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A conference paper about the Government Responsiveness prepared for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Orlando, Florida in 2013 is presented. Topics discussed include empirical studies of the variation in government responsiveness, supremacy of domestic over foreign policy, and response of the government when public spending increases. Also discusses the contribution of the International Social Survey Programme on the issue.

Our paper will compare the emerging powers of China and India. It will be divided into five principal sections. Section I will present a comparative history of China and India, focusing on China's emergence as a post-communist world power versus India's development into a post-colonial world power. Section II will rigorously compare and contrast broader aspects of the political, economic, and sociocultural climates within the two countries, but will also analyze the intricacies of the two political systems. Regarding economics, our paper will explore the significant modernization that has taken place in the two countries, as well as the impact these changes have had on China's and India's respective positions in the larger global economy. In the sociocultural realm, our paper will discuss the political culture in terms of liberty, equality, education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and entertainment. Our assessment will include comparative studies of Confucian culture's impact on China versus the caste system's impact on India, as well as investigations of gender, race, religion, and the manner in which each country acknowledges and adjudicates such issues. In Section III, we will highlight the current domestic and foreign policies of China and India. Section IV will synthesize the central themes discussed in the narrative part of our paper into an original table, allowing the reader to compare China and India at a glance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A heated debate rages in American academia and policy-making circles about what drives US policy towards Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Scholars are split over whether it's the "Israel Lobby" or strategic considerations that drive US policy in this regard. A common error in scholarly inquiries into this issue is the treating of US policy towards Israel on the one hand, and US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the other, as the same thing. This paper emphasizes that there is a distinction there. Since it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that makes US Israel-policy controversial, this paper will start with a brief historical account of the conflict to identify the remaining core contentions, before engaging the policy debate. The paper argues that while Israel is of strategic utility to the US, current US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict contradicts US interests. Thus, the general close US-Israel alliance may be attributed to strategic US interests in the region, while US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular may be attributed to the powerful domestic Israel Lobby in the US. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the distribution of power and conict initiation is one of the most studied topics in international relations. In studies of power parity and conict, there is an implicit assumption that all balanced dyads are created equal. However, there is variation in the aggregate capabilities in these particular dyads. This study addresses the question of what affects the likelihood of conict initiation within relatively balanced dyads. I argue that uncertainty - in particular the uncertainty of the expected costs of conflict - determines the likelihood of conflict among these dyads. More uncertainty means a greater likelihood of miscalculation that can lead to a bargaining failure. Hence, as an opponent's capabil- ities increase, uncertainty increases and the likelihood of conict increases. But, military action serves a purpose in bargaining and can help reduce uncertainty by signaling a state's willingness to inflict and endure costs in order to gain a better settlement. However, this information transmission is likely to be effective only when states have the capability to inflict significant costs. As such, while greater capabilities will lead to a high likelihood of initiation, they also lead to a reduced likelihood of reciprocation. The testing of contiguous directed dyads from 1885 to 2000 support the implications from this theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the presidential system, the probability that a president will draw legislators' support for his positions is said to be greater in foreign and defense policy than in domestic policy such that one may consider that there are two presidents, one acting in each of the two policy areas. This idea is based primarily on the assumption that legislators are deferential to the president in foreign and defense policy. Analyzing individual-level data related to legislators' voting behaviors in the 95th to 108th House of Representatives of the United States, this article shows that this is not the case. Foreign policy as well as domestic policy is the product of political and ideological conflicts within the legislature and between the executive and legislative branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to better understand the conditions associated with a productive Congress a new measure of "significant" legislation is developed. The measure taps topical legislative output by tracking action on issues brought to the attention of Congressional Digest readers; a journal that has focused on approximately ten salient issues facing the nation each year since the 1920s. A law passed after the Digest raises awareness on the issue, and before the Congress in question adjourns sine die, is the primary measure of productivity used. Furthermore, the Digest topics are disaggregated into foreign, domestic and intermestic policy types to test whether Congress is more proficient in one policy arena than another, but also to test whether there are different predictors of productivity in domestic versus foreign policy. The research uncovers that Congress is not more efficient in passing either domestic or foreign policy, but is decidedly more productive when faced with intermestic policy initiatives. In the secondary analysis it is determined that traditional predictors of legislative productivity perform well when trying to model domestic legislative productivity, but not well at all when foreign policy productivity is the dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people trust the government, they are more likely to support its policies, especially those that require sacrifice (Hetherington 2005). However, "the government" is a complex and amorphous set of institutions. Depending upon what parts of the government become salient, the public's understanding of the nature and functions of it changes. Following the New Deal and the Great Society, people most often thought of government in terms of its ability to deal with race and welfare policy policies. We find, however, that the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Bush administration's response ushered in a new era in which people began to think about the government in terms of defense and foreign policy. As a consequence, we witness a change in how trust matters. Political trust ceased to affect attitudes about redistribution and race-targeted programs and started to affect foreign policy preferences. Our analysis of the 2000-2004 ANES Panel Study and the 2004 ANES Time Series Study shows this change transformed political trust from a reservoir of support for programs that serves the least well off to a factor leading people to favor interventionist and hawkish foreign policy. These results contribute to a somewhat new understanding of political trust. Specifically, the policy domains that become salient determine which policy preferences political trust affects. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bibliography on "uploading" European integration posits the bottom-up creation of a supranational body of institutions, rules and procedures by the members of the European Union (EU). In integration, the independent actors are the States and the EU is the dependant one. Recently, this path has been refined with an emerging attention on "downloading" Europeanization, the top-down domestic adaptation to the pressures emanating from EU membership. In Europeanization, the EU is assumed to be an autonomous actor, able to shape policies, polities and politics of its members.However, many studies suggest a spurious refraction between European integration and Europeanization. To this regard, my hypothesis is that when States fail to Europeanize in a particular area, they are providing a true input toward a new way to integrate that I call "un-adaptive integration". This failure happens because some non-negotiable domestic power, interests, norms and beliefs prevail.To validate my hypothesis I analyze two examples where non-negotiable domestic predominance causes failures in Europeanization and finally canalizes in un-adaptive integration. The first example is the German management of the Balkan crisis, where the pursuit of a non-negotiable "great power" foreign policy by its government nullified the task of any EU common foreign policy, not pursuing the goal to be a pacifier and democratic promoter. The second case is the French refusal to ratify the European constitution via popular referendum, demonstrating how non-negotiable societal vetoes can reverse the direction of the relationship in Europeanization, being the State the independent actor, not the EU. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship makes the case that local governments, specifically their policy performance, have a significant impact on democratic regime support (Hiskey and Seligson 2003; Smith 2005). However, this research has been limited to single country analysis. To gain a broader picture of this relationship between local government performance and regime support, I analyze this puzzle within 7 Latin American countries using public opinion data, controlling for political, social, and economic factors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does public opinion influence presidential decisions to use force abroad? Taken together, studies in international relations suggest an entangled description of this relationship. I assess four disparate accounts extracted from the literature: "neglect," "responsiveness," "manipulation," and "anticipation." "Neglect" asserts that the president ignores public opinion in decisions to use force, resulting in a null relationship between opinion and military action. "Responsiveness" contends that the president follows public opinion in decisions to use force, pointing to congruence between opinion and policy. "Manipulation" argues that opinion and policy are congruent, but only because the president and other policy makers manipulate the public through the media and repeated speeches. Finally, "anticipation" posits that the president chooses whether to become involved in an international crisis on the basis of expected public opinion. To evaluate these perspectives, I compiled survey data on U.S. public attitudes toward the use of military force from 1949 to 2001 and carried out three sets of empirical analyses. To assess the "neglect" and "responsiveness" accounts, I evaluate the impact of public opinion on presidential decisions to use force. To assess the "manipulation" perspective, I estimate the influence of presidential crisis statements and media coverage on public attitudes toward the use of force. To test the "anticipation" argument, I evaluate the effect of public opinion on U.S. crisis involvement. Using a variety of units of analysis, dependent variables, and configuration of public opinion data, I find that the bulk of the evidence indicates that the interrelationships between the president and the public in decisions to use force are characterized by "anticipation." Although the results fail to support the normative ideal of democratic control of the sword (i.e., "responsiveness"), the findings suggest that the public figures prominently in presidential decisions to use force abroad. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]