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The article presents an extensive analysis and discussion of the work of the 20th-century American artist Vija Celmins, particularly her lunar drawings. Details are given outlining the historical context and source material for the moon drawings, providing an overview of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) campaign to document and showcase the American space exploration program. In-depth commentary is also given exploring the themes and techniques of Celmins' work, discussing themes of human-machine relationship and the technological medium of cameras.

Part book and part toy, the 1905 "The House That Glue Built" gave young readers an opportunity to cut and paste paper objects into rooms found within the book's pages. Its Arts and Crafts design was a novel departure from other Glue Books at the turn of the twentieth century, and a sophisticated marketing agenda by publisher Frederick A. Stokes helped propel its success. This article examines "The House that Glue Built "as book, object, and toy and traces its evolution within the publishing world from concept to international best seller, becoming the cornerstone of the seventeen-volume Glue Series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lists reports presented at the General Scientific Meetings of the Marine Biological Laboratory on August 14-16, 1995.

In 1947, the Cornell psychiatrist Keeve Brodman and a handful of colleagues began developing what would become one of the most widely used health questionnaires of its time—the Cornell Medical Index (CMI). A rigidly standardized form, the CMI presented 195 yes-no questions designed to capture the health status of "the total patient." Over the following decades, Brodman's project of standardizing medical history taking gradually evolved into a project of mathematizing and computerizing diagnosis: out of the CMI grew the Medical Data Screen (MDS), one of the first computerized methods of deriving diagnoses from patient data. This essay follows the life course of these tools through the second half of the twentieth century. It argues for a genealogy of biomedical computing and computerized diagnosis that takes more seriously the continuities between computer-based digital practices and paper-based analog ones. The computerized MDS evolved from, and rested upon, paper data practices associated with questionnaires and surveys. The interlocking histories of the CMI and the MDS prompt a reconsideration of the material and temporal parameters within which the history of computerized medicine has conventionally been understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study replicating the paper written by Robert Hayes in 1983 about library and information science studies in the United States. Use of the Social Sciences Citation Index; Examination of publishing and citation activity; Assessment of individual productivity and productivity by school.

This paper uses the elections of 1980 to 2004 to illustrate that political candidates from opposing parties face different incentives in mentioning foreign policy during campaigns and in taking foreign policy positions. The paper demonstrates that citizens connect their own foreign policy views clearly to their evaluations of Republican candidates, but these same foreign policy opinions are much less likely to affect evaluations of the Democratic party and Democratic candidates. In addition, this paper reveals another significant asymmetry—in a threatening environment, Americans reward candidates and parties perceived to hold hawkish positions but even more severely punish candidates perceived to be dovish. Using two datasets, I find that Americans' opinions on defense spending and diplomacy mattered significantly for the type of political leadership the public preferred at election time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A producer pays commodity taxes on sold goods, realizing only later that the tax was unlawful. Yet, his claim for refund is denied. Tax authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere use the "passing on defense" to deny refunds of unlawfully levied taxes. The defense states that some or all of the unlawful tax the producer paid was passed on to consumers through the price of goods, and thus the producer would be enriched if refunded fully. The passing on defense is largely perceived in legal scholarship as a choice between unjustly enriching the producer by a full refund and unjustly enriching government by denying it. A balance is thus called for, e.g., by applying equity considerations. This paper shows that a full refund of overpaid taxes never enriches the producer-taxpayer. Since the defense does not serve to prevent producers' enrichment, it should be rejected. Further, the paper demonstrates that, in fact, the passing on defense generates an additional implicit tax in the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the legal doctrine of market share liability from an economic perspective. It explains the underlying economic, or quasi-economic, basis for the doctrine: to obtain appropriate cost internalization of harm-causing behavior where it is not possible to identify which of many producers of identical harm-causing products harmed any single victim. The paper discusses the recent extension of the concept in the lead paint litigation in the U.S. in both products liability and public nuisance cases. The article discusses the very particular requirements necessary for the doctrine to appropriately internalize costs. It also discusses the implications of the passage of time as between manufacture and harm for the application of the doctrine and addresses the view that market share liability can effectively provide a form of insurance for loss. The article shows that application of the doctrine of market share liability serves in many contexts--including with respect to lead paint--chiefly as a form of taxation, which cannot generally be defended on social welfare grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 election renewed interest in the Wilder or Bradley effect, the gap between the share of survey respondents expressing support for a candidate and the candidate's vote share. Using new data from 180 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. It demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was Governor of Virginia. Evidence from the 2008 presidential election reinforces this claim. Although the same mechanisms could affect female candidates, this paper finds no such effect at any point in time. It also shows how polls' overestimation of front-runners' support can exaggerate estimates of the Wilder effect. Together, these results accord with theories emphasizing how short-term changes in the political context influence the role of race in statewide elections. The Wilder effect is the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to underrepresented groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate between the ''consensus'' school of American politics and its various critics, all participants have shown themselves capable of shedding light on different historical periods or particular political conflicts; and, of course, given the complexity of public discourse, many American political controversies lend themselves to elucidation by more than one of them. This paper's purpose is to suggest yet a further way of interpreting American political discourse, one that carries the capacity to illuminate a kind of discursive structure in American politics that goes undiscerned by both the consensus school and its critics. The paper illustrates this alternative approach by using it to interpret discourse leading up to and following the 1996 welfare reforms. It concludes by suggesting that since welfare debate lends itself well to this interpretation, the question of whether other American political debates might also do so is a worthwhile project for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an interpretation of the uncertainty that exists on election morning as to who will win. It is based on the theory that there are a number of possible conditions of nature that can exist on election day, of which one is drawn. Political betting markets provide a way of trying to estimate this uncertainty. This type of uncertainty is different from polling standard errors, which estimate sample-size uncertainty. This paper also introduces a ranking assumption concerning dependencies across U.S. states. The assumption does well when tested using data for the 2004 presidential election and the 2006 Senate election. It is shown that if the ranking assumption is correct, the two political parties should spend all their money on a few states, which seems consistent with their actual behavior in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of any important political decision are always to some degree uncertain. This uncertainty may be ameliorated by the collection of policy-relevant information. Predictably, if such information is biased, then political decisions based on that information will be biased as well. This paper explores the converse of this statement: if the policymaker is biased, will the information provided to him or her also be biased? It is shown in this paper that, in equilibrium, information provided to a sufficiently biased policymaker will inherit the policymaker's bias. Accordingly, the provision of biased policy-relevant information is not evidence of an attempt to produce biased policy decisions. The implications of the theory are examined within the context of modern administrative policymaking within the United States Federal Government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how best to balance the pursuit of security with the protection of civil liberties has been heavily debated in recent years. This paper challenges the conclusions reached in that debate. It argues that although theorists have identified important subsidiary causes of imbalance, they do not address the structural dilemma posed by state secrecy, which creates an information asymmetry that allows officials to manipulate safeguards meant to secure an appropriate balance. Since this asymmetry cannot be easily resolved, imbalance remains a perennial danger that often can be addressed only retrospectively. Unfortunately, retrospection too can be stymied by the executive's control over state secrets, and it can also be undermined by partisanship, even when the relevant information becomes available. With this in mind, the paper identifies mechanisms to limit the abuse of state secrecy and indicates institutional features that may temper the adverse effects of partisanship.Polity (2009) 41, 166–188. doi:10.1057/pol.2008.27; published online 19 January 2009 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of multicandidate races in U.S. presidential elections motivated the modern invention and advocacy of approval voting; but it has not previously been recognized that the first four presidential elections (1788–1800) were conducted using a variant of approval voting. That experiment ended disastrously in 1800 with the infamous Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Burr. The tie, this paper shows, resulted less from miscalculation than from a strategic tension built into approval voting, which forces two leaders appealing to the same voters to play a game of Chicken. Because the Burr Dilemma poses a significant difficulty for approval voting, this paper urges that researchers give more attention to “instant runoff” reform options, especially the alternative vote and the Coombs rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about several awards presented by the American Society of Naturalists. The President's award of the American Society of Naturalists is given to the best paper that appeared in the journal "American Naturalist" in the preceding calendar year. The Edward Osborne Wilson Naturalist Award was established in 1997 on the occasion of Professor Wilson's retirement in recognition of his lifetime of outstanding contributions in the areas of ecology and evolutionary biology, including the study of social insects, biodiversity, and biophilia. The Sewall Wright Award, which recognizes a senior-level active researcher for significant and continuing contributions to the objectives of the American Society of Naturalists, was awarded in 2005 to Robert E. Ricklefs. The Young Investigators' Prizes recognize outstanding and promising work by investigators who received their doctorates in the three years preceding the application deadline or are in their final year of graduate school. The prizes include presentation of a research paper at the annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, reimbursement for travel to the annual meeting, and a $500 honorarium.

We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed-effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e.,“residual votes”), followed by optically scanned ballots, mechanical lever machines, direct register electronic machines (DREs), and punch cards. In gubernatorial and senatorial races, paper, optical scan ballots, and DREs are significantly better in minimizing the residual vote rate than mechanical lever machines and punch cards. If all jurisdictions in the United States that used punch cards in 2000 had used optically scanned ballots instead, we estimate that approximately 500,000 more votes would have been attributed to presidential candidates nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an historical study of Richard Rorty's political philosophy, demonstrating how his 'mature' thoughts about patriotism and nationalism (evidenced in Achieving Our Country) advance the complexity and nuance of his political theory. By showing where Rorty diverges from his earlier insistence upon the severe separation of the public and private, the paper hopes to expose his newfound appreciation of the private and cultural spheres and their roles in American pluralistic politics. In Rorty's more recent writings, contestation plays a more important part in building civic identity; the legitimacy of his patriotism and liberal consensus is now dependent on civil societies' access to the public sphere. Rorty's expanded site of politics, the paper argues, results from (among other things, to be sure) his 1984 confrontation with Jean-François Lyotard and his 1994 confrontation with Nancy Fraser. Rorty's more recent admission of the private sphere into politics is sensitive to the demands of legitimacy and makes the ongoing process of political legitimation more possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Focuses on the role of professional conferences in the American visual arts. Fixtures of modern professional life; Pressure to public academic papers; Acceptance of a conference topic or paper; Representation of the visual arts at the American Studies Association.

This paper examines the so-called "perquisites/constituency service" hypothesis that purports to explain incumbents' electoral margins in congressional elections. First, it reviews the individual-level and aggregate-level studies, pointing out serious problems in measurements and methodology and concluding that existing literature does not and cannot support the thesis Second, using 1984 CPS/NES data, the paper models the voting decisions in 1984, finding that respondents' decisions were affected by shared partisanship with the incumbent, ideological compatibility, challenger spending, assessments of President Reagan, and (a dubiously measured) recollection of the incumbent's having done something for the district. Individual casework experience did not affect the voting decision. Third, with data gathered from over 200 House offices, the percentage of the vote won by incumbents in the 1982 election is modeled as a function of 1982 casework loads, staff allocation, mailings, and several baseline variables. The findings are that casework loads, trips home, and mailings did not affect the vote, but that district partisanship and ideology, redistricting, national electoral tides, and occasionally district education levels did. We conclude that, based on existing evidence, the perquisites and casework hypotheses have not been demonstrated and that to explore the theses further panel data are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using the development of the appropriations process in the House between 1865 and 1921 to generate a series of cases, this paper explores one way in which two congressional research paths, rational choice theory, and historical analysis, can be joined. The theory section specifies four types of structural strategies that rational members of Congress might pursue in order to make particular substantive outcomes more likely expansionary fragmentation, retrenching centralization, expansionary centralization, and retrenching fragmentation. The empirical section of the paper examines episodes in the House between 1865 and 1921 when each of the four structural strategies was pursued Expansionary fragmentation is the most common strategy during this period, confirming conventional wisdom concerning congressional budgeting. But the exact opposite strategy--retrenching centralization--had its persistent supporters who were frequently successful at instituting reform. Finally, the other two strategies--expansionary centralization and retrenching fragmentation--were pursued less frequently during this period, but their pursuit still demonstrated a rational response to different decisional contexts. The general findings of the paper suggest that the marriage of rational choice and historical analysis in the study of Congress can be a fruitful one, with each mode of inquiry elucidating and extending the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1978, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, began a collaboration exploring the evolution of self-deception. Together they published a brief paper that used their ideas about the naturalistic basis of deceit and self-deception to explain the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 in Washington, D.C. Given the continued power of the naturalistic fallacy in the modern life sciences, historical attention typically focuses on highly visible controversies with great popular traction. This essay instead mobilizes the muted legacy of Trivers and Newton's publication to underscore the inherent difficulties scientists face in finding a receptive audience for their theories, even naturalistic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of pre-professional anthropology in nineteenth-century U.S. society have generally emphasized the roles of individuals and institutions in the development of the field. Their reliance on particular kinds of archives and sources has led some of them to neglect the work of intellectuals of color, many of whom had important anthropological insights. Thus, the hegemonic genealogies of U.S. anthropology make it difficult to discern alternative understandings of the emerging field before the Civil War by virtually eliminating dissenting voices. This paper calls attention to the anthropological thought of James McCune Smith- intellectual, former slave, and radical abolitionist-and situates his perspective in the sociohistorical context of antebellum America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As genotyping technologies have precipitously decreased in cost since the completion of the Human Genome Project, personal genetic testing has increasingly been marketed to consumers. Genetic testing is now available for an everexpanding list of genetic mutations associated with diseases—including breast cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's—as well as traits such as ancestry, intelligence, and athleticism. Close examination of the direct-to-consumer personal genomic industry reveals several forms of potentiality at work that are informed by imagined and real power over bodily information. The marketing and consumption of personal genetic information relies on constructions of biological potential that result from struggles over the ability to control and act on individualized genetic information and to translate it into meaning. This paper explores the emerging discourse over personal genetic testing—and the marketing and consumption of the alluring and carefully tailored idea of potentiality that fuels American entrepreneurialism—and concepts of freedom and self-actualization. Policy debates over rights of access to genotyping fail to recognize the shifting landscape of human genomics in the United States. Genes in the marketplace are justified by liberalism, civic republicanism, and multiculturalism propelling a paradigm shift away from traditional models of governance toward open access to genetic testing and minimization of individual harm. The turn to the market emboldens the consumer and creates a new set of social meanings and ethical quandaries over who may harness the potential attributed to genetic information and for what purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the use of the set of positional auxiliary verbs SIT, STAND, LIE, and MOVE in Biloxi. It offers a detailed analysis of these positionals and compares their use with other Siouan and some non-Siouan languages. While positional stance verbs also double as positional auxiliaries in many languages of the world, in Biloxi positional auxiliaries are grammaticized variants of what were once physical stance verbs, evidenced by the fact that the positional auxiliaries no longer take pronominal marking and sometimes occur side-by-side with their physical stance counterparts. This is a typologically interesting situation in which positional auxiliary verbs form a discrete series distinct from positional stance verbs. The proper use of positional verbs is a complex aspect of the grammar of Biloxi and other Siouan languages. While the choice of positional verbs is often logically motivated based on an object's salient axial extension or shape, this analysis demonstrates that, particularly in more abstract cases, the proper choice of positional auxiliary is not at all obvious. Discrepancies in choice of positional, even among closely related languages and even in the same language, are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a typological contribution by describing a stress system that uses syllabic trochees while also displaying characteristics more typically associated with a quantity-sensitive language. The description comes from Tohono O'odham. The rhythm of this language is quantity-insensitive and trochaic, although the language also displays characteristics often associated with quantity-sensitivity (i.e., long vowels, gemination). Examined together, the facts illustrated here demonstrate the prosodic inconsistency of Tohono O'odham: that rhythm and prosodic morphology offer different perspectives on the role played by quantity, and that Tohono O'odham is the first language documented to split its rhythm and prosodic morphology along quantitative lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an overview of an increasingly global community of physical (biological) anthropologists as it pertains to the study of living human variation (human biology) and as it is represented in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA), focusing especially on the period of 2001-2007, when Clark Spencer Larsen served as editor in chief. The journal was founded by Aleš Hrdlička in order to provide professional identity of physical (biological) anthropology as practiced in the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, the journal editorship under T. Dale Stewart called for greater presence of international research collaboration and publication in AJPA. By 1960, international collaboration and non-U.S. authorship began to have significant presence in the journal, a pattern that has continued to the present. As in the pre-2000 period, although non-U.S. contributions cover all major topics in human biology, they tend to focus on population genetics and population history. For the period of 2001-2007, there is an increased presence of multinational collaborative research and non-U.S. authorship, a trend that will likely increase. The recent rise in non-U.S. submissions and authorship is due in large part to increased international collaboration and electronic access to the submission process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a broad range of ways in which anthropological research was linked to military and intelligence agencies during the Cold War, and it examines evidence and implications of the l976 findings by the US. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (chaired by Senator Frank Church) that during the 1950s and 1960s "massive ". amounts of international research were covertly funded by the CIA. The reasons anthropologists did not more critically consider why or how their work aligned with the interests of the CIA and Pentagon are considered, and the implications of post--World War II disciplinary decisions to ignore political dimensions of research in favor of ethical considerations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect of race on deliberations inside congressional committees. It investigates whether black representatives are more or less likely to use liberal policy frames and mention marginalized groups during committee debates. The results suggest that black legislators are more likely than whites to present liberal policy frames for black interest bills and they often take a more active role during committee debates. However, black legislators are no more likely than white Democrats to mention blacks and other marginalized groups during committee deliberations. When it comes to mentioning marginalized groups during committee deliberations, party is the most important explanatory factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the term was coined at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, time capsules date back to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when autographs, photographs, and other artifacts were sealed in various cities as tributes to the bourgeois elite. These memorial safes and chests, while related to cornerstone deposits, were inspired by new concerns about the proliferation and decay of paper records, the inadequacy of monuments, and the specter of class apocalypse. But amid mounting labor unrest, they proved contentious, provoking widespread criticism and inspiring fictional reappropriations by authors including Mark Twain and the socialist George Allan England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this field, the authors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: (1) sharing and support, (2) teaching and public education, (3) social critique, (4) collaboration, (5) advocacy, and (6) activism. They show that engagement takes place during field- work; through applied practice; in institutions such as Cultural Survival, the Institute for Community Research, and the Hispanic Health Council; and as individual activists work in the context of war, terrorism, environmental injustice, human rights, and violence. A close examination of the history of engaged anthropology in the United States also reveals an enduring set of dilemmas, many of which persist in contemporary anthropological practice. These dilemmas were raised by the anthropologists who attended the Wenner-Gren workshop titled "The Anthropologist as Social Critic: Working toward a More Engaged Anthropology," January 22-25, 2008. Their papers, many of which are included in this collection, highlight both the expansion and growth of engaged anthropology and the problems its practitioners face. To introduce this collection of articles, we discuss forms of engaged anthropology, its history, and its ongoing dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Rawls's Political Liberalism asserts that liberal politics can and should be conducted without engaging debates about the truth of its theoretical foundations. This paper argues that political liberalism is in fact far more concerned with questions of truth than Rawls was willing to admit. Once political liberalism's relation to truth claims is understood more clearly, it becomes evident that political liberalism is closer to its Enlightenment predecessor than Rawls claimed, and that affinity with the Enlightenment enables a reevaluation of political liberalism's position on the place of religious argument in political debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these different groups of votes. To conduct our analysis we focus on all roll calls on the 13 annual appropriations bills across eight congresses. When we concentrate on these smaller issue areas, we find that voting is multidimensional and members do not vote in a consistent ideological fashion across all issue areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One mystery of U.S. politics is why the president's party regularly loses congressional seats at midterm. Although presidential coattails and their withdrawal provide a partial explanation, coattails cannot account for the fact that the presidential party typically performs worse than normal at midterm. This paper addresses the midterm vote separate from the presidential year vote, with evidence from generic congressional polls conducted during midterm election years. Polls early in the midterm year project a normal vote result in November. But as the campaign progresses, vote preferences almost always move toward the out party. This shift is not a negative referendum on the president, as midterms do not show a pattern of declining presidential popularity or increasing salience of presidential performance. The shift accords with ''balance'' theory, where the midterm campaign motivates some to vote against the party of the president in order to achieve policy moderation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Institute of the Black World (IBW), an Atlanta, Georgia-based activist think tank promoting black liberation. It examines the institute's role in black print culture and argues that it promoted a pragmatic black nationalism. The author comments on the organization in relation to the creation of a black political agenda and the founding of Black Studies programs. Other topics include civil rights activist Vincent Harding and the Atlanta University Center (AUC), an organization of historically black colleges. The article considers the IBW's periodical "The Monthly Report," its pamphlet series called the "Black Papers," and its column the "Black World View," which appeared in several African American newspapers.

Though forgotten by history, the 1935 Gold Clause cases concerning abrogation of gold-indexed bonds were instantly dubbed historical landmarks. Perry v. U.S., the case addressing federal bond contracts, should be remembered as an important instance of strategic judicial retreat. Expecting that the wrong outcome would provoke an attack and harm its legitimacy, the Supreme Court granted the administration an important technical victory. This paper elucidates three conditions necessary for retreat: (1) very strong government outcome preferences, (2) signals of a direct attack, and (3) an environment which makes these threats credible. It compares the Gold Clause cases with a control case, U.S. v. Butler. It shows that the former strongly met the conditions while the latter, in which the Court made a sincere decision, did not. Finally, it refutes legal and attitudinal explanations and argues that the Perry opinion was written to grudgingly reach the strategically necessary result by granting a technical victory in the remedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 presidential election can be said to suffer from an audacity of analysis, a rush to place the Barack Obama presidency in historical perspective before the Obama presidency actually makes history. Some historical facts are irrefutable, such as the election of the first African-American president and the smashing of campaign finance records. But other aspects of the 2008 election remain to be proven, such as whether a permanent Democratic majority has emerged and an electoral realignment has taken place. Another audacious aspect of the discussion of this election has been the crediting of a permanent shift in electoral and governing coalitions to the strategic efforts of a presidential candidate, that is, to link the presidency to structural changes in the vote and the formation of a new Democratic Party coalition. This paper identifies the questions that must be answered to prove such conclusions, and cautiously tenders some answers. First, what indications are there that the Obama coalition is a sustainable coalition or a permanent shift in the vote? Second, what might be the role of a presidential candidate and a sitting president in building and maintaining a majority party coalition?Polity (2009) 41, 388–407. doi:10.1057/pol.2009.8; published online 11 May 2009 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the moral work of a controversial psychiatric diagnosis-Borderline Personality Disorder-in an American eating disorder treatment center in the era of managed mental health care. Based on fieldwork at this clinic spanning more than 6 years, I consider how clinicians invoke aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder in everyday conversation, in a practice I call "borderline talk." I argue that borderline talk emerges in response to being caught between contradictory models of the subject entailed in managed care and psychodynamic discourses. Specifically, borderline talk enables clinicians to endorse a formulation of the subject that, although considered pathological, provides them with a clear path of ethical action in otherwise ethically ambiguous situations. These kinds of everyday ethical negotiations percolate throughout the American health care system and are key mechanisms through which notions of economic expediency become entangled with concepts of the healthy subject. As clinicians struggle out a course of action between competing ethical imperatives, they also struggle out the workability-and failures-of various articulations of the subject within contemporary American cultural ideologies of health and pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that the American people are woefully ignorant about law and courts. In light of this putative ignorance, scholars and other commentators have questioned whether the public should play a role in the judicial process¿for example, whether public preferences should matter for U.S. Supreme Court confirmation processes. Unfortunately, however, much of what we know¿or think we know¿ about public knowledge of the Supreme Court is based upon flawed measures and procedures. So, for instance, the American National Election Study, a prominent source of the conclusion that people know little if anything about the U.S. Supreme Court, codes as incorrect the reply that William Rehnquist is (was) a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; respondents, to be judged knowledgeable, must identify Rehnquist as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (which, of course, technically, he was not). More generally, the use of open-ended recall questions leads to a serious and substantial underestimation of the extent to which ordinary people know about the nation's highest court. Our purpose in this paper is to revisit the question of how knowledgeable the American people are about the Supreme Court. Based on two national surveys¿ using more appropriate, closed-ended questions¿we demonstrate that levels of knowledge about the Court and its justices are far higher than nearly all earlier surveys have documented. And, based on an experiment embedded in one of the national surveys, we also show the dramatic effect of question-form on estimates of levels of knowledge. Finally, we draw out the implications of political knowledge for the degree to which people support the U.S. Supreme Court. Our findings indicate that greater knowledge of the Court is associated with stronger loyalty toward the institution. We conclude by reconnecting these findings to ''positivity theory,'' which asserts that paying attention to courts not only provides citizens information, but also exposes them to powerful symbols of judicial legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinction between ideas and discourse remains ambiguous in ideational theories of political choice. In addition, the role of rhetoric, or the strategic choice of language to represent a given idea, in ideational theories of political decision making is promising but underspecified. To explore these issues, this paper studies the impact of a specific discourse (i.e. an “ensemble of ideas”) about risk—often presented rhetorically as “the precautionary principle”—in a prominent political controversy: the regulation of Brominated Flame Retardants (BFRs). Widely used chemical compounds that improve fire resistance in many commercial products, BFRs have been measured in the fatty tissue of animals and human beings in increasing concentrations. The resulting concern about the safety of BFRs has led to regulatory action in a number of U.S. states. Although some have argued that a discourse of precaution facilitates the enactment of new environmental policies, we find that the rhetoric of the precautionary principle was an impeding factor for these BFR regulations. At the same time, we find that while political actors avoided the precautionary principle by name, they relied on certain ideas often attributed to the principle. Thus, the causal role of specific ideas in politics, we conclude, is significantly contingent on their precise rhetorical presentation.Polity (2009) 41, 189–210. doi:10.1057/pol.2008.31; published online 26 January 2009 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have investigated the diffusion of public policies, often focusing on the ways in which learning among governments influences that process. We know relatively little, however, about those policies that diffuse very rapidly, rather than in the familiar S-shaped distribution associated with policy learning, or about what causes variation in temporal diffusion patterns. This study focuses on policy characteristics as a way to develop a priori expectations about the diffusion patterns of public policies. It argues that the salience and complexity of an issue condition lawmakers' willingness to discount long-term consequences in favor of short-term electoral gain and, thus, to forgo policy learning in favor of immediate adoption. It tests those expectations in an analysis of 57 previously studied policies that diffused between 1850 and 2001 and finds evidence that salience increases the likelihood of rapid diffusion, particularly in noncomplex policies. The paper also explores the causal mechanisms behind these empirical findings in a case study of two policy adoption decisions in California. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, this paper investigates the characteristics of white Southern constituencies that reelected racial liberals to the U.S. House in the period between the 1948 Democratic Convention and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In doing so, it tests theories of Southern politics and the electoral connection. Further, it also addresses several methodological issues regarding inferences made from comparative-historical research. Ultimately, it reveals that racial liberals from the Peripheral South and the cities of the Deep South were able to establish bonds between themselves and their constituents that were sufficient to win reelection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that presidential leadership tends to exacerbate partisan disagreement in Congress on the issues the president champions. The argument starts from the president's role as highly visible party leader. Because of this role, members of Congress of both parties have a collective political stake in the disposition of presidential initiatives: members of the president's party tend to benefit politically from presidential successes, while members of the opposing party receive few political benefits and may suffer costs. These political incentives are likely to drive the parties in Congress farther apart on presidential initiatives than they would be in the absence of presidential leadership. To test for these effects, this paper controls for variation in issue content and isolates for separate analysis votes involving ideologically divisive issues. Analysis reveals that the parties are systematically farther apart on presidential agenda items, controlling for issue content and other factors affecting voting partisanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of higher education diversity for both African Americans and Latinos, by investigating how the structure of the bureaucracy affects the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. The key theoretical determinants of minority college enrollments are legislative representation, bureaucratic structure, university-level policies, and restrictions on affirmative action. A hierarchical linear model of 500+ universities over an 11-year period shows that each of these factors affects minority enrollments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political theorists and pundits often attribute the malaise that they argue hangs over U.S. politics to the omnipresence of political spectacle, where participants are reduced to spectator-voters rather than engaged as active citizens in the political process. The result, many conclude, is widespread cynicism that stymies collective action. We argue, however, that “spectacle” is not necessarily opposed to political participation, and indeed that the “actor–audience” dichotomy so often employed by political theorists is much too simplistic to describe political activism. In fact, groups such as the Billionaires for Bush use spectacle to advance their message(s) and to inspire political change. These groups have much in common with what media scholars call “culture jammers,” activists who deliberately subvert spectacular images in order to reclaim them. In this paper, we explore how groups we label political culture jammers combat cynicism by replacing the dominant images of politics with provocative counter-images. Through their use of ironic self-presentation and humor, political culture jammers offer an appealing alternative means of invigorating political praxis by complicating the citizen/spectator binary that so many critics invoke.Polity (2008) 40, 273–296. doi:10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300104; published online18 February 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Hispanic voting behavior in the 2004 Presidential election. Our research makes a significant contribution to the literature on Hispanic politics, as this is the first study to apply theories of issue and economic voting to a nationwide sample of Hispanic voters. We demonstrate that, similar to Anglos, issues and ideology were highly influential in the vote choice of Hispanics in the 2004 election. However, using the best available data on Hispanic voting behavior for this election, a statewide aggregation of the National Election Pool (NEP), we demonstrate that in this election Hispanic voters placed more emphasis on moral values issues and national security than on traditional domestic issues such as the economy and education. This accounted for Republican gains beyond the overall increase in Bush's vote share from 2000 to 2004. We also show that moral values and national security had roughly equal importance in Bush's victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the manner and extent to which differences in militaristic orientations occupy an important front in the much ballyhooed American "culture war." In particular, we posit that belief in biblical inerrancy engenders a "messianic" militarism. We further suggest that this relationship occurs not only directly but also indirectly, through a heightened sense of nationalism. We compare the predictive capacity of such traditionalistic Christian "believing" to other elements associated with it: (1) cognitive dogmatism, (2) hierarchical visions of authority, (3) devotionalism, and (3) immersion within the traditionalistic Christian culture. Finally, we demonstrate the relevance of these dynamics to understanding "red/blue" cleavage structures in the United States, by showing that as belief in the authority of the Bible increases, so does the perceived electoral salience of foreign policy issues, relative to domestic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers analyses on the Anglo-German agreement in Munich, Germany. It cites that the effort is purpose to read the crap of the paper in order to draw metonym by presenting the country's negotiation in the past, future and contemporary. Moreover, the event will be the process of listening to voices, some polite arguing, a level of emotion and other muttering behind the scenes. In addition, Prime Minister Syrový asserts that the Czechs has accepted the agreement with bleeding hearts and marked by strong resentment.

When women run in general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, they win at approximately the same rates as their male counterparts. With the exception of studies of selected congressional districts in particular years, however, scholars have virtually ignored the gender dynamics of the congressional primary process. In this paper, we fill this void, analyzing data from 1958 to 2004 to test hypotheses about women's victory rates and levels of primary competition. Our analysis results in an additional explanation for women's underrepresentation: the congressional primary process. Although women generally do not win primaries at lower rates than their male counterparts, women in both parties face more primary competition than do men. Gender neutral victory rates, then, are not the result of a gender neutral primary process. Women have to be "better" than their male counterparts in order to fare equally well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]