bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bureaucrats, Legislators, and the Size of Government
Authors: Miller Gary J. , Moe Terry M.
Published: May 2006

Some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget-maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget-output combination on legislatures, subject to cost and demand constraints. However, theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget-maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super-optimal levels of production, nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation. In this bargaining model, the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget-maximizing bureaucrats, but the legislature's decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization.
Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections
Authors: Calvert Randall L. , Ferejohn John A.
Published: May 2006

This article presents a method for analyzing the extent and strength of coattail voting in presidential elections. This method allows the authors to estimate the magnitude of coattail voting and then to decompose this estimate into more “basic” elements. Estimates are given for presidential elections beginning with 1956.

The determination of the coattail vote and its decomposition depend on the theory of the voting decision that is assumed. In this article we present a model of vote determination that is similar in most respects to the traditional SRC model; the vote for congressional representation in a presidential election year is determined jointly by partisan affiliation, attitudes toward the presidential candidates, and local forces unique to the congressional race (such as may be captured by an incumbency variable). This model permits the separate estimation of the strength of short-term forces and of the efficiency of the presidential coattails.

Application of the model to survey data since 1956 indicates that efficiency of presidential coattails has declined during this period. Furthermore, the 1980 election does not appear to be an exception to this trend. On the other hand there has not been any particular trend in the strength of short-term forces during this period; instead events peculiar to the context of a specific election generate short-term forces at the level of the presidential election, but the degree to which these forces are carried over to local races seems to have declined.
Voting One Issue at a Time: The Question of Voter Forecasts
Authors: Enelow James M. , Hinich Melvin J.
Published: May 2006

When issues (i.e., dimensions) are voted on one at a time, a voter whose preferences are not separable across issues must forecast the outcome of later issues in order to know how to vote in the present. This is the problem of expectations. In this article, we develop a general theory designed to handle this problem. Assuming that voters are risk averse and maximize expected utility, we demonstrate that a random variable forecast of how later issues will be decided reduces to a point forecast, which is the mean of the multidimensional random variable. We also show that single-peaked preferences are induced on each issue, and consequently there exists an equilibrium across issues.
Voting Behavior on the United States Courts of Appeals Revisited
Authors: Goldman Sheldon
Published: May 2006

In an earlier study of voting behavior of U.S. appeals courts judges, attitudinal patterns were investigated along with an analysis of the relationship of judges' backgrounds to their decisions. In this revisit, the earlier findings were treated as hypotheses and tested with a new case population covering a subsequent and longer time period. In all, 2,115 cases decided nonunanimously were coded on one or more issues. Most cases could be classified under ten broad issue categories which were then utilized for most of the analyses. Although the research design was similar to that of the earlier study, a wider variety of methods was employed including nonparametric and parametric intercorrelations of voting behavior on the ten issues and stepwise multiple regression and partial correla-tion analyses of seven background variables and their relationships to voting behavior on the issues. The principal findings were similar to those found earlier but it was possible to map voting behavior with some-what more precision and to uncover some unexpected relationships such as those concerning the potency of the age variable particularly for voting on political liberalism issues.
Justice as Fairness: For Groups?
Authors: Van Dyke Vernon
Published: May 2006

InA Theory of Justice, John Rawls assumes that the principles of justice are for individuals in a society, and in general he assumes that the society is an ethnically homogeneous state. He thus follows the tradition associated with the dominant form of the social contract theory, which focuses on the individual and the state. His assumptions neglect the fact that almost all states are ethnically plural or heterogeneous, and that many of them confer special status and rights on ethnic groups as collective entities; for example, many of them confer special status and rights on indigenous groups, on groups disadvantaged by prior discrimination, and on minorities and other groups conceded a right to survive as distinct cultural entities. Status and rights for groups necessarily mean differentiation among individuals depending on their membership; and this in turn means that a theory of justice that focuses on the individual and neglects the group both fails to account for existing practices and fails to give guidance where the practices are at issue.
Rejoinder to “Comment” by Jack Citrin: Political Discontent or Ritualism?
Authors: Miller Arthur H.
Published: May 2006

In 1958 only 22 per cent of the total population felt that they could not “trust the government in Washington to do what is right” all or most of the time. By the fall of 1972 that figure had climbed to 45 per cent. Furthermore, the percentage of eligible voters participating in the 1972 presidential election was the lowest it has been since 1948; crises and scandals have continually plagued the government since the Watergate revelations; and the economic conditions of the country have provoked widespread uncertainty and anxiety among the populace. There is good reason, then, for the intense current interest in attitudes of political disaffection and alienation.

Present U.S. conditions demonstrate that political alienation is a phenomenon of fundamental significance in political processes. Feelings of political cynicism and alienation may substantially diminish the willingness of citizens to participate in politics or to support programs directed at resolving the social problems that stimulate discontent. Attitudes of political alienation have likewise been related to public demands for radical political reforms during trying periods of social or economic discontent. Alienation and non-participation, however, go beyond just questions of voluntary compliance with policies or the possibilities for radical change; they strike at a very basic democratic norm. Democratic theory emphasizes voluntary consent as the basis of political obligation and legitimacy. Democratic government assumes—indeed, requires—widespread participation, political equality, the accountability of leaders and protection of the individual citizen's constitutional guarantees. The full attainment of these values is only possible when the relationship between the leaders and the public is based on mutual understanding and reciprocal trust rather than on the use of coercive and arbitrary authority.
Urbanization and Political Demand Making: Political Participation Among the Migrant Poor in Latin American Cities
Authors: Cornelius Wayne A.
Published: May 2006

This paper investigates the proposition that rapid urbanization produces significant changes in the kinds, volume, and intensity of demand making aimed at local and national governments, leading to political system “overload” and pressure for major shifts in resource allocation. Drawing upon data gathered among low-income migrants to Mexico City and other Latin American cities, the paper analyzes the process through which objective needs are converted into demands upon government. The findings indicate that there are often major lags in the process of demand creation among cityward migrants, and that many kinds of felt needs are viewed by migrants as needs to be satisfied primarily through individual rather than governmental action.

Data are presented on the incidence of demand making among the migrant population and the substantive nature of the demands they make upon government. Strategies used in attempting to influence government decisions are described, and the attitudes and perceptions underlying the migrant's preference among alternative strategies are analyzed. The long-term propensity of migrants and their offspring to engage in demand making with regard to broad social and economic issues rather than individual or community-related needs is assessed.
Decision Making in Soviet Cities
Authors: Frolic B. Michael
Published: May 2006

How are decisions made in Soviet cities? Who are the municipal decision makers? What kinds of decisions do they make? Is there a Soviet urban political system? This article attempts to answer these questions by focusing on four aspects of decision making in Soviet cities: budget formulation, the planning process, housing construction and allocation, and the staffing of key municipal posts.

Urban autonomy has increased in the past decade, but Soviet municipalities are very much restricted in their decision making. Superior Party and governmental authorities continue to dominate the decision-making process and any decision made by municipal authorities can be vetoed by superior Party and governmental organs.

Soviet municipal decision making is now being influenced by three tendencies: municipal administrators are acquiring more influence in municipal government and administration; the educational qualifications and professional expertise of city Party members are rising; ad hoc citizen and group interest articulation may be developing. Comparisons between Soviet and North American urban decision-making models are useful and valid, although they require an improved methodology and much more Soviet data.
The Social Origins of Liberal Democracy: The Swedish Case
Authors: Tilton Timothy A.
Published: May 2006

Implicit in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and explicit in Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy are respectively a liberal and a radical model of democratic development. Neither of these models adequately accounts for the experience of Sweden, a remarkably successful “late developer.” Although Swedish industrialization proceeded with little public ownership of the means of production, with limited welfare programs until the 1930s, and above all with restricted military expenditure—all factors Dahrendorf implies are crucial for democratic development—it did not produce the traditional liberal infrastructure of bourgeois entrepreneurs nor a vigorous open market society. Similarly only three of Moore's five preconditions for democracy obtained in Sweden: a balance between monarchy and aristocracy, the weakening of the landed aristocracy, and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the workers and peasants. There was no thorough shift toward commercial agriculture and, most important, there was no revolutionary break with the past. Consequently, one has to evolve a radical liberal model of development which states the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Sweden without revolution. This model contains implications for the further modernization of American politics.
Clashing Beliefs Within the Executive Branch: The Nixon Administration Bureaucracy
Authors: Aberbach Joel D. , Rockman Bert A.
Published: May 2006

This article examines two key political beliefs of high level American federal executives: their views on the role of government in providing social services and their views regarding inequities in political representation. Data were collected in 1970 through open-ended interviews with a sample of 126 political appointees and supergrade career civil servants in the domestic agencies. Both of the beliefs analyzed were pertinent to the efforts of the Nixon administration to reorder national priorities and policies. The evidence in the paper establishes differences in the outlooks of administrators depending on agency, job status, and party affiliation. Agency and party affiliation are particularly important variables, and their joint effects on the beliefs examined are substantial. Democratic administrators in the social service agenoies were the most liberal and Republicans in the non-social service agencies the most conservative. Our data document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation and a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future conflicts between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.
The Neo-Alexandrians: A Review Essay on Data Handbooks in Political Science
Authors: Gurr Ted Robert
Published: May 2006

Four major new compilations of macropolitical data are compared and evaluated. Each summarizes a large-scale research effort to code or to collect data suitable for theoretically relevant, cross-national comparisons. As a group the new handbooks incorporate many improvements and innovations on earlier handbooks, which concentrated mainly on cross-sectional, aggregate data or simplistically coded judgments about nation-states. About a third of their measures consist of “made” data, derived by coding journalistic and historical sources. All provide some measures for cross-time comparisons; one is devoted exclusively to time-series data. Many of their measures denote properties of internal and international conflict and of international transactions. All but one are painfully self-conscious about problems of reliability and comparability of data. One criticism is the reliance of several of the handbooks on “counts” of conflict events rather than assessment of more theoretically relevant properties of conflict. A second is the paucity of indicators of inequality and, more generally, of measures which give a “view from the bottom” of political systems.
Political Implications of Gender Roles: A Review of the Literature
Authors: Krauss Wilma Rule
Published: May 2006

This essay introduces the reader to the contemporary literature on gender roles and feminine behavior, including the major concepts, empirical findings, and social thought which have implications for political behavior and research. Gender roles as they relate to the psychology and activity of men and women, and their systemic cultural, economic, and legal ramifications provide an explanation and a basis for understanding political behavior, including recurrent women's protest movements. Contemporary writing contributes to building a non-androcentric and accurate body of knowledge regarding political woman, and it calls into question the ideology of the biological determinism of political activity. The literature surveyed has potential usefulness for public policy: an expansion of democracy is viable with the discernment and removal of barriers which hinder substantial proportions of women from achieving political leadership and hence participating in authoritative decision making and value allocation. A bibliography of major references is appended.
U.S. House Members in Their Constituencies: An Exploration
Authors: Fenno Richard F.
Published: May 2006

The paper addresses itself to two questions left underdeveloped in the literature on representative-constituent relations. First, what does the representative see when he or she sees a constituency? Second, what consequences do these perceptions have for his or her behavior? The paper reverses the normal Washington-oriented view of representative-constituent relations and approaches both questions by examining the representative in his or her constituency. The paper's observations are drawn from the author's travels with seventeen U.S. House members while they were working in their districts. Member perceptions of their constituency are divided into the geographical, the reelection, the primary and the personal constituencies. Attention is then given to the home style of House members. Home style is treated as an amalgam of three elements – allocation of resources, presentation of self, explanation of Washington activity. An effort is made to relate home style to the various perceived constituencies. Some observations are made relating constituency-oriented research to the existing literature on representation.
Economic Power and Political Influence: The Impact of Industry Structure on Public Policy
Authors: Salamon Lester M. , Siegfried John J.
Published: May 2006

Political scientists have devoted considerable attention to the ways in which economic power can be translated into political influence. Yet there has been little empirical research capable of confirming or denying general hypotheses about the political implications of various aspects of economic structure. This article seeks to begin filling this gap by first identifying five aspects of economic structure likely to affect an industry's political influence (firm size, industry size, market concentration, profitability, arid geographic dispersion) and then testing these aspects by analyzing how well they account for variations among industries in their success at securing public policies of benefit to them, especially in two policy arenas: federal corporate income taxes and state excise taxes. What emerges most clearly from this analysis is an empirical confirmation of the popular hypothesis linking firm size to political influence with respect to both federal corporate tax policy and state excise tax policy. Beyond that, we find reasonably strong negative relationships between political influence and market concentration, profitability, and industry size – the latter lending interesting support to Mancur Olson's argument about the political disabilities of large groups. In the process, the article suggests a potentially fruitful new way to get beyond the case study approach in studying the impact of economic power on political influence, and thus a way to bring to bear more powerful methodological tools on this central issue of modern democracy.
Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process
Authors: Cobb Roger , Ross Jennie-Keith , Ross Marc Howard
Published: May 2006

Agenda building is the process through which demands of various groups in a population are translated into issues which vie for the attention of decision makers (formal agenda) and/or the public (public agenda). This paper presents three models for the comparative study of agenda building. The outside initiative model describes groups with minimal prior access to decision makers, who must consequently first expand their issues to a public agenda before they can hope to reach the formal agenda. The mobilization model accounts for issues which are placed on the formal agenda by political leaders, who subsequently attempt to expand these issues to the public agenda to obtain the support required for implementation. The inside access model refers to leaders, or to those having close contact with these leaders, who seek to place issues on the formal agenda directly, and for whom expansion to the public agenda is both unnecessary and undesirable.

Propositions are stated about intergroup variation in patterns of agenda building within societies; about variations in success rates for different strategies and probabilities of occurrence for the three models in different types of societies; and about characteristics of the agenda-building process which hold in all three models and in any social setting.
“The Divine Science”: Political Engineering in American Culture
Authors: Ranney Austin
Published: May 2006

The American polity's designers proceeded from what John Adams called “the divine science of politics”—an approach very close to that of modern empirical political science. It was rooted in their conviction that truth is best discovered by the systematic investigation of experience; they investigated experience with methods primitive by modern standards but advanced for the eighteenth century; they applied their findings to the design of political institutions; and they regarded all institutions as experimental, to be revised when experience indicates. This faith in political and social engineering has remained ever since a major element in American political culture. It has recently been shaken by Vietnam, Watergate, and other systemic failures; but it is still far preferable to alternative faiths, especially if we today can cool our rhetoric, moderate our expectations, and recapture the pragmatic, experimental mood of those who created “the divine science.”
Justice and the Oresteia
Authors: Euben J. Peter
Published: May 2006

The essay is concerned with justice in the Oresteia and the way the Oresteia contributes to the justice it celebrates. It begins by examining the place of tragedy in Athenian politics as a preface to an analysis of the trilogy's understanding of justice. That understanding is explored using two examples of fundamentally conflicting forces which are reconciled in the play to create a whole larger and more just than either force alone. The essay goes on to argue that the form of tragedy recapitulates and reinforces the substantive teachings on justice previously analyzed. Here four elements are considered: the balances between intelligence and passion, action and boundaries, political discourse and poetry, and the Euminides and Agamemnon.
Pathways to Participation
Authors: Beck Paul Allen , Jennings M. Kent
Published: May 2006

The premise of this article is that adult participation in politics is affected by strong preadult forces in addition to the contemporaneous factors emphasized by recent studies. To test this premise, data are drawn from the 1965–1973 national socialization panel study of young Americans and their parents. Four causal models depicting pathways to participation among young adults are evaluated; each includes civic orientations as intervening variables. Three of the models assess the direct and indirect effects of parental characteristics—socioeconomic status, political activity, and civic orientations. The fourth model assesses the impact of adolescent involvement in high school activities. Taken individually, each pathway is shown to have an effect on adult participation, with parent socioeconomic status and high school activism having the most impact. When the four pathways are combined in a single model to reflect the connections among them, all remain important. The combined model illustrates the importance of a variety of methods of political learning. The combined model also demonstrates the crucial role of civic orientations in converting preadult experiences into later participation. Civic orientations are the primary carriers of preadult political learning. Overall, the results rebut the critics of socialization research who have questioned the existence of a linkage between early learning and adult political behavior.
Explaining the Variable Utility of Disjointed Incrementalism: Four Propositions
Authors: Lustick Ian
Published: May 2006

Much of mainstream organization theory has been concerned with the implications for organizational design and policy process of high levels of uncertainty or complexity in task environments. Decentralization, disjointed incrementalist decision strategies, and quasi-market coordinative mechanisms have been advanced as rational responses to the complexity of most problems in the socio-political sphere. This article presents and illustrates four conditions which reduce the relative utility of this approach as a means of coping with uncertainty. The propositions are shown to be implicit in the logic of “muddling through,” and are used to help explain/predict the evolution of relatively centralized and planned organizations in certain types of complex task environments.
What Moves Public Opinion?
Authors: Page Benjamin I. , Shapiro Robert Y. , Dempsey Glenn R.
Published: May 2006

Democratic theory must pay attention to what influences public opinion. In this study the content of network television news is shown to account for a high proportion of aggregate changes (from one survey to another) in U.S. citizens' policy preferences. Different news sources have different effects. News commentators (perhaps reflecting elite or national consensus or media biases) have a very strong positive impact, as do experts. Popular presidents tend to have positive effects, while unpopular presidents do not. In contrast, special interest groups tend to have a negative impact.
Residential Mobility and Voter Turnout
Authors: Squire Peverill , Wolfinger Raymond E. , Glass David P.
Published: May 2006

We examine the characteristics of a largely ignored low-turnout group—people who have recently moved. We find that neither demographic nor attitudinal attributes explain their lower turnout. Instead, the requirement that citizens must register anew after each change in residence constitutes the key stumbling block in the trip to the polls. Since nearly one-third of the nation moves every two years, moving has a large impact on national turnout rates. We offer a proposal to reduce the effect of residential mobility on turnout and estimate that turnout would increase by nine percentage points if the impact of moving could be removed. The partisan consequences of such a change would be marginal.
The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power
Authors: Shepsle Kenneth A. , Weingast Barry R.
Published: May 2006

Legislative committees have fascinated scholars and reformers for more than a century. All acknowledge the central strategic position of committees in legislatures. The consensus, however, centers on empirical regularities and stylized facts, not on explanations. We seek to explain why committees are powerful. We formulate an institutionally rich rational-choice model of legislative politics in which the sequence of the legislative process is given special prominence. Committees, as agenda setters in their respective jurisdictions, are able to enforce many of their policy wishes not only because they originate bills but also because they get a second chance after their chamber has worked its will. This occurs at the conference stage in which the two chambers of a bicameral legislature resolve differences between versions of a bill. A theory of conference politics is offered and some evidence from recent Congresses is provided.
Influences on Executive and Congressional Budgetary Priorities, 1955–1981
Authors: Kamlet Mark S. , Mowery David C.
Published: May 2006

A reduced form equation system is used to analyze the influence of economic, political, and institutional influences on the budgetary priorities of the executive branch and Congress during fiscal 1955–81. Three related issues are considered: the extent to which political and macroeconomic factors affect priorities; the degree of interdependence among the components of the federal budget and between spending and revenues; and differences between the executive branch and Congress with respect to these issues. Both types of interdependence are present within both executive branch and congressional budgeting, although this interdependence is stronger within the executive branch. The influence of economic conditions on budgetary outcomes is strong but varies considerably across spending categories. There is no evidence of apolitical business cycle. Political variables exert a modest influence on the budgetary outcomes examined; differences between Democratic and Republican budgetary policies, as well as differences in the budgetary priorities of different presidential administrations, are small by comparison with the differences between executive and congressional policies.
Reason and War
Authors: Bueno de Mesquita Bruce , Lalman David
Published: May 2006

A new specification of the expected utility model of international conflict places expected utilities within a polar coordinate system; treats third-party choices in a manner more consistent with classical forms; estimates the expected utilities derived from not challenging existing policies; more fully represents the expected costs of conflict; and normalizes expected utilities regardless of system size. By assuming that the probability of escalation of a dispute increases monotonically with leaders' expectations of gain, we derive continuous functions for the probabilities of war, intervention, violence, and peace. The revised theory significantly improves our ability to discriminate between violent and nonviolent disputes and between violent disputes that escalated to warfare and those that did not in Europe between 1816 and 1970.
Freud and Freedom of Speech
Authors: Schwartz Joel
Published: May 2006

In this essay I develop a psychoanalytic defense of freedom of speech that is implicit in Freud's works, principally in his discussions of verbal slips and jokes. Freud argues that freedom of speech benefits people by providing a harmless outlet for aggression, suggesting that it is better to express aggression in words than in violent deeds or to repress it altogether. The psychoanalytic defense of free speech has affinities with various liberal defenses, but it is partial because apolitical; it emphasizes the emotional self-expression of speakers as opposed to the rational persuasion of listeners. The intellectual roots of the contemporary concern with “freedom of expression” (as opposed to “freedom of speech”) can be found in Freud: to focus on freedom of expression is to ignore the qualitative differences among forms of self-expression and to neglect the specifically political character of speech.
Party and Bureaucracy: The Influence of Intermediary Groups on Urban Public Service Delivery
Authors: Jones Bryan D.
Published: May 2006

Geographically based intermediary groups in cities, primarily the political party structure and community groups, can potentially affect the distribution of public services to neighborhoods in three ways. First, they can stimulate citizen demands for services, which urban bureaucracies transform into outputs; more demands yield more services. Second, urban service agencies may grant special consideration to demands mediated by the intermediary structures, producing more output per demand for mediated demands. Finally, parties and groups may intervene in neighborhoods to co-produce services, gaining more impact from agency efforts than in neighborhoods not represented by strong intermediary structures.

Using data on citizen complaints, agency outputs and service impacts in neighborhoods, this study of building code enforcement in Chicago finds that the party structure is efficacious at all three stages of the service provision process, but that groups are not effective at any stage.
Economic Outcomes and Political Support for British Governments among Occupational Classes: A Dynamic Analysis
Authors: Hibbs Douglas A. ,   Nicholas Vasilatos
Published: May 2006

The first section of the article establishes the political salience of macroeconomic issues to the British electorate, reviews the distributional consequences of macroeconomic outcomes, and suggests that unemployment outcomes in particular have strong class-related distributional effects.

The second part presents a dynamic model of how rational voters evaluate the governing party, based on the idea that voters evaluate the cumulative performance of the governing party relative to the prior performance of the current opposition. Since the present relevance of prior outcomes decays over time, voters weight current performance more heavily than past performance informing contemporaneous political judgments.

The empirical analyses in the third section include measures of nominal economic performance (inflation and exchange rate movements) and real economic performance (unemployment and real income fluctuations). The regression results indicate that the responses of political support among the occupational classes to macroeconomic changes are sizeable, and that the cross-class variations are consistent with the distributional consequences reviewed at the beginning of the article.

The concluding section develops the electoral implications of the empirical results and presents a novel interpretation of trends in class-related political support for the parties. The evidence shows that the argument that there has been a persistent decline of class-based political alignments in Britain is erroneous.
Estimating the Degree of Mobilization and Conversion in the 1890s: An Inquiry into the Nature of Electoral Change
Authors: Wanat John , Burke Karen
Published: May 2006

The prime voting dynamic in the critical presidential election of 1896 was, according to the literature, the conversion of Democrats to the Republican banner. Unfortunately, mobilization of new voters has not been given much attention. To assess the role of mobilization, the vote shift possibilities from 1892 to 1896 were formalized, and all possible scenarios conforming to the aggregate data that characterized the electoral shift were analyzed by computer. Solutions to the tables representing the changes in voting from 1892 to 1896 show that in the Midwest more voters were mobilized in the 1896 election than were converted. In the Northeast, the conventional wisdom was not challenged. The findings illustrate the importance of mobilization as an explanation of large-scale electoral change.
Interest Representation: The Dominance of Institutions
Authors: Salisbury Robert H.
Published: May 2006

Interest group theory traditionally assumed that policies advocated by group representatives in some sense grow out of the interests or values of the group's members. Mancur Olson and others compelled important revisions in this assumption, but still left the process of interest advocacy to membership groups. It is contended here that institutions, such as corporations or local governments, occupy a dominant position with respect to interest representation in Washington, and this finding requires substantial revisions in both theoretical and descriptive formulations of the governmental process.
The Socio-Economic Determinants of Popular-Authoritarian Electoral Behavior: The Case of Peronism
Authors: Schoultz Lars
Published: May 2006

In several highly mobilized Third World societies, rising levels of working-class political activism seem to have encouraged the development of political movements which are both popular and authoritarian. This popular authoritarianism melds intensive political mobilization of previously excluded social sectors with political structures which severely limit these groups' ability to affect public policy. Much of the research on popular authoritarianism has attempted to explain the phenomenon by identifying the socioeconomic determinants of popular-authoritarian electoral behavior. In an effort to clarify the relative merit of contending explanations, this study uses data from the prototypic case of Argentine Peronism to test six common hypotheses and then to construct a model which optimizes the explanatory ability of five major socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that an area's rate of industrial growth and the size of its working-class population account for more than four-fifths of the variation in Peronisi electoral behavior that can be attributed to socioeconomic variables.
Developing Public Policy Theory: Perspectives from Empirical Research
Authors: Greenberg George D. , Miller Jeffrey A. , Mohr Lawrence B. , Vladeck Bruce C.
Published: May 2006

There has been considerable interest in the development of theories of public policy formation, but theoretical efforts to date have not demonstrated adequate recognition of the distinctive qualities of the dependent variable as a focus of research. Facets of public policy are far more difficult to study systematically than most other phenomena investigated empirically by political scientists. Our attempt to test hypotheses with some rigor demonstrated that public policy becomes troublesome as a research focus because of inherent complexity–specifically because of the temporal nature of the process, the multiplicity of participants and of policy provisions, and the contingent nature of theoretical effects. We use examples of policy making taken from the case study literature to show concretely how such complexity makes it essentially impossible to test apparently significant hypotheses as they are presented by Lowi, Dahl, Banfield, and others. Our effort here is to enhance theoretical development by carefully specifying and clarifying the major shortcomings and pointing out the apparent directions of remedy.
Bargaining in Legislatures
Authors: Baron David P. , Ferejohn John A.
Published: May 2006

Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures. In our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts, explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting. The model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard, institution-free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium.
Simple Explanations of Turnout Decline
Authors: Cassel Carol A. , Luskin Robert C.
Published: May 2006

Several recent studies have claimed to explain the post-1960 decline in U.S. presidential and congressional election turnout in terms of just a few variables. Abramson and Aldrich (1982) attribute the great bulk of the decline to aggregate declines in partisanship and political efficacy. Shaffer (1981) attributes still more of the decline to aggregate decreases in these same two variables plus age and following the campaign in the newspapers. And Kleppner (1982) attributes “virtually all” of the decline to aggregate decreases in the first three of these variables. We show how these studies measure explanation too generously and how the very short-handedness of their models makes them seem more successful than they are. These few variables, we conclude, leave most of the decline unexplained.
A New Theory of Congressional Compromise
Authors: Enelow James M.
Published: May 2006

A new model of congressional compromise is constructed in which leadership, faced with a bill whose prospects are uncertain, is forced to compromise. Leadership has policy preferences of its own and seeks a compromise that will minimize its expected loss.

A reasonable expression for the probability of each outcome is assumed, and the form of the optimal compromise is derived based on two simple parameters. The solutions are quite revealing and support the expectation of compromises close to a 50-50 split under a broad range of conditions.
Residues of a Movement: The Aging of the American Protest Generation
Authors: Jennings M. Kent
Published: May 2006

The theory of political generations asserts that enduring and relevant political consequences result from critical experiences during the formative years. This study draws on a national three-wave panel study of young adults surveyed in 1965, 1973, and 1982 to test the theory with respect to the Vietnam era protest movement. College-educated protestors and nonprotestors are compared with themselves and with each other over time. Generational effects are categorized into absolute, relative, and equivalent continuity. Very strong continuities emerge for attitudes associated with the protestors' political baptism. Although erosion effects appear in more contemporary affairs, the protest generation remains quite distinctive. However, its limited size dampens the generation's political impact and qualifies the general thesis in a fashion that probably characterizes other examples of political generations also.
Rebellious Collective Action Revisited
Authors: Klosko George , Muller Edward N. , Opp Karl Dieter
Published: May 2006

Why does it happen that ordinary people can come to participate in rebellious collective action? In the June 1986 issue of this Review, Edward N. Muller and Karl-Dieter Opp argued a public-goods model to account for why rational citizens may become rebels. They offered empirical data drawn from samples in New York City and Hamburg, Germany in support of the public-goods model. George Kolsko takes issue with the rationale of Muller and Opp, arguing that their public-goods model is not a rational-choice explanation of rebellious collective action. In response, Muller and Opp clarify their theory and further elaborate its assumptions.
Political Transition, Social Development, and Legal Mobilization in Spain
Authors: Giles Micheal W. , Lancaster Thomas D.
Published: May 2006

While it has been frequently asserted that the use of courts is responsive to political and social contexts, the evidence is inconclusive at best. In the case of political context the dearth of evidence may reflect focusing on the U.S. case, where there is relatively limited variation in relevant characteristics. In the case of social context it may reflect a failure to focus on periods of substantial transition. In the present study we examine court usage in Spain between 1960 and 1980. During this period Spain experienced rapid economic growth with its attendant social change and dramatic political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Both the movement toward democracy and social development are found to be positively linked to increases in legal mobilization.
The Cooperative Resolution of Policy Conflict
Authors: Quirk Paul J.
Published: May 2006

I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several aspects of the policy process: issue content, the structure of conflict, leadership, party politics, and political institutions.
Political Efficacy at Work: The Connection between More Autonomous Forms of Workplace Organization and a More Participatory Politics
Authors: Elden J. Maxwell
Published: May 2006

Carole Pateman (1970) argued that democratized industrial authority structures would require workers to develop precisely the skills and resources necessary for participation in political life beyond the workplace. She based her argument on a close analysis of classical democratic theory and the indirect empirical evidence available at the time concerning workplace-related political participation. Although a great deal of research in industrial psychology and sociology and organization behavior is available, none treats expressly political correlates of workplace democracy. Analysis of data from a new factory designed on the basis of semi-autonomous, self-managing work groups provides empirical evidence directly supporting Pateman. The analysis also results in empirically grounded scales that differentiate betweenwork humanizationandwork democratization.The latter correlates significantly with a sense of political efficacy. Further research to support democratizing industrial authority structures seems warranted for a political science that would contribute to a more participatory politics.
Black Consciousness and Political Participation: The Missing Link
Authors: Shingles Richard D.
Published: May 2006

Recent research has demonstrated that black Americans are far more politically active than whites of similar socioeconomic status. The difference has been related to black consciousness. Yet the reasons for this relationship have not been adequately explained. Starting with the work of Gurin and Gamson, this article theorizes that black consciousness contributes to political mistrust and a sense of internal political efficacy which in turn encourages policy-related participation. The relationship between the two attitudes and policy-related behavior is demonstrated to be conditional. The conditions favor blacks more than whites. What I shall call the Gamson-Gurin thesis is supported by data from Verba's and Nie's 1967 survey of the American public. The thesis, and its derivations, prove useful in clarifying the scope and nature of black participation in the American political process as well as helping us to understand how individuals in general select one mode of participation over another and how the choice varies by race and social class.
Patterns of Adoption of Tort Law Innovations: An Application of Diffusion Theory to Judicial Doctrines
Authors: Canon Bradley C. , Baum Lawrence
Published: May 2006

Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American states, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among state court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativeness, and the pattern of diffusion. The findings suggest that the diffusion of judicial doctrines is a very different process from the diffusion of legislation. A major reason for the difference appears to be the courts' dependence on litigants to provide opportunities for innovation.
Constituency Candidates Versus Parties in Japanese Voting Behavior
Authors: Richardson Bradley M.
Published: May 2006

Most studies of Japanese elections have seen constituency candidates and their campaigns as the major factor in electoral mobilization. In order to explore the effects of candidate campaigns and voters' images of candidates, as well as party identifications, party images, partisan issue opinions, and past voting, I develop models portraying these effects upon the vote, both separately and together, and test the models using survey data. The results show that partisan attitudes are the dominant force in Japanese parliamentary voting. The most plausible explanation for the importance of partisan factors lies in the electorate's being exposed regularly to information about parties but only intermittently to information about candidates. The plausibility of an information-based explanation of the importance of robust partisan attitudes in Japan suggests in turn that comparative differences in voting may reflect systemic variations in information processes.
Contending Models of Cabinet Stability
Authors: Strom Kaare , Browne Eric C. , Frendreis John P. , Glieber Dennis W.
Published: May 2006

A spirited debate has arisen over the best approach to the analysis of the durability of governing coalitions in parliamentary democracies. In this controversy, Kaare Strom enters a number of criticisms of the stochastic modeling approach offered by Eric C. Browne, John P. Frendreis, and Dennis W. Gleiber, and by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. In turn, Browne and his colleagues join the issue.