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Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the European Union has attempted to reinforce its existing nascent capabilities to combat terrorism. The European Council adopted a comprehensive Plan of Action and reached political agreement on a number of important counterterrorism initiatives, including strengthening of Europol and Eurojust; and the introduction of a European Arrest Warrant. This paper provides a critical analysis of these key operational measures and reveals that the EU counterterrorism policy suffers from an implementation deficit, in large part due to the absence of genuine pro-integration thinking in the area of Justice and Home Affairs. A multitude of political, legal, and cultural challenges still need to be overcome in order to make the EU counterterrorism policy less of a paper tiger and more of an effective counterterrorism device. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines the formation of municipalities in the U.S. It traces change in unincorporated areas over decades to determine how basic dimensions of population heterogeneity affect the probability of a municipal incorporation. The paper also examines how state legislation on local government autonomy affect that probability of a municipal incorporation. To guide the study, I follow theory on local government boundary change and the Tiebout hypothesis--literatures interested in the role of municipal fragmentation in tax-and-service differentials within metropolitan areas. I take advantage of this opportunity to present a boundaries-normalized dataset that can be useful to other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that voided Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act which deprived Section 5 of its enforcement powers. The paper presents an overview of conditions leading to the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It reviews the Act's effectiveness, a point agreed to by all. It briefly looks at the impact of a black man in the White House on racial attitudes and sketches the current economic and social changes affecting African Americans. The paper then introduces the Supreme Court decision and traces in particular the philosophic and ideological Court precedents that underlay the Court majority's decisionmaking. It moves on to look at efforts to restrict black and other minority election participation prior to the Court majority's decision and then such efforts in the aftermath of the decision. It concludes by questioning the Court majority's argument that the society had changed to the extent the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed. It then asks what the proper role of the Supreme Court is in a democratic society and which branch of government, the Court of the Congress, should legitimately decide such issues as electoral representation. This in turn brings into relevance the question of what should be the Supreme Court's role. The underlying theme is a question as to what constitutes adequate representation in a democratic society.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper offers a possible, partial explanation for the continued operation and ultimate survival of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and direct federal support for the arts in the 1990s: political institutionalization. The thesis of our paper is that during the 1990s an "advocacy coalition" (see Sabatier, 1993) consisting of the NEA and the state art agencies (SAASs) emerged from the institutional environment of American cooperative federalism (e.g., Elazar, 1964) and "marble-cake" intergovernmental relations (e.g., Grodzins, 1993). The advocacy coalition of the NEA and the SAAs formed around a deeply shared and embedded belief in the appropriateness of federal support for the arts in the U.S. and the necessity of the federal-state partnership in its provision. Drawing on Meyer's General Institutional Model for organizational analysis (Meyer, 1994) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's Advocacy Coalition Framework for policy analysis (Jenkins-Smith & Sabatier, 1994; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993), we develop the Institutionalized Political Organization (IPO) model to demonstrate how the emergence of the NEA-SAA advocacy coalition had the primary consequence of institutionalizing federal support for the arts in the U.S. Thus, our proposed paper suggests that the political institutionalization of federal support for the arts in the U.S. provided a resilient and stable political environment that shielded the NEA from congressional threats and enabled American arts policy to continue to operate in and ultimately survive the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative governance has become a common theme in the literatures on environmental policy and the impacts of public administration and management on environmental governance. Research has addressed the structures and dynamics of effective collaboration and the perceived costs and benefits of this approach. However, a significant knowledge gap persists regarding whether collaborative efforts lead to improved environmental outcomes and the potential of collaboration to address existing regulatory limits and constraints. Public policy scholars have studied the limitations of iconic statutes such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. These regulations based on a command-and-control approach have been criticized for being inefficient, expensive, inflexible and often, inadequate in addressing complex policy problems. However, a systematic analysis of the limits and constraints of the US environmental regulatory framework has not been undertaken to a large extent in the existing literature on collaboration. Further, the literature is limited in explicitly testing whether collaborative governance approaches such as public voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) can address the constraints of environmental regulations. The paper offers a conceptual framework to describe a type of limits and constraints of the US environmental regulatory framework. The paper analyzes the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI)--a public voluntary environmental program lead by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established in 2009 during the Obama Administration. Findings from the semi-structured interviews of GLRI participants and analysis of archival documents show that the GLRI has been largely a successful program in terms of achieving its objectives. The key characteristics that are attributed to its success are funding and bipartisan political support. The challenge of the GLRI, however, remains in terms of developing strong metrics to evaluate the outcomes of the GLRI and integrating climate change into its projects. The findings have important implications for practitioners, academics, and those interested in the evolving role of US federal agencies such as the EPA from being a regulator to a change agent developing creative solutions to address our contemporary environmental challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evangelical Christians are a rapidly growing share of the population in most Latin American countries, yet there is substantial cross-national variation in their involvement and success in electoral politics. This paper examines one possible explanation for the electoral success or failure of evangelical politicians--the effect on voting behavior of their ties to former dictators. In the context of an online survey experiment conducted prior to Chile's 2013 general election, the treatment primes evangelicals' historical support for the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. I then examine the effect of this association on vote intention for an evangelical candidate for Congress. For right-wing, non-evangelical respondents, priming the Pinochet connection increases vote intention. However, the treatment has no significant effect for nonevangelicals on the center and left or for evangelical voters of any stripes. Moreover, public associations of evangelical politicians with pinochetismo are low, and campaigns do not focus on this connection. Hence, the weight of the past does not appear to be a factor in Chilean evangelicals' limited electoral success. The paper concludes with a discussion of plans to conduct similar survey experiments during upcoming general elections in Brazil, Guatemala, and Peru. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing a dim possibility of ESEA reauthorization in the near future, the Obama Administration invited state applications for waivers in meeting the original No Child Left Behind goals of attaining 100% student proficiency by 2014. Waiver applications were also required to meet the federal assurances on state and local education reform. By June 2014, about 80% of all states received federal approval on their NCLB/ESEA waivers. As the ESEA flexibility waiver has been in placed in many states for 2-3 years, this paper aims at understanding the state implementation of ESEA flexibility waiver requests. First, we discuss the ESEA waiver in the context of the Obama Administration's education reform agenda. We argue that ESEA flexibility waiver, as a policy design, aligns with the administration's efforts to incentivize state agencies to meet federal expectations on systemic improvement, including the implementation of evaluation systems on teachers and principals and a differentiated approach to support low performing schools. Second, the paper highlights the 18 key elements that the federal government requires states to demonstrate progress in exchange for ESEA flexibility. We then examine the extent to which these federal expectations are met by the state, using data from the U.S. Department of Education's state-by-state reports on "ESEA Flexibility Part B Monitoring Report" for a sample of 16 states. In addition to the overall patterns, our sample of 16 states offers an opportunity to consider interstate variation in their waiver implementation. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which state governance (divided versus unified) and academic performance may have affected the degree of waiver implementation. The concluding section provides several observations on the policy and politics of ESEA flexibility waiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about U.S.-China conflict due to Taiwan is presented which was discussed at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including China's emerging global influence in the post-Cold War era and the U.S. involvement in the Taiwan Strait conflict.

A conference paper about the term American exceptionalism is presented which was prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans, Louisiana, from August 30-September 1, 2012. The paper discusses topics including the true character of American exceptionalism and shallow portrayals of U.S. policies by media outlets both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A conference paper about progressivism and American exceptionalism is presented which was prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans, Louisiana, from August 30-September 1, 2012. The paper discusses topics including U.S. President George W. Bush administration's decisions to launch wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American acquisition of the Philippine Islands in 1900.

A conference paper about militarized conflict in the cross-strait relations is presented which was prepared for presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including the U.S.-China-Taiwan triangular relationships and the alliance-like arrangement between Taiwan and the U.S.

A conference paper about the U.S. constitutional politics is presented which was prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including American political life, liberal democracy of the U.S., and the political thoughts of political scientist Herbert Storing.

Recent findings show that deliberation outcomes can be vulnerable to manipulations by moderators. However, what makes moderators influential over deliberation outcomes and how to minimize the chance of manipulation have not been investigated yet. To address this issue, this paper presents a lab experiment which tests one of the mechanisms through which moderators can affect deliberation outcomes. This study investigates how perceived expertise of a moderator conditions the moderator's potential to persuade participants of deliberation. Subjects are asked to deliberate on whether to expand the subsidized jobs program of New York State or not. The result suggests that participants of deliberation are more susceptible to moderator's influence when they perceive the moderator having expertise on the policy issue than not. The empirical evidence of this paper contributes not only to the existing literature on deliberative democracy but also provides broader implications to studies on leadership effects in a group discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This year's theme of representation poses an interesting set of challenges for health researchers. For example, it is very difficult to find any organized participants in health politics and policy-making who do not claim to speak for and represent the best interests of patients. Perversely, those who likely have the best normative claim and the greatest resources available to represent patients (elected officials) do not seem all that interested in the job, in spite of their regular claims that they do in fact fulfill this role. While there are many ways in which the term patient representation can be understood, this paper will look at the question in the following terms. First patients are defined as those members of the population who use and anticipate having to using health services in a given jurisdiction. Second, patient representation is understood to mean speaking on behalf of patients to ensure that their concerns (as a collective population) over how, where and in what quantities services are provided are represented within health decision-making structures. The paper will argue that this unwillingness to represent patients that is demonstrated by elected officials is a by-product of efforts to design organizational structures for financing and managing care that allow them to avoid blame for the inability of health systems to satisfy all demands for care. Evidence to support this argument is found by looking at the path that health reform has taken in the three countries Tuohy identified as ideal cases for her typology for health systems: Canada (collegial governance), The UK (hierarchical governance) and the US (market governance). In Canada and the UK politicians deliberately adopted organizational and financial reforms that reduced their ability to represent the interests of patients in debates regarding how, where and in what quantity services would be delivered. Meanwhile in the US, lawmakers chose reform options that will undoubtedly expand the population able to afford care but which simultaneously did little to replace the control exercised by market based organizations over how and where service will be provided to most Americans. Where new regulation is required federal and state elected officials have put many of the most important decisions in the hands of arms-length agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars across a number of different countries have demonstrated that the media often publish unprofessional poll findings, that they over-interpret results or that they fail to provide good documentation of the polls (Brettschneider 1997; Andersen 2000; Welch 2002; Beyer & Waldahl 2009; Strömbäck 2009). A related concern is the so-called "horse-race journalism" that stress entertainment instead of concentrating on political issues. Previous research has not however, been able to demonstrate that polls have a clear impact on voters, their opinion and attitudes or the election outcome (Waldahl et al 2006; Hardmeier 2008). One explanation behind the ambiguity in previous research might be that different effects neutralize each other while another is related to the challenge of creating a research design that isolate potential poll effects from other equally important factors. In this paper we argue that opinion polls might have a considerable indirect impact on the political process because significant people believe that they have an effect on the public. While a large number of studies have tried to investigate if polls have an impact on the electorate, most research has neglected the impact of polls on journalists and politicians. A few studies have focused on the relationship between journalist and public opinion polls (Donsbach & Antoine 1990; Weaver 2008, Weaver et al. 2007, Wichmann & Brettschneider 2009), but we do not know what leading politicians think about public opinion polls. Neither do we know if journalists consider poll results more trustworthy than politicians do or if journalists and politicians think that polls have a significant effect on the electorate. This paper offers a significant contribution to the research literature by providing knowledge about how journalists and politicians across a number of European countries perceive the reliability and impact of opinion polls. The results are based on a surveys conducted among political journalists and members of the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Swedish parliaments in the period 2007 - 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There can be no denying the profound changes in U.S. campaign financing since the U.S. Supreme Court's January 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Nevertheless, there has been confusion about the extent to which the decision should be seen as the primary explanation for what has occurred. This paper begin to disentangle the strands through an analysis of independent expenditures in elections at the state level in 2006 and 2010 from new data gathered and supplied by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. The paper's findings tend not to support some key claims being made on both sides of the contemporary political debate surrounding independent spending. First, contrary to statements made by some of the decision's critics, we find that Citizens' United itself did not have a noticeable direct effect on independent spending in 2010 - although this could, of course, change. Increases were more or less comparable in states that prohibited corporate spending before the decision and those that did not. However, the paper also addresses one of the claims normally associated with the opposite side of the political spectrum. It is often said that limiting contributions to the political parties (ending "soft money") has displaced party money, increasing independent spending by unaccountable non-party organizations. We find that party contribution limits have indeed displaced some party independent spending in the years and states we studied. However, the displacement has been not been toward ideological groups, umbrella organizations or vaguely defined party networks, but rather toward national organizations of state elected and party officials who are acting as party organizations in all but the most formal sense of that term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important developments in the recent politics of education reform has been the rise of a new group of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) that are working to mobilize parents behind school reform at the district and state levels. The past two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of state education reforms to increase accountability for student achievement, improve teacher quality, turn around failing schools, and expand school choice, much of this fiercely opposed by the teachers unions. The ERAOs and their efforts to organize parents have played an important role in pushing for these changes in state capitols, and they clearly are reshaping the politics of school reform in the United States in important ways. Despite the increasing number and activity of ERAOs, we know relatively little about them and how they operate. This paper will offer an in-depth examination of ERAOs and what we can learn from their efforts to engage parents in school reform and from other grassroots community organizing experiences. Including academic research, a brief literature review, and field-based case studies and interviews, this paper will assess the circumstances necessary for parent empowerment campaigns to be successful and the factors that may hinder engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a polarized political climate that sets religion and irreligion in ever more antagonistic opposition, there is heightened pressure on the American state constitutional provisions known as 'Blaine Amendments' or 'No-Aid Provisions' which were passed between 1835 and 1959 to prohibit public aid to religious schools. Judgements about No-Aid Provisions have largely been made by scholars on an ad hoc basis using narrative-based historical accounts, emotive language and without clear classificatory criteria. Using content analysis this paper constructs the first quantitative scale of No-Aid Provision strength and subjects it to statistical treatment to explain why some prohibitions are much stronger than others. It finds that larger Catholic populations, Republican dominance and Federal Enabling Acts make No-Aid language more strident. In so doing this paper adjudicates between competing explanations for No-Aid Provision strength and undermines the absolutist language of Church/State separation prevalent in American public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are at-large formats for electing city councils inherently discriminatory? This paper briefly reviews the history of the introduction of at-large elections during the Progressive Era. Then it examines the standards under the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the California Voting Rights Act of 2001 for determining whether or not an at-large election is discriminatory. Finally, the paper analyzes the 2010 Whittier city council elections, finding evidence of racially polarized voting by non-Latino voters, which diluted minority voting power and denied them the ability to elect candidates of their choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State government policy frequently focuses on stimulating a healthy business environment with the assumption that this is linked with long term economic growth. The conventional wisdom is that a state's tax rates are negatively correlated with economic development, prompting states to decrease business-targeted taxes to encourage economic stimulation. Surprisingly, however, very few studies have documented the long-term effects of these taxes on different facets of the state economy and overall business atmosphere. In short, we do not know how the level of business taxation actually affects the economies of states. Using panel data for all fifty U.S. states from 1977 to 2005, this paper examines the impact of state business taxes on the overall economic status of the state, specifically looking at their effect on economic development and business growth. With an elaborate set of controls, the paper links taxes to gross state product, job creation, personal income, poverty rates, and business establishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of best available science into environmental policy is frequently considered a priority by scientists, policymakers, and scholars. These actors often puzzle over the fact that such integration is difficult and often does not occur despite substantial effort to achieve it. This paper uses institutional analysis to understood the roots of such an integration failure. Five Mid-Atlantic states have been struggling for years to adopt rapid wetland assessment tools, a class of science policy innovations, into their wetland regulatory programs. Their struggles are the product of incomplete and contradictory pressures on state policy by exerted two federal agencies whose substantial power over states, and conflict with each other, is set up by the structures of the Clean Water Act and cooperative environmental federalism. The perverse incentives, constraints, and path dependencies at play in the implementation scenarios described in the paper both stymie state tool adoption efforts and lead each federal agency to try to use states as instruments for imposing its priorities on the other. Incoherent, conflicted federal-level influences actually give typically subordinate states the opportunity to pressure federal actors into accepting the science policy innovation at issue, but few states seize this leverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US interrogation policy continues to be an important subject of public policy debate in the United States. A number of Republicans criticized President Obama for restricting the questioning of suspected terrorists to the noncoercive techniques listed in the US Army Field Manual. The most important policy question about enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) is not what did happen or even what should have happened in the past, but what the policy of the United States should be with regard to interrogation. This paper will address three questions about EITs: 1) are they torture? 2) are they justified? and 3) are they effective? In answering these questions, the paper will contrast the opinions of defenders of coercive interrogations with the judgments of actual interrogators during the war on terror, the latter rejecting the efficacy and morality of EITs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between party system and legislative institutionalization. Much of the existing research on legislative organization suggests that parties create legislative rule sand institutions as means to capture the gains from legislative trades (e.g., Aldrich, 1995; Cox and McCubbins, 2005; Cox and McCubbins, 1993). If parties create rules to benefit their interests, this raises two questions. First, is legislative institutionalization the result of partisan decisions? And, if so, how does the institutionalization of the party system impact legislative institutionalization? This paper seeks to begin answering these questions by examining the relationship between party system and legislative institutionalization in the U.S. The results show strong correlation between the two [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a theory explaining the circumstances under which the United States takes advantage of its defense industrial market power and globalization's efficiency gains to collect economic rents and under which it will instead forgo these rents to achieve geopolitical gains. In this bargain, the United States distributes much of the financial gains from collaboration to its partners in exchange for their joining an American-dominated global arms network, giving up ambitions to act autonomously in defense, and foregoing sales to regimes that threaten American security. The second contribution is to test, for the first time, the many competing theories on defense globalization using statistical analysis of a large time series cross-sectional data set, which measures the financial premium paid (or subsidy received) by US arms customers from 1970-2007. While the paper finds support for its theory, it also shows that large US budgets lead to inflated export prices, and that US market power appears to be eroding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Occupy movement sweeping the country has drawn critical attention to the need to develop new economic models that enrich communities rather than a small group of investors that have little or nothing to do with the communities from which their wealth is extracted. This need is nothing new, of course, especially for New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, although liberal capitalism among other factors has produced long-running economic disasters in many cities that parallel the natural disaster that befell New Orleans. However, there is more at stake here than economic resources. In fact, as I will argue in this paper, addressing the problem of wealth extraction also requires addressing the separation of economics and politics through the democratization of the economy. Specifically, this paper will examine the role of cooperatives as democratic institutions and an important element of the solidarity economy, giving attention to their historical development as a way of drawing out their democratic character. The size and extent of cooperatives in the U.S. is not often recognized, yet with some 120 million members (and 800 million members worldwide), cooperatives may represent the world's largest democratic social movement. Indeed, the nature of cooperatives as democratic enterprises must be better understood, as they vary considerably in terms of size, shape, and the degree to which they adhere to their founding principles of egalitarianism, shared property and democracy. For example, while worker cooperatives are often regarded as the paradigmatic case of a democratic enterprise, they remain fully engaged in the capitalist logic of production for exchange rather than use. By the same token, the consumer cooperative model gets away from the problem of exchange-value vs. use-value, but their large size may mitigate against participatory frameworks in favor of the kind of alienated representative governance that tends to produce apathetic, disinterested publics. Two models, an associative model and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, will be considered as ways to address some of the problems of democratic deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the scope of the "Governmental Politics Model" (GPM). Proponents of the GPM, which has been predominantly used in the context of the U.S. presidential system, claim that it is also applicable to parliamentary systems of government. However, this claim has seen hardly any rigorous testing. This paper argues that parliamentary systems feature certain characteristics that should be conducive to the emergence of "governmental politics" --understood as bargaining processes among governmental actors whose policy preferences are informed primarily by their position in government--and thus suggest the applicability of the GPM. Those factors are the formation of coalition governments and the comparatively weaker position of the head of government. The 2008 decision of the German grand coalition government to deploy armed forces to the European Union-led anti-piracy operation "Atalanta"--which saw extensive "pulling and hauling" among the foreign and the defense ministers, and which can be characterized as an unintended compromise solution- serves as an illustrative case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions do losing candidates file complaints about election fraud? And, what can such complaints teach us about the nature and extension of election fraud? This paper investigates a method for measuring electoral fraud by examining a dataset of challenges over unfair elections filed to the Committee on Elections of the United States House of Representatives between 1840 and 1939. Drawing on a general "calculus of petitions" that can help untangle when contests might be filed, we seek to evaluate the extent to which the analysis of election disputes is a useful method for measuring the incidence of election fraud. We also analyze a variety of hypotheses on the over-time and cross-sectional distribution of election disputes. Overall, the paper seeks to use the American historical case to contribute to the growing comparative politics literature on the causes of election fraud in newly democratizing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our political science department created a majors only section of Introduction to Government and Politics two years ago to achieve several department goals (improve writing, provide a baseline assessment, improve retention through a cohort experience, etc.). Unlike the typical survey approach to this course, we designed our majors only section to examine politics and governing around a central theme, specifically the tension of res publica and individual rights in democratic governance. The core readings consist of three books-Joseph Ellis' American Creation, Anthony Lewis' Gideon's Trumpet, and Larry Diamond's The Spirit of Democracy. We selected Ellis to illustrate the tension between res publica and individual rights underlying the compromises forged during the founding and early years of the republic. The students read Gideon's Trumpet as a case study in the evolution and expansion of individual rights in federal systems and as a springboard to exploring contemporary concerns involving the tension between individual rights and res publica (e.g. Patriot Act). Diamond's study of democratization extends America's perception of res publica on a global scale or a concern for the common good of all people. The course ends with a return to the United States, where students are asked to propose and examine policy recommendations in their five-page paper around the theme of Diamond's final chapter where he argues that America has become a troubled democracy. To assist our first-year students in making the leap from theoretical conceptualization to policy recommendations, they spend the final three sessions of the course working in groups to generate, debate, and expand their policy recommendations in the five key areas Diamond targets for reform: influence peddling, corruption, campaign finance, protecting freedom, enhancing participation, and bridging the bipartisan divide. Each group reports their initial policy recommendations to the class and explains/defends their ideas to their classmates. The two professors who team-teach the course grade and return the papers as part of the course requirements. They also submit clean copies of the papers to the department curriculum & assessment committee, who select two members to assess (blind review) the papers on the basis of the department's Student Learning Outcome #5 (the extent to which the students successfully convey the tension between res publica and individual rights in their essays). This paper reports fully on our experience, including the department's goals for this course and its design and assessment results. Appendices contain the course syllabus, our essay grading rubric, and the department's assessment plan for the BA in Political Science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Tea Party is the latest in a long line of populist social movements - of both right and left - that emerge periodically in American politics - and particularly in times of economic hardship. These movements tend to be ephemeral but they frequently leave a lasting impact on American politics and public policy. The paper discusses the rise of the Tea Party, the nature of the movement, its popular base of support, its tense relationship with the "Republican Establishment", its impact on the 2010 midterm election campaign, its future prospects, and how closely its development to date fits the historical pattern of American populist social and political movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about development of the right to privacy in the U.S. is presented which is to be discussed at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington, in September 2011. The paper focuses on topics including Supreme Court cases involving privacy, NAACP v. Alabama, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Meyer v. State of Nebraska.

A conference paper about heath care reform in the U.S. and Great Britain is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science association annual conference, from September 1-4, 2011, in Seattle, Washington. The paper discusses topics including divergence in the governance of health care regimes, and the ongoing round of health care reform in the two countries.

A conference paper about gay identity and political participation is presented which is prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the rights and place of LGBT communities in society, acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

A conference paper about palliative care as a citizenship right is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington. The paper discusses topics including the provision of palliative care to seriously ill and dying citizens, the Affordable Care Act in the U.S., and the stability of the democratic regime.

A conference paper about politicisation of marriage in the U.S. is presented which is prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including immigration regulation in the U.S., marriage as a political institution and the definition of political institution.

A conference paper about New Deal's reconceptualization of rights is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, in Seattle, Washington, on September 2, 2011. The paper focuses on topics including the theoretical importance of the New Deal in the American tradition, social contract and welfare state.

A conference paper about housing rights and inequality in the U.S. after the Second World War is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the ways that the U.S. government built on the two-tier system of housing programs created during President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and political agitation.

A conference paper about American exceptionalism and nationalism is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from September 1-4, 2011, in Seattle, Washington. The paper discusses topics including working class in the U.S., sectarianism, American welfare state, and racial politics.

Environmental information disclosure has been much discussed but only infrequently studied systematically to determine the effects of making various kinds of information available to the public. This paper draws from a comprehensive study of environmental information disclosure in the United States, most of the results of which have been reported in Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance (MIT Press, 2011). The book uses ten years of comprehensive data from the Toxics Release Inventory; a nationwide survey of corporate officials; a comparable survey of federal, state, and local officials directly involved in the implementation of the TRI program; and illustrative case studies of selected industrial facilities and communities. Taken together, these data allowed the project team to rigorously examine the effects of information disclosure on industrial facilities and the communities in which they are located. The paper analyzes the effects of information disclosure in the 50 states, the variation among the states in efforts to make information available to the public, the use of TRI information by state and local officials, and the views of those officials regarding actions that might be taken to improve public understanding of environmental and public health risks. Particular attention is given to how the TRI program might be changed to improve the flow of information to the public and to enhance public understanding of environmental risk data of this kind. Increased public understanding and involvement would provide additional incentives for facilities to improve environmental management and performance over time. The fifty states vary widely in environmental performance as measured by changes from year to year in the release of TRI chemicals and the risk associated with those chemicals. Among the most significant variables explaining the differences are state political conditions (such as strong environmental group membership), robust environmental regulations, and innovative pollution prevention policies. Federal, state and local officials report that they use TRI data in a variety of ways, including comparison of emissions by similar facilities, assisting with regulation and enforcement, educating citizens about local pollution problems, checking facility emissions against permit records, and comparing and evaluating public and environmental health risks. However, local officials were far less likely to use TRI data in these ways than were federal and state officials. These officials also report that public understanding of chemical risks could be improved in many ways. These include bringing local officials more thoroughly into the process of information disclosure and chemical management, reporting TRI data with different metrics and especially in terms of public health risks rather than quantities of chemicals released to the environment, improving the accuracy and currency of TRI data, and making use of new and creative ways to reach out to and involve the public, for example, via social networking sites. The paper appraises these suggestions in terms of technical, administrative, and political feasibility and likely their effects on environmental performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a draft chapter from a larger book-in-progress, tentatively titled Moral Evolution: Why Culture Trumps Religion in American Politics. The book argues that in the long run, religious perspectives on political issues follow rather than lead public opinion. During periods of cultural transition, religious leaders often resist trends in attitudes, values, and behaviors that conflict with their doctrines, but they adjust their positions as their own members become affected by the same transformations sweeping across the rest of society. The current paper applies these ideas to the politics of homosexuality in America since 1900. Before the late 1960s, religious and secular orientations toward homosexuality overlapped, with secular institutions-the law and order arms of government on the one hand, the psychiatric profession on the other-taking the lead in condemning homosexuality through laws, practices, and scientific discourse. As Americans became more tolerant of homosexuality beginning in the early 1970, different parts of the public moved in tandem. Using data from the General Social Survey, I show that Catholics and mainline Protestants closely resembled the overall U.S. population from 1973 to 2010 in their opinions about the morality of homosexuality and the need for civil rights protections for gays and lesbians. Evangelical and black Protestants started from lower bases but shifted their opinions in the same direction as the rest of the population The paper documents three responses through which Christian leaders accommodated the growing acceptance of homosexuality among their members and in American society more generally. The first response was a theological debate about the relevant biblical passages on homosexual behavior, with revisionists arguing that traditional interpretations of the Bible are wrong. The second response included varied actions by mainline denominations, including statements more favorable to homosexuality and, more recently, the ordaining of gay and lesbian pastors. The third response was a softening of political rhetoric, including among conservative Christians and the organizations that represent them. Taken together, these responses show how Christian groups have made important accommodations on the issue of homosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a newly compiled aggregate measure of issue competence for the Republicans and Democrats based on 2,450 survey items on issue competence over six decades. Using quarterly time series data between 1980 and 2008 we test three theoretical propositions about the issue valence of U.S. parties: citizens' ratings of party competence on valence issues tend to move in common over time, consistent with the existence of a prevailing mood in public opinion, controlling for partisan bias; issue valence is driven by presidential performance when the party is in power, but by other valence indicators when the party is in opposition; and, the effect of valence exerts a substantive influence upon electoral support. The paper therefore reveals that existing performance measures of party choice are useful indicators of competence, but issue valence provides a valuable contribution to explaining party choice. The implications are significant for the analysis of electoral choice in U.S. politics and for our understanding of dynamics of public opinion and party competition [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The barriers to concerted political action on climate change mitigation are steep, especially in multilevel systems where power is diffused and authority contested. Yet action and mobilization - galvanising resources and people to participate actively - is possible, and in certain instances far reaching. This paper seeks to explain how mobilization occurs in complex multilevel systems. It compares two different polities - the United States and the European Union - to tease out the key features of multilevel systems and how they affect climate activism, mobilization and governance. Focusing particularly on climate activists - politically engaged participants - the paper analyses climate mobilization across three stages: awareness-building, alliance-building and network creation. It argues that successful mobilization is highly contingent on activists' ability to exploit - or at least navigate - multilevel institutional barriers. To capture this mobilization dynamic, the paper develops the notion of 'mobilization networks' - stakeholder networks able to transcend levels and institutional inertia and steer polities towards particular climate goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast economics literature embraces taxation of the carbon content of fossil fuels as the superior policy approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pursuing other major energy policy goals. However, national government experience around the world suggests that carbon taxes face exceedingly difficult political hurdles. Federal experience in the United States and Canada confirms this pattern. This paper reviews sub-federal policy development among American states and Canadian provinces, a great many of whom have been active in climate policy development. With one notable exception, it concludes that explicit carbon taxation appears to remain a political non-starter. At the same time, states and provinces have been placing indirect carbon prices on fossil fuel use through a wide range of policies over the past fifteen years. These tend to strategically alter labeling, finding different ways to characterize new or expanded policies by avoiding the terms of "tax" and "carbon" in imposing costs. The paper offers a framework for considering such a diverse set of strategies and examines common design features, including direct linkage between cost imposition and fund usage to build political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many decades, Supreme Court justices and legal scholars have argued over the validity of different tools in constitutional interpretation, including social science data, public opinion and, most recently, laws and standards of decency from abroad. Although several of those currently on the bench maintain that foreign laws have no place in American constitutional adjudication, the larger universe in which their institution operates has become increasingly transnational since the end of the Cold War. The term judicial transnationalism has been coined to describe this phenomenon, characterized by unprecedented levels of interaction and exchange between foreign courts and legal activists. This paper examines these changes, evaluating the extent to which they have resulted in higher levels or new forms of foreign and transnational participation and interest in Supreme Court cases. In doing so, it tests a common observation made about the effect of judicial globalization in the U.S. context: that because of the increasingly complex and global nature of legal structures, the Supreme Court is more likely to hear cases that involve some form of foreign or international law. By analyzing the litigant and amicus briefs filed in all cases from the 1979-1980, 1989-1990, 1999-2000, and 2009-2010 dockets, this paper attempts to determine if there has indeed been an increase in the presence of foreign law arguments made in briefs filed to the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I begin to examine the nature of the relationship between state court decisions and the legal issue of environmental standing. Prior to the 1970s, standing rules stood as a barrier keeping many environmental groups out of the courts. The consequences were profound, and the federal courts' standing rules were a hurdle to the advancement of environmental policy. After the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Sierra Club v. Morton, environmental interest groups have achieved more success in standing disputes in federal courts, ushering in a new era of environmental litigation and policy advancement. Despite the extreme importance of standing as a hurdle to environmental litigation, these changes in standing policy have generated very little research to date. In this paper, I present a very initial look at how environmental interest groups have fared in standing disputes in California state courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the redistricting revolution of the 1960's, which began with a series of Supreme Court decisions that forced states to draw equally populated districts for the U.S. House and state legislative chambers, the standards for Congress and legislative districts have evolved over time. Today's standards call for virtually no population deviations for congressional districts, though legislative districts can typically deviate up to 10 percent. In practice this means that districts can vary by as much as five percent above and below the ideal population within a state. In this paper I demonstrate that these population deviations are a simple tool for those that redraw electoral boundaries to create a partisan gerrymander. If one party controls the redistricting process, districts from the opposite party are typically over populated and districts favoring the party in control are usually under populated. I demonstrate this phenomenon using data from 47 states after the 2000 round of redistricting. The paper concludes with a discussion on why that courts ought to abolish the "10-percent" rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor is perhaps the most widely studied intelligence failure in American history. The lessons of that failure included the belief that warnings are invariably available before such a disaster, but missed, and that a major part of the solution is to improve the ability of analysis to find the key signals amid the background noise. These lessons have become conventional wisdom, and have been often reaffirmed since then, including after the 9/11 attacks and the Christmas Day 2009 airline bombing attempt. But this paper argues that the conventional wisdom about what went wrong with intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor is incorrect, and that this misconception has contributed to continuing intelligence failures today. This paper proposes a new model that better explains the failure of Pearl Harbor, and which can help improve intelligence performance today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The superpowers' Cold War nuclear arsenals have been frequently mocked as "arsenals of folly" that greatly exceeded the requirements of deterrence. This paper instead demonstrates that the U.S. arsenal was principally driven by the political economy of U.S. military commitments to Europe. Ultimately the least bad option for the United States given constraints was to plausibly threaten nuclear first use, which in turn required plausible damage limitation by destroying Soviet nuclear forces. This paper demonstrates that this logic inexorably drove U.S. nuclear doctrine and posture, and in fact had the desired effect on the Soviet leadership of making nuclear first use seem plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the heightened aggressiveness that North Korea has shown since late 2009. It argues that a combination of militarism and frustration amplified by precarious leadership transition caused Pyongyang's astonishing belligerence. Simultaneously, it calls into question common alternative accounts pointing to either excessive or insufficient engagement or a presumably uncontrolled military as the primary cause for North Korean hostility. In addition, the paper argues that North Korean aggressiveness is channeled toward South Korea (rather than the United States) and particularly its western maritime frontier, because there are especially acute grievances in that region and safer grounds for implementing militaristic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores immigrants' rights activism by non-state actors in assisting immigrants and xenophobic activism by ultra-nationalist groups at the local and national level. Three classes of non-state pro-immigration organizations that are concerned with immigrants exist throughout industrialized societies: immigrant ethnic associations, faith-based institutions, and immigrant advocacy groups. Through seven years of fieldwork, I have found that different kinds of non-state organizations predominate in different locations. Immigrant ethnic associations predominate in Sweden, faith-based organizations in the United States, and immigrant advocacy groups in Japan. Less dominant immigrant organizations exist in each country, but are much rarer. The target of activism by non-state actors also differs in these three countries. In Sweden, activists target state elites at all levels, including politicians, bureaucrats, and the European Court. In the United States, faith-based groups partner with local labor unions to target both local and national politicians. In Japan, immigrant advocacy NGOs work with local government officials to target the national bureaucracy and the Supreme Court to influence policy outcomes on immigration. I also observed more xenophobic activisms in both the United States and Japan but less in Sweden. However, xenophobic activism involving armed vigilante groups are larger in membership size in the United States than in Japan. My paper argues that the type of electoral system explains the presence/absence of certain political groups on immigration issues. Political opportunity structure helps identify specific political conditions and associational strategies under which a political and/or social group emerges to mobilize public opinion and influence policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the many references to an "Anglo-Saxon model" there were, as the financial crisis unfolded, important discretionary fiscal policy differences between the US and the UK. This paper considers the reasons why the US adopted a far larger fiscal stimulus (as a share of 2008 GDP) than the UK, the Labour government in the UK committed itself to early fiscal retrenchment, and the UK failed to embrace spending projects whereas they constituted a sizeable proportion of the US total. Although relative deficit and debt levels should be considered and agency-based variables cannot be disregarded, the paper emphasizes the part played by underlying economic variables and the institutional architecture. It suggests that there were particular opportunities open to the Obama administration in its early months while the Labour government in the UK faced significant constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]