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The trajectory of the Chinese nuclear program over the last decades of the twentieth century presents a puzzle that nuclear deterrence theory is ill-equipped to explain: Despite a strong commitment to a deterrent strategy and ample economic and technical abilities to build the necessary forces, China allowed its nuclear program to stagnate dangerously â€" perhaps beyond the point of second-strike survivability with respect to the major nuclear arsenals of the world. To explain the pattern of Chinese nuclear development, a richer understanding of the context â€" both domestic and international â€" is necessary, including improved (though still tense) superpower relationships, a shifted focus toward economic growth (for its own sake and as a source of power), and a reduced voice of military actors in policy-making. While not changing the fundamental implications of deterrence models, this context reduced the willingness of the Chinese leadership to make trade-offs when pursuit of nuclear modernization would have compromised objectives in other arenas. This paper suggests that deterrence theory must be broadened to incorporate a wider range of factors, both to reflect the decision-making process and to accurately predict outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper replicates and updates a study by Chamberlain and Haider-Markel in 2005 on regional policy diffusion. The results of the update show that the original results were incorrect, and diffusion did not occur with the policy issue studied. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Starting in the 1970s, the second wave of the women?s rights movement spread globally, transcending national borders. In the following decades, almost every country has responded with some type of women?s rights policy. However, most of this change has been largely symbolic. What makes some policies harder to implement than others? Why are some countries more successful with their implementation? In this paper I propose a policy process framework with two models for the better understanding of both policy formation and implementation. In both models I start from a dimension addressing how a given policy resonates with societal values. In the first model, a second dimension focuses on the different actors and mechanism necessary for policy formation. In the second model, the second dimension focuses on the potential strategies and resources possible for various women?s rights advocates acting and interacting to ensure implementation within their institutional environments. This paper presents the theory behind this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a model of bargaining under certainty to examine the effects that preferences over policy and office have on bargaining duration. In previous work I have shown that the importance of particularistic politics improves our ability to explain patterns of coalition formation cross-nationally. Simply put, the more important particularistic politics are the more politicians behave as office seekers (as opposed to policy seekers). The focus on particularistic politics thus provides a link between the two main strands of theorizing about coalition formation. The paper thus makes two types of contributions. First, it offers us insights into the factors determining the duration of coalition bargaining in a comparative perspective. Extended periods of coalition bargaining may prevent major policy decisions to be addressed and create uncertainty about the future for both political and economic actors. Furthermore, bargaining duration has occasionally been used as a proxy for the ideological divisions within the coalition. If bargaining duration, however, is influenced by the importance of particularistic politics then the proxy is not an appropriate one. The insight offered by modeling the duration of coalition bargaining does not only apply to the formation of coalition cabinets but can also be applied legislative bargaining more generally where the implications of bargaining delay may be more obvious and persistent. Second, the paper contributes to our understanding of coalition governance more generally and, in particular, provides additional support for my theory of coalitions and particularistic politics. In this paper I derive further hypotheses from that same theory but focus on a different dependent variable. By doing so I am both subjecting the theory to further testing as well increasing its scope. I test the empirical implications of the models on a sample of bargaining situations from 10 Western-European countries (although I am trying to increase that number) using an event history analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“The scope of conflict is an aspect of the scale of political organization and the extent of political competition. The size of the constituencies being mobilized, the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the conflicts people expect to develop have a bearing on all theories about how politics is or should be organized… Nearly all theories about politics have something to do with the question of who can get into the fight and who is to be excluded” (Schattschneider 1960: 20). Schattschneider’s emphasis on the linkage between participation and conflict has deeply influenced recent efforts to understand interest group participation in national policy debates. Scholars have examined the number and type of participants active in policy areas or on different policy issues; they have found evidence both of issue areas and issues characterized by conflict (as measured by high/ “broad” participation), and of issues and issue areas where conflict is presumed to be low (because of low/ “niche” participation) (Brown, 1990; Grey and Lowery, 1996; Heinz, et al., 1993). More recent research has considered how common both niche and broad participation are (Baumgartner and Leech, 2001), and how the structure of conflict varies across policy domains (Salisbury, et al., 1987). What unites each of these studies is the idea that conflict is assessed through focus on the type and diversity of organizations that are active in different policy areas or on different issues. Neglected in this research are additional dimensions of conflict – specifically, type, scope and intensity of opposition – that both provide opportunities for and place constraints upon organized interests in their efforts to articulate and pursue their public policy objectives. The paper I propose for the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association meeting will investigate the type, scope, and intensity of opposition that characterizes the debates on different issues as a function of the characteristics of the issues at stake (e.g., recurring versus non-recurring; small, medium, large scope of proposed change), and their institutional and political contexts (e.g., regulatory versus legislative venue; partisan versus bipartisan). In addition, I will study how opposition varies across the different types of organized interests involved in these debates (e.g., business/economic versus citizen, peak versus externality). Among my hypotheses is that there will be differences in the type and scope, but not the intensity, of opposition associated with issues that are primarily regulatory and those that are primarily legislative. I also anticipate that economic interests are more likely to be associated with issues that involve opposition of narrow scope, and that intensity of opposition encountered on issues of interest to citizen groups will differ from the intensity of opposition encountered on issues that draw primarily the attention of economic interests (e.g., citizen groups are expected to be relatively more likely than business interests to encounter opposition in the form of an insufficiently mobilized set of allies). My empirical investigation draws on data I have gathered (in collaboration with Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Beth Leech, and David Kimball) through hundreds of personal interviews and from various public sources (e.g., Lexis-Nexis, House and Senate websites, organization websites, Vanderbilt Television News Archives) about the advocacy efforts associated with 100 randomly selected issues (see http://lobby.la.psu.edu). In my paper, type of opposition will be measured by the source of opposition (e.g., other groups, members of Congress, the public, the president). Scope of opposition refers to the number and diversity of opposition sources, and intensity will be measured along a continuum to indicate the nature of the source’s opposition ranging from lack of support/interest to explicit hostility. I will use a combination of descriptive statistics, cross-tabular analyses, and difference of means tests to investigate the issue- and advocate-specific correlates of opposition type, scope, and intensity (the unit of analysis is the issue debate, and for some analyses, the issue-advocate dyad). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over the dynamic processes of policy planning and budgeting have raged for decades. Proponents of the incremental approach have argued that policy changes tend to be small from year to year. Opponents of the incremental approach have contended that the incremental approach underestimates the importance of radical changes in policies. Recent models of policymaking have integrated the two approaches in to a punctuated equilibrium model in which policy processes experience long periods of stability followed by short periods of rapid, dramatic change. However, this research has been limited to demonstrations of the existence of the characteristic distribution of punctuated equilibrium processes. This paper seeks to advance the research on the dynamics of policymaking by introducing a multivariate approach to studying punctuated equilibrium policy processes. Using a large panel data set on budgetary decisions by educational organizations, this paper employs a multivariate punctuated equilibrium methodology to assess the impact of bureaucratization and district size on the relative frequency of large budgetary changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does public opinion respond to the production of major legislation? A central pillar of representative democracy is that elected officials are held accountable for their actions. There is a rich literature exploring the electoral effects for legislators who deviate from their district’s opinions, and there are numerous anecdotal arguments about the consequences of scandals and foibles for both legislators and executives. However, public policy is neither made by individual Members of Congress nor exclusively by executive actions. The most significant policies are enacted through laws passed by Congress and signed by the president. Scholars have very little understanding of how the public assigns credit or blame for the net output of the legislative system. This paper addresses this question directly. As part of a larger project, this paper will examine the impact of the passage of major legislation on congressional approval. Because approval ratings are collected from individuals but legislation is produced over time, the paper employs hierarchical statistical techniques to answer this question. This method has enjoyed some popularity in education and psychological research, but has not seen frequent use in political science. Concurrent research by the author indicates that while presidential approval is responsive to the production of the system, congressional approval is unaffected. Credit and blame for the joint activities of the political system are laid at the feet of the president, not Congress. This has implications for interbranch power dynamics as well as research on public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional concept of justice is based on the ideals of neutrality and impartiality, the search for and adherence to universal or generalized principles, and rational expertise. Feminist scholars have provided a critique of this traditional concept of justice and have presented an alternative concept of justice that is based on the recognition of difference, particularities, contexts, emotions, and participation. I will refer to this perspective as the dialogue perspective. In addition to the theoretical critique of the traditional concept of justice, a review of the current criminal justice research seems to indicate that policies consistent with the dialogue perspective of justice are more effective than policies consistent with the traditional concept of justice. This leads us to an important question--is there a trade off between just policies and effective policies, or could a different concept of justice create more effective policies? This paper will first present a critique of the impartial perspective of justice and then offer a feminist perspective of justice as a positive alternative to the impartial perspective. Both the traditional and dialogue perspectives want to promote justice and fairness, which is giving people what they deserve. But what is under dispute is what people deserve and how to determine what people deserve. Although it may be possible through the use of the dialogue perspective for policy makers to use principles that will create both just and effective criminal justice policies, if the feminist critique is correct, the dialogue perspective may never be fully utilized because it will jeopardize those who benefit from their current power, and the status quo of the traditional perspective will be maintained regardless of its ineffectiveness. Therefore, the paper will then present the research methodology and findings from 30 in-depth, face-to-face interviews with Utah legislators who were presented with the feminist critique of the ideal of impartiality and its application to criminal justice policies to determine whether an alternative abstract theoretical perspective can inform or enlighten the practical process of making criminal justice policy. The findings presented in this paper will address both how the theoretical feminist perspective can and does inform or enlighten the practical process of making criminal justice policy, as well as how the practical process that legislators experience can inform or enlighten the feminist theoretical perspective. The theoretical feminist perspective enlightens the practical process of making criminal justice policy by providing: a set of criteria to evaluate criminal justice policy, an articulation and defense of the dialogue perspective for those who already operate under that perspective, concrete ways and strategies to encourage others to adopt the dialogue perspective, and an opportunity for those who have been staunch supporters of the ideal of impartiality to think about its ramifications. The practical process that legislators experience informs the feminist theoretical perspective by allowing us to see: a more complex concept of fairness; that it is not the instrumental use of power that maintains the status quo through the use of the ideal of impartiality, but rather it is the lack of personal experience with those who are different that perpetuates the status quo; the problems with and roadblocks to the dialogue perspective; and ways to increase the use of the dialogue perspective. In conclusion, the paper will suggest ways to: improve the feminist critique of the ideal of impartiality, to increase the application of the dialogue perspective to criminal justice policy making, and apply the dialogue perspective to other areas of public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veto player theory argues that a higher number of veto players lowers the likelihood of change; in turn, policies that do not change help to sustain commitments but may prevent adaptation to changing circumstances. This paper challenges that claim of veto player theory by arguing that policy stability does not necessarily mean lower policy adaptability. If policymaking takes place over time with actors interacting repeatedly, more cooperative polities might be able to achieve both objectives at once, and a higher number of veto players might even favor intertemporal cooperation. The paper presents a simple formalization of the argument and some supportive cross-national empirical evidence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a large-scale empirical analysis of interest group influence on EU policy-making across a wide range of issues. The explanation of policy outcomes as well as the democratic legitimacy of the EU crucially depends on how much influence interest groups have and how influence is distributed among them. However, only few studies have addressed the question of influence and most are limited to case studies focusing only on one single issue. Recent literature however suggests that interest group influence varies considerably across issues. It is assumed that influence is not a mere function of interest group characteristics, but strongly shaped by the issue context. The lack of large-N studies controling for issue variables is mainly due to methodological difficulties in measuring influence. Hence, this paper employs a new approach: Drawing on quantitative text analysis performed with Wordfish, policy preferences of interest groups will be compared with the policy output in order to identify the winners and the losers of the decision-making process. While controling for interest group characteristics, the effect of issue-related variables on interest group influence will be tested across 20 policy issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political science field has developed a good understanding of how political institutions shape policymaking incentives. This paper investigates whether these incentives differ given underlying societal preferences. Analyzing the provision of public goods, I begin capturing preferences with a measure of ethnic fractionalization. However, I modify this rudimentary conceptualization by adding a measure of how ethnicity is distributed amongst income groups, what I call ethnic-income cross-cuttingness (in reference to the term cross-cutting cleavages). The paper first introduces this new measure and accompanying cross-national dataset. It then builds a socio-institutional theory of the policymaking process. Specifically, following the Horowitz school, I argue that when society is highly ethnically fractionalized and lowly cross-cutting, that small, majoritarian districts generate better incentives for politicians to cater to broader segments of society and provide more broadly-targeted public goods. This stands in contrast to the traditional institutional wisdom (Lijphart school) that large, PR districts are always best for public goods provision. I test my theory with a dataset of 40-odd developing democracies between 1970-2000. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research examines the interplay among foundations, politics and public policy. This paper uses data from the Foundation Center Foundation Directory, foundations’ tax forms, and foundation publications, as well as the existing literature on policy grant-making, to create a grant and foundation classification system that will be used to answer questions related to the making of policy grants and the relationship between foundation characteristics and the type and purpose of grant making. Using a correlation study, the paper provides an understanding of how foundations fund school districts (are grants made for sports, curricular programs, policy changes, etc.) and whether the purpose of funding varies by the characteristics of the foundations. This paper clarifies the role that foundations play in supporting school districts and improves our understanding of the role that foundations play generally in supporting pre-collegiate education. It also adds to the literature on the relationship between foundations and education and on who influences education policy making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the high-stakes issue of "regulatory takings" as a testing ground, and employing innovative computer technologies, this paper examines how the lower courts respond systematically when asked to create policy without High Court guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines institutional effects on the frequency of policy punctuations. It does so by using the theoretical framework of Baumgartner and Jones in a comparative study of Danish civil defense and Danish national home guard policy 1949-2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests a model of policymaking in which elements of the political context (e.g., ideology, economic resources, party politics, female representation) differentially affect states' use of distinct policy tools -- based on the visiblity and coerciveness of each tool. Using pooled, cross-sectional data from four time points (1990, 1994, 1998, 2002) on states' use of four early care and education policy tools: grants-in-aid for local preschool programs, vouchers for child care, tax credits for child care expenses, or regulation of child care centers, we find evidence to support the notion that the politics surrounding use of each of the policy tools varies and that much of this variation can be explained by characteristics of the policy tools. Although interesting expections are also found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For what kind of policies are elected officials more likely to be responsive to public opinion? The limited research in this area has found varying degrees of strength in the relationship between public opinion and policy on different policy domains. But scholarship about this important question has been handicapped by a lack of adequate measures and estimates of constituency opinion on policy issues. In this paper, I use the unprecedented statistical power and breadth of the 2000 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) to explore the representation of constituency interests in Congress in greater detail than has previously been possible. I examine the relationship between congressional roll-call votes and constituency opinion on 20 different public policy issues. I find that in the House of Representatives between 1999 and 2000, the roll-call votes cast by members of Congress were responsive to public opinion was significant on a wide range of policy issues, including abortion, military spending, education, crime, taxes and the environment. Democratic and Republican lawmakers are responsive to public opinion on substantially different subsets of policies, suggesting a typology of issue responsiveness that is highly dependent on the varying levels of credibility that parties establish with voters on different issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a heuristic framework to examine similarities and differences between parties, this paper examines the left/right dimension in three party systems expected to cartelise (Katz and Mair, 1995). The party systems chosen (Austrian, Danish and Norwegian) are those that exhibit or have exhibited electorally successful populist-right parties: a product of cartelisation (Katz and Mair, 1995). Focusing predominantly on the main majoritarian parties in each system, policy convergence is searched for, though remaining parties on the right in each system are also examined. Convergence is shown in two out of three cases. Similarities and differences are evident across other parties. While some of the main majoritarian parties appear to have damped competition, tentative findings suggest that smaller parties display competitive tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical model of policy decentralization that explicitly accounts for the fact that national and local governments may have preferences over patronage distribution, as well as over policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European deep seated unease with Washington is a serious issue for political actors, analysts and citizens alike, in both sides of the Atlantic. During the presidency of George W. Bush, European agreement with US foreign policy has declined dramatically. Public opinion polls concur that less than 15 percent of the European population supported the reelection of President George W. Bush. The widespread mistrust and strong negative sentiments for the Bush-administration begs the question: Does the image of a politician affect the way citizens evaluate news about policy proposals? In this paper we evaluate the impact of the image of George W. Bush and Nelson Mandela on the way European citizens understand policy issues as they appear in the news media. This research project draws on the literature of media effects, persuasion and information processing. When people are exposed to information from the mass media, they do not evaluate it in an unbiased manner. Instead they use simplified cues or shortcuts based on pre-existing preferences, which affect the way they understand the news. To examine how clearly citizens differentiate their attitudes about the personality of political actors from the policies they support, we analyze data from two experimental studies. We take actual policy proposals as they appear in the news, vary the name of the candidate supporting the proposal, and measure participants' reactions to the informational content of the articles, their approval of the proposed policy, and their evaluation of the candidates. We find that European citizens disapprove a policy promoted by George Bush driven mainly by their strong negative emotional response to this candidate. On the other hand they support a policy that carries the Mandela trademark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research continues to have difficulty distinguishing between moderate, ambivalent, and indifferent policy attitudes. Krosnick (1991) notes that the number of respondents who appear to have moderate policy preferences is likely inflated because midpoint responses do not distinguish between those with meaningful moderate preferences and those who are simply indifferent towards the policy. Others may choose the midpoint because they are ambivalent: torn between good arguments on both sides of the policy debate. Distributions of policy preferences generally show an uptick at the midpoint, likely due to amalgamation of moderate policy preferences, policy ambivalence, and simply indifference. Even when respondents refuse to indicate a policy preference, scholars sometimes override this refusal and place them at the midpoint anyway. I argue, however, that this “muddle in the middle” (Converse 1995) masks important differences between these attitude attributes. Those with a true moderate policy preference favor a middle of the road approach. They want a specific policy enacted and their preference may be weak or strong. For example, they may feel strongly that abortion should be legal, but only in some circumstances (a strong preference for a moderate policy). Those with ambivalent policy preferences are internally conflicted and see the validity of arguments both for and against a policy. Faced with the choice between falsely claiming that they “haven’t thought much about it,” picking sides, or straddling the fence, the select the latter. Indifferent attitudes are those that are simply not that important or relevant to the respondent. Indifferent respondents simply don’t know enough or care enough about the issue to state meaningful preferences. Some will readily admit that they haven’t thought about the issue, while others will place themselves at the midpoint to avoid perceived negative stigma attached to indifference. This paper attempts to disentangle moderate, ambivalent, and indifferent policy attitudes. The above discussion suggests that moderate preferences are likely just as informed and likely to affect other attitudes and behaviors as more extreme preferences. While ambivalent attitudes are unlikely to affect other attitudes and behaviors, they should nonetheless be informed attitudes. Indifferent attitudes are likely uninformed and unlikely to influence other attitudes and behaviors. There are several design features built into the 2000 NES that are particularly helpful for this task. First, the policy preferences are measured using both traditional seven-point scales and a series of branching questions. The former allow respondents to give moderate policy preferences while the latter do not (by narrowing the permissible policy preferences to four). The branching format also measures the strength of a binary policy preference, rather than measuring a more precise location on a policy preference continuum. Second, two versions of these questions are included for some policies: one that explicitly allows respondents to say that they “haven’t thought much about it” and another that doesn’t. The first version allows respondents to express indifference, while the second discourages doing so. This research provides important insights into the substantive meaning of policy preferences and carries implications for their proper measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laments have grown in recent years over the increasingly widespread belief that most policy analysis is now being driven by the service of specific, powerful interests. Three types of responses are apparent: On the right in particular, interest groups have supported the development of "think tanks"; serving particular ideological perspectives, which nurture the development of a cadre of "hired guns"; to develop analytic resources to support established views. A second response is typified by the recent report charted by the minority party in the House, criticizing the politicization of analysis and presumably seeking a return to the world of "neutral expertise". The third response is found in the academic literature, where critics urge the development of a broader discourse (including unrepresented and under-represented groups) and information supporting neglected perspectives and voices (e.g. Hajer, 2003). We can infer a larger critique from these efforts -- that policy analytic tools, and the substantial resources of information and understanding that they represent, are skewing policy deliberation. We argue that these laments offer an incompletely specified response to the defective political process that they have identified. In answer, we offer what we call "the analytic contract" model of policy analysis which we believe offers an approach to analysis that can resolve the concerns that these critics have identified. The model has two important strengths: it prescribes a process that both enhances and focuses policy deliberation; in ways that should enrich participation, and it offers analysts a clearly prescribed role that relies on the strengths of a professional community. Briefly, the model envisages a several stage process. At the outset, an interested party or parties identifies the need for an analysis, perhaps in response to exogenous triggering events, or perhaps not. These interests, together with other interested parties, can then be expected to advertise the need for analysis. This leads to the "contract phase -- in this phase, a "professional analyst" is invited into the process, perhaps with some funding or other support, or perhaps operating on internal resources. The analyst (which may be an individual or may be an organization) then seeks to formulate an "analytic contract". They begin the process by developing a stakeholder survey: this involves the identification of relevant stakeholders (others, e.g. Dunn, 2003, have explored some of these issues, albeit not conclusively), and the development of an understanding of their interests. In this phase, the "policy analyst", operating as a professional, is responsible for identifying relevant stakeholders and incorporating them into the process. We argue that this process offers some hope of overcoming "moblization biases", by charging analysts to operate as professionals, accountable not only to recognized interests, but also to a professional community for their responsibility to identify and incorporate the interests of those interested, but not effectively mobilized. Once this stakeholder community has been identified, the policy analyst then moves to the development of an analytic contract -- but in consultation with the broader stakeholder community that has now been identified. In keeping with Lowi’s insight of many years ago, we argue that the crystallization of this process into a March and Olsen-like "choice opportunity" (as opposed to the more typical evolving soup of policy windows and deeply ambiguous moments of opportunity) improves the chances for the incorporation of poorly mobilized and thinly supported interests. This process is related, in ways to be explored in greater length in the paper, to the literature on democratic discourse and deliberative democracy. The analytic contract that is ultimately negotiated through the facilitation of the professional analysts specifies the questions to be investigated and the data and information resources to be employed (including any relevant research design issues). The analytic contract may, quite plausibly, address multiple and not necessarily commensurate objectives -- it is intended, after all, to "improve the opportunity for the exercise of informed judgement" as E.S Quade said, not to determine policy. Once this contract has been developed, the analysts is then prepared to develop funding for the work envisaged. The analyst remains responsible to the professional community for an appropriate execution of this analytic contract, but this does not preclude the development of support for the work that is more partial and self-serving (so long as the entire contracted exercise is undertaken). This process recognizes that not all analysis will prove "successful", nor will it yield unambiguous results. It seeks to offer "objective analysis"; in an "accountability framework"; (as Landau observed years ago, "objectivity is accountability"; "offering fair controls over assertions, not pristine, unambiguous facts). Analysts are accountable to the community of stakeholders (for the deliberations over the identification and clarification of their sometimes distinctive interests) and to the community of professional analysis for the appropriate development of a fully realized map of the stakeholder universe; for the development of a well articulated analytic contract, in response to their interests; and for the appropriate execution of the terms of this contract. The professional community, then, provides the validation of these analysts -- those operating without this imprimatur, then, are appropriately understood to be engaging in a different enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project addresses a central question in the comparative study of democratic institutions: How do coalition governments, which are composed of multiple parties with often conflicting ideological goals, manage to make policy? Surprisingly, relatively few studies have examined this issue in a systematic cross-national fashion. Instead, most research on multiparty government has focused on the formation and termination of coalitions, largely neglecting the policymaking process between these events. In this study, we address this question by examining lawmaking in two European parliamentary democracies, Germany and the Netherlands. The theoretical model in the project focuses on a central principal-agent problem that coalition cabinets must solve if they are to govern successfully. Because expertise is needed to plan and implement public policy, governments in parliamentary democracies must delegate important policymaking powers to individual ministers who have control over relevant issue areas. In particular, cabinet ministers enjoy considerable autonomy in drafting government legislation within their jurisdiction. For coalition governments, such delegation creates the risk that ministers will use their autonomy to bias policy in favor of their own parties without adequately taking into account the interests of their coalition partners. The incentive to do so grows particularly strong on issues that greatly divide coalition members. The argument proposed here is that parliamentary oversight provides a key institutional mechanism that allows coalition parties to deal with this problem. While it is difficult to police ministers from within the cabinet, coalition members can make use of the legislative process to scrutinize and amend legislation introduced by hostile ministers. We contend that this mechanism is particularly important where the coalition is internally divided. If correct, this argument challenges the common perception that parliaments in Western Europe are largely irrelevant institutions. Legislatures may play a crucial role as an intra-coalition conflict management tool that allows parties with divergent preferences to govern jointly. To evaluate this argument empirically, we examine the relationship between the extent to which government bills are changed in the legislative process (as measured by the proportion of articles in the bill that are amended) and the policy divisions between coalition partners. We perform statistical analysis using original data on over 400 government bills introduced in Germany and the Netherlands from 1982 to 2002. This paper thus provides one of the first systematic attempts to examine the policy-making process within coalition governments and the vital role that parliaments may play in allowing parties with divergent preferences to govern jointly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Hume’s general way of studying politics is by means of an empirical and inductive method that seems consistent with his works on human knowledge and the passions. In the essay, ‘Of Civil Liberty’ for example, he says that political science is a branch of empirical inquiry, which by making observations of political life today and studying political history may yield general principles. These are in turn susceptible to refutation by further experience or other data. This empiricism leads him to doubt even that political science is now possible. The pool of relevant data is so small, he says, and humanity’s power of forming rational generalizations is so corrupted by passion and prejudice, that a science of politics may be something that we can hope to establish only in the future, if at all. In the same essay he writes, ‘I am apt to entertain a suspicion that the world is too young to fix many general truths in politics so that not only the art of reasoning is still imperfect in this science, as in all others, but we even want sufficient material on which we can reason.’ While this suspicion does not prevent him from venturing into political theory, his attitude toward it seems to exhibit the flexibility, originality, and tentativeness that is characteristic of his views on natural religion, science, morals, and other things. How strange it is, therefore, to turn to his essay, ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science,’ in which all doubts about the extent of human knowledge seem to disappear. Here he claims to have discovered in politics certain, ‘causes and principles eternal and immutable.’ At another point he says that he has established, ‘an universal axiom in politics,’ and at a further one he describes a particular generalization as, ‘one of those eternal political truths, which no time nor accident can vary.’ Further, he stipulates that, ‘Effects will always correspond to causes,’ and then, when comparing two kinds of aristocracy, he says that ‘The different operations and tendencies of these species of government might be made apparent even a priori.’ The extravagance of the claims in this essay is inconsistent with his other writings, and the meaning of these claims is most confusing given the general bent of his theory of human knowledge. This paper attempts to explain Hume’s claims in this essay by reference to the context in which they were written and his rhetorical goals in composing the work. In short, Hume found it necessary to choose between being a good empiricist and a good citizen; and he chose the latter. This fact has consequences for how we should read his Essays and other popular works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many policies or programs surrounding us today, from highway safety policies, innovation or science and technology policies to privatization policies or child wellbeing programs are implemented or reiterated without a sufficiently thorough and systematic analysis of their impact. Understandably, using comprehensive public policy analysis methodologies is not always a welcome or affordable option. However, in those instances when the use of such methods is sought, as well as in many other instances, two extremely powerful and yet not so often used methodological tools can be of tremendous value: time series based analyses and pragmatic eliminative induction enhanced quasiexperimental inquiry (QEI). The Quasi-experimental tradition underscores the importance of identifying and eliminating threats to validity from our analysis based on quasiexperimental settings. A very new and not so well known development in this tradition is the addition of context validation (elimination of context based threats to validity) to the four already traditional types of validations, respectively statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, external validity, and construct validity (Dunn 1997). This is done through pragmatic eliminative induction (PEI). PEI suggests a way to determine and test “an approximately complete set of rival hypotheses” (Dunn 1997) and not solely some rival hypotheses chosen most often because they are readily known or easily testable. Employing the methodology in our study is (1) scientifically more complete, and (2) likely to yield interesting insights that may not have been uncovered so far. In this paper, we offer a systematic description of the use of the pragmatic combination of these methods, their advantages and practical challenges to their application. We exemplify by briefly applying the combined methods to various policy analytical settings, such as assessing success of innovation or science and technology policies, forecasting or assessing success of implemented privatization policies, and assessing success of some Public Health programs. We also propose and test a small modification to the original (Dunn 1997) PEI technique for enhancing QEI based methodologies, likely to make the process more affordable and less time and resources intensive This study thus offers one of the first practical applications of the extremely new and thus seldom used PEI enhanced quasi-experimental method in scientific policy analysis. Combining PEI with the use of other policy impact analytical tools should empower policy analysts with a new powerful, quasi-complete and now relatively affordable tool in their methodological toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of laws a legislature makes in a given year reflects the broadness or narrowness of the area in which it updates current policy during that period. The legislature decides on this so as to maximize the chair?s utility. Those variables, therefore, that increase benefit or decrease cost add to the annual number of laws; socio-economic change, political change, the strength of the governing parties, and legislative resources are expected to influence legislative productivity. In this paper, these hypotheses are tested in two ways. The first approach compares 45 countries. The second deals with the longitudinal data of Japanese lawmaking from 1961 to 1994. In terms of statistics, it is necessary to tackle the problem of spurious regressions because these time series data are unit root processes. Engle Granger methodology solves it and confirms the theory. The results show that political factors, not socio-economic ones, determine the number of laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public officials, administrators, and scholars may agree that direct democracy complicates direct and efficient policy-making, but the tenor of their agreement often be varies. While some praise direct democracy in local government and the increasing number of initiatives, referenda, and recalls others suggest we have gone to far, binding the hands of local officials to do anything to promote local growth and prosperity. The case of Chestnut Street in a small, rural Mid-west city offers lessons that help illuminate issues surrounding (and the arguments for and against) direct democracy in local government policy making. The case revolves around the planning and authorization of paving a small section of road in the city involving the interaction of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in conjunction with direct citizen involvement. This paper explores the impact of direct democracy on local government and the ensuing interaction between the three branches of government. It brings the issues down from the general focus on these issues to where the rubber meets the road (literally) in local governments, where citizen legislators, professional administrators, neighbors, and local judges connect to forge the future of municipalities. Governments need to be more acutely aware of the interplay between the three branches because the citizens are becoming more active or at least more informed Recognizing the integration of the legislative, executive and judicial elements of local policy making will improve the content as well as the process of making collective decisions in municipal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of Mayhew’s (1991) Divided We Govern created an explosion of research on the causes of legislative gridlock, but most of these explanations hold that divided government are the result of ideological differences within legislative institutions or between legislatures and the executive. Those few studies looking at an interest group-based explanation have placed blame on tightly knit communities of groups with similar interests conspiring to defend the status quo rather than support new, innovative legislation. In this paper I take an alternative approach by assuming that interest groups working on individual issues have policy preferences at odds with each other and compete to influence legislation. I argue that because legislators desire consensus before moving bills, they are only willing to proceed when competition among groups can resolve into consensus rather than conflict. I test a set of hypotheses based on this argument with data drawn from interviews with interest groups lobbying six different policy issues from 1999 to 2002. I find that the degree of group competition does have a substantial impact on the probability of legislation being enacted into law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paper proposed as part of panel 031015: Questioning the Applicability of the Natural Science Model to Political Science For over a century, hermeneutic-phenomenological thinkers such as Dilthey, Gadamar and Charles Taylor have been pointing out a critical difference between the natural and social sciences, which renders the methods of the first inappropriate for the latter. Natural objects exist independently of what the researcher thinks about them; they cannot, in Anthony Giddens’s words,answer back to the investigator. In the social sciences, however, the facts may be changed by the desire to change [them]; and this desire, already present in the mind of the investigator, may be extended, as the result of this investigation, to a sufficient number of other human beings to make it effective. The purpose is not, as in the physical sciences, irrelevant to the investigation and separable from it: it is itself one of the facts (E. H. Carr). The mainstream of American political science ignored this hermeneutic critique and had increasingly become committed to a positivist epistemology patterned after the model of the natural sciences. Interestingly, the discipline’s continuing aspiration to become a science coincides with a growing aspiration to become relevant to public debates and policymaking. For example, recent APSA president Robert Putnam launched an initiative to enhance the public presence of political science. The putative contradiction between these aspirations -- to be detached from the politics we study while seeking to influence these politics -- is rarely discussed. I seek to (re)open such a discussion through a critique of three important books in IR: Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire, Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War, and Fareed Zakaria’s From Wealth to Power. All three books were written in the idiom of science, and all of them offer generalizations claimed to apply across time and space. All three books empirically observe a pathology in the international body politic; and all of them have normative implications that, if acted upon by their readers, would cure the pathology. Herein lies the tension: if the policymakers to whom the books are partly addressed were to modify their behavior according to the lessons implicit the books, the empirical generalizations elaborated in these studies would cease to be valid. For example, if national leaders learned that the belief in security through expansion is a dangerous myth (Snyder), they might avoid expansionary policies in the future. If they do so, the empirical regularity documented by Snyder’s analysis -- the striking proclivity of great powers for over-expansion -- would no longer hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of voting systems as a constitutive tool in the process of democratization. I use voting system reform as a lens through which to examine the development of modern, mass-participatory democracy in the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Specifically, I look at movements for proportional representation on the national and state level beginning in the Reconstruction period and extending to the Progressive era. Scholars have explained such movements as either a part of a broader trend of democratization or an example of electoral engineering whereby incumbents attempt to change the rules in order to ensure future electoral success. I argue that these explanations are misleading and insufficient, respectively, and that voting system reform under conditions of democratization can best be understood as an attempt to undermine working class influence in legislative bodies. The driving force behind voting system reform is elite anxiety over the fate of their representative institutions after suffrage expansion. Elites sought voting systems reform as a means of constituting the electorate in such a way that it would serve their vision of good government. The movement succeeded on two levels: in establishing institutional barriers to mass participation, and in constituting a model of modern democratic government where participation is divorced from representation and policy making is primarily an elite enterprise [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study will examine the effects of policy diffusion on the development of constitutional courts during the early stages of the democratic transitions in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia. Constitutional courts are often assigned the task of interpreting constitutional limits on government power, a role essential to democratic transitions. (Schwartz, 2000) I choose these fours cases, because of the different levels of success achieved by the courts in these countries, so as to better examine the diffusion of the constitutional court concept from Western Europe to these countries. All four of the countries studied are former authoritarian states that began the transition to democratic states after 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union (although in the case of Poland and Hungary the transitions began prior to 1989). The different processes used in developing new governmental systems in each of these countries may be used to help understand the critical role of the constitutional court in the democratic transition process. This becomes even more important when one considers the how these countries modeled their new constitutional courts. Did these countries use a “blue print” method of policy development when creating their new courts, or did they simple develop their own version of the constitutional court based upon the concept? Alternatively, what political factors played a role in the development of the constitutional courts in these countries? In this paper I will examine the history of the constitutional courts in each of the four countries used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What restrains a military – one which had extended its role into politics and policy-making – from challenging or vetoing civilian authority again? The military monopolizes the instruments of coercion and may use force to pursue its goals. This unique and virtually absolute source of power poses a significant threat to civilian rule and the stability and progress of democratization. Given these considerations, what restrains the military, especially one that had interceded in politics previously, from re-intervening? This paper evaluates the conditions that foster the military’s restraint in South Korea and Taiwan from the 1970s to 2000. The focus on systematic evaluation fills a gap in existing studies . The results show that, contrary to the prevailing prognoses, the military’s restraint in South Korea and Taiwan are positively related to legislative fractionalization and negatively related to GDP growth. These results underscore the utility of systematic evaluation for theory-building in the civil-military relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a politician, the president enjoys tremendous access to the media in order to advance his political agenda. In his role as America’s chief public administrator, the president is responsible for creating, advocating, and implementing policy, despite the fact that the policy agenda is largely the exclusive realm of Congress. This paper provides an empirical test of Kingdon’s multiple streams theory. I examine the role of the State of the Union address in the legislative policy process by looking at congressional responses to the president’s policy proposals. Presidential proposals made during State of the Union addresses of eight presidents from 1960 to 2003 are examined with respect to the effects of issue salience, policy areas, and contextual influences on the number of bills that survive the committee stage of the policy process. The results indicate that (1) presidents are able to use the State of the Union address to increase the level of issue salience for their policy proposals, (2) presidents are able to use rhetorical strategies to make public appeals for their policy proposals by calling on Congress and the mass public to act, (3) the policy area pertaining to the president’s policy proposal affects the level of salience toward the proposal, and (4) the policy area and the level of salience may also affect the likelihood that bills will make it out of committee. Overall, the findings suggest that the State of the Union address plays an important role in the policy process by providing the president an opportunity to influence the national policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a two-level game approach to explain the normative character of the EU’s CFSP. Analyzing the role of democracy and human rights values in the second pillar, it identifies three causal factors that shape the normatively driven policy-making:.x000d.On the supply side, first,under the unanimous voting setting, the final outcomes reflect either a lowest common denominator according to which the idealized and commonly accepted norms would generate little resistance, or a ‘creative ambiguity’, a deliberately designed strategy by member states with vaguely stated foreign policy objectives which members can and do interpret differently when they have to act. Second, the high number of veto points, by decreasing issue ownership and spreading responsibility hinder any effort to define concrete interests or possession goals from normatively driven milieu goals..x000d.On the demand side,high levels of domestic support for common foreign policy lead political leaders to give broad promises and set objectives that conform to the preferences of their constituencies such as protecting human rights. The potential benefits stemming from higher domestic support both for the governmental parties and the EU integration easily offset the costs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper models an actor’s policy making tactics when others are facing the same challenges. It focuses on the ways they can learn from or follow others to navigate complexity. I have initially applied this model to firms’ responses to ambiguous legal changes in order to provide leverage on legal impact questions. It applies to other situations including policy choice in state legislatures and regulatory agencies as well. I assume that mappings from policies to outcomes are uncertain and that it is costly to learn the mapping to enact an optimal policy. I also assume that this uncertain mapping is partially invertible. (I model the uncertainty as Brownian motion) Observing another’s policy choice and outcome, an actor knows how well this policy will meet its needs, and in which direction to move to get closer. I derive conditions for when an actor will learn from another and how they will learn. Choices of who to learn from, and whether to simply adopt another’s policy, or attempt to alter it to better meet one’s own goals will depend on the complexity of the issue, and the traits of the other actors. This model yields predictions about learning, policy interdependence, and diffusion in legal response and other settings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at legislative choices in the judicialization of campaign finance policy. Examining roughly 90 years of campaign finance law prior to the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), I find that Congress usually maintained direct control over the policy, with very little judicial review. An important turning point came in the Watergate years, and my study uncovers an interesting motive behind the extensive judicial review provisions enacted in the 1974 FECA. From Buckley v. Valeo onward, political leaders have sought judicial review as a way of regaining their own control over campaign finance policy. Thus, while scholars often assert that judicial review has foreclosed reform, recourse to legal institutions was actually vital to legislative policymaking in the field. Congress needed to delegate policymaking discretion to courts, both to overcome internal conflicts over the rules and to entrench the policy for the future. In fact, the legislative history on campaign finance policy reveals something of a paradox: the more seriously legislators wish to restrict campaign finance practices among incumbents in the political branches, the less they are able to fashion those rules independently of courts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way in which the internal organization of legislatures, in addition to the power of legislatures relative to their institutional rivals, shapes the legislative party system. We argue that the incentives for aggregating across districts in a bid to create large national parties are strongest where legislative policy-making authority is concentrated in the hands of the largest party. To test this argument, we draw on recent studies of legislative organization to develop measures of our key independent variable, the distribution of legislative policy-making authority. Using two different data sets, one a cross-section of recent elections from approximately fifty minimally democratic countries and the other a time series cross section of approximately 300 post-war elections in twenty advanced industrial democracies, we find support for our argument that party system aggregation and the number of electoral parties are related to the concentration of policy-making authority within the legislature, as well as to external constraints on the legislature's authority. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If globalization is ever to become a productive analytical tool and policy guide, it requires far more precision and clarity than now conveyed. This paper suggests a four-track framework encompassing political-legal, security, cultural-ideological, and economic affairs as indispensable requisites for globalization, each track containing at least three essential foundations of power. On the basis of these measures, globalization, despite the presence of some necessary architecture, remains a myth lodged between system anarchy and world government. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I test whether treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and media trust moderates the persuasive impact of positive news about the UN, and different media sources reporting that information, on subjects' UN policy preferences. Of particular interest is whether subjects' level of trust in the news media moderates the impact of the treatments on subjects' stated UN policy preferences. Building on the Reception-Acceptance-Sample model's theoretical axioms (Zaller 1992), this paper hypothesizes that media trust plays a central role in moderating the persuasive impact of political messages shaping political opinions. OLS regression results suggest that treatment group subjects' policy preferences were generally more positive compared to the control group, taking into consideration the relevant moderators. The strongest positive policy preferences were associated with strong Democratic treatment group subjects with high political awareness and high general media trust. OLS regression analysis did not indicate any statistically significant interaction effect among treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and trust in specific media sources that they were exposed to in the experiment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diermeier and Fong (2008) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In that model, policy making proceeds until the proposer has no more incentive to make a new proposal to replace the previously approved policy. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and any preference profile. We also provide an algorithm to compute these equilibria. In any such equilibrium proposal power is endogenously limited compared to the case of no reconsideration. The general model is then applied to various policy environments, including a model with spatial preferences. In the context of a public goods environment we can show that lack of commitment increases policy efficiency. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congressional conference committees serve a crucial legislative purpose: to reconcile bicameral disagreement. Though we articulate this fact in introductory government courses, in secret we offer a separate detail: conference committees are organized to advance the majority's preferred policies. The purpose of this paper is to assess these competing perspectives. Using data from the 104th - 110th Congresses I find that in the current era of strong parties, the bicameral function of conference committees—coordinating the behavior of both chambers—serves as an institutional constraint on the majority in their pursuit of party median policy. This is not to say that conference committees cannot be marked by party politics: quite the contrary. In assessing the two perspectives (the partisan and coordinating theories) I find that small conference delegations with non-jurisdictional conferees advance the policy goals of the majority party while large conference delegations with policy experts expedite the bicameral reconciliation process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the agenda status and change of the prescription drug policy domain. The dynamic governing the evolution of pharmaceutical policy, and drug importation in particular, is a case study in how positive and negative feedback shape policy subsystems. We open our study with a brief review of the literature dealing with policy equilibria and subsystems. The empirical portion of the paper develops congressional indicators of attention and jurisdiction that allow us to track the evolution of pharmaceutical policy between 1947 and 2007. Our preliminary findings suggest both the House and Senate have periods of subsystem politics typical of a dominant coalition, as well as sessions characterized by competitive politics. Forthcoming research will provide an even more nuanced measure of subsystem political variation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an original critical and conceptual analysis of different models of space, society and politics now employed by a variety of social scientists. It shows the limitations of those models plus their usefulness for empirical studies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines states’ climate change policies using several analytic approaches. The results show that states’ internal factors, are stronger predictors of states’ climate change policies than are diffusion effects from neighboring states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a three-dimensional model of punctuated equilibrium in immigration policymaking, reviews the history of immn policy, and analyzes the 2005-07 debate over comprehensive immigration reform in this context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the factors leading to successful climate policymaking in California, and how lessons from the sub-national experience can be applied to national climate policymaking in the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of legislative institutions to produce public policy depends on the willingness of members to introduce legislation. In this paper, I explore the individual and institutional factors that influence the number of bills senators introduce. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent decades in western democracies new governance patterns have emerged that have challenged prevailing analytical models and generated a diversity of new approaches. What is often missed in both cases is the issue of how the relationship between politics and policy is reconfigured and re-orientated in these new patterns. This paper attempts to first describe how this relationship appears to have changed in terms of a communication systems shift. Second, it will investigate ways of characterizing the difference between older politics-policy forms and more recent policy-politics patterns as a shift from model to modal behaviour. This second aspect draws attention to the emergent qualities of interactive policy formation thus sensitizing political analysis to questions of how open generative modes operate in fluid conditions while nonetheless 'authoritatively allocating value' (Easton). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about gender dynamics in defense and foreign policy-making in the House of Representatives. In this paper, we explore gender differences in committee membership and legislative activity in these domains from 1991-2007. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss circumstances under which the dyadic model of policy diffusion can produce misleading estimates in favor of policy emulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]