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A conference paper about protests in Madison, Wisconsin, during the 1960s is presented which is to be discussed at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, in Seattle, Washington, on September 2, 2011. The paper focuses on topics including mass media culture, political protests, and compelling personalities in their news coverage.

A conference paper about welfare privatization in California, New York, Texas and Wisconsin is presented which is prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association from September 3-6, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario. The paper discusses topics including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and the privatization of welfare-related services.

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the impact of lobbying of different groups like business and corporate enterprises, trade associations or unions, on the state legislatures. It uses a database of lobbying contacts in the state of Wisconsin, and examines how different groups' lobbying efforts affect the progress of bills through the state legislature.

I do not know how it is to teach in a laptop university because I do not teach in one. This institution meaning the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UW-L) has been talking about going "laptop" ever since the 1990s. There is talk about finally making it by the year 2010 (or is it 2015?). This Political Science professor has had it with all talk and no gain! So she has taken the unofficial use of the technology in all her Political Science courses to lead the way. This paper will describe the efforts at developing modules that allow for the delivery of material in a timely fashion. It will show aspects of JiTT (Just in Time Teaching) and its advantages in the classroom. It will also demonstrate the use of PRS (Personal Response Systems) in an attempt to gauge what students are learning. Data based on student surveys will show the pros and cons to being a "renegade" in the classroom with the use of technology. Readers will hopefully gain a few pointers in the uses of technology in the Political Science classroom. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the complex political economy of school choice, primarily as it has developed in Wisconsin, although we believe the models we develop will generalize to other locales. We focus specifically on how these various forms of choice interact and compete with each other. Most striking to us was that school choices, particularly charter schools, have expanded beyond the inner city and urban areas to include mid-sized cities and smaller towns. To explain this expansion of choice, we develop a theory derived from spatial economic theory. Spatial theory, which explains firm placement relative to customer and supplier location, is applicable to school districts and schools. The empirical data we analyze, in addition to our rich case study materials, include the growth and expansion in charter schools; and, for Wisconsin, the use of open enrollment by charter-school districts. The results are startling in terms of how well they seem to conform to our abstract spatial-economic theory. An exception is the creation of virtual charter schools that draw on a market defined only by the borders of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do residents of the United States connect anti-government attitudes with preferences for small government? The two are not necessarily the same, but claims that government is out of step with real working Americans are one common contemporary strategy of arguing against government spending and social programs. This study analyzes multiple conversations among 39 groups meeting of their own accord in 27 municipalities sampled throughout the state of Wisconsin to investigate current understandings of small government. The results illuminate the role of race and also rural identity in arguments that connect lack of government representation with support for small government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study which focuses on public support for the election of members of the judicial bench, and the importance of studying judicial elections to understand the connection between perceived legitimacy of courts and the state of democracy. It is based on the data from two statewide surveys of Wisconsin residents to analyze their support for the work of the Supreme Court. It analyzes voter attitudes' toward courts, and the role of courts in state politics.

We explore the use of geographic boundaries as regression discontinuities, studying designs where the assignment variable is distance to a boundary and subjects on either side of this boundary are compared. We develop the identification assumptions behind RD designs of this type and suggest that the key assumption is more likely to be violated, since agents are better able to sort around the discontinuity. Moreover, we show that geographic RD designs that employ a naive notion of distance as the assignment variable fail to recover the treatment effects of interest. We develop an new estimator that is faithful to the inherently spatial qualities of the design and a method to test between identification strategies. We illustrate our argument and method with an application on whether ballot initiatives increase turnout. Specifically, we focus on a 2008 initiative to provide paid sick leave that was on the ballot in the city of Milwaukee but not the rest of the state. We find no evidence that turnout increased due to the ballot initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the politics of territorial division in the U.S. which includes creation of Wisconsin Territory from Michigan, creation of Illinois Territory from Indiana and creation of Michigan Territory from Indiana. It discusses several facts which includes concerns of territorial organization, fluidity of the jurisdictional boundaries and the inherently temporary nature of a territory.

Political scientists are often interested in understanding whether state laws alter individual level behavior. For example, states often alter their election procedures, which can increase or decrease the cost of voting. In this example, it is important to understand whether these changes alter turnout since changes in costs may disproportionally affect those at the margin of voting. Analysts have typically used one of two different regression based research designs to estimate whether changes in state laws increase or decrease turnout. In both instances, voters from states without a change in laws are used as counterfactuals for the voters who experience a change in election law. Here, we carefully examine the assumptions behind both research designs and study their plausibility. Next, we outline a series of research design elements that can be used in addition to the usual designs. These research design elements allow the analyst to better understand the role of unobserved confounders, which is obscured in standard research designs. Using these design elements, we demonstrate that what appears to be clear cut evidence from the usual research designs is often a function confounding. We argue that to truly understand how changes in voting costs alters turnout, a different research design is required. Future work must rely on a research design that makes comparisons among voters who live within the same state. Our work has implications beyond turnout to any investigation of how state level treatments alter individual behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how education funding policy and perceived school quality are affected by increased diversity within a community. It assesses perceptions of community members from Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin about changing school spending priorities and policies as a result of new populations.

While there are many studies that examine the impact of campaign contributions on the judiciary most of these focus on the impact on case outcomes. We posit a relationship between the campaign contribution to an individual justice and the vote of that individual justice. To determine the relationship between campaign contributions and the votes of state supreme court justices we employ the data from the National Institute for Money in Politics on the donations to Wisconsin Supreme Court justices and the cases they decided post-contribution. With one notable exception, we find no significant relationship between contributions and votes of the justices of Wisconsin Supreme Court. Our findings create a future research agenda to examine the impact of contributions on individual justices of other state supreme courts to determine if there are similar findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]