the study of budgetary spending as an extension of policymaking. Given the two contrasting paradigms of policy change, we develop the following line of inquiry: Does punctuated equilibrium create a different budget in the long term than incrementalism? We address this question through an analysis of American state budgets because the US states provide a rich variation in both budgetary outcomes and political institutions. Specifically, we examine budgetary data across all budget categories through a simple quantitative measure for the degree of budget punctuation based on the fourth l-moments score (Hosking 1998). We use budget data from all American states for the period between 1984 and 2002 to illuminate the consequences of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. We have three general findings: (1) state budgets are punctuated to varying degrees, (2) however this degree of punctuation does not influence long-term budgetary outcomes, and (3) allocational budget categories are more likely to exhibit punctuations. The strength of our approach is its sensitivity of variations in policy punctuations across time (16 years), across space (50 state institutions), and across issue space (10 budget categories) into account. The paper's theoretical contribution is linking budgetary evolution and punctuated equilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic values lie at the heart of the 2004 election, and this paper explores their relevance for policymaking. This paper explores the values problems that afflicted the Democratic party during the 2004 presidential campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines when states stop receiving US foreign assistance. Using duration models on all US aid recipients from 1948-2000, this paper examines the influence of realist, liberal, and economic explanations on when states stop receiving aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory of seat change in U.S. House elections. The theory contends, in short, that a substantial part of the impact of national electoral forces on seat change acts indirectly through the intervening variable of challenger quality. District and aggregate level models of challenger quality are estimated using a new database of House challengers. Jacobson's district level model is estimated using pooled data from the 1946-2002 elections. Krasno and Green's district level model and a revised version of their model are estimated for each of the 1946-2002 elections. Jacobson's aggregate level models of relative challenger quality are estimated using data from the 1946-2002 elections. A new aggregate level model of challenger quality is developed in this paper. The overall performance of the new model as measured by explained variance is comparatively greater than for earlier models. The impact of national forces on challenger quality is moderate at best. A new seat change model including challenger quality as a causal variable is introduced and estimated for the 1954-2002 elections. Estimates of this model demonstrate that challenger quality is an important cause of seat change. In addition, the impact of both national and district electoral forces on seat change, acting through the intervening variable of challenger quality, is estimated using data from the 1954-2002 elections. The indirect impact of national forces on seat change is moderate. Finally, an alternative measure of challenger quality constructed from data originally gathered in order to construct Krasno and Green's measure of challenger quality is substituted for Jacobson's traditional measure. The substitution improves the overall performance of the new aggregate level model of challenger quality presented here, but the additional gain in the performance is small. In conclusion, the analysis presented here provides empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory. However, the theory has limited explanatory power. The impact of national forces on seat change acting through challenger quality is not large enough to account for much of the observed seat change that occurs from one election to the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using never-before-published/cited historical materials from archives holding deceased legislators’ papers around the country, this paper compares the amount and quality of oversight performed by Congress in relation to CIA during the Truman/ Eisenhower presidencies. McCubbins and Schwartz suggested in the 1980s that legislative oversight varies in relation to events/conditons in the American political environment, and that oversight resembles a fire alarm process, rather than systematic police patrols. This paper shows such variation in comparing three years: 1950, 1955, and 1958, with the oversight being by far the most vigorous in 1958, but confirms that congressional oversight in that era was never systematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this proposed paper we expand on the earlier research by Garand and Procopio (1995), who used data from the 1992 American National Election Study (ANES) to model popular support for term limits as a function of a variety of variables, many of which are found in the scholarly literature. However, unlike previous work Garand and Procopio include independent variables representing the effect of characteristics of U.S. House members, especially seniority. Garand and Procopio suggest that, controlling for the effects of other variables, citizens will respond to the characteristics of their representatives and adjust their support for term limits accordingly. For instance, they find that citizens represented by House members with high seniority are less supportive of term limits than citizens represented by junior members. We propose to extend this general model to data from the 1994 and 1998 ANES surveys. We also propose to consider whether public opinion on congressional term limits is shaped by the configuration of partisan identification and partisan control of Congress. With rare exception, previous research on support for term limits in the mass public has focused on the pre-1994 period in Congress, during which time both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate were controlled by the Democrats. Such a focus does not allow for a full longitudinal test of the connection between partisan attitudes and attitudes toward term limits. Specifically, previous research has found that Republican identifiers are much more likely than Democrats to support term limits, but it is unclear if this is an integral part of being a Republican or if support for term limits would change once the Republicans are in control of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. We speculate that Republican support for term limits in 1992 was based in part on self-interest, insofar as Republicans did not have majority status in the Congress at that time; on the other hand, we speculate that, once control of Congress shifted to the Republicans with the 1994 congressional elections, support for term limits among Republican citizens should have declined and support for term limits among Democrats should have increased. In this proposed paper we will utilize data from the 1992, 1994, and 1998 ANES surveys, which are the only ANES surveys that include items on support for term limits. We estimate a series of models to explain variation in individuals’ support for congressional term limits. Our core model includes demographic variables, as well as variables measuring political attitudes, system support, legislative support, and political knowledge. We also intend to include characteristics of respondents’ House members in our term limit model; these characteristics will include members’ seniority, the ideological distance between respondents and their House members, and estimates of grant funds brought to each district, among others. Moreover, we consider the mediating effect of political knowledge on the effects of these variables on support for term limits. Following Garand and Procopio, we suggest that high- and low-knowledge citizens use different kinds of information in shaping their attitudes toward term limits. Finally, we focus particular attention on how the effects of partisanship on support for term limits varies under periods of Democratic control of Congress (before 1994) and Republican control of Congress (after 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideas of what Army transformation is and how it should be performed abound. Articles from pundits appear in popular print media that claim the deactivation of the U.S. Army’s armored or aviation forces is a requirement for transformation to begin. Scholars and civilian practitioners publish papers in first tier journals that describe their view of transformation as either a result of or cause for some variable in the Army’s environment In fact, Don M. Snyder and Gayle L. Watkins cite at least three schools of thought that encompass military transformation in their seminal anthology on the future of the profession of the Army: the revolution in military affairs school; the public organizational theories school; and the civil-military relation theory school. In all of these schools the two constants are that the discussion is about change and there are calls for contextualizing that change. Simply stated, it is the researcher’s view that changes in military organizations either constitutes reorganization or transformation and that both types of change are not mutually exclusive. Reorganization is simply changing an aspect of an organization which allows it to conduct its core functions in order for it to accomplish its mission. The organization’s core functions remain the same. How the organization conducts those core functions changes, but the organization’s founding assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes the way that organization views reality and how members of that organization share those aspects does not shift with this simple type of change. Transformation, on the other hand, is a changing of an organization’s core functions in order for that organization to be viable enough to accomplish its mission. In its essence, it calls for a paradigm shift. In order for the organization to continue to be viable enough to accomplish its mission, it must change its founding assumptions, concepts, values, and practices, or be shelved in the dust bin of irrelevancy. Understanding the difference between the two changes and when each type of change is required helps public managers of the Army to properly facilitate that change. This paper will analyze those two aspects of change with regard to Army transformation and will provide recommendations for civilian and military leaders to use in better managing that change in the Army. It will draw on data from the researcher’s graduate work and evidence gathered from research conducted on different Army agencies, or organizations within the total Army organization. This will prove fruitful in assisting the analysis of managing change in other public and multi-agency-type organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, or inter-agency task forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose for this research paper is to investigate the reasons behind the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) initiation of democratization in Taiwan in using the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico as comparison. The KMT should be consider as one of the rare hegemonic ruling party in the world to survive democratic transitions intact, even though the nature and structures of the party have been changed tremendously through democratization. The PRI possess the same qualities. However, the reasons for initiating liberalization of the two parties were somewhat different. Ultimately, four explanatory factors (two internal, two external) emerged as the main contributors to the democratization process in Taiwan. They are: first, the development of Taiwanese identity different from that of the Chinese; second, the political demands and activism of a growing middle class due to the economic success; third, the changes in United States foreign policy towards the encouragement of democratization; and fourth and most importantly, the competition with China for support and the recognition from the international community and the need for the Taiwanese government to enhance its appeal to international supporters, particularly the United States. In addition, while the four factors mentioned above all contributed to the KMT-led democratization in Taiwan, the influence of the United State’s foreign policy in the Fast East and its support of democratic states should be considered the most significant factor contributing to the democratization in Taiwan. In sum, the hypothesis proposed by this research paper is that the accumulation and interaction of all four factors made democratization in Taiwan and the end of the KMT one-party dominance inevitable, with the external pressure from the U.S. essentially playing the most significant role in impelling the KMT elites’ decision to liberalize, adopt electoral reform and stop the persecution of the opposition. The theoretical approaches of the paper are as the following: this paper will adopt the definition of “democracy” provided by Linz and Stepan (1978) to serve as guidelines for whether there is democracy in both Taiwan and Mexico. The definition from Linz states that the criteria of democracy are: “ [The] legal freedom to formulate and advocate political alternatives with the concomitant rights to free association, free speech, and other basic freedoms of person; free and nonviolent competition among leaders with periodic validation of their claim to rule; inclusion of all effective political offices in the democratic process; and provision for the participation of all members of the political community. Practically, this means the freedom to create political parties and to conduct free and honest elections at regular intervals without excluding any effective political office from direct or indirect electoral accountability” (Linz, 5). The paper will also posit that Lipset’s take on modernization theory (1959) holds valid in the case of Taiwan. The economic success in the 1970s and 1980s created a large, well-organized middle class that in turn demanded more political freedom, equality and liberalization. In addition, the paper also addresses Linz and Diamond’s (1989) claim that the genesis and maintenance of democracy is ‘greatly facilitated by values and behavioral dispositions, particularly at the elite level, of compromise, flexibility, tolerance, conciliation, moderation and restraint” (Linz, 12). The methodology use by the paper will be comparative analysis on both the KMT and the PRI’s initiation to liberalize. The paper will also provide historical analysis on the nature of the KMT and its 50-year dominance on Taiwan. Lastly, the paper analyzes voter turn-outs and the results of the 2000 presidential election, which validated the consolidation of democracy in both Taiwan and Mexico. Maybe it is because of the geographic distance; Taiwan and Mexico are not often compared and studied together. Even though there are great differences between the KMT and PRI authoritarian regime, the end result of democratization and the eventual ousting of both parties from power were the same. The paper hopes to shed light on the reasons behind an elite-led liberalization by comparing two difference cases with the same end results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the handful of constitutional clauses central to recent interpretations of federalism is the Commerce Clause. The meaning and implications of that clause have been in dispute from the beginning. More recently, as then Justice Rehnquist noted in Hodel v. Virginia Surface Min. and Reclamation Association, 452 U.S. 264 (1981) (at 307), “(i)t is illuminating for purposes of reflection, if not for argument, to note that one of the greatest fictions of our federal system is that the Congress exercises only those powers delegated to it, while the remainder are reserved to the States or to the people. The manner in which this Court has construed the Commerce Clause amply illustrates the extent of this fiction.” Little did we know twenty years ago that the Court would end the century engaged in a debate over the nature of commerce, replicating much of a two-century debate over that definition. Almost always the debate was put in the context of the greater relationship between the National Governments and the states in a federal system. A favorite mechanism in that debate has been reference to “framer’s views” of the pertinent clauses on federalism. In this paper, I propose to examine the early views of the Commerce Clause. The Commerce Clause was a major reason for passing the Constitution. Its absence in the Articles of Confederation was widely believed to be a major problem and its passage involved little debate. But no clause has created more controversy or generated more cases, beginning with Chief Justice Marshall’s famous edict that the Clause “acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the Constitution,” and “among the states” permits the regulation of commerce within “the interior.” (Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824) ) In the paper proposed, I will look at the early debates over the Clause to search for the range of views on it held by the Framers, opponents, and other commentators on the Constitution in the first period of American history. I will start with the Constitutional Convention itself, but given the scarcity of debate on the Clause there, I will then look at the wider debate in the state ratifying conventions.. Moving on, I will examine the views expressed on the Clause in the Federalist Papers, that led to operationalization of the Clause in the early decades of the country. This culminates with Marshall’s landmark position in Gibbons. While my method is largely descriptive and analytical, it is based on thousands of pages of documents, including the records of the Constitutional Convention, the debates over ratification such as the Federalist Papers, the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, a collection of the records of the ratifying conventions, and numerous early court cases. The paper is part of a larger research effort by me with James Tubbs that looks into a variety of issues relating to federalism through American history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

America’s 3,066 county governments have continued the difficult task of providing essential services to the public even as the national economy has faltered and budgets are being cut at the federal and state levels. Attention has focused mainly on the state budget problems, and little is known about the fiscal situation facing America’s county governments. Utilizing the results of a national survey of county governments completed in spring 2003 by the National Center for the Study of Counties at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government on behalf of the National Association for Counties (NACO), this paper analyzes the survey responses of county administrators and clerks to determine the fiscal condition of counties and the causes and implications of the current budgetary crisis in county government. In addition, this paper seeks to examine the current crisis in the context of state-local relationships. The paper analyzes to what extent, and with what implications, state budgetary retrenchment has had an impact on the current era of county fiscal stress. It further seeks to relate county fiscal stress to cutback management theory by examining the patterns of local response to fiscal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of public opinion on presidential decision-making in foreign policy. Although a good deal of research looks at this general question, beyond the broad distinction between crisis and non-crisis decisions, the literature is largely inconclusive. We begin from this central distinction, utilizing the International Crisis Behavior Project’s criteria as the starting point for case selection. To observe in detail how differing patterns of public attentiveness influence foreign policymaking, we compare four cases: the 1991 Gulf War; the 1999 U.S. intervention in Kosovo; the U.S. response to Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s; and U.S.-Japanese economic relations between 1988-1992. To move beyond the broad question of “public opinion and foreign policy,” we propose a more precisely specified analytical model, conceptualizing foreign policy decision making as a five-stage process: problem representation, option generation, policy selection, implementation, and policy review. At each decision stage, the question is asked: How influential was public opinion on a president’s decision? The model generates several testable hypotheses. For instance, foreign policy crises tend to produce a public that is highly attentive throughout all stages of the decision process. While strategic imperatives often overwhelm domestic political considerations in the early stages of a crisis, the relative importance of public opinion as a decision premise tends to increase during later stages, with presidents apt to sacrifice strategic effectiveness to pacify a highly attentive domestic audience during the implementation phase. Conversely, salient non-crisis foreign policies produce a selectively attentive public, whose greatest influence is likely to be on the president’s selection of policy rather than the manner in which that policy is implemented. Freed from the constraints of an attentive public, presidents are afforded considerable autonomy in implementing non-crisis policy in a manner consistent with their vision of the national interest, even if the general public does not share that same vision. This paper outlines the model and provides a brief overview of each of the cases, then assembles data on aggregate public opinion from a wide range of surveys and polls, and analyzes the resulting time series to compare the pattern of public involvement to the model’s predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that civic engagement in the U.S. has been in decline for the past forty years has received much attention, in part produced by the scholarly debate fueled by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: the Decline and Renewal of Community in America (2000). The paper tests a new thesis that challenges the assumption that national trends provide an accurate potrayal of civic engagement, focusing instead at the level of community. Putnam amasses a wealth of indicators at the national level, including patterns of declining involvement in political activity, religious affiliation and participation, voluntary activity and social engagement. While Putnam’s data demonstrates clearly that civic engagement in formal political institutions and processes has declined, does this also hold true for community involvement at the local level? Is it instead possible that the dynamic activity of a sprinkling of small groups are the key to social capital formation and activity in the larger community? The paper provides an alternate view through examination of qualitative data concerning community voluntarism and labor union activity at the local level. Analysis of interview data reveals that the picture on the ground is quite opposite from what Putnam portrays. Voluntarism, labor activism, and social engagement are found to be quite active, and run counter to the trends depicted in Bowling Alone. The broad national picture captured by the lense of aggregate data becomes quite different when the lense is focused on the micro level of local communities around the country. Interviews with volunteer and staff leaders of nonprofits and religous organizations in several cities and smaller communities across the country during a cross country semester program involving seventeen undergraduate students from Baldwin Wallace College reveal patterns of social capital dynamics that challenge Putnam’s contentions. The paper will also examine the pedagogical dynamics of this experience, and will challenge Putnam’s assumption that Generation X/Y is civically disengaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan has become one of the major weapons importers in the past ten years and is likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Constrained by an inadequate military technology base and increasing threats from China?s rapid arms upgrading, Taiwan?s primary approach to maintaining its defensive capability has become the acquisition of weapon systems from abroad, especially from the United States. However, recent open policy debates on arms procurement have exposed Taiwan?s longstanding problems in relation to the legitimacy of procurement policy making, which in turn has delayed weapon acquisition process. This paper closely examines Taiwan?s policy process in relation to the purchase of Kidd-class destroyers from the US Navy, which provoked unprecedented and heated domestic debates and disputes between the US and Taiwanese governments. Drawing on the notions of science and technology studies, this article analyzes the evolution and nature of the technology controversy in the case of the acquisition of the Kidd destroyers and in the context of Taiwan?s democratizing policy process. It argues that the technological rhetoric taken up by policy actors for policy advocacy is often not as rational and accurate as it appears. In fact, military professional judgments and technological rhetoric in the policy process tend to be manipulated and fluid. It is therefore found that Taiwan?s current arms procurement decision, which is almost initiated and dominated by the military services and their own assessments, has failed to gain appropriate legitimacy. In the initial stage of the acquisition of Kidd destroyers, the military proposal approved by the US left no alternative for domestic policy deliberation. The pressure of the acquisition schedule and legislative scrutiny easily drove the military to set the accomplishment of arms deal as a goal without carefully contemplating the accountability of internal assessments and policy alternatives. The present paper suggests that legislative deliberation should be applied to the early phrase of Taiwan?s procurement policy-making, so that alternative solutions and measures can be discussed and analyzed. The research also points to the need for the US, as a major supplier of arms to Taiwan, to pay more attention to and have more patience with Taiwan?s domestic response to weapons offers so as to maintain American long-term interests in the region. Given the growing number of civilian policy actors in the area of Taiwan?s defence policy, an acquisition process cannot be streamlined unless its policy legitimacy is secured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constantly changing landscape of American society and polity from World War II to the present time has presented significant challenges for all branches of social inquiry. Critical theory, in its attempt to provide description, analysis, and critique of contemporary circumstances, has been particularly affected by this thrust of alteration in the social environment. Critical theory has continually been forced to examine and re-examine its reliance on various strains of thought, especially its (however) latent reliance on Marxist thought. The decline and fall of the Soviet bloc – indubitably the key historical event of the late 20th century confronting the possibility of a critical theory based on Marxism – as well as the stunning increase in technological advances leading to the development of the globalistic, “new” economy has created a world environment in which post-industrial, service-oriented capitalism, and a society characterized by hyper-consumerism and hyper-pluralism, are the order of the day. The currently largely uncontroverted predominance of democratic capitalism in developed societies presents critical theory with perhaps its greatest challenge to date: That is, how to (re-)construct a critical theory that will be able to provide analysis and criticism of the current age despite democratic capitalism’s world hegemony. To that end, this paper will formulate a renewed conception of critical theory that will be equipped to deal appropriately with the contemporary global socio-political situation. My conception will make use of certain post-modernist authors in order to theorize particular novel aspects of the contemporary age, as well as utilizing various neo-Marxist theorists to underscore the continued influence of capitalism on global society and culture, and the importance of maintaining a critique of the capitalist system as an essential facet of a critical theory. In so doing, I will interrogate the work of certain post-modernist thinkers in order to note how their conceptions of the contemporary era can support the type of critical theory I am espousing. Specifically, I will analyze certain of the works of Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Laclau & Mouffe to determine what sorts of political action could be effective in the contemporary social/political constellation as a part of such a critical social theory. In its totality, the paper will put forth an outline for a critical theory, which can provide a nuanced analysis/critique of the ever-changing, (potentially) post-modern landscape, and which critically evaluates the possibilities for meaningful political change in that landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from exit polls conducted by the Voter News Service (VNS) and survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) to show that gay voters are very strong Democratic voters, and that identification with the Democratic Party is becoming an increasingly important factor in how voters feel about gay issues. The paper shows that the impact of sexual orientation on individual vote choice has become as important as the effect of race?and that it dwarfs other commonly cited factors in its impact on the vote. In addition, an examination of the opinion of the general public on gay issues over time finds that party identification has played an ever-larger role in the past two decades in determining how individuals feel about gay people and gay rights. As political elites?demonstrated by roll-call votes in Congress?show an increasing partisan divide over gay issues, so does the general public. More than ever, gay voters identify with the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is identified with gay rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States citizens often evaluate elected officials on the basis of information received from news coverage. But, the origins of this news coverage are not clear. Journalists follow a variety of routines when deciding which officials to cover and how to present their statements and actions. We know less about politicians’ own independent role in the construction of news. This paper investigates the effectiveness of U.S. Congress members’ efforts to win favorable news coverage. The first part of the paper discusses how congressional party leaders and followers may interact in public relations efforts. I explain how this interaction can lead to news coverage, as well as be influenced by that coverage. In the paper’s second section, I discuss the congressional and newspaper data for testing my arguments, as well as the appropriate methodology for assessing how politicians’ statements and journalists’ stories may influence each other. The third part of the paper documents this interaction on three prominent issues in 1997: health care, national defense, and a supplemental appropriations bill that became law in June of that year. The data and methodology for the paper are extensive and complex. To investigate these questions, my paper focuses on a three-month period in 1997 when I worked as an APSA Congressional Fellow in the office of then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). During these three months, I collected copies of all the press releases submitted to the congressional press galleries, as well as records of all the televised press events on Capitol Hill. I have supplemented these records with transcripts of congressional press conferences available through Lexis-Nexis. Finally, for the same three-month period, I have downloaded electronic versions of all news articles appearing in the New York Times and the 42 local newspapers. A computerized content analysis program allows me to analyze these stories for mentions of congressional politicians and their messages. Each model in the paper involves four basic variables: measures of the Democrats’ and Republicans’ promotional efforts on a particular issue, and measures of each party’s news coverage on the issue. Given the potential causal relationships among these variables, I use vector autoregression (VAR) to estimate each model. I estimate a number of VARs, varying the basic variables across several dimensions: coverage in the NYT versus local newspapers, the promotional efforts and coverage of House versus Senate members, the promotional strategies employed by these legislators, and the particular issue. The resulting VARs (which number more than 30) allow me to compare the effectiveness of legislators’ promotional efforts across the dimensions just listed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I extend a model of deliberation developed in earlier studies (Carroll 2003, 2001) to examine the quality of deliberation on environmental issues in the House of Representatives. The quality of deliberation in legislative debate can be measured as a function of three components: First, the inclusiveness of discussion. (How many viewpoints are incorporated into the argument?). Second, the public or private nature of policy discussion. (Do members appeal to generally shared values and interests or to narrow partisan and district concerns?). Third, the rhetorical strategy used by members. (Do members adequately represent the arguments of political opponents? Do policy statements include polarized rhetoric or personal attacks on political opponents?). Using content analysis, I examine member statements on major environmental legislation in the period under consideration and assign scores for each component. These scores are then summed to create a composite measure of the quality of deliberation for each statement. Because deliberation is time and resource intensive, it should be used only when other strategies for winning support are unavailable or expensive. The quality of deliberation is therefore expected to vary with the relative cost of alternatives such as bargaining, side-payments, and leadership pressure. To use a simple example, one might expect the quality of deliberation to increase when an issue divides party members and prevents the leadership from enforcing party unity. Other factors that may increase the quality of deliberation include when the policy is discussed (debates early in the term allow more time for the working out of a deliberative strategy), access to leadership powers (formal prerogatives decrease the need to use deliberation), point in the electoral cycle (election year debates will forego inclusiveness for appeals directed toward specific constituencies), and publicity (media presence turns attention away from persuading other members to posturing for the public). I will test this argument using OLS regression on a sample of environmental bills selected from the House Resources Committee during the 104th-108th Congresses. The dependent variable will be the composite measure of deliberation. The key explanatory variables are scheduling (a scaled variable gauging where the bill falls during the session), media attention (mentions of the bill in Congressional Weekly and major national newspapers), power within committee (a scale variable that scores members according to party membership and position within the committee structure) and electoral pressure (measured by a dummy variable where 1= election year, 0 = off year). Significant relationships among the variables will suggest how and when legislators incorporate deliberation into larger rhetorical and political strategies to win votes. By rigorously examining legislative deliberation as it occurs on a daily basis in the House of Representatives, this paper goes beyond previous research and sets a foundation for future study. Isolating the environmental conditions under which representatives use deliberation enables us to move beyond theoretical debates and toward an understanding of deliberation as a pragmatic approach for building legislative coalitions. References: 2003. Deliberation in the House of Representatives: Evidence from Trade and Environmental Policy Debates. Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association. April 15-18, San Antonio, TX 2001. The Role of Ideology in Legislative Deliberation: Congressional Member Organizations and Environmental Policy. Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, November 8-11, Atlanta, GA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to systematically explore the religious rhetoric of recent U.S. President’s (Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush). Considerable effort has been spent reporting the religious rhetoric of Ronald Regan and George W. Bush. In response to this it has been noted that practically all U.S. Presidents have used religious rhetoric at various occasions (Dionne 2003). While the topic of the religious rhetoric of presidents has sparked this debate, to date no one has performed a systematic evaluation of the religious rhetoric of presidents. This paper will provide a more complete evaluation of the phenomenon of presidential use of religious rhetoric. It examines how presidents differ in this realm. It also will display the palpable difference in the use of religious rhetoric among the presidents. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have used more religious language, as a total of all their spoken words, compared to other recent presidents. That fact is interesting, but what is more interesting is how the content of their religious rhetoric has differed from other presidents. A second goal of this paper was to see if the rhetoric differed between presidents of different parties. Questions answered by this paper are: Do Republicans use more religious language, as a percent of total language, than Democrats? And, is there an ideological/theological difference between the parties in the use of religious rhetoric? A primary accomplishment of the paper was the creation of a coding mechanism to help try to categorize religious language on a liberal/conservative spectrum. To do this, three dichotomies and were created. These dichotomies separate theological emphases into categories that could be considered liberal or conservative. The dichotomies are: (1) specific theological constructions / universal principles; (2) other-worldly focus / this-worldly focus; (3) good v. evil & universal sin / sin as the absence of good. The former sections of the dichotomies are considered conservative and the latter are considered liberal. The presidential speeches coded for this paper will be: the party nominee’s acceptance speech at the party’s nominating convention, the new president’s inauguration speech, and all of his State of the Union addresses. One advantage of using these speeches is that they are uniform. Another advantage is that if significant differences in the religious rhetoric used by presidents exist, those differences are more likely to be observed by examining speeches given on standard occasions of public ritual. By exposing the differences among the presidents and between the presidents of different parties, this paper will help scholars investigate such things as: differences in the worldviews of political elites, partisan ideology and its manifestation in political communication, and religious belief structures and the effect of such structures on political communication. My hope for this paper is that it will help lead towards an investigation into the reciprocal relationship between presidential rhetoric and American political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes people care about issues? Why do some issues act as agents of change in the electorate while many others are swallowed up by existing cleavages or just fade away altogether? Is there any way to predict which issues will stick, which will die, and which might instigate gradual, mass partisan transformation? In their model of partisan change, Carmines and Stimson (1989) note that elites establish and shape the reputation of political parties on issues. But what mechanisms do elites use to do that? A great deal of work has established the media’s role as an agenda setter (Iyengar and Kinder 1987), but less is known about the impact of second level agenda-setting, or framing (Nelson and Kinder 1996, McCombs, Weaver, and Shaw 1997). I demonstrate that the framing of issues impacts the public’s belief that an issue is important. Additionally, partisan framing appears to impact opinion formation and change on political issues. After analyzing coverage of President Bush’s tax cut, the California energy crisis, and coverage preceding the latest war in Iraq, this paper demonstrates that one answer to the question of what mechanisms do elites use to shape the reputation of political parties on issues lies in the way that political issues are framed in mass media coverage. This paper uses content analysis of four major newspapers to show that at times of low mass salience, issues receive coverage that include several, often disparate frames. As the number of frames for issues are winnowed down in mass media coverage, the salience of the issue increases. Further, opinion change appears to be linked to the winnowing down of frames into two dominant, partisan ways of characterizing a particular issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did aggressive issue advocacy tactics become prevalent in the mid-1990s? One hypothesis is that political actors took time to ``learn’’ about the dimensions of election law. Election law is dynamic, however, sensitive to how statutes and regulations are interpreted, changed, or modified; thus political learning takes place in a evolving regulatory context. This paper is about the relationship between that context and the political actors charged with conforming to it, with a specific emphasis on interest groups. I examine all advisory opinion requests to the FEC between 1977 and 2003 (these are specific requests to the FEC about the permissibility of proposed campaign activity), and I make two key conclusions. First, political actors are dynamic participants that understand and respond quickly to changes in the regulatory environment. Second, approval or disapproval of these requests varies across time and type of petitioner. From this, I assert that one explanation for tactical emergence and diffusion lies in how regulatory watchdogs interpret (and change their interpretation of) election law. This paper makes a contribution to the literature by arguing that rules matter in understanding how groups and political actors choose their electoral tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper Abstract: The paper explores the effect of illicit interest groups (IIGs) on the decision making process that surrounds counter-narcotics negotiations between Colombia and the United States. Legal interest groups and movements have been found to influence domestic and international politics because they generally operate within legal state structures, however, illicit interest groups such as drug traffickers have been rarely accounted for in the literature on interest groups, but also play a role in affecting domestic politics and international negotiations. The purpose of this study is two-fold: The first is to study under what conditions illicit interest groups become political entities that can produce an impact on domestic and international politics. This task will be achieved by exploring the influence of the Medellin Cartel on negotiations between the United States and Colombia. The second purpose is to examine how asymmetric power structures influence the outcomes of international agreements. Since the United States is considered a hegemon in the Western hemisphere, it has significant power capabilities compared to those of Colombia. Therefore, an investigation of asymmetric negotiations between Colombian and US officials on counter narcotics efforts will allow for the production of more research on this type of negotiation. In sum, this study is significant because it will focus on three research areas that have not received much attention in international relations literature, such as: the impact of illicit interest groups on international negotiations, the nature of asymmetric negotiations, and the interaction between domestic and international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2002 redistricting cycle renewed questions of how districting affects the nature of legislative elections and Congress generally. In this paper, we address several questions. How have congressional districts’ partisan composition changed overtime and why? What are the electoral consequences of these changes overtime and in the foreseeable future? Finally, what can be done to make congressional districts more competitive? This paper is an assessment of partisan stratification. A confluence of social forces has generally contributed to partisan stratification in legislative districting over the last four redistricting cycles. Urban economics and migration studies conclude that ethnic and racial segregation have not only been very slow to break down, but have also been reinforced by white mobility to suburbs (Cutler, et. al. 1999; Massey and Denton 1993). Additionally, the suburbs that blacks and nonwhite Hispanics move to are only slightly less segregated than the urban neighborhoods left behind (Gimpel 2000). Other studies demonstrate growing economic stratification particularly within the largest metropolitan areas (Epples and Platt 1998). Political trends have not slowed this social and economic stratification. The increase in majority minority districts during the 1990 redistricting cycle strengthened the electoral and institutional effect of partisan stratification. Technology has also enabled political cartographers to draw finer district boundaries. Geographic information systems (GIS) programs allow mapmakers to anticipate political implications of smaller unit changes in district boundaries (Monmonier 2001). We show that there has been a clear decline in the proportion of districts that conform with county or other political boundaries over the two several districting cyles particularly as a compactness criteria has given way to demographic and computer-driven districting. The paper is organized as follows. We discuss the concept and evidence of partisan and social stratification in congressional districts overtime. Next, we report a clear decline in the proportion of electorally competitive congressional districts over the preceding 40 years coinciding with stratification, particularly those electorally competitive districts held by congressional moderates. We measure the electoral effect of stratification separate from incumbency, campaign finance and other effects. We then measure the electoral effect of stratification in the 2002 redistricting showing a 20 percent decline in the proportion of electorally competitive congressional districts in the recent cycle alone. Finally, we model where and why these lost competitive districts occurred demonstrating relationships between electoral competitiveness and state districting rules. This study contributes to literatures on districting and political demography generally by measuring the electoral consequences of partisan stratification. It also contributes to existing work by assessing the impact of state districting rules on electoral outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that the United States is going through a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has risen from a marginal place in the realm of U.S. military thinking to a central role in studies of the future of warfare. However, writing in academic political science has trailed in its recognition of the importance of RMAs for international security. RMAs can generally be defined as the synergistic combination of innovations in military technology and changes in thinking about how to organizationally use military force. RMAs give nations qualitative increases in military capabilities that change the nature and structure of international conflict, allowing them to conduct military operations faster, in a broader geographic area, and with greater intensity. This paper focuses specifically on the nuclear revolution, testing the empirical importance of nuclear weapons for the initiation and escalation of international conflict. Three advances in the literature are developed. First, the data setup allows for comparative hypothesis testing to begin empirically evaluating the Waltz/Sagan debate. Second, the paper uses newly collected data on chemical and biological weapons to conduct empirical tests of their relative importance for international conflict. Third, the paper incorporates measures of uncertainty regarding WMD possession to determine the way varying levels of certainty influence the escalation of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and pundits alike believe that presidential campaigning in midterm elections can and does make a meaningful difference in electoral outcomes. Moreover, since presidential resources are finite, scholars contend that presidents are strategic in their choices of where and for whom to campaign. Further, the overarching goal of improving future chances of the successful passage of the president?s agenda through Congress is assumed to be the key factor in the crafting of a president?s midterm strategy. Despite the overwhelming acceptance of this logic, little empirical evidence has been accumulated to determine if the president does indeed allocate his resources in such a way that would accomplish his goals, or whether such efforts pay dividends in subsequent sessions of Congress. In this paper, I test the contending explanations for presidential campaigning in midterm elections. I show that conventional scholarly explanations for presidential midterm behavior may be unwarranted, and suggest that we readdress our theoretical expectations for why presidents campaign in midterm elections. I also examine, albeit more casually, the relationship between midterm campaigning and subsequent support in Congress. The results of this analysis suggest that presidential midterm campaigning does not pay very great dividends in terms of subsequent support for the president?s agenda. Overall, the general implication of this paper is that, if presidents are attempting to approach midterm campaigning in a strategic fashion geared toward optimal allocation of their midterm resources and increased future support in Congress, they are not very successful at it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, religious conflict has occurred when two distinct religions meet at a specific geographic frontier or border (i.e. Ireland/England, Pakistan/India, Yugoslavia, etc.). In each of these cases, religion was not necessarily the exclusive source of conflict, but quickly established itself as the focal point around which individuals defined their identity. Although the differences between the two groups may have been numerous (political, economic, cultural, etc.), religion provided the easiest and most prominently accessible tool for mass mobilization and identity differentiation. Once this shift occurs, the religious identities become so salient that all future interactions tend to be defined along religious lines, which in turn lends itself to intractability. This paper argues that globalization has fundamentally changed the nature of international interactions and has eliminated geographic proximity as a necessary condition for the development of religious conflict. Groups previously isolated from one another now find themselves interacting to a degree never before seen in history. While much of the world has accepted globalization, certain groups (i.e. Al-Queda) have viewed it as a threat to their lifestyle and have reacted with force and religious rhetoric. U.S. response to these actions (i.e. Afghanistan, Iraq, support for Israel, etc.) has been perceived as overzealous by many in the Middle East and has sparked a growing frustration with U.S. foreign policy. Although many within the region may not have initially seen this conflict along religious lines, Islam provides the most prominent and convenient forum for articulating their frustrations. The similarities between the current U.S./Islamic tensions and the early stages of other historic religious conflicts are striking. In this paper, parallels are drawn between previous intractable religious conflicts (Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia) and the current developing conflict between the United States and the Islamic world. Although the United States has made a concerted effort to declare a war on “terror” and not Islam, the perceived threat associated with current U.S. foreign policy behavior is encouraging the redefinition of Middle Eastern identity in Islamic terms and creating the possibility of intractable religious conflict on a global scale. Ironically, it appears that the use of conventional military and political approaches to the war on terror will likely exacerbate and strengthen the Islamic identity of individuals in the Middle East contrary to the desires of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of how national party leaders set their party’s policy positions. Currently, the literature on this question exhibits a gap between theory and reality; spatial models predict convergence of party policy positions in a two-party setting, while empirical scholars found divergence in real world situations. Our paper is an attempt to fill in this gap. We do so by introducing two additional issues that have been relatively neglected in the existing literature. First, we stress the importance of establishing a party label for national party leaders as part of a strategy for the goal of seat-maximization in addition to the Downsian convergence strategy. Second, we address the issue that national party leaders are likely to adjust their party policy positions in response to heterogeneous preference distributions of voters across districts, in which the party has varying degrees of success. Incorporating these two issues, we show in a simple spatial model that in a two-party, single-member plurality system, two parties’ positions on a given policy issue are likely to converge if the given policy issue is at stake in closely competed districts, while two parties’ positions on a given policy issue are likely to diverge if the given issue is at stake in districts where one of the parties already has a secure majority. We use the case of the US party system (1945-2000) as the empirical test and find that the regression results are consistent with this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the evolution of civil-military relations theory in the United States. Its central claims are that there are two traditions in American civil-military relations: the republican theory of the citizen soldier and the liberal theory of the neutral professional. These two traditions have their roots in two distinct periods of American history. The citizen soldier is a product of the anti-rationalism prevalent in founding political thought, while the liberal tradition was born of a new rationalism that characterized Progressive Era thinking. The following pages detail the birth and evolution of these two theories and conclude that this history reveals important conceptual difficulties in the now orthodox liberal view. First, contemporary calls to abandon the ideal of the citizen-soldier as an outdated concept ignore the important role first principles play in democratic legitimacy claims. Such an abrupt break with the founding beliefs threatens military democratic legitimacy in a country that embraces first principles as a kind of secular religion. This legitimacy problem is particularly troublesome in Samuel Huntington?s outright rejection of the Constitution as having failed to establish an appropriate civil-military relationship. The second problem with wholesale dismissal of the citizen-soldier tradition is the discredited assumption upon which liberal views like ?objective civilian control? rest. Observers of Public Administration have long demonstrated the neutral professional of Progressive Era lore to be fallacious. The actions of elected officials and their administrative executers are each fundamentally political. This has been particularly evident in recent U.S. military missions in which the army has increasingly assumed constabulary and state-building functions. Nevertheless, as many public administration theorists argue for a refounding of administrative legitimacy on the concept of representative bureaucracy, civil-military relations literature calls for an abandonment of its own longstanding version of representative bureaucracy: the citizen-soldier. In sum, the liberal vision of the military as a tool of society rather than a part of society is theoretically and practically flawed, as well as dangerously dismissive of legitimating founding principles and beliefs. This paper argues for the need to reengage the citizen-soldier tradition as a central concept in constructing a military that better reflects American society. The issue is determinative of the kind of army the nation will have and, indeed, the kind of democracy the nation will become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of stare decisis, or the principle that judicial decisions should conform to previous case law, is central to the functioning of the U.S. legal system. Yet, despite its importance, modern scholars of judicial decision-making often question the frequency with which Supreme Court justices abide by the dictates of stare decisis. Attitudinal scholarship argues that Supreme Court justices have the ability to pursue ideologically motivated decisions, as they are largely unconstrained with regard to both case selection and final decisions on the merits. In their article on the influence of stare decisis, Professors Segal and Spaeth test adherence to precedent through an examination of a random sample of 54 landmark cases and their progeny. According to the definition given by Segal and Spaeth, a Supreme Court justice who dissents in a landmark case and then reverses his position and votes with the original landmark majority in a progeny case has conformed to stare decisis. The authors find that the justices in the sample voted in accordance with their preferences, rather than precedent, 90.8 percent of the time. The Segal and Spaeth research has motivated vigorous debate within the literature of Supreme Court decision-making. Several authors have attempted to dispute the Segal and Spaeth findings, either through suggestions for methodological improvements or by recoding portions of the original case set. Such attempts have yielded highly disparate conclusions with respect to the influence of stare decisis. This paper seeks to reevaluate these findings by employing an improved definition of stare decisis. Preliminary research indicates that United States Supreme Court justices act in accordance with precedent more frequently than earlier studies suggest, about 58.9 percent of the time. More importantly, this paper expands previous research through the use of logistic regression analysis to account for variations in the decision to vote in accordance with precedent or preference. Preliminary logistic regression suggests that increased length of tenure on the Supreme Court renders a justice more likely to conform to the dictates of stare decisis. The initial regression also supports the assertion that a larger voting block in the landmark majority corresponds with an increased probability of adherence to the landmark decision. Similarly, initial results suggest that as the landmark precedent ages, justices become less likely to vote in accordance with its dictates. Finally, the preliminary logistic regression analysis indicates that the model is effective in explaining variations in the voting decisions of U.S. Supreme Court justices (α = .01), predicting 78.1 percent of the votes correctly (reduction of error = 46.7 percent ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how presidents balance the competing desires for both loyalty and competence in agencies in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) like the Office of Management and Budget, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the National Security Council. Presidency scholars historically have expressed concerns about presidents focusing too much on securing loyalty in EOP agencies to the detriment of bureaucratic capacity. In this paper I explain when presidents have incentives to place loyal political appointees into important bureaucratic posts formerly held by career professionals or in new positions over career employees as a means of gaining more control over administrative decision making. I summarize my claims into a series of general propositions and test them with data on EOP agencies from 1939-2002. I find that agencies in the EOP are becoming more politicized over time and that electoral turnover in the White House is a primary cause of politicization. I also find that presidents try to balance needs for both responsiveness and competence in their relationship with agencies in the EOP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of implementation have sometimes used principal-agent models to explain policy dynamics in the American federal system. Applications include studies of clean air enforcements (Wood, 1988, 1991, and 1992), education funding (Chubb, 1985), radioactive waste disposal (Hill and Weissert, 1995), and surface mining (Hedge, et al, 1991; Hedge and Scicchitano, 1994). In this paper I argue that principal-agent models offer a reasonable start for understanding certain aspects of policymaking and federalism, but they are necessarily limited for two general reasons. First, the measurement demands of these models tend to move scholars using principal-agent approaches to focus on policy outputs (the actions policymakers take) as opposed to policy outcomes (the substantive results of policy). All of the studies cited above specify dependent variables that are outputs, such as the size of government expenditures, the number of inspections, and counts of citations issued. Whether those activities resulted in cleaner air or more educated students, for example, is impossible to determine from the research. While that lack of information on outcomes is understandable given the studies’ designs, it is an important substantive gap, nevertheless, given that policymakers and citizens alike have become increasingly interested in measuring policy success based on outcomes. Scholars of public management have noted this trend as well (i.e., Kettl, 1997). Thus, it is important to develop more general ways of studying policy implementation and federalism that bring outcomes to the forefront. A second limitation is that the theoretical demands of principal-agent models (i.e., actors are well-defined, lines of authority are clear, and behaviors are clearly specified) can be difficult to meet in the American intergovernmental system where policymaking environments are quite complicated. This limitation is important given the increasing number of areas containing multiple principles and agents working to influence policy; the existence of networked, rather than purely hierarchical linkages between actors; and environments where actors can operate simultaneously as principals and agents. To overcome these two general limits, I integrate scholarship on federalism, public management, and organizations, in particular Wilson (1989), to develop a management-oriented approach to the study of intergovernmental policy implementation. I apply my approach to the early implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the main U.S. federal law addressing K-12 education, and contrast my approach with the principal-agent view. Key quantitative data come from the National Center for Education Statistics, and content coding of states’ progress in developing their educational accountability systems, which the states most recently reported to the U.S. Department of Education in June 2003. Qualitative evidence comes from several elite interviews conducted during 2001-02 with members of the education policy community in Washington, DC, and documentary sources reporting on federal, state, and local efforts to implement the No Child Left Behind Act. Overall, the paper is part of an ongoing research program that investigates the relationship between federalism, policy agenda setting and implementation, and K-12 education in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]