Search

This paper re-examines the empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory of seat change in U.S. House elections. The theory contends, in short, that a substantial part of the impact of national electoral forces on seat change acts indirectly through the intervening variable of challenger quality. District and aggregate level models of challenger quality are estimated using a new database of House challengers. Jacobson's district level model is estimated using pooled data from the 1946-2002 elections. Krasno and Green's district level model and a revised version of their model are estimated for each of the 1946-2002 elections. Jacobson's aggregate level models of relative challenger quality are estimated using data from the 1946-2002 elections. A new aggregate level model of challenger quality is developed in this paper. The overall performance of the new model as measured by explained variance is comparatively greater than for earlier models. The impact of national forces on challenger quality is moderate at best. A new seat change model including challenger quality as a causal variable is introduced and estimated for the 1954-2002 elections. Estimates of this model demonstrate that challenger quality is an important cause of seat change. In addition, the impact of both national and district electoral forces on seat change, acting through the intervening variable of challenger quality, is estimated using data from the 1954-2002 elections. The indirect impact of national forces on seat change is moderate. Finally, an alternative measure of challenger quality constructed from data originally gathered in order to construct Krasno and Green's measure of challenger quality is substituted for Jacobson's traditional measure. The substitution improves the overall performance of the new aggregate level model of challenger quality presented here, but the additional gain in the performance is small. In conclusion, the analysis presented here provides empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory. However, the theory has limited explanatory power. The impact of national forces on seat change acting through challenger quality is not large enough to account for much of the observed seat change that occurs from one election to the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For five seasons, The West Wing has remained one of the most popular dramas on television. For a show that features no sex, little violence, and lots of fast-paced dialogue about arcane political issues of the day, the appeal of the show appears obscure. In this paper, we will see how TWW taps into particular American ideological narratives regarding duty, power, and their interrelation. TWW offers the viewer an idea of what duty means in the particular context of an American political ideology; furthermore, it attempts to work out how Americans demonstrate a commitment to their duties, and to whom or what that sense of duty is owed. Since the show exists within the scenery of the American presidency and politics more generally, it also addresses (albeit indirectly) the allure of power in public service, acknowledging that a sense of duty often proves insufficient to motivate individuals. But American attitudes and ideas of power, as American political figures from Washington to Lincoln to Lyndon Johnson have noted, contain much nuance and appreciation for the good of power, contrary to our popular (and perhaps populist) notions of the human corruptibility that comes from power. Such being the case, the paper unwinds the interweaving of duty and power, demonstrating how TWW’s creators and cast propound a theory of American politics that has deep roots in the history of our political ideology and that emphasizes familiar rhetoric while pointing to little remembered components of our shared ideological heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to systematically explore the religious rhetoric of recent U.S. President’s (Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush). Considerable effort has been spent reporting the religious rhetoric of Ronald Regan and George W. Bush. In response to this it has been noted that practically all U.S. Presidents have used religious rhetoric at various occasions (Dionne 2003). While the topic of the religious rhetoric of presidents has sparked this debate, to date no one has performed a systematic evaluation of the religious rhetoric of presidents. This paper will provide a more complete evaluation of the phenomenon of presidential use of religious rhetoric. It examines how presidents differ in this realm. It also will display the palpable difference in the use of religious rhetoric among the presidents. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have used more religious language, as a total of all their spoken words, compared to other recent presidents. That fact is interesting, but what is more interesting is how the content of their religious rhetoric has differed from other presidents. A second goal of this paper was to see if the rhetoric differed between presidents of different parties. Questions answered by this paper are: Do Republicans use more religious language, as a percent of total language, than Democrats? And, is there an ideological/theological difference between the parties in the use of religious rhetoric? A primary accomplishment of the paper was the creation of a coding mechanism to help try to categorize religious language on a liberal/conservative spectrum. To do this, three dichotomies and were created. These dichotomies separate theological emphases into categories that could be considered liberal or conservative. The dichotomies are: (1) specific theological constructions / universal principles; (2) other-worldly focus / this-worldly focus; (3) good v. evil & universal sin / sin as the absence of good. The former sections of the dichotomies are considered conservative and the latter are considered liberal. The presidential speeches coded for this paper will be: the party nominee’s acceptance speech at the party’s nominating convention, the new president’s inauguration speech, and all of his State of the Union addresses. One advantage of using these speeches is that they are uniform. Another advantage is that if significant differences in the religious rhetoric used by presidents exist, those differences are more likely to be observed by examining speeches given on standard occasions of public ritual. By exposing the differences among the presidents and between the presidents of different parties, this paper will help scholars investigate such things as: differences in the worldviews of political elites, partisan ideology and its manifestation in political communication, and religious belief structures and the effect of such structures on political communication. My hope for this paper is that it will help lead towards an investigation into the reciprocal relationship between presidential rhetoric and American political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did aggressive issue advocacy tactics become prevalent in the mid-1990s? One hypothesis is that political actors took time to ``learn’’ about the dimensions of election law. Election law is dynamic, however, sensitive to how statutes and regulations are interpreted, changed, or modified; thus political learning takes place in a evolving regulatory context. This paper is about the relationship between that context and the political actors charged with conforming to it, with a specific emphasis on interest groups. I examine all advisory opinion requests to the FEC between 1977 and 2003 (these are specific requests to the FEC about the permissibility of proposed campaign activity), and I make two key conclusions. First, political actors are dynamic participants that understand and respond quickly to changes in the regulatory environment. Second, approval or disapproval of these requests varies across time and type of petitioner. From this, I assert that one explanation for tactical emergence and diffusion lies in how regulatory watchdogs interpret (and change their interpretation of) election law. This paper makes a contribution to the literature by arguing that rules matter in understanding how groups and political actors choose their electoral tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that the United States is going through a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has risen from a marginal place in the realm of U.S. military thinking to a central role in studies of the future of warfare. However, writing in academic political science has trailed in its recognition of the importance of RMAs for international security. RMAs can generally be defined as the synergistic combination of innovations in military technology and changes in thinking about how to organizationally use military force. RMAs give nations qualitative increases in military capabilities that change the nature and structure of international conflict, allowing them to conduct military operations faster, in a broader geographic area, and with greater intensity. This paper focuses specifically on the nuclear revolution, testing the empirical importance of nuclear weapons for the initiation and escalation of international conflict. Three advances in the literature are developed. First, the data setup allows for comparative hypothesis testing to begin empirically evaluating the Waltz/Sagan debate. Second, the paper uses newly collected data on chemical and biological weapons to conduct empirical tests of their relative importance for international conflict. Third, the paper incorporates measures of uncertainty regarding WMD possession to determine the way varying levels of certainty influence the escalation of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of how national party leaders set their party’s policy positions. Currently, the literature on this question exhibits a gap between theory and reality; spatial models predict convergence of party policy positions in a two-party setting, while empirical scholars found divergence in real world situations. Our paper is an attempt to fill in this gap. We do so by introducing two additional issues that have been relatively neglected in the existing literature. First, we stress the importance of establishing a party label for national party leaders as part of a strategy for the goal of seat-maximization in addition to the Downsian convergence strategy. Second, we address the issue that national party leaders are likely to adjust their party policy positions in response to heterogeneous preference distributions of voters across districts, in which the party has varying degrees of success. Incorporating these two issues, we show in a simple spatial model that in a two-party, single-member plurality system, two parties’ positions on a given policy issue are likely to converge if the given policy issue is at stake in closely competed districts, while two parties’ positions on a given policy issue are likely to diverge if the given issue is at stake in districts where one of the parties already has a secure majority. We use the case of the US party system (1945-2000) as the empirical test and find that the regression results are consistent with this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the evolution of civil-military relations theory in the United States. Its central claims are that there are two traditions in American civil-military relations: the republican theory of the citizen soldier and the liberal theory of the neutral professional. These two traditions have their roots in two distinct periods of American history. The citizen soldier is a product of the anti-rationalism prevalent in founding political thought, while the liberal tradition was born of a new rationalism that characterized Progressive Era thinking. The following pages detail the birth and evolution of these two theories and conclude that this history reveals important conceptual difficulties in the now orthodox liberal view. First, contemporary calls to abandon the ideal of the citizen-soldier as an outdated concept ignore the important role first principles play in democratic legitimacy claims. Such an abrupt break with the founding beliefs threatens military democratic legitimacy in a country that embraces first principles as a kind of secular religion. This legitimacy problem is particularly troublesome in Samuel Huntington?s outright rejection of the Constitution as having failed to establish an appropriate civil-military relationship. The second problem with wholesale dismissal of the citizen-soldier tradition is the discredited assumption upon which liberal views like ?objective civilian control? rest. Observers of Public Administration have long demonstrated the neutral professional of Progressive Era lore to be fallacious. The actions of elected officials and their administrative executers are each fundamentally political. This has been particularly evident in recent U.S. military missions in which the army has increasingly assumed constabulary and state-building functions. Nevertheless, as many public administration theorists argue for a refounding of administrative legitimacy on the concept of representative bureaucracy, civil-military relations literature calls for an abandonment of its own longstanding version of representative bureaucracy: the citizen-soldier. In sum, the liberal vision of the military as a tool of society rather than a part of society is theoretically and practically flawed, as well as dangerously dismissive of legitimating founding principles and beliefs. This paper argues for the need to reengage the citizen-soldier tradition as a central concept in constructing a military that better reflects American society. The issue is determinative of the kind of army the nation will have and, indeed, the kind of democracy the nation will become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following methodology employed in the United States (Lieske 1993) this paper examines the existence of regional political cultures in Canada, the UK and Australia. Existing literature in all three cases suggests that political boundaries, whether provincial, regional or state, create political sub-cultures. An examination of existing data suggests, however, that these are not sub-cultures, nor are they created by sub-state politics. Rather, they are regional variant cultures encouraged by differing patterns of treatment from the parliaments in Ottawa, London and Canberra. Building on methodology adapted from Lieske’s article on “Regional subcultures in the United States” and presented at the recent Canadian Political Science Association Conference the analysis draws on aggregate data for constituencies and then identifies coherent cultural clusters. Data from election studies allow for an analysis of the dominant attitudes and behaviours in each cluster. The paper argues that such clusters operate across and within sub-State political boundaries and urges a conceptual distinction between political sub-cultures and regional variations of a dominant culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the functioning of the governing system of the United States by analyzing distributional outcomes from 1947-2000. The key question of this paper is whether public policy influences distributional outcomes. The macro politics model of the U.S. governing system (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002) and the power resources theory of welfare policy (Huber, Ragan, and Stephens 1993) suggest that left policies should equalize the distribution of income. I utilize single equation error correction models to assess the impact of policy on income inequality through two mechanisms ? the manipulation of economic opportunity and redistribution. Since nearly every government action influences economic opportunity, I examine policy in the aggregate rather than focusing only on policies explicitly designed to redistribute income. The analysis indicates that policy influences inequality through both mechanisms, with left policy producing more equality. The results are consistent with power resources theory and strongly support the macro politics model, by demonstrating that political choices are an important determinant of distributional outcomes. Furthermore, the manipulation of economic opportunity is as important as, and works in tandem with, explicit redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhanced political competition is a crucial element of the “resurgence of the states,” and many American states are significantly more competitive than they were a generation ago. What effects have these changes had on their political processes? Since V. O. Key examined the American South a half century ago, scholars have celebrated the positive effects of political party competition. Strategic politicians in competitive states are expected to mobilize new participants into politics, leading to more responsive outcomes. Furthermore, because these formerly passive citizens are generally of lower economic status than those who are already active, such mobilization is predicted to result in greater economic redistribution. A generation of scholars has challenged these expectations, however. First, empirical tests have been largely inconclusive and suffer from methodological and substantive limitations. Second, the logic of this classic argument excludes important political realities. This paper is part of a larger project that alters the terms of this debate in several important ways. Its first contribution is substantive. Many studies link enhanced inter-party competition to policy outcomes, such as increased welfare spending. Assertions about why such changes take place are implicit in these accounts but rarely examined. To construct a convincing account of why competition matters, it is essential to look at this missing link. Scholars often speculate that policy changes result from shifts in the amount of electoral participation, the types of individuals that are mobilized into the process, and the responses of political leaders to these changes. In this paper, we examine this last domain. We test the hypothesis implied by theories of party competition that state legislators from more competitive districts are more likely to be involved in redistributive legislative activity. The second contribution of our paper is methodological. With few exceptions, studies of inter-party competition look exclusively at cross-sectional variation. In contrast, our paper looks intensively at developments over time within three states that have differed considerably in trends in party competition since World War II: Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas. Texas represents a logical candidate for inclusion because the state has undergone a postwar transition from a state dominated by Democrats to one where Republicans hold the levers of power. In contrast, Massachusetts was once competitive but is now dominated by a very liberal Democratic Party. Maryland provides a control case, remaining solidly Democratic throughout the period. Therefore, at the state level, we assess if changes in competitiveness over time are linked to changes in redistributive legislative activity over time. This case selection allows us to account for two important challenges to hypotheses about the effects of party competition. First, many analyses fail to consider the role of race, a curious omission given the importance of the South in these discussions and the likely role of race in creating the new competitiveness within states. Second, the proponents of party competition often fail to address the nature of one-party states. The uncompetitive Southern states of the mid-twentieth century were ruled by conservative coalitions, and several studies link policy outcomes to liberal party control rather than competition. By looking at both Northern and Southern states that vary considerably in ideology and racial composition, we can account for these possibilities. Party competition plays a peculiar role in accounts of American politics. Textbooks note its desirable properties, and comparative politics scholars have incorporated these insights into their discussions of democratization. At the same time, the empirical record is actually quite ambiguous. This paper is a step toward the construction of a more compelling account of the role of inter-party competition in our political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the work of scholars who study foreign policy decisions by courts as well as legal scholars who have noted an anecdotal trend of court deference to the political branches of government when deciding cases involving international law. It puts these anecdotal observations to the test by empirically examining if courts faced with cases involving international law follow the attitudinal model or instead defer to the expressed preferences of the political branches, particularly the Executive branch. This will build on a paper I am presenting at the Southern Political Science Association, which examines international law cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. It will study whether the lower courts follow the same patterns of decision-making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a much larger study that uses the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy as a window into understanding the influence of non-judicial and other non-governmental actors on the development of constitutional meaning. Using a de-centered or interpretive technique, the paper challenges the narrative that the rather drastic constitutional shifts that occurred in the areas of federalism in the mid-1990s can be attributed to President Ronald Reagan and an aggressive constitutional agenda pursued by his Counselor turned Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Using evidence drawn from an in-depth examination of the speeches and writings of actors associated with both the early Federalists and the Reagan Administration as well as data gathered from personal interviews, this paper presents a richer, more nuanced, and more complete narrative of the origins and real impacts of what many have referred to as the 'Reagan Revolution' in the law. In doing so, it makes a strong case for what I'll broadly refer to as an interpretive approach to the study of constitutional change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several valuable analyses of the roles of U.S. Supreme Court clerks have furthered political science's understanding of these important quasi-judicial actors. This paper applies the institutional insights provided by these works to a case study of the controversial fourth section of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). The study considers whether both the theory and content of this section were largely the work of one of the crop of clerks who worked for the Justice during the October '06 Term.Justice Kennedy's vote and his authorship of the majority opinion were unsurprising. However, the content of the controversial Section IV might be considered unexpected; its paternalistic approach to abortion rights is inconsistent with the otherwise libertarian arguments that he has employed in previous abortion cases (this part of the paper draws on my forthcoming book about Kennedy's jurisprudence). I hypothesize that this might be explained by the presence, within the quartet of Kennedy's clerks, of an individual who successfully wrote these particular views into the Justice's opinion.At the end of the day, the name on the opinion in Carhart is Kennedy's. He bears the public burden of shouldering responsibility for the opinion's content. However, recent studies have told us never to underestimate the importance of the men and women who clerk for members of the U.S. Supreme Court. In order to understand Section IV, might we have to accept that it is a good example of clerkish control? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a conceptual understanding of the political potentials of 'the public', predicated upon the phantom character of the public that Lippman, Dewey, and Habermas cast as a problem, whereas I argue it is at the heart of an opportunity.This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the public's political character. It argues that this must be understood in three steps. First, one must look at the historically specific invitation to agency extended to the public. This invitation is found sedimented in law, institutions and culture. Secondly, it is necessary to accept that this invitation does not have a precise addressee in the sense of a 'true' public. It invites a disembodied public to act. The combination of these two aspects of the political public then conditions the third step that has to be analyzed to understand specific political consequences of the public. This concerns the ways in which the public is enacted. Conceptually, such enactments take the form rhetoric calls synecdoche, a part expressing a whole, and are characterized by five traits. Enactments of the public are (1) dependent on external recognition, (2) always contestable, (3) mutually constitutive of the part and the whole - the public - it attempts to enact, (4) either bringing the public to bear as an actual presence or a virtual shadow, and (5) necessarily normative operations predicated upon the substitution of an 'is' - that the public is disembodied - by an 'ought' - that someone should nonetheless be allowed to enact it 'as if' it was not. The argument thus rejects a notion common to the work of Habermas, Dewey, and Lippmann, that the public should be understood in terms of a true embodiment with specifiable normative consequences. Instead, the paper lay out a model of the political public that provides the possibility of analyzing the prospects of the public of today, and its contribution to social cohesion and social change, and not only lament its failures in the light of what it could potentially be in the future. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs Skocpol's theory of revolutions to explain the genesis of the Civil Rights movement and its impact on American politics. It emphasizes the usefulness of a state-centered approach to the study of racial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that terror alerts keep the public's attention on foreign affairs and off of domestic issues, which is favorable to the president?s approval ratings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of term limits on incumbent U.S. state legislator career decisions. First, I hypothesize that term limits influence career decisions in advance of the final term, as legislators strategically prepare for subsequent careers. Specifically, I hypothesize that the probabilities of retirement and higher office increase as legislators exhaust eligibility. Second, I posit that legislators serving under term limits are more responsive to open state Senate and U.S. House seats and that the probabilities of running for these open seats increase as legislators consume the term limit. Third, I hypothesize that legislators in term-limited legislatures are more likely to run for local office or accept non-elective political employment. I test these hypotheses employing two datasets of career decisions, electoral, and legislator demographic data in a general model of career choice. The findings support the hypotheses and indicate the intensity of political careerism and the strategic nature of responses to term limits. The results also suggest that while term limits stimulate legislative turnover, they also lead to the recirculation of careerists up and down the political career ladder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the theory of the Unitary Executive to the current Bush administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative framework, this paper explores the parallel rights revolutions in Canada and the United States, particularly as they relate to the implementation of federal fair employment policies during the 1940s and 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explain when politicization occurs in the U.S. federal government, focusing on the tradeoff between political control and bureaucratic competence. I analyze data on the percentage of political appointments among managers in 250 federal agencies over the 1988-2004 period. I show that politicization is neither increasing steadily over time nor caused by the actions of Republican presidents. Politicization increases when agency preferences diverge from those of the president and when agency outputs are relatively insensitive to changes in politicization such as when agency tasks are uncomplicated or when outside wages available to career managers are low. Politicization also increases during periods when Congress and the president share similar policy preferences. I conclude that politicization occurs in regular and predictable patterns and that understanding these patterns are essential for an understanding of American politics, public management, and the policy process. [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]

This paper expands on the experimental findings of the motivated reasoning literature to numerous election studies in the U.S., Britain, and Germany. Conclusions inform both the information processing and campaign effects literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper looks at the increasing importance of moral issues like abortion and gay rights in deciding Congressional elections. This phenomenon has benefited the Republicans and played a major role in their takeover of the House in 1994. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an intellectual history and critique of one of the most naturalized notions in American political and economic life: the right to private property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the jurisdictional interpretation of the religion clauses, which holds that at least one, if not both, of the clauses protects states' rights and not individual rights [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a comparison of Japanese koenkai and American political machines in order to build an analytical framework with which to better understand reciprocal relationships between those in power and their constituents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitive federalism and race politics have helped shape aid to the poor in the United States. In this paper, I investigate how the geographic distribution of population influences antipoverty policymaking in the states. Specifically, I test whether welfare benefit levels and time limits are affected by the presence of large poor or minority populations living near state borders. I estimate that doubling the black population living within fifty miles of the average state’s borders would decrease that state’s maximum annual welfare benefits by about $220. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many political scientists have been searching for a national realignment among the American electorate in recent political history. Individuals who examine political behavior and party systems with strict periodization requirements in mind expected a ?critical realignment? to occur during the 1960s. After examining past historical instances at the national level, it would seem as though a realignment did not occur as expected. A durable partisan change in the national electorate resulting in a new majority political party assuming power, and the implementation of sweeping public policy changes (as occurred during the Civil War in the 1860s and the New Deal realignment during the 1930s) remains elusive. The value of examining whether a realignment has occurred only at the national level is questionable, however, since a single focus on national electoral and partisan patterns likely obscures changes occurring at sub-national levels. This paper investigates the possibility of regional realignment by examining the change in partisan identification among whites residing in one discrete region of the United States: the Northeast. Multivariate logit analyses are employed in order to uncover the generational, social group, and attitudinal factors contributing to change in the partisan identification of whites in the Northeast using National Election Studies survey data, 1972-2000. The findings support the notion that whites in the Northeast are more Democratic than Republican in terms of their partisan identification over time. However, the underlying contributing factors, and the magnitude and direction of partisan change vary according to the classification of the partisan identification dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scholars have long debated citizen competence and whether or not average Americans can effectively play their part in a democratic system. In recent years this discussion has been dominated by the notion of heuristics, and by the optimistic argument that average citizens can use simple cues to compensate for their narrow knowledge base and less than systematic reasoning processes. Our paper calls this argument into question by noting a simple fact; before people can use heuristic cues, they must possess them; any potential benefits from heuristic reasoning logically depend on citizens perceiving and acquiring such cues. And our findings suggest that people perceive and acquire--and use--political cues less frequently than political scientists have supposed. In a completed set of studies, we exposed subjects (n=300) to experimental manipulations that varied several aspects of cue presentation; the sources who were providing the cues, the information environment in which cues were presented, and the nature of the cues themselves. Subjects were exposed to cue treatments on several proposed public policies, including long-term health care and juvenile justice. Following this exposure we measured subjects’ policy preferences on these matters to determine whether cue exposure had affected preferences. Finally, we measured subjects’ recognition of several types of information that had been presented. We tested for recognition of heuristic cues--most obviously--but also for recognition of specific details of policy proposals, information about the horse race aspects of policy competition, and recognition of non-political human interest information about persons discussed in connection with the policy competition and policy proposals. The data demonstrate two basic results. First, cues generally failed to affect subjects’ policy positions. Second, as indicated above, our results suggest that citizens perceive heuristic cues less often than we might suppose. Cues were recognized at lower rates than virtually any other kind of offered information; aggregating across issues, generally less than half of subjects were able to recognize cues immediately after they had been presented. Moreover, when results were disaggregated by levels of general political knowledge, citizens with low general knowledge fared particularly poorly in recognizing presented cues. These finding suggest a general caution regarding the utility of heuristic reasoning, since cues seem to have little effect on citizens’ opinions. More interestingly, our results suggest that there are two tracks leading to cue ineffectiveness. Well-informed citizens seem to perceive and acquire proffered cues, but these cues have little effect on reasoning, a result consistent with the various literatures showing high opinion stability among such individuals. Most importantly, poorly-informed citizens largely fail to perceive cues in the first place. This seems to represent a devastating blow to the basic suppositions of the heuristic reasoning model; it suggests that those citizens most needing help from cues seem least able to even perceive or acquire them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideologically-driven partisanship is now a central element of American political life, shaping almost every aspect of process, policy, rhetoric, and strategy. By every measure (notably, Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-Nominate scores and Grossclose, Leavitt and Snyder’s adjusted ADA scores), the ideological gap between the congressional parties has been increasing steadily since at least the late 1960s. By the 107th Congress, it had become wider in both houses than at any time since World War I. Why has ideological and partisan polarization grown? Most political scientists reflexively favor exogenous explanations for changes in congressional behavior: party polarization in Congress should reflect changes in preferences of the parties’ respective electoral coalitions and activist supporters, membership turnover, the advent of divisive new issue agendas, or aggressive electoral strategies. Congress, in this view, is a creature of its broader political environment, most especially the environment’s electoral components. From this perspective, the central explanation for partisan polarization must lie in the process of selection, with electoral politics producing increasingly divergent Republicans and Democrats with each succeeding electoral generation. Congressional insiders and others who observe the House and Senate on a day-to-day basis, more attuned to the personalities, tactics, and moods of members, point to events and developments internal to Congress as forces driving the parties apart: disputed elections, personal clashes between leaders, fights over judicial appointments, partisan scandal-mongering, slash-and-burn tactics of disgruntled minorities, rules altered or manipulated to partisan ends. These episodes are obviously manifestations of intensified partisan conflict; but they may also contribute to it in a self-reinforcing spiral, magnifying party divisions beyond what can be explained by the electoral connection or the issue agenda, particularly when they lead to durable institutional changes that reflect their origins in intense partisan conflict. To the degree that partisan polarization is an endogenous product of Washington politics—a view more common among journalists and politicians than among political scientists, but nonetheless implied by the theory of “conditional party government”—then we should observe partisans becoming increasingly divergent ideologically over the course of their careers in the House and Senate. My paper will examine trends over the 80th-107th Congresses in House and Senate members’ DW-Nominate and adjusted ADA scores to weigh the relative contributions of changes in electoral constituencies, legislative turnover, and forces endogenous to Congress to partisan and ideological polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public-private partnerships have existed in the United States since the colonial period. However, in particular, government and nonprofit interactions?embedded in social, economic, and political structures?have taken different forms and have varied over time, among different fields of service, and in different contexts. In recent times, especially in the last two and a half decades, not only has there been an expansion in the types of human services once provided primarily by government agencies, but also the list of viable not-for-profit providers continues to broaden including a variety of organizations. Scholars note that in this era of devolution, the trend towards ?privatizing? human services is expected to continue the advancement of networks and network structures between the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors in public policy implementation. Even the widespread use of terms like ?cooperation?, ?collaboration,? ?strategic alliances,? ?joint ventures,? and ?partnership? across the sectors have become commonplace. Moreover, public discourse in policy circles, academic arenas and in practice seem to accept the taken-for-granted benefits of such alliances with the increasing popularity of such approaches to address America?s social problems, even though there is limited research evaluating the actual nature and process of the effects of existing partnerships in light of theory. The following paper attempts to begin to fill this gap by exploring collaboration between government agencies and faith-based organizations utilizing principal-agent theory. Such arrangements may pose serious legal and administrative challenges that may not be easily overcome. Providing government services through contracts with private organizations raises traditional management and accountability concerns and have implications for public management, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview: Diehl and Goertz (2000) and Valeriano (2003) have investigated certain types of rivalry linkages. Diehl and Goertz (2000) focus on rivalries that are linked through a common foe or a common alliance partner. Valeriano (2003) investigates the impact of simultaneous rivalries on the severity of conflict within a rivalry. What is left is to look at rivalry groups. Some rivals are not dyadic, but rather groups of actors inter-linked together. For example, the rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union is deeply linked with China. This paper will identify which groups of states make up a complex rivalry; or those rivalries that include more than two interstate actors. Once the initial dataset is created, this analysis will allude to the dynamics of conflict within complex rivals. Do these types of rivalries experience war more frequently? Do they last longer than other types of rivalries? Are they more severe than other types of rivals? Not all rivals are strictly dyadic and the interactions of complex rivals may suggest that these types of rivals have significantly different conflict propensities and foreign policy practices than dyadic rivalries. Distinguishing between a typology of dyadic and complex rivalries will aid theorists and researchers in the investigation of the causes and consequences of rivalry relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we develop a model of political trust among African Americans that combines micro- and macro-levels of analysis. Using survey data from the 1996 Black National Election Study together with data on the type of congressional district in which respondents live, we demonstrate that the presence of minority voters in a legislative district and the election of minority representatives independently have a positive effect on political trust among African Americans. However, we also find that these two factors interact, such that African Americans who live in congressional districts with higher proportions of minority voters and are represented by a black member of Congress actually show lower levels of political trust than African Americans who live in districts with smaller proportions of African Americans in the district. Tests show that the results are robust, even when we control for a number of individual-level factors such as political interest and economic performance evaluations. Our results suggest that the positive impact of electing a black representative on political trust are diminished when coupled with an overwhelming number of minority voters in a district. Using the results we speculate as to the possible effects of court-ordered “unpacking” of majority-minority congressional districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of political behavior have traditionally viewed labor unions as important mobilization institutions in U.S. electoral politics. Unions are seen as particularly important for lowerclass individuals, who tend to lack the individual-level resources (e.g., education, income, political interest) that are otherwise associated with voter turnout (see, for example, Verba, Nie and Kim 1978). Yet the empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of unions mobilizing turnout is not particularly strong, and the consequences of the welldocumented decline of union membership in the U.S. for electoral politics are not entirely clear. An unresolved issue in studies of the effect of union mobilization is whether unions’ mobilizing efforts are directed toward, and effective for, union members alone or also on all individuals residing in areas of union strength and activity, regardless of their membership status. This issue is key in interpreting both individual and aggregate level evidence on whether unions are effective mobilizing institutions. We take issue with the focus of this issue on membership status and argue that, theoretically, the critical question is whether unions mobilize lower status individuals moreso than higher status individuals, rather than members vs. nonmembers. In this paper we examine the impact of unions on turnout: both the direct affect through union members voting at higher rates than non-members, and the contextual affect through union mobilization of non-union members. We look at the contribution of the decline in union membership to changes in both the level of, and class composition of, turnout in the United States since 1964. And we show that the decline of unions has had substantial effect on overall turnout and class-bias in turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of several projects examining what I call the ?politics of disaffection.? This research is motivated by an interesting puzzle in the political behavior literature. The conventional wisdom suggests that knowledge promotes sentiments that make citizens more likely to take part in politics. However, recent evidence reveals two strains of ideas. One strain suggests that political knowledge fosters sentiments of affection, which bring people closer to politics. Another strain, found mostly in the race politics literature, suggests that knowledge fosters sentiments of disaffection, which push people outside of politics. My dissertation seeks to merge what we know about political knowledge with insights derived from the racial politics literature to determine whether the conventional wisdom will hold up in light of these contrasting, if not conflicting strains of ideas. My contribution to the discipline will be my introduction of disaffection as a measurable construct in American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a reading of Melville’s fascinating and troubling short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” that calls attention to what I contend is its underlying philosophical problem, namely, the problem of the will. The problem of the will is integral to American political self-understanding precisely because of its democratic and liberal politics. Yet rather than focus on broad political or philosophical doctrine, Bartleby induces us to examine the problem of will at a more basic level of moral psychology. The question driving the story is the following: what is the basis for vital, meaningful human action? Bartleby stands as a powerful critique of the orthodox American answer to this question. This orthodoxy holds that the basis for vital, meaningful human action is the human will. One acts with purpose and passion because one wills to act with purpose and passion. Moreover, it is with this claim that the general American ideology of self-determination and self-making finds its foundation. Yet it is precisely the human will that is so puzzling and problematic about Bartleby, that listless figure whose only will is to do nothing. In Bartleby’s case, the moral energy of the will has reached its limit. What sense can be made of such a condition? This is the issue faced by two seminal American philosophers of the will, Jonathan Edward and William James, and a brief examination of their insights will allow greater purchase on the puzzle of Bartleby. Taking their separate historical contexts into account, Edwards and James shared the observation that a presumed age of energetic social and moral will did not impassion but rather enervated souls. Neither the will to religious fervor nor the will to industrial fervor produced real moral vitality. Rather, they seemed to have the opposite effect, engendering passionless moral selves. Indeed, for both Edwards and James the problem lay with the willing soul itself. They understood that what enervates the willing soul is its proclivity to will ends that are not subject to its will. In living solely in the realm of deliberate will, the moral self vitiates its vitality. Failing to recognize its own limits, the will shuts down. On a social level, the perverse consequence of an ideology that encourages such a life of will is a widespread listlessness of willing souls. It is this listlessness that is Bartleby’s final condition. To such a condition, thinkers like Edwards and James counterpoise the Puritan idea of moral regeneration. Moral regeneration consists of the abandonment of will in such a way that it opens the self to a morally reinvigorating experience. For Edwards, that experience is constituted by divine grace; for James, the pluralistic universe. Yet the final image of Bartleby admiring a flower grown through the stones is chilling. It implicitly challenges us to discover the conditions for moral regeneration in a democracy increasing enclosed and constituted by the artifacts of human will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the last three years the Representation in American’s Legislatures Project has been collecting roll call data on the universe of state legislatures and the US Congress for the 1999-2000 sessions. In this paper we explore the topography of these collections of roll calls from the 101 chambers. We compare several features of the rolls calls from frequency, dimensionality, levels of conflict, and degrees of party cohesion and polarization. We find that the variation in these data present many opportunities for comparative analyses of existing theories of legislative politics and that differences among the chambers further suggest new lines of legislative research. [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]

Research on presidential elections in American politics at both the individual level and the aggregate level usually comes to a common conclusion: As national economic conditions worsen, voters are less likely to vote for the incumbent presidential candidate. On the flipside, as national economic conditions improve, voters are more likely to vote for the incumbent candidate. The literature on forecasting presidential elections each consists of three common aspects. First, the body of research largely consists of some combination of a variable that seeks to measure the national economic conditions at some point before the upcoming presidential election and a variable that seeks to measure the incumbent presidential popularity at some point before the upcoming election. Second, this body has exclusively used linear, ordinary least squares (OLS) methods to measure and predict the outcome of the upcoming presidential election. Finally, with the exception of Lynch (1999) and Norpoth (2001) among others, this body of literature uses mainly aggregate data dating back to no earlier than 1948. There is no issue regarding the first aspect. However, the latter two aspects do bear reassessment. Concerning the second aspect, while OLS measurements have often shown statistically significant results in relating economic conditions to the percent share of the incumbent two-party vote, these measurements do not adequately explain how regardless of how well national economic conditions are performing, the incumbent presidential candidate receives approximately no more than a sixty percent share of the two-party vote due to the partisan loyalties from a sizable portion of voters. Subsequently, regardless of how poorly national economic conditions are, the incumbent presidential candidate receives approximately no less than a forty percent share of the two-party vote. Hence, even during periods of extreme economic conditions throughout the early 20th century, the United States is approximately no more than a 60-40 country, an aspect that OLS measurements do not adequately pick up. Concerning the third aspect, the literature only dates back to 1948 primarily because public opinion questions about incumbent president popularity in the present wording form only date as far back as 1948. While this justification is valid, such measurement omits the possibility of observing this economic-presidential election relationship during the Great Depression era in a forecasting model. For instance, particularly when even though economic conditions were at their most extreme points in 1932 and 1936, national economic conditions still fit within the 60-40 confines, assuming a more non-linear relationship. In this paper, I will use aggregate presidential election data that dates back to the 1932 elections. Using a generalized additive model to estimate the non-linearity of this economic-presidential election relationship and to compare it to linear estimates, I expect to find a small gain in precision in using nonlinear estimates over linear estimates. While I do not intend to challenge the validity of the different OLS models currently used to predict presidential election outcomes, I do hope to contribute to this body of research by reassessing the economic impact on presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent popularity of American Political Development (APD) as a subfield of Political Science, there has been a resurgence of interest in ideology and American political thought among numerous scholars. However, the accepted place or role of the study of American political thought in APD is uncertain. This paper will examine the status of the study of political thought in the subfield of APD, discuss what contribution it might have to this growing subfield, and explore possible tensions between the study of political ideas and ideology and the study of history and institutions so fundamental to APD. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on political careers consists mostly of empirical analyses that treat career choices as independent observations generated by a stochastic process. In this paper, I study differences among whole career sequences rather than individual choices. Specifically, I use sequence analysis methods to analyze mayoral careers in 15 large U.S. cities from 1801 to 1980. Using these methods, I construct a novel distance measure that captures differences among mayors in the number, type and order of offices they occupied. These distances are then analyzed using cluster analysis to identify a few discrete paths to office. Substantively, I show that these career paths reflect the influence of both personal attributes and the local institutional setting. I also find that differences in the path to office can help explain mayors' decisions about whether to stay, retire or move to another office. More broadly, I demonstrate the usefulness of sequence analysis methods for studying political careers and other types of sequential data in political science. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Too much institutional conflict can inhibit landmark productivity in Congress, but so can too little conflict. Moderate conflict fosters productivity. The paper tests this thesis for all Congresses from 1857 to 1994. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that the apparent inconsistency between his political thought and behavior in the 1780's and 1790's was a result of his ambivalence toward executive power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hierarchical Bayesian model of citizen ideology both at the state and individual levels that are directly comparable to the ideal points of U.S. senators. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the shifting grounds of resistance to LDS politicians competing in a national arena as one telling example of a larger pattern of religious belief and tolerance in the US. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical framework to understand why the ideological leanings of the incumbent and the degree of concentration of powers in the polity interact in ways that affect stock market performance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a measure for liberal religious commitment using the concept of solidarity. It analyzes political attitudes and behavior using the measure with a 2000 Religion and Politics Survey and the 2004 American National Election Study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses limitations of the Martin-Quinn scores of judicial ideology, which assume that ideological voting is unidimensional. This approach poses problems for courts that are more ideologically nuanced than the U.S. Supreme Court. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that sitting politicians are more likely to take run for higher office when their private market opportunities are better. The intuition behind this prediction is that politicians should be more willing to take that risk when they have an attractive fallback option. I test this prediction by using a fixed-effects (a.k.a. condition) logistic regression to analyze the decision of U.S. House members to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The results show that House members are more likely to run for a Senate seat when their expected income from working in the private sphere is higher. This result holds through the several robustness checks that are preformed. Implications of the results for the nature of competition in American politics are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect ambition for higher office has on party loyalty and party cohesion in the U.S. Senate. Findings indicate that ambition and a need to appeal to primary voters influences party loyalty in the upper chamber. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]