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The article presents information on a paper presented at the Northeastern Political Science Association Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts from November 11-13, 2010. The paper investigates the political behavior theories developed in the U.S. and their degree of applicability in Asia. It further discusses the features and degree of political participation in several Asian countries while accounting for the patterns of participation.

Why do potentially transformative U.S. reforms often prove incoherent and incremental? In the U.S., the cultural and institutional barriers to enacting major reforms are high. After reforms are enacted, their opponents retain many institutional pathways to challenge reforms. This paper focuses on presidents in emergent partisan regimes as uniquely-positioned actors who broker design compromises throughout the reform process. During presidential campaigns, opposition candidates have incentives to promise transformative reforms which offer a decisive break from the past. Upon entering the legislative arena, however, presidents' incentives shift toward supporting moderating design compromises. Finally, as reforms are implemented, presidents face intense demands to make administrative decisions which appease the business community. Through the layering of design compromises, reforms are watered down and made less coherent. This paper explores this dynamic by analyzing the design and implementation of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. Existing scholarship explains the Federal Reserve System's design through reference to discrete critical junctures: a clandestine retreat at a Georgia resort; a broad congressional compromise; or a partisan-controlled implementation process. These explanations each describe the emergence of a more coherent "Fed" than the fragmented organization which began operations in 1914. To understand why potentially transformative reforms often disappoint, one must account for the shifting pressures presidents encounter when guiding reforms to fruition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives surrounding womanhood and motherhood provide important clues about the political citizenship of women in the U.S. today. In particular, narratives about motherhood and the public policies that accompany them have the ability to disrupt the potential of many women from becoming actively political in an electoral sense. This paper looks at post-partum and early parenthood policies including breastfeeding promotion and maternity leave policy affecting childbearing women in order to link such policies to women's underrepresentation in elected politics. Such narratives have a profound effect on nascent political activity of otherwise ambitious and qualified women, thus creating a cycle where women's representation is inextricably linked to embedded and even legislated social norms surrounding women as mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is both a political history as well as a methodological model for understanding the relationship between participation of religious actors and the continued existence of blue laws, which restrict alcohol sales on Sundays, in certain states but not in others. In order to do this, the paper will first review the history of the role of religion and politics in the United States with particular interest in regards to Sabbath laws and alcohol policies. Second, the paper will review the literature in regards to religion and political participation in order to demonstrate the role religious actors have had in regards to public policy. Finally, this paper will propose a model and method by which to explore the association between religious participation and the continuing existence of blue laws in some states but not in others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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).

Religion and democracy in the United States have a long and uneasy relationship. While some scholars such as Tocqueville have praised religion as a force contributing to civic engagement and democratic citizenship, others have been less sanguine, viewing religion and religious persons as sources of political intolerance and a rigidity that weakens democratic discussion and debate. In this paper we address a fundamental question, namely, "Does religion tend to promote or inhibit democratic citizenship?" The paper begins with a theoretical discussion in which we consider the nature of democratic citizenship and its various dimensions. We then proceed to examine the relationship between religion and these dimensions. Dependent variables (measures of democratic citizenship) include political involvement, political knowledge, viewing the cheating of government as acceptable, political cynicism, voting turnout, and membership in voluntary organizations. Independent variables include religious tradition, religious orthodoxy, religiosity, socio-economic variables, and political variables.The primary data source used in this paper is a national pre-election survey conducted by the Paul Henry Institute in April 2008. This national survey (N=3007) is uniquely suited to the task at hand in that it contains a variety of important religious, political, and social variables. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do so-called 527 organizations represent a recent and different avenue for financial influence in federal elections, as conventional wisdom suggests? This paper seeks to answer that question by examining the political and regulatory development of 527s and political action committees (PACs). The paper employs a mixed methodology that utilizes historical analysis and descriptive statistics.Preliminary analysis of the data suggests that although 527s represent a unique regulatory creation, the legislative history of federal campaign finance law shows that concerns about transparency and "soft money"—often prominent in the debate over 527s—are not unique to 527s. In fact, similar arguments surfaced during the evolution of PACs a generation earlier. Data from recent elections suggests that 527s are more financially potent than were PACs during a similar period in their development, but 527s appear to be waning in ways not seen among PACs. The development and financial presence of 527s and PACs is therefore complex and multifaceted. Nonetheless, common themes emerge that can enhance the study of these two major forces in American campaigns. Although the study of PAC development faded by the 1990s, this paper suggests that lessons about the future of 527s, and potential regulatory considerations, can be discerned by examining PACs—a related but all-too-often separately examined source of campaign funding. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue that the differences in the proportion of elected female U.S. state legislators between 1975 and 2007 can largely be attributed to widely-studied institutional, structural, and cultural barriers. Using the case studies of the best and worst nine states in regards to female state representation, I will compare and contrast the effects that different types of government, size of legislatures, partisanship levels, birthrates, GDP per capita, high school graduation rates, female labor force participation, and level of religious affinity are identified as explanatory variables contributing to the "representation gap" amongst state legislatures. This paper concludes that cultural and structural barriers to female representation have a greater effect than institutional variables; with GDP per capita, female labor force participation, and level of religiousness having the greatest influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does the prime minister call election? This paper attempts to solve the puzzle by utilizing financial option pricing model developed in the field of financial economics. We construct an actor-based theoretical model that designs early dissolution as solution for the prime minister's dynamic optimization problem. The prime minister seeks to exercise her right to dissolve her cabinet at the optimal timing, the timing that maximizes her chance of winning an election, until the end of her term. This is analogous to the choice that the owner of financial "call option" faces. The owner of call option seeks to exercise his call option at the optimal timing until the expiration date. In this paper, we first construct a modified financial option pricing model that fits to political situation, calculate values of the prime minister's right to dissolve, and solve the dynamic optimization problem of the prime minister. Second, we deduce a theory-driven empirical model that serves as an alternative to the hazard model, a long-time standard empirical framework for research on this and related topics. Finally, we run simulations and find several theoretical as well as methodological insights. For example, compared to past empirical research that assumed rising/constant "duration dependence" with little theoretical explanations, results of our simulations show that "duration dependence" of early election has strong and complex theoretical foundations. Our simulations also show the volatility of the popularity of cabinet, whose significance has been overlooked in past research, has strong impact on determining timing of early elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overview:One determinant of the parties' ability to resist the median voter may be constituency size. We test this proposition with a measure of legislator ideology that is directly comparable to voter ideology, using referenda votes as bridging observations.Abstract:At the state and local level throughout the United States, there is considerable variation in the power of parties to control nominations, structure legislative voting, and compel non-median behavior from elected officials. Some of this variation stems from the range of institutional arrangements that govern parties. For example, more stringent rules on primary participation may result in the nomination of more extreme candidates (Fiorina 1974; Gerber and Morton 1998). Long periods out of power may also cause parties to unify while nominating more centrist candidates (Bawn et al 2006). Lee and Oppenheimer (1999) suggest a role for constituency size in determining partisanship. They find that senators from larger states tended to be policy activists, while those from smaller states tended toward more centrist behavior.In this paper, we investigate the role of constituency size in inducing party strength. Masket's (2007) study on this phenomenon was hampered by an important methodological barrier; any study that tries to determine whether legislators are more or less partisan than constituents must make very strong assumptions about the ideological scales of those two populations. Even if we accurately measure preferences with legislative votes and with electoral returns, the scales from both measures are arbitrary, and not the same.This is a common problem in the literature, to which we offer a possible solution. We propose to bridge the two populations using referenda, on which the legislature and the electorate both vote. They thus serve as bridging observations between the two distributions (e.g. Bailey 2007). We explore several critical features of this strategy. First, legislators can only vote yea or nay, but electoral districts can pass or fail a measure by any margin. We develop strategies for using that additional information without compromising the goal of comparability. Second, any further application of this strategy will suffer, since referenda are scarce. So we attempt to quantify the additional leverage gained by adding more bridging observations, and the dangers of having too few. This paper would be appropriate for panels on methodology, political parties, state politics, representation and nominations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first tests whether voters punish incumbent state supreme court judges who are ideologically distant from the state’s citizens. The paper then examines whether ideologically distant incumbent judges are more likely to be punished when facing politically involved citizens. The empirical results show that ideologically distant incumbent judges are more likely to lose an election, but that this effect is conditional on the citizenry’s level of political participation. While this effect appears to be disproportionately stronger in partisan elections, the relationship between incumbent defeat and ideological distance also appears to be present in non-partisan elections. These results have two main implications. First, it provides additional evidence that ideological accountability is a feature in some judicial elections. Second, the results show that judicial elections are very similar to non-judicial elections, in that politically interested voters cast more sophisticated votes. These findings lessen two concerns about judicial elections: that judicial elections are fundamentally different from non-judicial elections and that voters are unable to hold elected judges accountable. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parents, once again, have been given a high-profile role in the 2008 electoral campaign by both the parties and the media. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s status as a working mother seems to have reinvigorated the parties’ attempts to appeal to parents and portray themselves as the true champions of the American family. Reflecting the environment of the 2008 election, the ‘Soccer Moms’, ‘NASCAR Dads’, and ‘Security Moms’ have given way to ‘Mortgage Moms’ and ‘Hockey Moms’. In this paper, we will employ content and contextual analysis to examine the use of parent and family themes by the parties, their presidential nominees, and the media in the 2008 election. We will place the results in historical perspective by comparing them to our prior research in which we analyzed platforms, nomination speeches, and print election coverage, from 1952 through 2004â€"and revealed a dramatic politicization of parenthood over time. This paper will explore whether the politicization of parenthood reaches new heights in 2008 and whether elite rhetoric about mothers, fathers, and families represents change or continuity from previous elections. It will also provide insights into the theoretical issues of party and issue evolution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do party strength and activity affect women's political representation? In this paper, I use data from a new nationwide survey of county political party chairpersons to investigate this question. I first present an outline of existing literature on local parties and women's political representation. Then, I introduce the data used in this paper, including an original survey of county party elites across the U.S. and a new database containing demographic and political information for over 16,000 county candidates. Next, I evaluate competing claims about party strength and women's representation. Scholars have proposed many reasons why strong parties might increase or hinder women's emergence as political candidates. I evaluate the relationship between local party strength and women's representation as local candidates and officeholders, and examine particular components of party strength in greater detail in order to determine how specific party recruitment practices, campaign activities, interactions with community and interest groups, and other factors affect women's representation as political candidates at the county level. I find that party strength is positively related to women's political representation at the local level for Democratic party organizations. My results also suggest that party recruitment increases women's political representation, conditional on party leader beliefs about women's electability. Party gatekeeping is detrimental to women's political representation, while increased contact between Republican party organizations and community and interest groups is positively related to women's representation. In all, county political party characteristics and activities have a significant influence on who runs for county office. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Iraqi leg of the creature referred to as a "Shiite Crescent" - a theoretical construction that postulates the existence of sectarian loyalties between the rulers of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, as well as the possibility of these rulers entering into some kind of project of political unification or close coordination with the aim of dominating the Middle Eastern region as a whole. Based on historical evidence, the paper concludes that the likelihood of Iraq ever entering into this kind of purely sectarian alliance is slim. There is however a caveat, and this concerns external factors rather than drivers internal to the region: Five years of US rule and systematic empowerment of Iran in Iraq during the Bush administration followed by what could turn into an overly complaisant Iran policy by the new Obama administration. Together, these factors could create a situation in Iraq that would bring the country's much closer to Iran than the historical legacies of the region would suggest as a natural outcome. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the assumption has been that voting barriers have been on the decline since the 1960s, this paper examines the effect of a new generation of registration and voting barriersâ??voter ID laws, provisional balloting, etc. Changes in federal law in 1993 and 2002, even while they have increased federal oversight over the voting process, also injected a great deal of new variation in how states and counties administer both registration and voting. Drawing on data from the 2004 Current Population Survey, this paper explores the impact of state-level electoral institutions on voting and registration on the population as a whole as well as on potentially vulnerable populations such as first generation immigrants, blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans. The paper 1) argues that old barriers to participation haven't entirely faded away and that in fact new barriers, while perhaps not as pernicious as those in the past, continue to appear. 2) indicates that these barriers have real effects on electoral participationâ??and naturalizationâ??particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, and immigrants. And 3) makes a case for thinking about these policies as working in conjunction as parts of states' policy 'ecosystems,' such that policies in one arena (like voting) have effects in other arenas (like naturalization). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper tests whether the state-centered model of political involvement, as developed in research on citizens'experiences with key federal government programs, applies to city governments' efforts to empower neighborhood-based participation. Drawing upon survey data for 29 cities from Putnam's Social Capital Benchmark Survey in 2000, U.S. Census data and content analysis of each of the 29 cities' newspapers for 1999, the paper tests for the impacts of both empowerment and reactionary mobilization, while controlling for key demographic predictors, city size, and institutional arrangements of city government. The key results show that (a) rates of neighborhood association involvement are higher in cities with larger black populations and that (b) higher levels of neighborhood empowerment by city governments' have the perverse effect of depressing rates of neighborhood association involvement. An interpretation of this result as a manifestation of free-rider logic is introduced. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of Latino and Hispanic political bloggers. Among the top political bloggers, blogging has primarily been undertaken by white men, coined by Chris Nolan as the "Big Boys Club." This research assesses how Hispanic bloggers use their blogs for purposes related to politics, and it investigates whether blogging facilitates political partipcation.The data for this paper are based on in-depth interviews with 20 Hispanic bloggers, conducted in June 2007, whose blogs focus on politics. Primarily exploratory, this paper examines the issues and topics dicussed by Hispanic bloggers, and whether and how bloggers are using their blogs to engage in political partipcaiton. Additionally, this research investigates wehther Hispanic bloggers face exclusion or discrimination by other political bloggers. Findings how that while Latino bloggers tend to write about a variety of issues, they tend to focus on topics relevant to Hispanics and the Latino communities. Results also indicate that Hispanic bloggers do indeed use their blogs to encourage their readers to engage in various forms of political participation. Finally, and perhaps most important, Latino political bloggers reported that they do not feel discriminated against or excluded by other bloggers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political incorporation of immigrants and their children has long been critical to the civic health of the United States. From the nation's first days, governments, civic institutions, and ethnic organizations have faced the political consequence of the nation's continuing commitment to large scale immigration: the need to ensure that immigrants and, more importantly, their children become regular participants in the nation's civic and political life. The consequences of failure are potentially quite high. If immigrants and their descendants come to be excluded as a class from equal participation in the democratic process, the nation will not meet its ideals of equal participation. Over time, the excluded could potentially use their exclusion as a tool for mobilizing and come to organize in opposition to U.S. political institutions. The relative success of the United States at meeting this responsibility to incorporate most immigrants and their descendants has long been a subject of scholarly attention and popular concern. While this rich immigrant tapestry may create opportunities and tensions for the United States, it undoubtedly offers the foundation for rich scholarly analysis of the cross-generational process of immigrant incorporation. In this paper, I review available models of the role of generation in immigrant political adaptation and test these models using data from a survey of immigrant mobility in the Los Angeles region conducted in 2004 (IIMMLA). In this paper, I measure political attitudinal change across generations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the work of scholars such as Simpson and Cornel West, in this paper we explore the question of whether young African Americans face a different threat that is "more difficult to identify, provide evidence of, and [is] more painful to acknowledge." We are interested in the threat posed by nihilism, especially since increasing numbers of prominent black leaders argue that it is nihilism, alienation and despair among African American young people that may endanger the promise of progress for this group. To that end, in this paper we explore the degree to which African American youth and young adults suffer from nihilistic attitudes and what impact such ideas and feelings have on their political behavior. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in immigrant political incorporation in the social sciences has examined level of civic participation and partisanship among new immigrants. However, little attention has been focused upon another step in the political incorporation of immigrants historically, differentiation from Blacks as expressed in negative racial attitudes towards Blacks. Do new immigrants express negative racial attitudes towards Blacks similar to those expressed by earlier White ethnic immigrant groups, and if so, what accounts for these attitudes? Using the 1992-1994 Multi City Survey of Urban Inequality, this paper examines the content of immigrant racial attitudes towards Blacks and test the utility of existing theoretical explanations of negative racial attitudes that include: context, contact, and perceptions of group conflict. These models have been used primarily to account for the attitudes of Whites toward Blacks, and although potentially important to accounting for the attitudes of new immigrants, I argue that these models do not incorporate germane variables important to understanding immigrant racial attitudes. Thus, the paper also tests the utility of assimilation theory that incorporates salient independent variables such as: ethnicity, English proficiency, level of civic participation, length of residence, and skin color which all could account for the racial attitudes of new immigrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of race and representation recognize that studies of representation must also assess the impact of representation on constituents' behavior and attitudes. Such a focus sheds light on the extent to which minority Americans view the American political system as legitimate and the extent to which they view their own role in the political system as meaningful. Literature on ``minority political empowerment” initially held an exclusive focus on black empowerment at the local level. Recent studies have expanded this focus to other levels of political representation and now also to Latinos in the United States. Yet, these studies will largely focus on only one group vis-a-vis one type of representative. This paper expands on earlier studies of minority empowerment and representation by comparing white, black, and Latino attitudes and behavior toward different types of racial representation in Congress by utilizing data from the same source. The data used in this paper comes from the ANES between 1992 and 2000. The general findings show that Latinos are positively responsive to Latino representation in Congress and both black and white Americans are not positively or negatively responsive to either black or Latino representation in Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concedes that voter turnout, low level of political knowledge and general apathy toward politics is a sign that our democracy is in crisis as ordinary citizens are no longer participating in the rule of their country. Believing that participation is learned and not an inherent trait, this paper examines the current education system to see where it fails to facilitate political socialization. Judging the current political science, government and civics curriculum in public education to be insufficient, this paper examines alternative teaching methods that politically engage students. Secondly, the paper examines the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, implemented by the current Bush administration, to see how it affects resources and curriculum, and measures teachers' abilities to inspire students to learn. This paper cites surveys of textbooks and teacher and administrator interviews. Teaching methods like service learning that appear to engage students in politics are highlighted to encourage teachers to implement them into their current curriculum. Unequal education for students in low income and minority communities was found to inadequately socialize those students into passive rather than active citizens. Lastly, broader education reform is suggested for further study. These suggestions are just the first step to create a new curriculum that will inspire students to become responsible active citizens in their democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the function of gender in print political advertisements distributed during two 2002 US Senate races involving women candidates. In addition to examining the ads produced by the candidates, this paper also analyzes gender messages in the ads distributed by political parties and interest groups involved in the races. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the growing conversation among political scientists about participation in the learning communities movement by discussing the author's experience teaching introductory American government in four different learning communities (LCs). It argues that while participation in LCs may sometimes modestly reduce the traditional topic coverage in introductory political science courses, political science instructors can benefit from the ways that LC collaboration extends the study of politics to other areas of human activity (such as literacy and education) and helps to spread the study of politics across the curriculum. The paper also includes a short final section reviewing some assessment findings that confirm the positive effects of LCs on student academic development. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the influence of business interests over the congressional agenda on environmental and natural resource issues. Specifically, the paper addresses the following research questions: 1. How often and in what manner does business take positions on environmental legislation? 2. How consistent are business positions on environmental legislation? 3. Is business success constant, or does it vary systematically across different stages of legislative agenda setting and across different patterns of business alignments? 4. To what extent can various political and economic variables explain the success of business influence? Data on the different positions business has taken on environmental and natural resource legislation in Congress between 1970 and 2000 are presented in order to answer the first two questions. The study seeks to answer the third question by examining the empirical components of the environmental legislative agenda and the positions of business within this sphere. This is accomplished by conducting a factor analysis of various indicators of agenda building in Congress. Multiple regression analysis is then employed to investigate how political and economic variables affect the advancement of environmental legislation when business aligns in certain ways. The results of this inquiry are used to address the fourth question. The implications of the overall findings are discussed at the end of the paper. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the evolution over the last half-century of how the Republican party has increasingly used the economy in its campaign appeals. Two dimensions are examined: agenda-setting (how prominent the economy is relative to other concerns) and framing (whether positions on specific issues are rhetorically linked to the economy). Despite embracing similar positions, the initial part of the paper shows, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defended them in different ways, with Reagan elevating economic matters in his agenda-setting and framing. An analysis of the party?s platforms from 1948-2000 shows that the rhetorical differences between Goldwater and Reagan were representative of the party?s approach in their respective eras. The analysis then turns to Republican governors? state-of-the-state speeches, with the sample chosen to include similarly matched years of both strong and weak economic performance. During the period under study the governors greatly increased the use of the economy in their agenda-setting and framing, a finding that applies to both the strong and the weak years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Hispanics now account for a greater proportion of the population than African Americans. What are the implications of this population shift to African Americans and Hispanics? The purpose of this paper is to examine the political relationship between African Americans and Hispanics in the United States. While African Americans have been politically active in America for over 50 years, Hispanics have only recently begun to make significant political strides. Two distinct issues have historically constrained their political impact. First of all, a sizable portion of the Hispanic population lack citizenship and therefore cannot participate in the political process. The second major constraint has been due to the multi-culture backgrounds of Hispanics. Since Hispanics come from many different counties and differ from one another in a number of ways, it has been difficult for them to build a broad-based political coalition in the way that African Americans have. This paper is explores three primary issues in order to determine the impact of the population shift on both groups and the country. First, the discussion begins with a brief history of both groups in the U.S. and how their experiences have shaped their political ideologies. Second, it analyzes grassroots movements and national organizations that specifically promote the African American and Hispanic agenda. Finally, there is an examination of the issues that unify and the conflicts that separate the two groups. The analysis seeks to examine whether the two groups will become the proverbial crabs in a barrel fighting to keep the other from rising to the top or whether they will forge a collaborative and supportive relationship. Recommendations are provided to increase the opportunity for the two groups to emerge as political allies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of America’s increasing diversity, research into the impact of community heterogeneity on civic and political participation has burgeoned in recent years. To date, the literature on the subject has revealed an intriguing inconsistency about the participatory consequences of heterogeneity In his recent book Democracy in Suburbia, Oliver finds that people who live in communities with greater economic diversity have higher levels of engagement in localized political action, like voting in local elections and contacting local elected officials. Likewise, a forthcoming book by Gimpel et al argues that heterogeneity leads to greater political engagement. In contrast, a number of economists have found that economic, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity all lead to a decrease in participation. However, in a recent review essay surveying this literature, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn note that fifteen recent papers by economists on the subject of community heterogeneity all conclude that heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. While at first glance the economic and political science literatures appear to be empirically incompatible, a closer look reveals that they are actually theoretically consistent with one another. It is important to note that these apparently divergent studies have examined different forms of participation. Mistakenly, the literature on participation often indiscriminately groups disparate activities together, notwithstanding considerable evidence that various forms of participation are qualitatively different from one another. Recently, Scott Keeter and his colleagues have conducted a massive study of participation in the United States, and upon analyzing an array of different activitiesconcluded that there are essentially three participatory dimensions (Jenkins et al. 2003). “Civic” activity, by which they mean non-political efforts like volunteering in the community, is a different dimension of participation than activity that communicates political preferences. This paper reconciles the seeming contradiction regarding the effect of heterogeneity on participation. It shows that civic activity, like volunteering, is facilitated in homogeneous places, while people are more likely to express political voice in communities that are heterogeneous. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most theoretically coherent and analytically consistent type of heterogeneity is not racial or economic (the focus of the current literature). Instead, it is ideological heterogeneity. The analysis employs the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which consists of representative samples drawn in 40 communities across the U.S. Because of the study’s hierarchical design, it is possible to construct aggregate measures of heterogeneity for each community in the sample, including the dispersion of political ideology (operationalized simply as the standard deviation of political ideology within the community). These data, however, also require attention to the statistical complexities of hierarchical data, and are thus modeled using hierarchical linear modeling. This method of estimation simultaneously accounts for individual- and contextual-level variables, ensuring that each of the model’s parameters is measured with the appropriate standard errors. In sum, this paper offers a theoretically-grounded explanation for an apparent contradiction in the literature on community heterogeneity and participation, thus helping to illuminate the impact of diversity on America’s civic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the content of the local media, looking for story frames, use of sources, and mobilizing information that may enable and empower citizens to participate in politics. To this end, the daily and weekly newspapers and local television news in Duluth, MN and Green Bay, WI are analyzed, with data collected in February and July 2003, respectively. These two cases were chosen because both cities have very high levels of participation relative to the national average. Recent research has demonstrated that perhaps there is more to the decision to participate in politics than socio-economic status and ideological commitment. In fact, communication scholars have found that media use, strength of community ties, and characteristics of a person’s social networks are better able to predict participation than the demographic models relied upon in political science. This paper builds on this recent line of inquiry, exploring the ways in which the media may contribute to participation in a community. The focus here is on local media as those are the media used by the majority of Americans as the primary sources of news. In addition, this paper explores ways in which the media vary as the local context varies, analyzing the differences across the two cases, and discussing ways these cases may vary from other locales. This study is important because it breaks new ground in exploring the content of media found to be positively related to political participation, and focuses on the local media and variations in media environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effects of racial diversity on political participation in American cities. A number of recent studies argue that political participation will be lower in more diverse areas (Alesina and La Ferrara 2000; Costa and Kahn 2003). In contrast to these and others, the paper argues that incentives for participation are greatly reduced by homogeneity. It is argued that heterogeneous places are characterized by more conflict over resources and more mobilized groups, leading to higher levels of political participation. First, I provide evidence in support of a group conflict theory of racial attitudes. Second, I test the implications of this theory for political engagement in American cities with varying degrees of racial diversity. In order to test this argument I use data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Respondents to the survey were matched with data on their place of residence from a number of sources, creating a unique dataset of close to 15,000 respondents nested in 690 cities. Because of the hierarchical nature of the data, I employ multilevel modeling techniques in the analysis. Preliminary results indicate that racial diversity is overall negatively correlated with participation; that is, the more diverse a place one lives in, the less likely it is that one will take political action. However, specifying a model where the individual effect of race is allowed to vary randomly across cities uncovers different results which remain “hidden” by the more crude specification of previous models. In this model, racial heterogeneity becomes a strong predictor of participation for members of minority groups while the participation of whites remains negatively related to diversity. The paper aims to make several contributions to the literature. First, by using multilevel modeling – a method not widely applied in political science research – the study is able to tease out interactions between individual race and the racial environment previously undetected. Second, with a few exceptions, past work in this area has tended to concentrate on black-white race relations and voting; this paper broadens the focus to include other racial groups as well as non-electoral forms of political participation. Finally, the paper provides evidence of the consequences of group conflict motives for citizen engagement in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent spate of scholarship has shown that it is taking longer for judicial nominees to be confirmed, at all levels of the federal judicial system. A number of these studies have also asked why some nominations move faster than others, finding that there are a number of personal and political factors that have an effect on how long it takes for a nominee to be confirmed. These studies obfuscate the question, however, of how these nominations are being delayed (or stopped completely) and for what reasons. In order to address these questions, we must turn our attention to the Senate and the actions of key senators. This paper therefore focuses its attention on two parliamentary maneuvers, senatorial courtesy and ?holds,? that individual senators may use to delay or kill particular judicial nominations. Examining all Court of Appeals nominations between 1987-2002 (the 100th-107th Congresses), this paper will begin by assessing the use of senatorial courtesy during this time period. It then concentrates the majority of its attention on analyzing the use of ?holds? as applied to Circuit Court nominations. It first discusses the history and application of holds and then address competing hypotheses for why holds might be used. This paper then examines the application of holds to Court of Appeals nominations between 1987-2002. Overall, this paper argues that the majority of nominees blocked by these procedural tactics are not stopped due to ideological objections but rather because of issues and disputes unrelated to their nominations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]