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This paper focuses on the question of whether the process of constitution-making merits consideration as an independent explanatory variable and proposes a framework for analyzing it. It understands constitution-making as consisting of three separate and recognizable phases: 1) Pre-constituent (or preparatory) phase; 2) the constituent (or decision-making) phase; and the 3) post-constituent (or implementation) phase. It conceives constitution-making as a series of interlocking processes which are sequentially connected via a series of mechanisms with each partial process having an impact on the subsequent phase, and examines the key issues in each stage. The argument places particular emphasis on coalitional politics, and claims that constitutions should be understood as the complex and often unexpected outcome of bargaining among political coalitions, the product of multiple designers with diverse values, beliefs and interests, cross cutting each other in multiple attempts at partial design. The paper uses the Andean cases as empirical bases for its conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watershed management associations have sprung up around the country to deal with local environmental issues. This paper examines these organizations in New Jersey with several questions in mind. To what extent are watershed management associations in New Jersey public-private partnerships in which all interested parties may make decisions regarding relevant policies? To the extent that this occurs, how are these organizations held accountable? Looking at these organizations from a different perspective, the analysis addresses the question of whether watershed management associations in New Jersey contribute to the development of civil society. The analysis connects these two broad concerns by assessing the organizational characteristics and activities of watershed management associations in New Jersey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bush Administration?s post-September 11 War on Terror has provoked a frenzy of criticism and counter-accusations, involving civil liberties, appeasement, preemption, and intelligence. Often lost in this cacophony is any systematic analysis of the underlying causes of these disagreements. At their core, these seemingly shrill, opportunistic, or partisan exchanges mask fundamentally opposing assumptions regarding the nature of world politics, the utility of force, the causes of terrorism, and the character of the adversary. The profound consequences of President Bush?s immediate interpretation of the September 11 attacks??we?re at war??indicate that one?s definition of the situation, or ?problem representation,? is of critical importance in shaping one?s policy responses. Research on problem representation indicates that one?s ontology, or worldview, shapes one?s definition of the problem, which in turn drives the generation and selection of policy options. This project employs these conceptual tools to systematically examine the contrasting causal and normative assumptions that animate competing viewpoints regarding the War on Terror and lead to differing policy preferences. The assumptions of key Bush Administration officials (including subsets such as the so-called ?neocons?) and their critics are uncovered with an eye toward mapping crucial areas of disagreement and agreement. Understanding the fundamental fault-lines that generate opposing camps in the War on Terror will shed light on the sources of American foreign policy, the underlying reasons for key policy disagreements, potential avenues for coalition-building, and the likely course of the War on Terror under the Bush Administration and under future administrations with alternative worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a mathematical model of small group decision making by foreign policy elites in which group member positions or opinions with respect to a given policy issue evolve in response to the influence of other group members, external events, and incoming information. The form of the model is guided by social psychology theories on attitude change and cognitively-based approaches to foreign policy decision making. The model represents decision maker policy positions as arrayed along a one-dimensional spectrum over which their positions are dynamically evolved via a set of coupled nonlinear differential equations. The nonlinearity arises from the form of the function that describes the influence of one group member on another. The fundamental question addressed by the model is whether or not a group will be able to forge a consensus around a given policy or rather will deadlock ensue. Sharp transitions between consensus and deadlock states are identified with bifurcations and accordingly the model can address the stability of a given decision in the face of new information. In addition, the model can address the ability to reach consensus and the consequent decision stability as a function of the network of influence relationships within the group such as whether two opposing factions talk directly or instead influence each other indirectly via a central broker. The results of the model suggest empirically testable propositions of a qualitative nature that do not require quantitative implementation of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policy is understood to be more than just health services and medical care today thanks to the new focus on population health and the social determinants of health. In this context inequality is a public health topic and a health policy priority. Inequality has been on the rise in the industrialized countries in the last 3 decades. We summarize what is known about the relationship between inequality and health. We conclude that the association between health and inequality is clear but that the causal linkages are complex. Causality may go in several directions that vary across time and geographical location. In short, the evidence from research does not now and may never yield clear directives for policy makers. In the absence of definitive evidence what are policy makers to do? We contend that they may well choose the wise course of implementing policies to halt the increasing inequality observed in industrialized countries. We argue that they are justified in taking such action because it does no harm. The criteria of ?do no harm? comes from the medical literature and is one that policy makers seldom consider though it has substantial advantages. Inattention to inequality by policy-makers has permitted incremental increases to accumulate over time. Inequality in the USA has risen from .349 in 1969 to .435 in 2001. This is testimony to the fact that the absence of policy is itself a policy. It illustrates Bachrach and Baratz? non-issue or non-decision in policy-making. In short, it is unacceptable to argue that the absence of a definitive, established causal link between inequality and health is justification for continued inattention to this public health problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the factors which allow advisors to influence decision-making during war and peace. Theoretical justification on the impact of advisors on crisis decision-making; Goals of advisors for decision-making; Use of rhetorical skills as the tool of influence of advisors.

The Treaty of Amsterdam formalized the idea of a ?European Employment Strategy? (EES), a supranational instrument to boost European employment rates and competitiveness. The European strategy is ruled by the ?Open Method of Coordination? (OMC), a new governance regulatory instrument for developing the ?social dimension? of the European Union that is not legally binding and is voluntary in nature. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand how non-binding measures, specifically the EES, influence policy-making processes and outcomes on member States. To sustain and illustrate my argument, I present data from interviews conducted in Sweden, Spain and Belgium, and from patterns of spending on active and passive labor market policy in fifteen member States. This paper seeks to expand the literature on ?Europeanization? of domestic configurations by providing a theoretical framework to analyze how non-binding measures affect policy-making processes in member States. In addition, it makes a contribution to the policy-making literature by trying to comprehend: a) the relationship between ?soft institutions and instruments? and the process of policy-making; b) policy settings that do not necessarily require the creation of legislation; and finally c) how exogenous, i.e., non-domestic, inputs affect policy-making processes on domestic settings. The analysis is grounded on the reasoning researchers should open the ?black box of policy-making? when understanding the effect of non-binding and non-domestic governance instruments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is a unique Federal agency because it is subject to the jurisdiction of different trial courts, the two most important of which are the United States Tax Court, a specialized court of limited jurisdiction, and the Federal District Court, a court of general jurisdiction. This manuscript compares the decision making process by the United States Tax Court and The United States District Courts in tax cases. Using data from 1996 and 1997, and incorporating the latest measures of ideology, I systematically examine the differences in decision making of these courts specifically focusing on expertise and ideology. I find that the United States Tax Court uses its expertise, and lack of realistic structural or hierarchical constraints, to decide the cases in a far more ideological manner than the United States District Court. I argue that this is consistent and proper decision making given the complexity and political nature of tax assessment and tax collection [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the European judicial integration in the context of the European Union's (EU) inter-institutional disputes. Cause of conflict between EU institutions; Overview of the decision-making process of the European Court of Justice; Static and dynamic models for judicial integration; Outcomes of inter-institutional disputes.

In a study of Supreme Court decision making in cases involving intercircuit conflicts, we test several different explanations for the Solicitor General’s success on the merits before the Supreme Court. Finding that ideology, deference to the other branches, and the SG’s case selection leave much unaccounted for, we conclude that jurisprudential influences are also at work in these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last legislatures, the Italian governments seem to have played a stronger role in the law making than in the past decades. This phenomenon does not seem to be connected with a change in the institutional means of the Executive agenda control; no new relevant rule has given directly more power to the Executive in the legislative bargaining. It is an (apparent?) increase of the Executive’s independence in determining the definitive content of the legislation. And the Parliament gives this independence by the delegations in the delegating laws, a kind of legislative instrument that has been included in the Italian Constitution for more than 50 years. In this paper I propose an explanation centered on the legislative game structure and the distance between the Executive and the Parliament in a multidimensional policy space: despite the appearances, the delegations in the delegating laws would be the counterintuitive outcomes of a wider distance between the two branches of the Italian Government. They are used for solving a problem of ‘credible commitment’ plaguing the Principal-Parliament in its relationship with the Agent-Executive. An important corollary can be inferred from the main argument: an increase of ‘delegations’ does not mean necessarily an increase of the delegation size in favor of the Italian Executive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are many studies that examine the impact of campaign contributions on the judiciary most of these focus on the impact on case outcomes. We posit a relationship between the campaign contribution to an individual justice and the vote of that individual justice. To determine the relationship between campaign contributions and the votes of state supreme court justices we employ the data from the National Institute for Money in Politics on the donations to Wisconsin Supreme Court justices and the cases they decided post-contribution. With one notable exception, we find no significant relationship between contributions and votes of the justices of Wisconsin Supreme Court. Our findings create a future research agenda to examine the impact of contributions on individual justices of other state supreme courts to determine if there are similar findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To add to our limited knowledge of courts of appeals’ dispositions, this paper provides examination of court of appeals publication practices through analysis of the court’s formal criteria and other inferred criteria or norms affecting publication. The former include publishing matters of first impression in the circuit or dispositions with dissenting or concurring opinions, and the latter, publishing rulings reversing a district court or administrative agency. We look at each guideline or norm in turn to evaluate their "match" with specific memorandum dispositions, and whether the court follows or departs from those criteria and norms. Examples are drawn primarily from the thirty years of use of unpublished dispositions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The examination allows us to say tentatively that many, perhaps most, unpublished dispositions fit the citeria or can be explained by inferred norms regularly used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widely accepted argument among students of presidential regimes is that inter-branch cooperation is impaired when the president’s party does not control a majority of seats in congress. This argument, however, fails to take into account three variables that should affect the performance of minority presidential governments: the location of the president’s party in the policy space, the strength of the executive veto and the formation of executive coalitions. Based on a new typology of presidential regimes, I propose the hypothesis that the most conflictive form of minority government is that in which the president’s party does not control the median legislator, the president lacks effective veto power, and no majority or median minority executive coalition is formed. This hypothesis is supported by data on executive-legislative conflicts and on interrupted presidencies in Latin America during the period 1979-2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much has been written about state making in Europe and in the developing world, there is no one widely-accepted theory of state making. After summarizing much of this inconclusive literature, I borrow from Morgan and Palmer?s foreign policy models to develop a general model of state making intended to subsume the disparate strands of the existing literature. The model focuses on leaders? efforts to find satisfactory trade offs between state making and efforts at self enrichment, while allowing for the possibility of a variety of policy tools that might enhance either goal, and also allowing for varying efficiencies with which those tools might address the goals. The paper closes with consideration of various empirical obstacles that must be overcome before the model can be tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, policies affecting the provision of women’s health care services were often at the forefront of legislative battles. It is therefore of considerable importance to investigate the process of how particular health care issues affecting women come to be seen as ‘hot button issues’ by legislators serving in state government. The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of state legislators serving in one Midwestern state to discover how they come to understand emerging health care issues affecting women. Findings indicate that the personal and professional life experiences that female state legislators bring to government have continued to broaden the public debate, particularly in the area of health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant portion of international relations scholarship over the last two decades has focused on the democratic peace hypothesis that democratic states do not go to war against each other. But one category of coercive policy that has been omitted from the debate and which poses certain caveats for democratic peace claims is that of covert action. Nixon’s policies toward Chile and Peru in 1969-1970 provide an interesting contrast that is difficult for democratic peace theorists to explain. Both states were implementing nationalization policies that threatened US economic interests, but Chile was an established democracy while Peru was under military rule. The democratic peace thesis would predict that Washington would try to negotiate and compromise with Chile and be more aggressive with Peru. Yet, the Nixon administration did the exact opposite, attempting to subvert Allende’s election in Chile, while negotiating with Peru. Using original documents and a process tracing approach, and evaluating factors at the systemic, domestic, and individual levels, this paper will illuminate the causal mechanism(s) behind the administration’s decisions in these two cases, shedding light on why it reacted so differently to substantially similar events in the two states and on whether their respective regime types played any role in the policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, judicial scholars have focused considerable efforts on examining both decision making and agenda setting on the Supreme Court. These studies have focused on such diverse topics as certiorari decision making, issue fluidity, voting fluidity, and opinion writing behavior. One aspect of the Court’s ability to control its agenda that has not been thoroughly studied, however, is the Court’s use of its power to ‘dismiss as improvidently granted’ (DIG) cases for which it has granted certiorari. Perry (1991) argues that the use of DIGs is rare and typically for ‘mundane, jurisprudential considerations.’ His conclusion that the utilization of DIGs is simply mundane, legal procedure, however, is based on interview evidence rather than large-N statistical analysis. In this paper, I utilize case specific as well as case contextual factors obtained from the Burger Court Judicial Database, the United States Supreme Court Judicial Database: Phase II, and my own data collection, to examine Perry’s claim. I argue that, contrary to Perry’s assertion, the Court can be, and is, strategic in its use of DIGs. In studying the Court’s strategic use of DIGs, I use a rare-events logistic regression analysis to examine this rarely utilized, yet potentially important, Court agenda setting power. This paper makes two contributions to the judicial politics literature. First, it helps us to better understand the Court’s broad power to set its own agenda–a process that occurs, for the most part, behind closed doors. Second, it examines the applicability of various theories of judicial decision making to this understudied aspect of Court behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although elections are common to all democracies, we still have a surprisingly murky understanding about how foreign policy decisions that occur in the context of an electoral campaign might be shaped and altered by them. Contradictory arguments abound. While some argue that leaders will use foreign policy to domestic advantage or otherwise alter their foreign policy choices because of electoral calculations, others suggest that politics effectively stops at the water’s edge and elections play no role in foreign policy calculations. In this paper, I intensively examine how Richard Nixon considered the 1972 election in his response to the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. These decisions are compared with a range of decisions made by Lyndon Johnson during the 1964 and 1968 presidential elections. By focusing on critical decisions that occurred in the midst of presidential election campaigns in 1964, 1968, and 1972 and employing newly released archival documents, this paper evaluates the extent to which these presidents, under a range of political and international conditions, considered their electoral prospects as they confronted several foreign policy choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the issues of agency merger and managerial flexibility in the Department of Homeland Security. The mission of DHS is to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce America’s vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur (Bush 2002b, 8). The creation of DHS reflects the confluence of two strains of thought: the key issues and strategies of homeland security and the values of strategic management, especially strategic human resources management. The remainder of the paper identifies the critical questions in each area that impact the future success or failure of DHS, evaluates the passage and implementation of the new Department, and makes recommendations for future action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest groups pursue their goals in a variety of venues, including the courts. At the United States Supreme Court, the predominant method of interest group participation is the amicus curiae brief (Epstein 1991). Since the 1960s interest groups participating as amici curiae have increased remarkably, with briefs now present in over eighty percent of cases given full treatment by the Court (Kearney and Merrill 2000). While scholars have accumulated a reasonably large body of work on amicus briefs, questions still remain regarding whether or not amicus briefs influence the decision making of Supreme Court justices, perhaps because much of the prior work on amicus briefs has been without strong theoretical foundation. Building on intuitions from the attitudinal model, I posit that amicus briefs are efficacious because they provide the justices with information that helps them locate their policy preferences. Accordingly, I argue that the presence of amicus briefs in a case enables the justices to reinforce and update their policy preferences, thus allowing them to make their decisions more coherently based on their attitudes and values. I subject this argument to empirical validation by examining all cases decided in the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1953-1995 terms. The results indicate that all justices respond to the presence of amicus briefs, even those briefs that are not congruent with their ideological predispositions. However, as theorized, liberal briefs are more influential for liberal justices than conservative briefs, while conservative briefs are much more influential for conservative justices than liberal briefs. While the findings suggest that ideology plays a mediating role in regards to how the justices respond to interest group pressures, they also reveal that attitudes offer only a partial explanation for the influence of interest groups in the Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A moral science of the politics of law has been reborn, overcoming tensions with liberalism, pluralism, and scientific objectivity and reasoning. What moral justifications do we find in Fourth Amendment judicial opinions of the 1986-1994 terms of the U.S. Supreme Court of the Rehnquist Court? This work develops and tests a moral justification model for predicting judicial decision-making on Rehnquist Court Fourth Amendment cases. First, we develop the moral justification model of judicial decision-making in a literature review, with linguistic patterns and categories by Hercules or Herbert for content analysis. Second, we discuss the methodological strategies used in this content analysis of official opinions of the Court on the Fourth Amendment from 1986-1994. Third, from this content analysis, we describe the patterns of moral justification in Rehnquist Court Fourth Amendment opinions, including the Court’s assessments of the moral virtue of "druggie" defendants. Finally, we draw conclusions on this analysis for a moral science of the politics of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes two experiments designed to see how policy attitudes interact with case characteristics to influence the perception of legal precedent. First, we discuss how the concept of motivated reasoning has been invoked in the public law literature. Using Holyoak and Thagard’s (1995) theory of analogic, we propose a mechanism of motivated decision making involving analogical perception. We put forth a model of analogical perception where the role of policy preferences in shaping perceptions is greatest a middle range of cases that are neither too close, nor too far away, from disputes decision-makers are currently considering. We describe a comparative experimental design testing the model for 208 lay observers of judicial outputs (Experiment Number 1) and 77 law students (Experiment Number 2). Participants in each experiment read a mock newspaper article that described a ‘target case’ involving unlawful discrimination. Embedded in the article was also a description of a ‘source case’ cited as legal precedent where (1) the target of discrimination, (2) the entity accused of discrimination, and (3) the outcome of the case were experimentally manipulated. Results indicate that participants in both studies were more likely to find source cases with outcomes that supported their policy views in the target dispute as analogous to that litigation. Significantly, however, this effect was constrained by the manipulation of case characteristics bearing on similarity, as predicted. Findings also indicate that lay participants who were supportive of gay scout leaders used more lenient criteria in judging case similarity than did those who were opposed. Contrary to expectations, legal socialization did not attenuate the effects of attitudes in similarity judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why Truman chose to operate through the United Nations in the Korean War, and the consequences of his actions for U.S. national security policy making today. Given the George W. Bush administration’s decision in February and March 2003 not to seek a resolution from the UN authorizing the use of force in Iraq, an analysis of the Truman administration’s decision to seek UN support for the Korean War is both timely and necessary. In particular, this article focuses on two questions: First, why did Truman seek a UN resolution authorizing the use of force in Korea? Second, why did Truman decide not to seek a congressional resolution supporting the war? The article finds that Truman’s use of the UN solidified the organization’s role in international conflict resolution, but that his decision not to seek a congressional resolution missed an opportunity to build a strong domestic coalition for his actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do decision-makers know what they know? Analysis of a recent survey of decision-makers in the executive and legislative branches of government in both the United States and Britain reveals that decision-makers increasingly rely upon external sources of information, including the commercial media, interest groups, non-governmental organizations, and academics for the information they use in foreign policy-making. This evidence provides confirmation of the current conventional wisdom in academic literature, newspapers, and policy papers that government bureaucracies are no longer able to compete with the information and activities of non-governmental organizations. As a result, I argue that theories of foreign policy-making need to be re-examined in order to account for two crucial developments of the 21st century: the information technology revolution and globalization. I present ideas about how and why a standard of foreign policy analysis, the bureaucratic politics model, should and could be adjusted to account for the empirical findings of the decision-maker survey. I then look to networking theories from sociology to understand the recent buzz about the advantages of networks compared to hierarchies when it comes to information collection, processing, and transmission. Network theories explain why non-governmental information sources are surpassing governmental information. I find networks have two chief information advantages which link the results of my decision-maker survey and the conventional wisdom regarding the new power of non-governmental actors. Networks enable non-governmental actors to acquire new information and provide access to decision-makers to communicate this information while simultaneously assisting decision-makers to develop relationships with information sources which help them quickly, easily, and cheaply evaluate the credibility of incoming information. Results of the decision-maker survey confirm that decision-makers often use personal relationships, intuition, and reputation to assess the credibility of incoming information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that newly appointed justices will initially exhibit distinct forms of behavior as they orient themselves to their institutional environment is an intuitive notion that has long intrigued Supreme Court scholars. However, few courts of appeals scholars have addressed this idea, and of those that do, none have discussed the potential for the acclimation effect to be in the variance in decision making. We do so here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenging elections of 2000 triggered electoral reforms across many states, though the scope and depth of these reforms varied widely from state to state. While political scientists have begun to understand the correlates of race, politics, and lost votes in the 2000 election, much less attention has been paid to these relationships and electoral reforms after election 2000. In this paper we examine the role of politics and ethnicity, among other factors, in leading states to pass electoral reform legislation after election 2000. Using state level data from 2001-2002, we find that party competition and minority representation played a key role in the passage of ‘voter barrier’ electoral reforms, while state resources and legislative style played a strong role in the passage of ‘voting procedures’ electoral reforms. Party control and the interaction of party control with racial representation played in general a small role. Overall, we find that different factors are jointly needed to understand the passage of electoral reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the Scottish Parliament matter? Beyond expectations of a ?new politics? in Scotland and beyond anecdotal examples of practice, this paper provides the first systematic attempt to investigate the salience of the Scottish Parliament to legislative outputs in Scotland. Adapting the methodological framework of Griffith’s 1974 study of the impact of the UK Parliament on government legislation, this paper assesses the impact of the Scottish Parliament on Executive bills to date (1999-2002). Assessment is based on an analysis of all amendments (N = 3983) for the first 37 Executive bills passed by the Scottish Parliament (1999-2002). Initial findings on the success and failure of amendments in the Scottish Parliament shows that the Executive dominates the process nearly as much as the UK Government was found to dominate the House of Commons in the Griffith (1974) study. However, when we account for type of amendment and initial authorship we find evidence that the Parliament actually makes more of an impact, particularly in terms of the level of success of substantive amendments to Executive bills. Moreover, when we investigate meanings behind ?non-success? we find that much of this is either intended as a means of fulfilling other legislative functions such as scrutiny, constituency representation and tension release, or is a consequence of the Executive having taken on board parliamentary concerns. Evidently, expectations of power sharing between the Executive and Parliament are being realised. Consequently, notions of a ?new politics? operating in Scotland, at least in terms of power sharing, may not be as fanciful as many critics suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political aftermath of September 11 shows the importance of film, television, and other electronic media in constructing our realities. The Bush administration is working with Hollywood screenwriters to help anticipate possible scenarios and targets for terrorist atrocities. Nonetheless the main Hollywood contributions have come earlier, even before September 11, in popular films. These let American audiences experience acts of political terrorism in vicarious, virtual, symbolical, and other modes. In response to the dramatic escalation of terrorist attacks on U.S. institutions, Americans are calling on cinematic prefigurations of terrorist strategies, the movements that use them, the regimes that support them, and the politics that reply to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the influence of political action committees (PACs) on roll call votes varies across different legislative contexts. Building off of the literature on congressional decision-making, I argue that PACs should have a significant influence on voting primarily on non-ideological, non-visible votes. The analysis supports the conclusion that on these types of votes PACs can be an important cue aiding member decision-making in the absence of other more frequently used voting cues (e.g. partisanship, constituency, etc.). The implications of this finding for legislative outcomes and overall PAC power are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is very much a first draft of a larger on-going study of the extent to which lobbying activities and techniques in the three largest and most significant lobbying markets in the world are influenced and shaped by the particular institutional frameworks which operate in those political environments - Washington, London and Brussels. It is intended to provide an identification of the activities which are undertaken by lobbyists in Washington, London and Brussels; to move towards a comparative description of the lobbying techniques which are employed in those places; and to determine how much and in which ways are those activities and techniques related to the policy making processes and political structures which operate in those locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some time, conventional wisdom held that briefs filed by amici curiae serve to introduce new information to courts not otherwise found in the briefs filed by the litigants, and the justices find this information to be useful, including it in their opinions. Where previous studies had not systematically studied the nature of the information provided by amici, Spriggs and Wahlbeck (1997) remedy this shortcoming by collecting data from all litigant and amicus briefs filed in the 1992 term of the Supreme Court. They find that the information contained in amicus curiae briefs often reiterate the position and arguments made in the briefs submitted by the litigants. This is in stark contrast to the accepted understanding of the role of amicus briefs - that courts are provided with information not contained in the briefs of litigants. They also find that majority opinions are not more likely to include information contained only in amicus briefs. Here, we build upon the work of Spriggs and Wahlbeck by extending the analysis to the state level. We are interested in determining whether or not amici filed at the state level provide unique information to state supreme court justices and whether justices find that information to be of use. By focusing on the state level, we are able to gain additional perspective on the effect of institutional differences between the states on the behavior of amici and justices. Specifically, we ask: What effect does retention system have on the likelihood that the court will incorporate the information provided by amici curiae in their opinions? We examine a sample of litigant and amicus briefs filed in five state supreme courts from 1986 to 1995, and find that institutional factors are related to the likelihood of state supreme courts using information contained in amicus briefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The division of responsibility between justice and law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court remains controversial. In this paper, we first examine the process of selection of law clerks by Supreme Court justices and then turn to the area of writing judicial opinions. To gather our data, we sent a self-administered questionnaire on this topic to a random sample of 600 former judicial clerks. In the area of law clerk selection, principal-agent theory suggests that Supreme Court justices will seek to avoid "shirking" by their law clerks. Therefore, we hypothesize that Supreme Court justices will select law clerks who share similar ideological positions as themselves. We also hypothesize that justices will attempt to ascertain the prospective law clerk's ideology through personal interviews. The data strongly supported our first hypothesis--that justices will tend to select ideologically similar clerks--although the strength of the effect tended to vary between justices. Our second hypothesis--that justices will use the personal interview to determine the potential clerk's ideology--was not confirmed. Given that there is clear evidence of ideological congruence between justices and clerks, we conclude that justices rely upon other cues and signals to determine clerk ideology in the hiring process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most recent work on the topic of divided government and judicial selection has focused on the use of delay as a tactic to defeating or frustrating presidential nominations to the federal courts. Less is known, however, about the actual policy outputs of judges selected under these conditions. In this paper, I analyze the career voting behavior of circuit court judges appointed by President Reagan and President Clinton and account for the level of senatorial opposition and whether the president confronts an opposition (party) chairperson of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time of the judge's appointment. I found no support across both the Reagan and Clinton models for the hypothesis that these appointment factors will be reflected through the course of the circuit judge's career voting behavior and, thus, that they actually influence the types of judges ultimately appointed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) as a potential jurisprudential regime in the area of administrative law. A jurisprudential regime is a key precedent that establishes case factors which matter to the justices’ decision making, and/or changes the way the justices evaluate case factors. In Chevron, the Court declared a new standard for the review of administrative agency decisions, so we expect that it alters the structure of influences on the justices’ decisions. We also hypothesize that ideology and deference are key aspects of the justices’ votes in administrative law cases. Relying on tests involving logistic regression, we find support for both of these hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of federal bureaucratic success before the Supreme Court have generally concluded that agencies are successful, but only provide limited explanations for this success.     Using three categories of explanatory variables; ideology, administrative characteristics and law, and compliance, I estimate a model to determine the factors that impact judicial decision making in the Supreme Court when federal administrative agencies appear before it. While I find support for the pre-eminent role that ideology plays in models of judicial decision making, I also uncover the importance of variables from the latter two categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare unanimous and nonunanimous decisions at the final vote and at the conference vote for the U.S. Supreme Court from 1954-1985. We find that cases that are decided with a liberal outcome, that are nonsalient, and that present a severe threat to the Court are most likely to be decided unanimously at the final vote. At the conference vote, however, cases with liberal outcomes and those that reverse a lower court decision are more likely to be decided unanimously. The evidence that justices are more likely to shift towards unanimity between the conference and final votes in nonsalient and severe threat cases confirms the importance of strategic or small group variables in explaining decision making on the Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The national policy making process can vary widely from one case to the next, even within a single field such as environmental regulation, tax policy, or intergovernmental management. The process may be directed by the president in one case, dominated by narrow interest groups in a second, guided by the norms of technical experts in a third, or driven by populist sentiment in a fourth. Some policies race through the process at breakneck speed, while others become stuck in a quagmire for years. Some emerge fully grown almost overnight, while others evolve in slow incremental stages. Some are shaped in the glare of public visibility, while others are crafted in obscurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how presidents work with the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.) to build support at the U.N. for American foreign policy. Despite the clear importance of personality and individual relationships in establishing the Ambassador’s power, an examination of the post’s evolution in the past fifty-plus years reveals some common features across administrations. This paper finds that a U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.’s influence on foreign policy making depends primarily on the president’s view of the Ambassador’s role in the policy-making process and the Ambassador’s own aspirations. To examine these factors systematically, the paper identifies four, sometimes overlapping, roles for U.S. Ambassadors to the U.N.: independent spokesperson, personal adviser to the president, professional diplomat, and policy maker. For Ambassadors who occupied the position long enough to become involved in the policy-making process, this classification is useful in identifying their role in the president’s foreign policy advisory team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates the effect experience has on leaders? responses to changes in the external environment. With a particular emphasis on U.S.-Soviet relations, in-depth case studies specifically address why, given changes similar in intensity although not content, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan altered policy toward the Soviet Union based on actions taken by the Kremlin, while Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Bush did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy decision-makers operate in a complex environment often characterized by an overload of information that is riddled with inconsistency and ambiguity. The complexity of the decision-making information environment is evident in many policy-making situations, such as the transformation of information related to a rival’s belligerent intentions or an enemy’s military capabilities. But this complexity is particularly crucial when the outcome of the decision-making process carries great costs, as in the case of whether or not to use force. When incorporating new information into the cognitive calculus of policy choices, decision-makers are often faced with a quantity versus quality dilemma, i.e. a tradeoff between testing the reliability of particular items of information (checking their credibility or ?truth? value) versus collecting more information pertaining to the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although elections are common to all democracies, we still have a surprisingly murky understanding about how foreign policy decisions that occur in the context of an electoral campaign might be shaped and altered by them. Contradictory arguments abound. While some argue that leaders will use foreign policy to domestic advantage to create an ?October Surprise? (a dramatic foreign policy achievement shortly before an election) or be tempted to divert public attention from domestic turmoil by the dramatic use of force internationally (as popularized by the recent movie Wag the Dog), others suggest that politics effectively stops at the water’s edge and elections play no role in foreign policy calculations. While scholars have made some progress in considering issues related to the influence of upcoming elections on foreign policy decision making, we still do not have a clear idea of when (if at all) and how policy makers will adjust their foreign policies in anticipation of facing their electorate. In this paper, I examine the influence of elections on several American foreign policy crises from the Johnson administration and suggest that the influence of elections depends largely upon whether the president is running for reelection or not [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning in foreign policy can be defined as a change in beliefs due to observation and interpretation of experience. During the Cold War it was argued that learning occurred in both the United States? and the Soviet Union’s nuclear policies (see Nye 1987; Blacker 1991; Weber 1991). This learning took place in a number of areas, including a better understanding of the destructive power of the weapons, control problems associated with the weapons, proliferation problems, arms race stability, and the importance of a deterrent force structure. Despite the immense changes in U.S.-Soviet relations since the Cold War, little learning has occurred in regards to each country’s respective nuclear policies. Except for minor policy shifts due more to structural necessities than learning or belief change, the nuclear policies of the United States and Russia have remained roughly the same. There are four reasons why learning has failed to occur. First, the learning that took place during the Cold War led to a belief in the growing obsolescence of nuclear weapons except as a deterrent against an other’s use of the weapon. This has placed nuclear weapons in an extraordinarily unique position as a weapons system. Second, the perceived absence of nuclear threat provided little impetus for learning. The fundamental changes in the make-up of the international system happened without the involvement of nuclear weapons. As a result there was no salient experience or observations that policy makers could make regarding nuclear weapons and their evolving belief systems. Third, it has been argued elsewhere that states that pursue an unsuccessful policy during a crisis will likely adjust that policy in a subsequent crisis, and that states that pursue a successful policy will maintain a similar policy whether it is warranted or not. Because both sides, in general, viewed their Cold War nuclear policies as successful, in that they deterred the opposing side from using nuclear weapons and engaging in other aggressive behaviors, there was little incentive for either side to seek out new nuclear policies despite more cordial relations. Fourth, despite declarations of a ?new world order? and ?the end of history? foreign policy makers have not replaced the ?realpolitik? belief systems that drove foreign policy decision-making throughout the Cold War. As a result we should expect to see the lessons drawn by today’s policy makers to be similar to the lesson’s drawn by policy makers for the past fifty years and little shift in either the United States? or Russia’s nuclear policies. As long as nuclear weapons continue to be perceived as a deterrent to nuclear weapons, a low likelihood of nuclear threats, a perception of success in past and current nuclear strategy, and a continuation of a ?realpolitik? belief system we can expect to see little change in nuclear policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European institutions have in recent years increased their competence in the field of employment policy. Between the Essen summit of 1994 and the Lisbon summit of 2000, the European Commission and the Member States have developed the European Employment Strategy and in doing so, transformed the way employment policy is made in the European Union. This paper seeks to understand why the Employment Strategy developed as it did and when it did and how, in particular, the European Commission was able to critically influence the final shape of the employment title that was included in the Amsterdam Treaty. This paper argues that the inclusion of the employment title in the Treaty of Amsterdam is the result of a ratcheting strategy by which the European Commission as a two-level policy entrepreneur succeeded in facilitating the gradual representation of previously latent interests within the Member States and thereby indirectly pressured the Member States to endorse the Europe-wide employment measures. The concerns of the public over unemployment in Europe at that time, gave the Commission a position of strength from which it was able to influence agenda-setting as well as the preference formation and thereby critically influence the inclusion of the particular employment chapter in the Amsterdam Treaty. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to better understand the actions of states, and the decisions that lead to those actions, require not only consideration of a wide range of variables but, also, an evaluation of which data sources might provide insightful, as well as accurate, information about decision-making processes. This paper examines one type of frequently used but often-criticized data source-political memoirs. In order to assess the utility and validity of memoirs as a resource, I compare the results of two different analyses of one research question, relating to the inclusion of international law considerations in foreign-policy decision making. One of the analyses uses a range of primary and secondary sources, while data for the other analysis was gathered only from relevant memoirs. By comparing the results of these analyses, we are provided with a more clear understanding of what memoir-reliant research can and cannot reveal, relative to a broader sampling of sources. This comparison demonstrates that memoirs do, in fact, appear to be an accurate and appropriate data source for examining the factors that affect top-level decision makers during periods of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without a majority in the Congress, the president's party looses the ability to direct policy change. With only one third of the vote, the president's party can prevent any initiative from turning into law. Individual opposition parties gain influence under divided government but lack the power to veto policy change. Contrary to what critics of presidentialism have argued, political parties in presidential regimes lack in incentives to cooperate and build policy-making coalitions. Coalition-building depends on the potential gains of cooperation that both the president's party and the opposition parties can capture if they modify the status quo. Two sufficient conditions for coalition-building can be identified: an extreme position of the status quo, and the location of the president's party at the median position. This explains law change and the size of lawmaking coalitions under divided government in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudinalism and New Institutionalism operationalize the effect of law on judicial decisions quite differently. The former sees law as a set of external, mechanical rules that do not affect judging, while the latter sees law as an internal, socialized consciousness that powerfully colors judging, but does not determine particular results. New Institutionalism’s view seems closer to lived judicial experience, but much of this scholarship still relies on external evidence of judicial activity, which makes it hard to test assumptions about the internal consciousness of judges. To move beyond this impasse, I propose an "Internal-Institutional" account of judging, which focuses on the "World- Disclosing" and "Creative-Evolutionary" functions of legal doctrine. Using a body of empirical hypotheses derived from this new account, I then report the results of my ethnographic study of a federal magistrate judge. This study confirms, in part, the predictions of the"Internal-Institutional" account in a reliable and trustworthy way, but more such studies are necessary to adequately test the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]