bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Latino Elected Officials in the 1990s
Authors: Pachon Harry , DeSipio Louis
Published: May 2006

Thirty years ago, political activity in the Latino community was relatively unknown at the national level. While there were Hispanic elected officials (HEOs) and Latino community activism, no one spoke of “Latino” politics or the “Hispanic” vote in national politics (Moore and Pachon 1985, chap. 10; Jennings and Rivera 1984). When analysts examined Latino politics, study was confined to the Southwestern states, New York City and perhaps Dade County, Florida. Now, however, Hispanics are one of this country's largest ethnic groups. Hispanics will be the largest ethnic minority group in the nation early in the 21st century (Edmonston and Passel 1991). Consequently, the political life of this community is coming under increasing attention. As examples, see May 1987; Didion 1987.

This overview examines one facet of the increasing Latino political presence—the growing number of Hispanics elected to office at all levels of government. Because the reapportionment and redistricting that will take place in the next two years will increase the number of districts containing a majority Latino population, this discussion is particularly timely. Many newly apportioned districts will elect Latinos to office for the first time. Thus, this overview may be used to assess Latino office holding in 1990 and will serve as a baseline for measuring the impact of post-1990 redistricting on Latino public-officeholding.
Taking the Initiative: Direct Legislation and Direct Democracy in the 1980s
Authors: Magleby David B.
Published: May 2006

The last decade has seen a resurgence in interest in three direct democracy devices—the initiative, the popular referendum and the recall. These processes reflect the Progressive Era reformers' aim of enlarging the role of citizens and voters as well as restricting or checking the power of intermediary institutions such as state and local legislatures, political parties, and elected executives. The focus of this article is to examine the increased use of the initiative and popular referendum at the state level as well as how the process actually works. The related processes of the recall and teledemocracy are addressed in other articles in this symposium.

Statewide Provisions for Initiative, Popular Referendum and Recall

The initiative process permits petitioners to write and, if a sufficient number of valid signatures are gathered, place those proposals on the ballot. The initiative can be placed directly on the ballot (the direct initiative); or before the legislature. If the legislature does not enact the measure or otherwise satisfy the sponsors of the initiative, the sponsors can gather additional signatures and place their proposal on the ballot (the indirect initiative). Five times as many states have the direct initiative as the indirect and, in states that permit both, proponents typically prefer to go directly to the ballot.
Arizona “High Noon”: The Recall and Impeachment of Evan Mecham
Authors: McClain Paula D.
Published: May 2006

April 4, 1988 marked the end of the most divisive and tumultuous period in the history of Arizona politics. For the first time in its seventy-six years as a state, Arizona, and the nation, witnessed the removal of a sitting governor, Evan Mecham, by conviction on impeachment charges by the Arizona Senate. Evan Mecham was the first governor in United States history to be confronted with a recall, impeachment and criminal indictment simultaneously. Although removed from office, the impact of Mecham's fifteen-month administration will permeate the social and political fabric of Arizona, as well as cloud its national image, for many years to come. This essay will briefly examine the concept of recall as an exercise in direct democracy, and the factors and context surrounding the recall drive and impeachment proceedings of Governor Evan Mecham.

The Recall and Arizona's Provision

The recall is one of three aspects of the concept of “direct democracy,” the others being referendum and initiative. According to Wilcox (1912, p. 169) the initiative and referendum are instruments in the exercise of “pure democracy” which supplement representative government—the initiative is direct participation on the part of citizens in legislative action, while the referendum is an exercise in veto action. Conceptually, however, the recall is different. It does not involve direct citizen participation in the legislative activities of government, but is concerned with their ability to remove officials, principally elected but in some rare instances appointed, from office before the end of their term. As Wilcox stated, recall “… is simply the guaranteed right of the people to discharge their public servants when the public servants cease to be satisfactory to them” (Wilcox, 1912, p. 169).
Politics and Society in the USSR: A Traveller's Report
Authors: Lipset Seymour Martin
Published: May 2006

In July I was in the Soviet Union for two weeks as one of eight American political scientists who were guests of the Soviet Political Science Association. This meeting was a follow-up to one held two years earlier in which six Soviets had met with an American group in Williamsburg, Virginia. We learned a lot from our Soviet colleagues in that session, since two years into the Gorbachev glasnost era they felt free to argue strongly among themselves about the social and political roots of Stalinism, and to explain how Gorbachev was chosen by a Politburo still dominated formally by the Old Guard, people who would a few years later be referred to in discussions with Americans as “the previous regime.”

It is appropriate to speak of parliamentarianism in the Soviet Union. For, as I shall briefly try to show, what is evolving in Moscow is a Presidential-Congressional system, a government which if it can be institutionalized, constitutionalized, along the lines it is developing, will resemble the American. It is, of course, far away from that stage as yet.
Lowi's Critique of Political Science: A Response
Authors: Calvert Randall L.
Published: May 2006

Sometimes an emotional irritant can be intellectually productive and provocative. For me, this was the case with Theodore Lowi's APSA presidential address, reprinted in the American Political Science Review (Lowi 1992). While disagreeing at many points with Lowi's account of the development of political science and with his critiques of the currently “hegemonic” subfields of “public opinion, public policy, and public choice,” I am led ultimately to clarify my own understanding of the relationship between politics, ideology, and science. This response to Lowi's address is intended to sketch a different view of the relation between science, especially social science, and government; to argue with Lowi's assessment of the value of reductionist paradigms such as those employed by the three hegemonic subfields; and to say that many of the rest of us are passionate about politics too. In particular, it is intended to indicate how “public choice,” my own favored member of that holy trinity, is in fact well suited to address issues critical to the matters of social value with which Lowi is concerned.
Three Steps Back for Women: German Unification, Gender, and University “Reform”
Authors: Ferree Myra Marx , Young Brigitte
Published: May 2006

The process of German unification has been a series of political surprises. Before the chain of events of summer and fall 1989 that led to the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, few could have predicted the “change of direction” (die Wende) of the government that followed. Fewer still would have suspected how quickly the overthrow of Honecker and his government would be supplanted by a drive toward economic and then political unification. In less than a year, on December 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, being wholly absorbed as five new states in the existing legal and political structures of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This has meant a wholesale restructuring of every social institution in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), not merely the economy; the method of unification chosen meant that all East German laws and organizations had to be brought into conformity with a virtually unaltered West German legal and social system.

This process has been troubled and troubling in many different respects, but not the least of the surprises to many observers has been the important role gender has played in the unification process. Not only did the government face sufficient protest that it needed to defer reconciling the different legal regulations of abortion in the two states, but shortly after the unification treaty was signed and its practical consequences began to be felt, the observation became commonplace that “women were the losers” in this process.
Congressional Term Limits, State Legislative Term Limits and Congressional Turnover: A Theory of Change
Authors: Fett Patrick J. , Ponder Daniel E.
Published: May 2006

During the first Congress of the United States, two measures to amend Article I of the Constitution were considered which, if ratified, would have limited the number of successive terms held by senators and representatives. Those measures were defeated and the issue was not considered again for over 150 years. However, since 1943 when the proposal was first resurrected in Congress, interest in the idea has grown to the point that from January 1981 through February 1992 no less than 69 proposals to limit the tenure of our national legislators were introduced into Congress (Richardson 1991, 80-90, 93-100; Richardson 1992, 1).

Today the idea of limiting the number of successive terms a member of Congress may hold is hotter than ever. Fanned by the support of the 1988 and 1992 Republican National Conventions, and fueled by the efforts of several special interest groups, the idea has achieved high levels of public support nationally. A nationwide poll of likely voters conducted two weeks before the 1992 elections showed that 79% favored congressional term limitations (Shafer 1992). In an impressive burst of voter resolve, 15 states have passed amendments to their constitutions that attempt to limit the number of successive terms that their own U.S. representatives and senators may serve in office.
Political Consultants and Democratic Governance
Authors: Petracca Mark P.
Published: May 2006

The United States faces a monumental challenge to the practice of democratic governance. This challenge stems, in part, from significant changes in the conceptualization and practice of political campaigning and from the revolutionary effects of the technology deployed in contemporary campaigns (see Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988). Two of the main forces behind this transformation are the rise of professional political consultants and the technology that they deploy in pursuit of electoral success (see Sabato, 1981 and Luntz, 1988). Even before the new president has a chance to settle into the office attention is being focused on the 1990 congressional mid-term elections and on the presidential election in 1992. Indeed, the “permanent campaign” now characterizes the essence of American electoral politics in the final quarter of the 20th century (Blumenthal, 1982).

Despite the meteoric rise to prominence ot political consultants in American political campaigns, political scientists have devoted surprisingly little attention to their analysis. This oversight is difficult to comprehend given the extraordinary penetration of consultants into the primary fabric of the American electoral system, the vast sums of money spent on consultant services by candidates, and the assumptions that we have about the considerable influence they wield. This analytic silence may be attributable to a number of factors. First, compared to voters, PACs, or interest groups, consultants are far more difficult to study. There are no readily available data sources to either identify consultants or document their activities.
Political Influence, the News Media and Campaign Consultants
Authors: Sabato Larry
Published: May 2006

Editor's Note: The following comments are excerpted from Sabato's remarks at the Roundtable on Political Consultancy and, Governance during the 1988 APSA Annual Meeting.

The 1988 election points out a number of important facts about and principles of consultancy. In early September, for example, we learned that Michael Dukakis couldn't live without John Sasso. Dukakis brought Sasso back into the campaign, and it was heralded as Dukakis' resurrection. In doing this, Sasso became as important to Dukakis as Jim Baker was to George Bush. This raises certain questions. One wonders, for instance, whether the press reaction would have been quite the same had this been Bush bringing back a disgraced political consultant. It was interesting to see the press spin on it, which I was that Sasso's rehiring was a very good thing, overdue, and necessary. Given what Sasso did and how he did it in the Biden incident, I think you could have put another spin I on that story.

On the other hand, if you ever doubt the power of some political consultants, then simply cite Dan Quayle as an example. I'm convinced that Roger Ailes, and to a lesser extent, Bob Teeter, were primarily responsible for putting Dan Quayle's name on the potential selection list. It's pretty well known that George Bush did not have a close and continuing relationship with Dan Quayle; they didn't know each other very well. So, how did the Quayle pick happen? Well, Bob Teeter, Bush's pollster, and Roger Ailes, his media consultant, had both handled Dan Quayle's previous congressional campaigns in Indiana. And they knew just how attractive and malleable Dan Quayle was.
Theodore J. Lowi and Juridical Democracy
Authors: Ginsberg Benjamin , Sanders Elizabeth
Published: May 2006

By selecting Theodore J. Lowi to serve as its President, the American Political Science Association has recognized his extraordinary scholarly and professional contributions. Indeed, Lowi's work has played a singularly important role in the intellectual development of the profession during the past two decades. He was recognized in an American Political Science Association survey as the most significant political scientist of the 1970s, and continues in every study to be the single most frequently cited member of the profession. At the same time, as a truly gifted teacher, Lowi has inspired large numbers of graduate and undergraduate students, many of whom have followed in his professional footsteps.

Lowi was born in Gadsden, Alabama in 1931. Much of his family lived in Marks, Mississippi (a city named for Lowi's great-uncle), and Lowi may be said to have considered—but rejected—Marksism in his youth. He chose, instead, to enter Michigan State University on a music scholarship. At Michigan State, Lowi played the oboe in both the marching band and orchestra before receiving his B.A.
Rejoinder to Dye and Zeigler
Authors: Parenti Michael
Published: May 2006

Professors Dye and Zeigler (D&Z) take the easy way out. They invite the reader to think of their present critic as one of those “academic Marxists” in the grip of a “secular religion” “insulated from world events, spinning out theoretical webs.” This approach enables them to rest secure in their ideological assumption that, while their critic is a hopeless ideologue, they themselves are value-free social scientists arguing closely from evidence.

Yet they continue to ignore evidence they do not find agreeable agreeable—as with the numerous examples of capitalist militarism and aggression I proffered. I noted other variables that could measure militarism, including treaties, overseas bases, striking power, mobility, levels of technology, etc. Given this opportunity to respond to these specifics, D&Z choose not to. One is tempted to conclude that they fail to answer because they have no answers.
Policy Models and Equal Educational Opportunity
Authors: Stewart Joseph
Published: May 2006

If anyone doubts that policy analysis is like a hot dog—its contents are both variable and suspect— Sabatier's essay in this issue should remove those doubts. His outlines of the open systems/funnel of causality, rational actors within institutions, policy streams, and advocacy coalitions approaches make pellucid that adherents to any one of these perspectives will examine different variables in searching for truth, beauty, or at least explanation in public policy-making. A full illustration of how each of these lens, when focused on the same policy area, would yield a somewhat different image would require a volume of significant length. While the profession waits for Sabatier to produce such a volume, perhaps we can be satisfied with a brief discussion of how the pursuit of equal educational opportunity would be viewed through a pair of these lenses. The rational actors within institutions and advocacy coalition lenses are used to examine this important policy area.

When the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the “separate but equal” interpretation of the constitution (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) and followed that quickly with a decision ignoring the “but equal” part of the phrase in public education (Cumming v. County Board of Education, 1899), racially segregated schools were legitimized. What followed was a long war, waged most obviously by the legal arm of the NAACP (Tushnet, 1987), which led to the Supreme Court's reversal of the Plessy decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, 1955). At that point policy-making in the area of equal educational opportunity shifted from a focus on overturning a loathsome judicial precedent to implementing a favorable one. Initial euphoria led to overly optimistic predictions about the speed with which segregated school systems could be dismantled.
Thoughts on Legislative Ethics Reform and Representation
Authors: Simmons Charlene Wear
Published: May 2006

This article explores the complex and contradictory nature of representative government and its impact on elected officials seeking to balance the public interest with their own private concerns. “Ethics in government” controversies occupy a gray area of public-private overlap which is particularly uncertain today as the press and the public's expectations of acceptable official behavior appear to be changing. Popular pejoratives directed at elected officials include “conflict of interest,” “special interest,” and “undue influence” in contrast to the “public interest.” These terms encompass key representational functions whose precise meaning is unclear.

The uncertainty lies in our inadequate understanding of the nature of representation, that complex interaction between governmental institutions and individual behavior. As Heinz Eulau contends, “… none of the traditional formulations of representation are relevant to the solution of the representational problems which the modern polity faces.” These conceptual limitations hamper our ability to craft “ethics” laws defining appropriate legislative behavior without distorting essential representative functions and responsibilities.

The following discussion explores two contradictory notions of representation: the “trustee” and the “delegate.” Each model inherently favors particular decision-making biases and creates potential conflicts of interest. Important trade-offs are implicit in promoting one model over the other. The analysis also implies that rational and ethical decision-making can result from institutional processes which are designed to check and balance self-interested individual representative behavior.
Creationism, Evolution and the Courts
Authors: O'Connor Karen , Ivers Gregg
Published: May 2006

The separation of religion and state is a fundamental principle of American constitutional democracy, but agreement over the proper relationship between God and Caesar is a far from settled matter. The concern of the framers of the Constitution for religious freedom is reflected in the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religious beliefs. The language employed is enigmatic, reflecting the delicate balance that the Constitution seeks to strike among the individual, the state and religion. The mosaic of religious groups in colonial America and the concern by the Founders to protect their religious freedom was “one of the forces that ultimately led to the adoption of a secular Constitution that included specific mention of free exercise and disestablishment” (Pfeffer, 1977: 13).

As the branch of government whose responsibility it is to decide the constitutionality of federal and state laws that challenge the relationship between religion and the state, the judiciary is faced with the unenviable task of adjudicating disputes that fall within the language of the First Amendment. Since the 1940s, when it first began applying the religion clauses to the states, the Court has ruled on the constitutionality of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, government assistance to parochial schools as well as general issues of what the state may legitimately demand from an individual without impinging on the free exercise of his or her religious beliefs. The aim of the Court has been to strike a balance between respect for the role of religion in American public life while prohibiting state preference for any religious faith. It is hardly surprising, then, that the fruits of its labors have been greeted with less than unanimous satisfaction from the competing interests of religious and non-religious groups. To expect anything more would be to discount the complex question of what limits the Constitution places on religion as a moral and educational component in our public and social order.
The Politics of Textbook Adoption
Authors: Currey Virginia
Published: May 2006

An implicit understanding, seldom bluntly articulated, has come apart. The federated sovereign states, nearly four centuries in building since the first European colonizations, are grappling with a dilemma not only in institutional processes and structures but also about consensus on dominant ideology.

Nothing illustrates the strange unraveling of federalism's implicit and pragmatically informal truce better than the present Great Textbook Controversy. In essence, it is a new states' rights fuss about super states versus small states versus a national insistence on uniform high standards in public education.

Public educational institutions have long represented the American Dream to our nation of newcomers and ever-mobile population. The First Amendment's No Establishment “Wall” meant that parents of diverse value systems could build a new community consensus around common needs at the school. By mid-twentieth century the U.S. high school had become the most important rite of passage into full U.S. citizenship and adulthood. No wonder, then, that each “blow” to the most cherished and legitimizing institution of individual communities has aroused such emotion. The local high school was the way into the great continental economy and culture.
Socialism and Equality in Cross-National Perspective
Authors: Dye Thomas R. , Zeigler Harmon
Published: May 2006

It is widely asserted that socialist economies are equalitarian. The distinguished Yale political scientist Charles E. Lindblom labels this proposition undeniable:

It is in communist provision of … some degree of equality in the distribution of income and wealth that the communist claim to approximate the humanitarian vision … seems undeniable. On these fronts communist systems have to be credited with great accomplishments, on the whole probably greater than those of the polyarchies [capitalist democracies] (Lindblom, 1977, p. 226).

Lindblom's influential work, Politics and Markets: The World's Political Economic Systems, expresses the conventional wisdom in academic circles that communist regimes trade freedom and economic prosperity for a leveling of economic benefits, and that capitalist nations opt for freedom and economic prosperity at the sacrifice of equality. Capitalism achieves higher economic growth rates by providing individual incentives for work, productivity, initiative, and enterprise; these incentives necessarily entail inequalities. Socialism, by eliminating private ownership of the means of production, achieves a leveling of wealth and income.
Can the Senate Examine the Constitutional Philosophies of Supreme Court Nominees?
Authors: Comiskey Michael
Published: May 2006

In the last 40 years, universal recognition of the Supreme Court's important policy-making role, the prevalence of divided government, and heightened conflict over value-laden issues such as abortion and school prayer have led to ever more elaborate Senate review of Supreme Court nominations (Freund 1988; Ross 1987, 116-23). Senate hearings into nominees' views on constitutional issues comprise the most visible element in the expanded confirmation process. Yet most recent nominees have won Senate approval while revealing little of their legal or political philosophies. As Powe (1976, 893) has concluded, “Senate questioning [of nominees] has proved astonishingly ineffective in eliciting the desired information.” The ability of nominees to hide their beliefs on vital constitutional questions raises serious doubts about the Senate's ability to give informed consent to presidents' Supreme Court nominations.

This article examines confirmation hearings on recent, pre-Clinton Supreme Court nominees to answer two questions. First, given the recognized importance of Supreme Court appointments and the correspondingly systematic scrutiny of nominees, how do nominees get away with revealing so little of their views on vital constitutional issues? Second, given the answers to the first question, can the hearings be reformed so that senators may air a nominee's views more thoroughly and give—or withhold—truly informed consent to these nominations?
George Bush and the Costs of High Popularity: A General Model with a Current Application
Authors: Brace Paul , Hinckley Barbara
Published: May 2006

People worry about the public-relations presidency: an institutional pattern of action giving high priority to public support, especially as shown by the opinion polls. These worries have been accentuated by actions in the White House and news media. “I don't live by the polls,” Bush told reporters early in 1990, parrying the implication that he did live by them. Daily polls that benefitted the White House were taken during the six months before the Gulf War by the Wirthlin Group (Ronald Reagan's second-term pollster) on behalf of “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” These included very sophisticated tracking and feedback devices. Bush, in fact, became the first president to mention his own popularity polls in a State of the Union address in January 1992. Yet, Bush could as well have accused reporters of living by the polls. Each change in his public approval ratings was accompanied by featured news stories. At the close of the war, even before the planes had returned to their bases, commentators began speculating on how soon the president's popularity would fall.

Several things stand out from Bush's approval ratings in his first three years in office. His polls were strikingly high in absolute terms and relative to the polls of his predecessors at the same points in their administrations. Another notable feature was that they were more erratic. Where Reagan's polls changed by more than five percentage points only twice in the same period, Bush's changed by this amount 13 times, leading modern presidents in this kind of fluctuation. Bush's approval ratings climbed with the invasion of Panama in January 1990, fell the next month, and then fell further.
Ethnonationalist and Political Attitudes Among Post-Soviet Youth: The Case of Russia and Ukraine
Authors: Robinson John P. , Gurr Ted Robert , Kurbanov Erjan , McHale Stephen , Slepenkov Ivan
Published: May 2006

For some 70 years, peoples of highly diverse origins and cultures were part of a political system called the Soviet Union. The leadership of the Soviet Union took great pride in attempting to organize that diversity into a “melting pot,” in which citizens of each ethnic background were to enjoy the same basic rights and privileges. Extraordinary political effort was expended by Soviet leaders to promote and advertise the success of this union of equals.

We will provide an empirical assessment of the attitudes of youth in two former Soviet republics, how they now see each other, and how they feel various minorities in each new republic should be treated politically. It involves the use of a common instrument in each of these new states that was designed to measure how each ethnic group feels about the other former Soviet peoples and basic ethnic policies in their own states. In addition, data on a variety of other political and social issues are examined, primarily to examine whether certain quality of life indicators are more positively responded to in a former Soviet republic than in Russia proper.
The Uses and Abuses of Registration and Turnout Data: An Analysis of Piven and Cloward's Studies of Nonvoting in America
Authors: Bennett Stephen Earl
Published: May 2006

A large corpus exists detailing the reasons for low turnout in American elections. It is not surprising that scholars disagree over the factors responsible. What should concern us is the extent to which single-factor explanations lead to serious misunderstanding of this phenomenon.

Piven and Cloward recently continued their crusade to relax registration statutes (1989: see also 1988a, 1988b). They contend that the most important causes of low turnout are “legal-institutional” features of American politics, especially personal registration laws. They assert that American turnout is lower than in most western democracies and what it had been in this country during the late-nineteenth century because registration laws keep many people, particularly those in the lower social orders, from voting. Eliminate registration, or shift the burden from individual to government, and the low turnout problem will be solved, so Piven and Cloward argue.
A Rejoinder to Piven and Cloward
Authors: Gans Curtis B.
Published: May 2006

The terms are not as Cloward and Piven have stated them, between one theory that holds that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote and another that holds that registered voters are going to the polls less and less, but rather whether registration barriers or lack of motivation is the primary cause of nonparticipation. It is also about the public policy implications of that debate—whether one engages in a unitary attack on registration barriers or a multi-faceted approach to nonparticipation, which includes but is not limited to barrier removal.

In the inexact world of voting statistics nothing will be fully solved without a full-validation study of Census-reported registration and voting figures, and state aggregate data on registration.

There are three issues involved: whether the state official registration rolls are inflated; to what degree; and whether they are progressively inflated. On the first there is broad agreement, which includes myself and the disclaimer I issue in each of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate's reports on registration and turnout.
Symposium on the Work of Samuel Lubell
Authors: Lamis Alexander P. , Ladd Everett C. , Schneider William , Meyer Philip , White John K.
Published: May 2006

For several generations of readers, Samuel Lubell served as a vivid chronicler and analyst of the complex and varied currents of the American electoral scene. The first of Lubell's books, The Future of American Politics, was his most famous and went through several revised and updated editions, the last in 1965. When the book first appeared in the spring of 1952, V. O. Key, Jr., immediately hailed it in The Saturday Review, writing that “Mr. Lubell has produced by a wide margin the most perceptive general analysis of American politics of the Roosevelt Revolution and the Fair Deal.” (April 12, 1952, p. 31).

Lubell wrote four more books in this field, each in its own way charting the course of American politics from the Eisenhower years (The Revolt of the Moderates in 1956), through the turbulent Sixties (White and Black: Test of a Nation in 1964, revised in 1966, and The Hidden Crisis in American Politics in 1970), ending with President Nixon's triumphal re-election (The Future While It Happened in 1973).
The Deeper Structure of the Savings and Loan Disaster
Authors: Redburn F. Stevens
Published: May 2006

The U.S. savings and loan debacle is, or should be, of great interest to political scientists. Any public policy failure as costly as this one deserves study for that reason alone. Analysis of its origins and development may reveal why it has been so intractable. Such analysis also may illuminate a broader class of regulatory policy problems that the political process tends to manage poorly.

Most writing about the savings and loan crisis has focused on its proximate causes. The deeper political roots of the thrift debacle have not been identified. As someone who has tracked the development of the thrift crisis and analyzed deposit insurance issues since 1986, I am convinced that the problems have a deeper structure, rooted in the organization of the U.S. political/regulatory system and its interaction with private markets. More specifically, the potential for this disaster was inherent in the original 1930s' design of deposit insurance and its associated regulatory policies. At this level of analysis, the challenge to policymakers posed by the thrift disaster can be appreciated and its similarities or differences with other regulatory problems examined.
The Savings-and-Loan Bailout: The Mismatch Between the Headlines and the Issues
Authors: Kettl Donald F.
Published: May 2006

In the twentieth century, the savings-and-loan crisis rivals only the bank failures of the Great Depression and the hyperinflation of the 1970s in threatening Americans' confidence in their financial institutions. The costs promise to be truly astronomical. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that at least $325 billion, probably much more, and at worst perhaps $500 billion, will be needed over the next thirty years to fund the bailout (Bowsher, 1990a, p. 15). Five United States Senators, the so-called “Keating five,” stand sullied in the fallout.

With such high costs and malfeasance, a host of villains but no fingerprints left at the scene of the crime, the bailout's problems are legion. The amount of money involved demands tight control, but the huge potential for political blame discourages any elected official from wanting to come close to the issue. Seats on the congressional banking committees, once prized plums because they often attracted PAC money, are now difficult to fill.
The Regency of the Proletariat in Crisis: A Job for Perestroika
Authors: Ollman Bertell
Published: May 2006

The discussion of Perestroika has suffered on the whole from inadequate attention paid to the nature of Soviet society. Yet, it is only upon knowing the kind of society we have before us that we can grasp the specificity of its problems and the possibilities within the system for resolving them. Hence any serious inquiry into Perestroika and Glasnost must begin by determining the best way to characterize the Soviet Union.

There has probably never been a society anywhere that has been burdened with so many different names: “socialism,” “communism,” “actually existing socialism,” “state socialism,” “bureaucratically deformed socialism,” “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “workers' state,” “people's democracy,” “state capitalism,” “totalitarianism,” “red fascism,” and there are others. The problem of finding the right label, of course, is a reflection of the difficulty people have had in deciding which one or few of its attributes have been decisive in giving the Soviet Union its distinctive character, including too its real history and potential for future change.
The Study of Politics: What Does Replicability Have to Do with It?
Authors: Feldblum Miriam
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this rejoinder is twofold. The first is to question the call to extend a “replication standard” for qualitative research in political science. (See Golden, 1995a). The second is to question how useful the focus on “replicability” is for research in political science in general (see King, 1995a, and the debate on “Verification/Replication” in PS, 1995 28(3): 443–99).

What underlies a replication standard for qualitative research? I believe that the call for a replication standard for qualitative research is applicable to only certain kinds of research, and that, even within its own limitations, is probably misguided. For the most part, when proponents of a replication standard have anticipated dissension over the requirement of replication for qualitative research, they have pointed to logistical, pragmatic, and privacy burdens that such a requirement may impose on researchers.

In contrast, my main contention concerns the very conceptualization of research as replicable. I argue that the assumptions underlying a replication standard are strongly and narrowly positivist. The replication standard itself is reductionist, and its use would marginalize a portion of the qualitative research now being conducted in political science.
Introduction
Authors: Cantori Louis J.
Published: May 2006

The study of Middle Eastern politics shares the problems of area studies in general in political science. Area specialists emphasizing the language and culture of other peoples have been pressured by behavioralists to “objectify” their studies and place all peoples in the context of universals of human political behavior. The result is that the specialized knowledge of non-European peoples and regions especially have had an uneasy relationship with the political science discipline. Post-behavioral political science for a time in the 1970s recognized that the purported scientific universals of the discipline were really the ethnocentric ones of the value assumptions of European and American political science. In the 1980s and continuing to the present, these earlier “scientific” or explanatory universals of political science now arguably have been replaced by the no less ethnocentric ones of democratization and “marketization.” These concepts are examined in the following essays.

Middle Eastern political science has shared the preceding problems but has added to them two additional factors. The first is that the languages and culture of the Middle East are difficult and complex. As a result, the development of a social science consciousness in political research has occurred most importantly only since the 1970s. The second is that the study of Middle Eastern politics is embedded in the historical attitude of American and European culture toward Islam and Arabism. Historically, Islam expanded at the expense of Christian Europe in the eighth century. This adversarial relation continued when European Christians mounted forays into the Moslem Near East in the Crusades of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; with the fall of Christian Constantinople to Moslem siege in the fifteenth century; and to the near defeat of Christian Vienna by Moslem attack in the seventeenth century.
Beyond Democratization: Political Change in the Arab World
Authors: Wickham Carrie Rosefsky
Published: May 2006

Over the past decade the paradigm of “democratization” has dominated analysis of political change, reflecting the dramatic transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. While the new literature on democratization has pointedly excluded the Arab world, a growing number of area specialists have sought to identify local developments that signal the early phases of, or at least potential for, a democratic transformation of state and society in the Middle East (Hudson 1991; Ibrahim 1993; Al-Sayyid Marsot 1990; Norton 1994). It is difficult to generalize about political change in the Arab world, as several distinct patterns have emerged, reflecting differences in institutional settings as well as in the strategies of regime and opposition elites.
The Old Orthodoxy and the New Orthodoxy in the Study of Middle Eastern Politics
Authors: Cantori Louis J.
Published: May 2006

It is said that the old political science attempted to be explanatory and the new political science is interpretive. A key question then is what is the meaning of political interpretation. Does it mean that political analysis is simply subjective and that intellectual anarchy reigns? The old political science had its apparent orthodoxy of the canons of the scientific method. The new orthodoxy refers to these and resembles the old in its underlying liberal, pluralist value assumptions.

The old orthodoxy in comparative politics focuses on develop-mentalism; the new orthodoxy emphasizes democratization, market-oriented economics, rational choice theory, and political economy. Developmentalism stressed the importance of the welfare of the individual as well as at the same time the need for secularization and political participation. Developmentalism was also teleological. The goal was to achieve secularization and participation, in the process replicating the advanced industrial states from which the ideas originated. The values implicit in developmentalism were obscured by the old orthodoxy's patina of behavioralism and “scientific objectivity.”

The new orthodoxy has abandoned behavioralism and “scientific objectivity,” but in neither a systematic nor a philosophical way. Instead, the validity of the criticisms seems to be tacitly conceded even while the spokespersons of the new orthodoxy operate within a “new” scholarly and foreign policy culture that shows evidence of having characteristics similar to those of the old.
What Political Scientists Can Learn from the 1993 Electoral Reform in New Zealand
Authors: Nagel Jack H.
Published: May 2006

In November 1993, 100 years after becoming the first nation to enfranchise women, New Zealand again made electoral reform history as its citizens voted by a 54–46 margin to replace their venerable, U.S.-style first-past-the-post (FPP) method of electing legislators with a new mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Political scientists in the United States and elsewhere may find New Zealand's decision instructive in six ways:

• as a harbinger of a wider movement toward electoral reform in established democracies and of a global trend toward mixed-member legislatures;

• as a demonstration of how constitutional reform can overcome entrenched interests;

• as a symptom of political backlash against the imposition of orthodox economic policies of the sort advocated by the IMF and other international agencies;

• as a partial repudiation of the Westminster model that U.S. reformers have often taken as their ideal;

• as the source of a new method of ensuring fair and effective representation for a minority ethnic group; and

• as an example of how political scientists can play influential roles as institutional designers and public educators.
The Effectiveness of the Political Consultant as a Campaign Resource
Authors: Medvic Stephen K.
Published: May 2006

Professional political consultants have acquired a mythic ability to single-handedly deliver victory for their client-candidates. Yet, among political scientists, factors other than consultant use appear to explain the difference between electoral success and failure. To this point, however, little quantitative work has been done to measure the impact political consultants have on American elections. In this article I will examine the relative influence political consultants and financial support from the political parties can have upon U.S. House elections.

Definitions and Data

For my purposes, a political consultant is anyone who worked in two or more congressional and/or statewide campaigns during the most recent campaign cycle, was among the highest grossing consultants in his/her field, or was a member of the American Association of Political Consultants. This operationalization is based on Larry Sabato's definition of a political consultant as “a campaign professional who is engaged primarily in the provision of advice and services (such as polling, media creation and production, and directmail fundraising) to candidates, their campaigns, and other political committees.” Noting that not every campaign staffer who is paid for his/her work qualifies as a consultant, Sabato narrowed the category of professional political consultants to “the relatively small and elite corps of interstate political consultants who usually work on many campaigns simultaneously and have served hundreds of campaigns in their careers” (1981, 8). The operational definition employed here focuses attention on only those campaign operatives who are “political consultants” in the most meaningful sense of the phrase.
Political Consultancy Overseas: The Internationalization of Campaign Consultancy
Authors: Farrell David M.
Published: May 2006

The work of campaign consultants in elections outside of their countries of origin is a relatively recent phenomenon. Joe Napolitan is credited as becoming the first international consultant in modern times when, in 1969, he worked on the successful reelection bid of Ferdinand Marcos. As recently as 1972, Napolitan wrote of a certain reticence in some countries toward using non-native campaign consultants A decade later, Larry Sabato (1981) saw evidence that use of non-native consultants was becoming a more accepted practice in campaigns worldwide. By the end of the 1990s, according to David Swanson and Paolo Mancini (1996), consultants from the U.S., Germany, France, and Britain were becoming increasingly active in elections outside their own countries. Since the use of non-native campaign consultants is likely to increase into the forseeable future, I would like to use this article to set forth the beginnings of a research agenda, to present an outline of a project worth pursuing, for determining how and why foreign consultants are being, can be, or should be used. The article has three parts. First, I present an overview, based on available evidence, of the nature of overseas work by campaign consultants. Second, I explore some possible explanations for the rise of this phenomenon. Third, I assess the main institutional factors affecting the internationalization of consultancy.
There He Goes Again: The Alternating Political Style of Bill Clinton
Authors: Greenstein Fred I
Published: May 2006

Some political leadership styles are of a piece. Jimmy Carter's is a case in point. Both in the comments he privately jotted on the margins of memos from his aides and in his public discourse, Carter exhibited a common concern for detail and insistence on the correctness of his own positions. Other styles are layered, as in that of Dwight Eisenhower, whose apoliltical public demeanor concealed an analytically detached political sophisticate who obtained results by indirection (Greenstein 1982).

The political style of President Bill Clinton is neither unitary nor layered. It alternates. The tempest over whether Clinton was involved in a dalliance with a White House intern is a reminder of his tendency to oscillate between an uninhibited, anything-goes approach to leadership and a more measured operating mode in which he sets attainable goals and proceeds skillfully in his efforts to realize them.

The pattern is recurrent. After his election as governor of Arkansas in 1978, Clinton instituted a substantial increase in automobile licensing fees, peopled his administration with bearded political activists, and otherwise failed to conform to the political mores of his state. As a result, he was voted out of office two years later. He then spent the next two years stumping the state and promising to remedy his ways. He was returned to office, serving from 1983 to 1993 and establishing a reputation as a pragmatic and effective state executive (Maraniss 1995).