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The article presents a study which examined the role of religion and religiosity in shaping the attitude of voters in Canadian on various issues, particularly the controversial and divisive moral issues. It established that there is a divide among voters on moral issues and religion and religiosity inform their attitudes on these issues. It noted that the religious cleavage in Canadian society may be indicative of things to come and the past conflicts in Canada along religious lines may yet be prologue to its own version of the culture wars.

The paper examines the role that the religious impulse plays in structuring public opinion on foreign policy attitudes. Over the past three decades scholars have examined the role and influence of religion in US domestic politics. Most recently, political commentators have turned their attention to the role that religion plays in US foreign policy - especially post 9/11 - with the belief that the religious impulse does not stop at "the water's edge" and that the "culture wars" now pervades foreign policy. However, much of the literature on the topic lacks empirical analysis and the paper fill the lacuna by analyzing NES, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and Pew data. The paper argues that fears that the US will "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy" on the basis of religious zeal are unfounded. The theoretical contribution lies in the demonstration that in the foreign policy arena the "culture wars" are mediated by religious, political, and policy contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the effect of career dynamics on the partisan composition of the contemporary House of Representatives (1954-2004). Extending earlier work by Gilmour and Rothstein (1993, 1996), we focus particularly on the effects of disparate retirement rates on the balance of partisan power in the chamber. Contrary to expectations, we find that even after their takeover of the House in 1995, Republican MCs have continued to retire at higher rates than their Democratic counterparts and that, ceteris paribus, this has significantly attenuated the size of their legislative majority. On the other hand, in recent years the GOP has dampened the impact of their continuing retirement problems by surpassing the Democrats in their ability to re-elect incumbents and to retain open seats. We conclude the paper with some speculations regarding what these findings imply about the nature of the two parties, the reasons for the relatively high rates of Republican retirements, and the balance of partisan power in the Congress. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article emphasizes that Canadian political parties are based on familiar social cleavages, that is, religion, region, nationality and national origin, language, ethnicity, class, and economic sector. It also records the persistence of the linkage of the social differences to the parties even as the party system has changed. The theoretical significance is in the demonstration that parties promote the interests of some social groups while excluding others even in political systems that attempt to lessen the legitimacy of intergroup conflict.

In previous studies of the presidential initiation and modification of economic sanctions, the role of Congress has been neglected since it is generally assumed that Congress is weak and has virtually no role to play in foreign affairs. Recent studies, ho ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper performs a content analysis on the rhetorical manifestation of missionary politics in presidents’ public speeches from George Washington to George W. Bush. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the impact of disparate partisan retirement rates on the balance of power in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1850 to 2005. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing a regression analysis of data from the Canadian National Election Studies, we establish that there is a divide among voters on moral issues, and religion and religiosity inform their attitudes on these issues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has show that democratic dyads tend to trade with each other more than any other pair of states. Although some scholars have theorized about how democratic institutions facilitate interstate trade, there have been no empirical investigations of the impact different democratic institutions have on trade. We argue that democracies with strong executives (e.g., presidential systems) will engage in more trade than democracies with weaker executives. Using time-series cross-section data from 1975-2000 with a battery of control variables, we show that presidents are bigger traders than prime ministers. However, this result is particularly powerful when a president is matched with a prime minister. That is, it is in these mixed-type dyads (president-prime minister) that trade levels are their highest. We conclude with a discussion of the results and their implications. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and compares occasions when foreign/defense policy have become atypically salient in British Public opinion by examining public opinion data on the Suez crisis, the Falklands war, the Gulf War, Kosovo, and the Iraq war. Our findings suggest that these events do produce a limited "rally round the flag" effect, but does not always redound to the long-term benefit of the government of the day. The effect of foreign/defense policy on British public opinion tends to be short-term and has not been a decisive issue in recent British general elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, public support can play a crucial role in the decisions to use and terminate military action. Several scholars argue that the public tends to hold prudent opinions regarding the use of the military; specifically, the American public supports military actions to stop aggression but not to engage in nation-building. We argue that what seems like a "prudent" opinion is actually driven by the complexity of the two goals of military intervention: stopping aggression is easily explained to the public, while nation-building is not. We devised four mock NYT stories about the deployment of the U.S. military; each story explained one of the two goals in either simple or complex terms. Respondents read the stories and answered a battery of questions about their support for the military action. The data show that the complexity of the rhetoric has a more powerful impact on the respondent?s support for military action than the actual policy goal. We conclude that the public tends not to be prudent and discuss the power of the White House to influence public support for military action. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]