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A conference paper about the importance of public ceremonies in democracies including Great Britain, France, and the U.S. is presented. It mentions that public ceremonies provide citizens their identity and the will to think of the good of all. The evaluation is necessary in order to demonstrate the norms and values that link elites and ordinary people.

This paper will examine how extreme partisanship in the United States Senate has prevented any significant collaborative efforts between the President Obama and Congress. I argue that the United States Senate is undergoing a modern era of disunion. The conditions in the Senate can be directly traced to the concerted efforts of Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to maintain ideological purity among his caucus members for the purposes ensuring that President Obama's has a failed presidency by asserting a Republican agenda that is aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Democratic initiatives. The Constitutional responsibility for shared governance has been severely compromised by conservative factions of the Republican Party. Subsequently, members of Congress who wish to find compromises across party lines are shut out of the political process. I propose that the restoration and continued health of the American democracy is dependent on the members' ability to reassert their influence collectively into the political process through engaging their colleagues and constituencies in the process of deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether constitutionalism presupposes the existence of a ?people.? After reviewing some of the relevant literature, the paper makes three claims. First, there are multiple varieties of constitutionalism. Only those varieties that aim at self-government presuppose the existence of a people, and not all constitutions need have that goal. Second, there are multiple conceptions of self-government which correspond to different conceptions of what a ?people? is. Third, there is a plausible version of constitutional self-government that presupposes only modest conditions for the existence of a people. In particular, it presupposes the right to travel, a common discourse, and a widely (though not unanimously) shared sense of mission, but it does not presuppose shared values, character, ethnicity, or (except in a very thin sense) heritage. These conditions are probably satisfied within the United States. The paper therefore concludes that it is possible to interpret American constitutionalism as an effort to secure a form of self-government that does presuppose the existence of an American people, but that does not presuppose the existence of shared American values, an American character, or an American ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the quantitative conflict literature employs data sets that draw a large portion of their cases from 1945-1990. This historical period coincides with the U.S.-Soviet bipolar competition and security arrangements associated with that competition. A debate within the democratic peace literature has emerged between those who view the democratic peace as a general phenomenon, and those who see democracy?s effect on international conflict as largely a function of the particular circumstances of the Cold War alignment. The critics of a general relationship between democracy and war focus specifically on the role of the United States as a leader of one of the bi-polar alliance blocks The possibility that observed relationships between democracy and war could be dependent on the particular historical circumstances of the Cold War raises the question: To what extent are other empirical findings about international conflict also a function of the hegemonic influence exercised by the superpowers during period? Using ordinal logistic regression to examine the pattern of third party joining this paper re-examines the extent to which the relationship between democracy and intervention as well as the relationships between variables commonly used to explain third party interventions in the conflict literature, such as proximity, power status, democracy, trade and alliances, are a function of the intervention choices of the United States during the Cold War. The paper finds that the intervention choice of the United States is by far the most important predictor of the intervention choices of other third parties to interstate wars. And that accounting for the intervention choices of the United States ?explains? away much of the general relationships observed in earlier studies. Interestingly enough though reduced in substantive importance, a statistical the relationship between shared democracy and joining remains even after accounting for U.S. intervention choice in this period. This finding suggests that the relationship between shared democracy and third party joining is not entirely dependent upon the exercise of American leadership during the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drug policy poses a fundamental challenge to American democracy. Nowhere is this more evident than in its impact on marginalized communities. To be sure, scholars have noted the social problems associated with the implementation of drug laws of the 1980’s, including: continued drug use and addiction; increased incarceration; and spread of drug-related illnesses. Additionally, civil rights activists attack the individual rights’ restrictions central to drug policy. Still, less attention has been paid to other ways in which drug policy harms citizens’ democratic experiences, particularly those of marginalized community members. The focus of this paper will be to examine the effects of contemporary drug policy on the political expressions and experiences of African Americans. Using Harlem as a case study, this paper confirms the argument that a racial gap exists across Americans’ perceptions of the drug problem. Factors influencing this cognitive divide include: 1) the disparate impact of drug legislation; 2) the symbolic messages communicated by political leaders about drug victims and culprits; and 3) the distrust and suspicion of the political motives of the government by African Americans. This study uses interviews, contextual and survey data to explore the democratic implications of these racial disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against certain features of one prominent account (by John Rawls) of democratic legitimacy, justice, and rights. The paper also argues for an alternative account. Rawls argues in his later writings (well after A Theory of Justice) that to set out some basic conditions for constitutional democratic legitimacy, we need an account of justice appropriate for the "domain of the political", we need "an overlapping consensus" of "reasonable comprehensive doctrines" about what is just, we need need citizen endorsement of "constitutional essentials" as described in the account of justice. On a Rawlsian view, religious, philosophical, or moral comprehensive doctrines that try to say what is generally valuable in human life cannot be enforced without the oppressive exercise of state power. I argue that a better philosophy would be more qualified about comprehensive doctrines, more empirical and disconfirmable, not so Kantian. Rawls is right that the legal enforcement of religion is likely to require the oppressive exercise of state power but wrong to say that enforcing philosophical and moral comprehensive doctrines can be ruled out across the board as involving the oppressive exercise of state power. This depends on the "comprehensive doctrine". I question Rawls’s rejection of what he calls "comprehensive doctrines’ that would enforce the ideal of autonomy (e.g., some of Joseph Raz’s views). Only if we defend the possibility of some philosophical and moral doctrines being used in correcting the societal consensus on "constitutional essentials", and effectively advocating constitutional reform, can we avoid political dogmatism about the nature of democratic legitimacy, justice, and rights. I offer some empirical and political confirmation of my view by drawing on what Cass Sunstein argues about socioeconomic rights embedded in the South African Constitution among many others, an arrangement that could be drawn on to criticize the American Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race has been a constant but unstable concept in US history, and the work of racial formation has taken place within institutions as well as in broader society and culture (as detailed by Omi and Winant, among others). This paper, part of a larger project, considers late twentieth and early twenty-first century efforts to address the legacy of racial discrimination in the law. It confronts the various strands of racial erasure advocated from different corners of the political spectrum. One element of this is the move to formal color-blindness in law spurred by interpretations of Warren Court precedents on race by the Rehnquist Court. The paper explores the roots of color-blindness in legal doctrine and critiques its current conservative application. Another related but less explored element is the political movement to erase racial references from state constitutions. In the last five years, several states have considered and passed initiatives and referenda that remove racially discriminatory language from their state constitutions. The paper considers this movement in Alabama and the meaning of these votes in the context of modern legal commitments to color-blindness. Ultimately, the paper argues that the process of racial formation continues in the modern era and that the historical legacy of racial formation cannot be erased. The paper ends with an analytical and political critique of efforts to deconstruct whiteness. It offers instead a qualified constructivist reading of racial formation as a simultaneously institutional and ideological process that leaves some room for agency and intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the public choice school, which has dominated the debate on metropolitan governance since the 1980s, is facing new intellectual challenges. Like the reformers during the first half of the 20th Century, many urban scholars and practitioners are again demanding more integrated governance structures for sprawling metropolitan areas. There are also fundamental differences between the early reformers and the current advocates of a new regionalism in metropolitan areas. The new conceptions can be seen as the latest step in a dialectic development of governance paradigms. Whereas the early reformers adopted a technocratic, "steering" perspective and proposed a consolidated regional city, the public choice advocates relied on an individualistic "choice" approach to propose decentralized and (territorially or functionally) fragmented government structures. The latest turn of the debate goes beyond a pure instrumentalist view on political institutions which is embodied in both traditions. Social constructivists understand the attempts for "boundary (re)drawing", which is at the core of all metropolitan reform plans, primarily as a process of constructing/ constitutionalizing individual and collective identities. This paper presents an analysis of distinct definitions of fundamental governance goals and the corresponding proposals for institutional design. Very different understandings of "democracy" can be described in Abraham Lincoln’s terms: Early reformers based their plans on a top-down perspective on democracy as "government for the people", rational choice advocates stress the bottom-up concept of "government by the people" and social constructivists focus their attention on "government of the/of what people" - an aspect which is gaining center stage in a world where socio-economic and cultural spaces of flows are superposing traditional spaces of place. The formula for economic success has changed from focusing on effectiveness (a concept based on welfare theory) over efficiency (based on political economy) to competitiveness (based on trade theory). Dominant definitions of social justice have been transformed from equality over equivalence to equity/difference. The paper uses those different definitions of core values and the corresponding proposals for institutional design to analyze the discourse on institutional reform in metropolitan areas in the United States from the 1950s to the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes the theoretical insights from the literature on transitional justice to address issues of racial justice (pertaining to African Americans) in the United States. The title is a bit misleading, as I say little about racial reconciliation as such. A more appropriate title would be something like "Racial Justice as Transitional Justice." Still, I do want to examine what would be required for a just resolution to a wide range of political issues involving race in the contemporary United States. The general argument is that much of the racial injustice in this country can be traced to the incomplete nature of the transition that took place during the civil rights era. More recent regime transitions in various parts of the world have taught us a great deal about what is necessary to make a just transition from a human rights-abusing regime to a human rights-respecting regime. In light of these more recent transitions, and the theorizing to which they have given rise, our own transition to democracy looks very incomplete. It therefore remains incumbent upon us to complete this transition in order to become a (more) racially just society. The argument proceeds in three main stages. I first discuss the range of views among theorists of transitional justice, and defend what I take to be a moderate position on the requirements of a just transition. These requirements include a strong prima facie presumption in favor of certain backward-looking measures such as prosecution, reparation, and acknowledgement. Next, I argue that the civil rights era in the United States was a regime transition, analogous to more recent transitions, and thus can be evaluated in light of the normative standards that have emerged from reflection upon recent transitions to democracy. By the standards I defend in the first section, our transition to democracy with respect to equal citizenship for African American was not just, or at least is so far incomplete. The country certainly did not undertake the measures that are prima facie required for a just transition, and it seems that the conditions that could rebut the presumption in favor of those measures did not obtain. The third section of the paper suggests a range of issues that should be considered in an effort to complete our transition to a nonracist liberal democracy. These include policies designed to implement a program of black reparations and symbolic and cultural issues related to the acknowledgement of the injustice of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about variations in punitiveness across the U.S., which was prepared for the 84th Annual South Political Science Association Conference held in Orlando, Florida on January 4, 2013, is presented. It discusses increase in mass imprisonment in the U.S., linkage between punitiveness and conservative political ideology, and relationship between crime policy and public response. Also mentions about theoretical linkage between incarceration rates and surplus labor.

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.

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]

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]

This paper takes the position that the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies were born out of a policy-making process that was the product of a specific ideology subscribed to by a few powerful and talented lawyers. While political ideology is always a motivator for presidents, when the Bush administration crafted its approach to combating terrorism, the interagency process of vetting policy was discarded in favor of a process that was single-minded in both its goals, and its approach. This paper is a first effort to examine the rich sources of information now available to try to explain how the process contributed to the policies, or more specifically, how a system of decision-making, insulated from the expertise of career professionals in the relevant agencies and departments, produced policies that prompted widespread disapproval, that have been largely discredited, and that are still a very live subject of continuing investigation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have attempts to force democracy by military force, whether by the United States and other external interveners, generally been unsuccessful? This paper suggests that there are at least four causes. The first is the fact that the motives and goals of the intervening actors may not easily translate to democracy. The second is that domestic factors of the neighborhood are often not taken into consideration. The third factor is that aid targeted specifically at democracy may not be sufficient and/or wisely used. Finally, general support by the international community may not be as helpful as it might be. The paper also suggests avenues for future research into the concept of forced democratization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Obama campaign's choice to court evangelical Protestants has resurrected discussion of the Christian Left in American politics. The Christian Left (which includes the evangelical left, the mainline left, and what we term the emergent left, which may be the only "new" part of the movement) is an ideological and theological phenomenon. While there is not a necessary relationship between liberal theology and politics, it is common and worth exploring. We argue that the Christian Left's understanding of eschatology ("end times" theology) motivates its political activity and shapes policy preferences. Particularly, the concept of the "Kingdom of God" bridges the theological and political within the movement, and based on this concept, much of the Christian Left is willing to use the state to produce largely religious outcomes. This willingness, within a pluralistic, constitutional republic, is reminiscent of critiques of the Christian Right. In the end, this paper will help distinguish, at a theoretical level, the common components of the Christian Left and Right in America, and should provide useful language and concepts necessary for a future empirical investigation of the Christian Left within the mass public. As for method, this paper will be an investigation of elite thought, using primary and historical resources, within the contemporary Christian Left. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the homogeneity of a party’s support across the nationâ€"party nationalizationâ€"is a key concern to new democracies. This paper tests the impact historical development, intra-party and institutional variables in explaining party nationalization in Central America. During the 1990´s, five of the six Central American countries experienced transitions to democracy. Although there are similarities in the democratization trends, my data covering the years 1980-2008 show remarkable, inter- and intra-country differences in terms of geographic distribution of the parties’ vote. An important focus of the paper is to distinguish among factors that explain differences between parties, among countries, and across time. Specifically I hypothesize that historical development factors and institutional elements are associated with party nationalization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses some difficulties arising from how liberal democracies address crises. It presents and compares two alternative methods for controlling executive discretion while permitting enough flexibility to preserve the public good. The first tightly constrains the executive with laws while acknowledging that some necessary actions will have to be performed extralegally. The second permits almost anything to be done within the ordinary powers of government, so long as it is done with the concurrence of an independent office. This paper argues that the second is preferable to the first but that there is no unobjectionable institutional solution to the problem of crisis government. It leaves for another place the application of its conclusions to the American constitution and the war on terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the role of political parties in a legislative environment that makesdecisions over both ideological and distributive policies. We develop a simple model inwhich the majority party leadership, seeking to achieve non-median policies as a means ofmaximizing the probability its party retains the majority, trades off distributive bene¯tsto obtain non-median ideological policy. The key prediction of the model is that moderatemembers of the majority party receive disproportionately large side-payments from the partyleader. This prediction receives support when tested against data from the 104th and 105thCongresses. In the second half of the paper, we demonstrate several important consequencesof a legislative environment with vote-buying: vote-buying biases ideal point estimates andgenerally causes researchers to overstate both the true level of polarization and the degreeof party homogeneity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timothy Dwight's orations, sermons, and poetry from the 1770s and 1780s reveal his consistent attempt to situate America as the endpoint toward which all of history had been inexorably moving. While drawing on Puritan, millennialist, and other antecedents, Dwight's vision of American destiny also paralleled that offered at the same time in Europe by leading radical Enlightenment figures, such as Turgot, Condorcet, and Richard Price. Dwight's philosophy of history and habits of mind match closely the analysis Eric Voegelin mapped out in his From Enlightenment to Revolution, in particular, Voegelin's concept of the "authoritative present." This paper applies Voegelin's vocabulary and analytical tools to one important part of America's self-understanding at the critical time of the Founding. The paper also explores the implications of America's tendency to conceive of itself as history's "authoritative present." Is such a national self-definition compatible with constitutionalism and a modest republic? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About the only good thing one can say about the militant unilateralism that until very recently characterized the George W. Bush Administration is that it boosted interest in such closely related and contested concepts as "superpower," "hegemon," "empire,""imperialism," and "colonialism." However, all of these terms--not least "empire"--remain contested. This paper suggests that there are at least four approaches to defining empire, each of which has its particular utility and also consequences. The first simply accepts as "examples" or an informal "ideal type" the traditional list of empires that hardly anyone would quarrel with: the Roman Empire, British, Ottoman, Tsarist Russian, Spanish, and so on. The second approach is much more self-consciously empirical, in that it seeks to tease out of those examples and others less well-known what exactly is the "essence of empire." The aim is to fashion an ideal type in a strict Weberian sense. A third "constructivist" approach ventures an opinion as to how a particular polity is generally regarded and/or ought to be categorized in some sort of reasonably objective sense. The fourth overtly normative or even pejorative approach engages in purposeful name-calling, obviously labeling a polity as an empire either for the purpose of praise/exhortation or to engender reform/resistance,Of course, there is some overlapping of these four definitional approaches: in their different ways, all are constructions and inherently normative. This paper gives particular attention to the empirical and overtly normative approaches, and then turns to the question of what light this may shed on the notion of American Empire. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wide range of efforts has been offered on "winning the peace" in Iraq. This paper examines the judgments of several comparative studies on post-conflict nation-building, and it introduces 1990s Russia as an additional source of "lessons learned". Beyond the widely recommended attention to the large and small technical tasks, or "factors", in the areas of security, democracy, administrative capacity, and economic reconstruction, this paper points to the importance of "dynamics" such as a real and lasting commitment by the United States and the coalition, the emergence of widely supported and particularly talented Iraqi leadership, and increased evidence of "learning" among Iraqi elites and masses and among the coalition and international community. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines differences in conservative attitudes on the Supreme Court. Using a political regimes type framework, we show how divisions among Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas, reflect divisions among conservatives in the current political regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use data for U.S. House members from 1974 to 2002 to test a series of models of sponsorship and cosponsorship behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary globalized environmental campaigns are increasingly acknowledged to have developed new kinds of political institutions and changed the way existing political institutions function. However, much contemporary political and international theorizing remains tied to an understanding of the appropriate space for and character of politics that tends to exclude the broader implications of these emerging forms of political practice from serious consideration. Consequently, political actors at the cutting edge of these efforts must negotiate the challenges they face in the absence of the resources that political and international theory should be providing, while contemporary theory simultaneously risks becoming less and less relevant to political practice. This paper emerges from a larger project that seeks to develop an innovative way of bridging the gap between the understandings of the political expressed and enacted by political actors and that of contemporary political and international theorists. In particular it will explore the challenges posed to both contemporary political actors and theorists by how environmental campaigns are disrupting the spatial resolutions of modern sovereignty, and as such are evading spatialized forms of democratic accountability. The concluding argument emphasizes the necessity and value of grounding political theorizing in a critical understanding of contemporary political practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I seek to test a possible explanation for the contradiction between those scholars who contend that the U.S. is a model democracy and those who have contended that democracy has been in decline in the U.S. for many decades. The former may be focusing on democracy as an end, while the latter may be focusing on democracy as a means. Thus, election turnout may decline and major civic organizations may have lost members, but new or rarely used mechanisms may have taken their place. By examining the use of alternative means in the city of Claremont, California, over a two-month period of intense political activity in early 2005, the posited explanation was not substantiated. Alternative means served as means for communicating the views of a small group of individuals and misinformation. Thus, the alternative explanation was not confirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dahl (1957) proposed that the U.S. Supreme Court's decision-making was an extension of the policy-making agenda of the ‘governing national coalition.’ Only recently has this view been applied to the study of the Court (e.g. Chen 2002; Gillman 2002; Powe 2000). Despite scholarly recognition that conservatism has had an enormous impact on American politics and public policy over the last thirty years, little research examines the extent of that influence on the policy-making of the federal courts (but see Keck 2004). This paper seeks to understand Supreme Court decision-making, in particular the Rehnquist Court's recent federalism decisions, by examining influences beyond the justices' own policy preferences, by looking at the ideology of the Republican coalitions that consciously promoted judicial restraint and greater respect for federalism, and which viewed the courts as key instruments of national policy-making (Gillman 2002; Peretti 1999). I locate the source of the Rehnquist Court's recent federalism decisions within the strategic and systematic effort of conservatives in the Reagan and first Bush administration who sought to push the Court's agenda to the right. Conservative leaders and activists were successful in institutionalizing a conservative agenda in the federal courts by engaging in the following activities: (1) using public rhetoric to promote a view of limited government and respect for federalism; (2) staffing key policy-making agencies, in particular the Department of Justice, with people who firmly believed in and advocated on behalf of limiting government and the intrusion of federal courts into arenas of legislative policy-making; and (3) institutionalizing greater executive control over the federal judicial appointment process so as to appoint conservative judges who believed in judicial restraint and respect for federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the perceptions of the United States in the mass publics in eight predominantly Islamic countries and in six European countries. Using a Bayesian Multi-Level Item-Response Theory Model, it distinguishes two types of attitudes, namely attitudes towards American culture and society and attitudes towards American policies. The empirical patterns in anti-American sentiment define a loosely constrained belief system where attitudes towards the American polity and American policies are only moderately connected. Approval of the American political ideals does not guarantee approval of America's political choices in the international arena. But the disapproval of America's policies does not have the psychological force to displace the aspirations that America symbolizes. Far from being the trump card that wins over the sympathy and approval of ordinary people, the mechanism of soft power nonetheless is at most an antidote to the most blatant forms of opposition to America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State public opinion influences the processes and outcomes of state politics and provides us with much information about the nature of political representation in the U.S. In a preliminary analysis, this paper breaks down state public opinion by various demographic groups (racial and ethnic minorities, gender, income and education, union membership, religion). The paper demonstrates that a number of groups have opinions that are distinctive from others in the state and are of sufficient size to alter the state's overall citizen ideology. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of majority party power in Congress (or lack thereof) is a rich and well-developed literature. But research on this subject in the Senate has lagged behind comparable studies in the House. This project deepens our understanding of the nature of party power in the Senate by asking the question: what mix of policies (be they liberal or conservative) would be passed by a majority party-influenced Senate? I propose a simple spatial model which makes several predictions. I then test these predictions empirically using Senate roll call vote data from 1953-1996. I suggest that the majority party attempts to control the status quo policies that are brought to the floor. This helps them enact bills that move policy in the majority party?s most-preferred direction. Both the theoretical question and the empirical measure employed in this paper provide a useful step forward in the research of majority party power in the Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterogeneous democracies face the challenge of respecting differences while pursuing the good of the whole. Although deliberative democracy has been posed as a way to achieve this, serious doubts remain. In this paper, I investigate the prospects of a particular form of communication to attend to diversity while upholding unity. My focus is on city-wide dialogue programs on race and ethnic relations that are currently used throughout the United States. Their unique focus on perspectives, power and inequality make these programs especially likely to strike a balance between unity and diversity. I examine the practice of civic dialogue programs through survey studies of people doing dialogue in two cities, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with practitioners, participants, and public officials in 45 cities throughout the United States. By looking at the effects of the dialogue, listening to the way practitioners are using this communication, and observing what takes place within it, this study expands our understanding of the contributions of deliberation to heterogeneous democracies. We see that in practice, civic dialogue is predominantly focused on recognizing and understanding cultural difference. Although there is little attention to unity in the form of consensus or common ground, the way in which people are using dialogue around the United States suggests a revision of our ideas about the place of marginalized voices within the deliberative system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that when political institutions fail to perform, that management increases in importance. The theory is tested using a large data set of public organizations with results that support this theoretical notion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers of democracy have long worried that it has the potential to degenerate into rule by the poor. Yet this has never happened in the United States. Is this because the U.S. has a relatively egalitarian class structure, or are there other reasons to be considered? For some of the ancient Greeks, democracy was a form of class rule, and the concern that poor majorities would threaten property rights has surfaced and resurfaced in democratic political thought ever since, including in the thinking of the American Federalists. In response to this concern, Aristotle suggested that an ideal democracy (or polity) would have a large middle class, and Alexis de Tocqueville believed that American democracy worked in part because there were no extremes of wealth here. However, if we wish to understand why democracy in America has never been a vehicle for rule by the poorer classes, class structure alone does not offer us an adequate explanatory framework. Ironically, the thinker who gives us the best clue as to why democracy does not become a vehicle for rule by the poor is Adam Smith, who understood the powerful grip that the dream of upward mobility can have on “poor men’s sons,” and who was aware of the peculiar admiration for the rich that seems to go with this dream. In short, what Smith recognized is power of ideology, culture, and class consciousness. The dream of upward mobility has had a powerful grip on the American imagination since at least the Jacksonian era, and today, according to one study, nearly 40 percent of all Americans believe that they either are in the top 1 percent of wealth-holders, or that they will be within their lifetimes. Under these circumstances, the concern that democracy will become rule by the poor seems moot—to say the least. But does not, then, a new concern arise? If such a large proportion of Americans identify themselves not just with the wealthy but with the extremely wealthy, how can the political interests of the non-wealthy be adequately represented? The dream of upward mobility would seem to cause citizens to vote not their own class interests, but the interests of a class of which they believe they will be a member some day. This paper traces the history of democratic thought about the implications of class structure for democracy. It then focuses on the rise of liberal populism in the United States in the early 19th century, and examines the continued power of the ideology of upward mobility. It considers explanations for the continued grip of this ideology on the American imagination, and it raises concerns about the future shape of democracy under these circumstances. [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]

The EU is a unique type of polity. It is neither a federation nor a state. It has achieved a high degree of integration during its history, but it is still a process, which meets different challenges. The actual institutional and constitutional structure of the EU does not allow it to always cope with the challenges. That is why it needs a change. The EU could take some lessons from successful federations and adapt them to its reality. The USA dual type of federalism is one example. The EU has already a significant number of federal features. However, it still needs reforms in order to function with the new enlargement. The objective of this paper is to see what the EU can learn from the dual American type of federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the demands of a new war against terror that will be protracted in time and global in scope, the thesis of this paper is that the indirect, political approach to intervention is superior to the direct, military approach. Symbolically, this commends a more modest imperial post 9/11 foreign policy than a more arrogant hegemonic one. This point is illustrated by the relatively more successful "imperial" U.S. interventions in Laos during the Cold War and in Afghanistan during the current war againts terror versus the less successful "hegemonic" American interventions in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and in Iraq today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether popular militarism is shaped by basic punitive values and beliefs. Assuming that punitiveness influences opinions about both criminal punishment and war, I infer hypotheses about relationships between death penalty support and support for war and military spending. I test these with 1990-92 American National Election Studies panel data and find death penalty support to be an important predictor of opinions about U.S. involvement in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Death penalty supporters disproportionately favored destroying Saddam’s regime rather than just containing it, and showed less sympathy for the Iraqi people, including enemy civilians caught in the crossfire. Death penalty support is also related, though less strongly, to general support for the acquisition and utility of military power. These findings help explain public enthusiasm for punitive wars, and the efforts of political leaders to demonize enemy ‘evildoers.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses results of in-depth follow-up interviews conducted with selected individuals of Chinese descent residing in Los Angeles and San Francisco who were previously chosen by random to participate in the 2000-01 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey. A total of 15 male and female informants migrated from Taiwan, Mainland China, and Hong Kong were interviewed in Mandarin Chinese. They were asked to compare the performance of the U.S. government to that of the government in their respective ethnic homeland. They were also asked to explain their reasons for supporting a certain U.S. political party, ideology, and type of candidates. In addition, they commented on the state of political participation or the lack of it among Chinese Americans. Finally, they explained the complexity of their ethnic self-identification and experience of racial discrimination. The results help dispel myths about Chinese Americans being politically indifferent and irrational. They help illuminate the possible relationships between ethnic identity, homeland politics, and political participation in the American context. They also provide exciting insights on improving the survey instrument regarding a majority-immigrant population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benedict Anderson argues that nationalist ideas in Asia and Africa are modeled on the 'modular' forms of nationalism that developed in the Americas and Europe. This paper argues that anti-colonial nationalism is a field of contestation between different ideas and practices. Some of these were indeed based on selective appropriation of Western practices, whereas some of these rejected such ideas and practices and contended that decolonization or emancipation necessarily entailed rejecting the examples set by Western nations. This paper compares the thoughts of Frantz Fanon and M.K. Gandhi, two of the most influential figures in post-colonial thought in the twentieth century as well as active participants in major anti-colonial struggles, and contends that in spite of contextual and ideological differences between them both rejected the Western models of nationalist politics and emphasized a repudiation of colonialism through political and institutional innovations in similar ways. The three major sections of the paper deals with their respective critiques of colonialism and elite nationalism; the prescribed modes of political practice; and the projects of national reconstruction. The unifying thread in each of these three sections is their common concerns regarding negation of colonialism as well as the cultural alienation of the nationalist elite and the necessity of a radical break with Western models of nationalist politics. The concluding section attempts to understand the reasons why their visions of national independence remains unfulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most political scientists believe that ideology is important in American politics, there is some debate over how to measure ideology and assess its influence. We evaluate two measures of Senate candidates’ ideology. Although citizen perceptions of Senate candidates and roll call voting measures are highly correlated, they are not equivalent. Furthermore, there are important differences in the responsiveness of the two measures to constituency characteristics. Consequently, we conclude that assessments of representation in both the U.S. Senate and other elected institutions depend on researchers’ decisions on both model specification and variable measurement. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Subjective agreement with a preferred party is the outcome of three processes: proximity voting, persuasion, and perceptual distortion. The key measures used in this paper are a subjective agreement coefficient, which increases in magnitude as a function of all three processes, and a rational democratic coefficient which measures the effects of the first two more rational processes. The data used include Swedish and U.S. election studies, studies of Swedish parliamentarians, and 20 countries from the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems. The rational democratic coefficient increases as education increases and as political involvement increases. The hypothesis that rational democratic processes are inversely related with wishful thinking also received support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of democracy often include an organized polity as a necessary condition for a developed democracy. The strength of civil society can indicate the degree of trust in the system and civic networks can be apolitical training ground for broader political movements. In this paper, I address the question of how civic engagement in democracies may be shaped by past experience with dictatorship. I analyze the effect of a particular form of authoritarian rule, bureaucratic authoritarianism (BA), on civil society in Latin America. I hypothesize that countries that have experienced bureaucratic authoritarianism will have fewer civil society organizations than other Latin American countries, as a result of past repression of the civic sector. By examining a cross-sectional data set of 17 Latin American countries I analyze the lingering effect of BA on civil society strength in the democratic regime. I find support for my primary hypothesis: I confirm that people in post-BA societies are less engaged in voluntary organizations. They are, however, consistently more willing to participate in mass political action. Among countries with past BA regimes, those that had harsher civil society repression show less civic engagement in post-authoritarian democracy. When used as a measure of how engaged people are in their society, and ultimately how invested in their country, the varying degrees of civil society strength across Latin America indicate that bureaucratic authoritarianism caused deep and long-lasting disruptions that will take time to heal, though these citizens continue to recover from the memories of past abuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]