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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]

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]

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]

While many studies have been conducted regarding the strategic behavior of interest groups, few have empirically examined whether groups compete against each other to change government policies. We ask, does lobbying on one side of a policy issue beget lobbying on the other? Further, how do government officials react to these competing demands? Using data from almost 1,700 comments on 40 government rules, we test two theories: 1) as lobbyists on one side of an issue increase their efforts, lobbyists on the other side will respond in kind, and 2) as the difference between the intensity level of the two sides increases, the bureaucrat is increasingly likely to act in favor of the dominant side. We find that 1) as the pressure from one group of interests increases, so too does the pressure exerted by opposing groups, and 2) as the split between the interest groups becomes more lopsided, the likelihood that bureaucrats will alter the content of final rules to match the preferences of the dominant side increases. In short, in the U.S. federal bureaucracy, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest group theories of politics often shift too easily from theoretical arguments that small business-oriented groups are best able to organize to the proposition that such groups are disproportionately powerful. This paper presents one of the first empirical tests of this proposition during federal agency rulemaking. We use ordered probit to analyze a dataset of over 30 bureaucratic rules and almost 1,700 comments. We find that comments from business interests have disproportionate influence over the promulgation of final rules. We conclude that certain kinds of interests are ?privileged,? not just in their ability to organize into groups in the first place, but also in their ability to ultimately influence bureaucratic policy outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Congress delegates the responsibility for crafting rules and regulations to unelected bureaucrats, whose interests prevail? Are rule makers faithful agents of their elected counterparts, the private sector, the courts, or some combination thereof? Since concern is ubiquitous about "out-of-control" agencies, how can we know when an agency is under control? Despite the cumulatively massive substantive impact of rules on American life and governance and the resultant pressing theoretical questions about the accountability of executive agencies to democratic forces, researchers have yet to provide answers to these questions grounded in a systematic agency-centered study of the process of rule generation. This paper presents a critique of the current scholarship on political control of the bureaucracy and in particular control of the rule-making process. I argue that the current state of the literature presents an opportunity to improve the empirical study of control by theoretical advances in the definition of control, the strategic nature of bureaucratic policy makers, and the nature of the institutional environment in which they work. I propose an empirical test of the new theory that uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of interviews with rule makers, veto players, and interest group representatives to assess the relationship between rule making agencies and their multiple principals. Unlike other studies of political control, the research suggested here focuses on the crucial policy development stage, relies on a multi-dimensional understanding of power, and models bureaucratic behavior as contingent on institutional veto points. Also, while most studies focus on bureaucratic responsiveness to a single principal, this study focuses on how rule makers balance the demands of multiple and conflicting principals. Ultimately, such an approach gives a more reliable and comprehensive picture of bureaucratic control than has heretofore been attained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study that examined state-level factors that can influence U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Methodology of the study; Results of the study; Conclusion.

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]

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]