bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sophisticated Sincerity: Voting Over Endogenous Agendas
Authors: Austen-Smith David
Published: May 2006

The empirical findings on whether or not legislators vote strategically are mixed. This is at least partly due to the fact that to establish any hypothesis on strategic voting, legislators' preferences need to be known, and these are typically private data. I show that under complete information, if decision making is by the amendment procedure and if the agenda is set endogenously, then sophisticated (strategic) voting over the resulting agenda is observationally equivalent to sincere voting. The voting strategies, however, are sophisticated. This fact has direct implications for empirical work on sophisticated voting.
Nationalization of the Electorate in the United States
Authors: Vertz Laura L. , Frendreis John P. , Gibson James L.
Published: May 2006

A current debate within the field of U.S. politics revolves around the extent to which the electorate is nationalized, that is, responds to national-level political forces. We provide additional evidence to help resolve this debate. Using the variance-components model of political effects developed by Stokes, we analyze presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial, and congressional races for the period 1962–1984. The results indicate that presidential races are highly nationalized, and congressional races largely localized. Senate and gubernatorial races are found to have a large state-level component to them. The analysis is also split into two segments to ascertain if a change in political effects is seen during this relatively short time frame; no such differences are found. We conclude that nationalization is not a process that can be understood from evidence provided by congressional races alone. Our results suggest that constituencies respond to political forces in a complex way, reacting to factors that are most relevant to a particular electoral contest.
Buying Time: Moneyed Interests and the Mobilization of Bias in Congressional Committees
Authors: Hall Richard L. , Wayman Frank W.
Published: May 2006

Over the last two decades institutional critics have increasingly charged that moneyed interests dominate the legislative process in Congress. Systematic research on campaign contributions and members' floor voting, however, provides little supporting evidence. We develop a view of the member-donor relationship that questions the theoretical underpinnings of the vote-buying hypothesis itself and suggests two alternative claims: (1) the effects of group expenditures are more likely to appear in committee than on the floor; and (2) the behavior most likely to be affected is members' legislative involvement, not their votes. In order to test this account, we specify a model of committee participation and estimate it using data from three House committees. In contrast to the substantial literature on contributions and roll calls, our analysis provides solid support for the importance of moneyed interests in the legislative process. We also find evidence that members are more responsive to organized business interests within their districts than to unorganized voters even when voters have strong preferences and the issue at stake is salient. Such findings suggest several important implications for our understanding of political money, interest groups, and the representativeness of legislative deliberations.
Soviet Citizen Participation on the Eve of Democratization
Authors: Bahry Donna , Silver Brian D.
Published: May 2006

We reassess the debate over Soviet citizen politics in the USSR during the Brezhnev era. We argue the need for a more complex model of citizen participation in the USSR before Gorbachev if we are to have an accurate baseline for evaluating changes in regime-society relations. We examine the connections between individual attitudes and individual behavior and show that political participation under the “old regime” was not nearly as one-dimensional and devoid of effect as many previous researchers (and current Soviet leaders) have described it. Many forms of political participation in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev did not fit the stereotype of a psychologically disengaged citizenry driven to participate only by coercion, a desire to conform, or a quest for particularized benefits from public officials.
Stable Governments and the Allocation of Policy Portfolios
Authors: Austen-Smith David , Banks Jeffrey
Published: May 2006

Different members of coalition governments typically have responsibility for different aspects, or dimensions, of policy. Such responsibilities are allocated as portfolios to government members. Given a distribution of such portfolios, final government policy is derived as the accumulation of individual members' decisions in regard to their respective responsibilities. We develop a portfolio allocation model of government formation and policy decision in multiparty legislatures. In particular, we focus on stable portfolio allocations, where a stable allocation is one that yields a policy that no legislative coalition is willing or able to overturn. Several notions of stability are considered and related to the usual concept of the core. Among the results are that although stable allocations are not guaranteed, such allocations can exist with minority governments; and that final policy outcomes associated with stable governments need not be “centrist.“
Lessons in Lobbying for Free Trade in 19th-Century Britain: To Concentrate or Not
Authors: Schonhardt-Bailey Cheryl
Published: May 2006

I present a modified version of the public choice interest group model that integrates concentrated and deconcentrated interests with successful lobbying. It is argued that effective free trade lobbying required the political fusion of the economic interests representing two fundamental changes in nineteenth-century Britain's economy: (1) geographic concentration of the core export industry (cotton textiles) and (2) deconcentration of the broader export sector both geographically and in terms of industrial structure. Empirical evidence from both national and individual levels firmly supports the contention that the timing and political success of Britain's nineteenth-century free trade lobby required the combined forces of core export interests and the more diverse and geographically more evenly distributed interests of the export sector as a whole.
The Impact of Presidential Campaigning on Midterm U.S. Senate Elections
Authors: Cohen Jeffrey E. , Krassa Michael A. , Hamman John A.
Published: May 2006

The conventional wisdom about presidential campaigning in midterm Senate elections is that presidential efforts lack impact or have negative impact. We discuss conceptual problems with the conventional view and offer an alternative that views presidential campaigning as strategic. We test this alternative and find support for it. Further, we find that presidential campaign efforts have a positive impact on the vote through the mobilization of nonvoters. Finally, in a significant number of cases, presidential campaigning may have been the margin of victory for candidates of the president's party. We discuss the implications of these findings on assessments of the president and relations with Congress during the second half of the term.
Do Endorsements Matter? Group Influence in the 1984 Democratic Caucuses
Authors: Rapoport Ronald B. , Stone Walter J. , Abramowitz Alan I.
Published: May 2006

Although candidates are very concerned about garnering prenomination group endorsements, there is virtually no research on the effects of such endorsements at the presidential level. In 1984, teachers', women's, and labor groups all endorsed Mondale for the Democratic nomination. Using a survey of Democratic caucus participants, we examine the effects of these endorsements on both candidate support and prenomination activity for the endorsed candidate. We find substantial effects of labor and teachers' group endorsements on the candidate choice of their members, but virtually no effect of women's groups. Labor union membership also had the greatest impact on campaign activity for Mondale.
Government Partisanship, Labor Organization, and Macroeconomic Performance
Authors: Alvarez R. Michael , Garrett Geoffrey , Lange Peter
Published: May 2006

Governments of the Left and Right have distinct partisan economic policies and objectives that they would prefer to pursue. Their propensity to do so, however, is constrained by their desire for reelection. We argue that the ability of governments to further their partisan interests and preside over reelectable macroeconomic outcomes simultaneously is dependent on the organization of the domestic economy, particularly the labor movement. We hypothesize that there are two different paths to desirable macroeconomic performance. In countries with densely and centrally organized labor movements, leftist governments can promote economic growth and reduce inflation and unemployment. Conversely, in countries with weak labor movements, rightist governments can pursue their partisan-preferred macroeconomic strategies and achieve similarly beneficial macroeconomic outcomes. Performance will be poorer in other cases. These hypotheses are supported by analysis of pooled annual time series data for 16 advanced industrial democracies between 1967 and 1984.
Party Identification, Realignment, and Party Voting: Back to the Basics
Authors: Miller Warren E.
Published: May 2006

The argument is presented for defining party identification by the root question, “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, or what?” With this definitional base, the partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans between 1952 and 1980 shows no evidence of realignment outside the South, belying the implications of the Markus-Converse and Fiorina analyses that suggest volatility in response to short-term influences. It also appears that the correlation between party identification and voter choices for president are very constant over time in the South as well as outside the South. Party line voting by party identifiers varies by region and party but did not decrease between 1952 and 1988.
Explaining Presidential Priorities: The Competing Aspiration Levels Model of Macrobudgetary Decision Making
Authors: Fischer Gregory W. , Kamlet Mark S.
Published: May 2006

This article develops a new statistical model of trade-offs among defense, nondefense, and fiscal policy concerns as they are reflected in the presidential budgetary process. The Competing Aspiration Levels Model (CALM) builds on Crecine's (1971) “Great Identity” argument. Unlike most previous attempts to model presidential budgeting, CALM explicitly represents the interdependence of decisions about defense, nondefense, and total federal expenditures. CALM models this interdependence as the result of the interaction of minimal aspirations for defense and nondefense expenditures with a maximum acceptable level of expenditures from a fiscal policy standpoint. Statistical analyses of presidential budgets for the fiscal years from 1955 through 1980 provide strong support for the CALM formulation. Substantively, the results indicate that fiscal constraints on total expenditures have progressively weakened, that the maximum acceptable expenditure level has generally exceeded the minimal expenditure aspiration level, and that when a potential “fiscal surplus” has existed, the nondefense sector has been more successful in capturing a share of this surplus than the defense sector. In keeping with traditional incrementalist arguments, the results indicate that previous year expenditure levels provide a relatively secure “budgetary base” for both the defense and nondefense sectors. Both sectors tend to receive their minimal aspiration levels plus a share of whatever fiscal surplus exists. The analysis also indicates that the executive branch has not been as strong a direct force for budgetary growth as Congress.
Conflict and Complexity: Goal Diversity and Organizational Search Effectiveness
Authors: Cohen Michael D.
Published: May 2006

There is a long-standing concern in organization theory with the effect of conflict on search. This article uses a computer model of organizational decision making to demonstrate an effect called “search-enhancing conflict”: organizational decision-making performance when there are conflicting subgoals may be better than it would be if all subunits evaluated alternatives in terms of a single organizational goal.
Legitimacy, Religion, and Nationalism in the Middle East
Authors: Razi G. Hossein
Published: May 2006

The significance of legitimacy to regime maintenance has been much neglected in recent investigations of the Third World, particularly by behavioralists and rational choice theorists. I define legitimacy, discuss factors that may have contributed to this neglect, and explore the significance of nationalism and religion as major sources of legitimacy in the Middle East. Both a misunderstanding of the role of higher values and rationality in individuals' relationship to social systems and a faulty projection applied to the mainsprings of behavior in other cultures have distorted the perceptions of a number of Western analysts. The relationship between religion and nationalism is complex. Contrary to the common assumption in the West, Islam in general has generated fairly sophisticated constitutional theories. Islamic fundamentalism in particular has been a major source of innovation and adaptation—as well as of spiritual gratification—for the Muslim masses.
Are Congressional Committees Composed of Preference Outliers?
Authors: Krehbiel Keith
Published: May 2006

A diverse set of congressional studies portrays members of standing committees as more or less homogeneous “high demanders” or “preference outliers” relative to members of the larger legislature. Using interest group ratings of members of the Ninety-sixth to Ninety-ninth Congresses, I conduct conventional statistical hypothesis tests to discern whether standing committees are more extreme and more homogeneous than the legislature as a whole. With only a few exceptions, the tests do not allow confident rejection of null hypotheses of identical committee and chamber preferences. The absence of convincing evidence of preference outliers is broadly consistent with emerging incomplete information game-theoretic legislative research and difficult to reconcile with many previous formal theories of legislative politics.
Ideology, Issues, and the Spatial Theory of Elections
Authors: Enelow James M. , Hinich Melvin J.
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this article is to explore the connection between ideology and issues in the minds of voters and the relationship between this connection and the electoral prospects of candidates engaged in two-candidate competition. Toward this end we examine the effects on electoral competition of either magnifying or collapsing the expected policy difference that voters associate with a fixed ideological difference. We find that magnifying this difference aids the incumbent, whereas collapsing it aids the challenger. We go on to point out how this second result provides an explanation for the electoral appeal of extremist candidates and an important insight into the question of state stability.
Partisan Dealignment in the American Electorate: Itemizing the Deductions since 1964
Authors: Norpoth Helmut , Rusk Jerrold G.
Published: May 2006

According to the SRC-CPS surveys, the proportion of Americans identifying with a political party declined sharply between 1964 and 1976, from approximately 75 percent to 63 percent. In order to cast some light on the reasons for this dealignment, we examine the contributions made by the changing age composition of the electorate, the entry of new voters into the electorate, the party desertion among voters already in the electorate, and the suppression of age gains in partisanship. These four sources are shown to explain close to 100 percent of the aggregate decline from 1964 to 1976, with the single largest contribution made by entry of new voters. Nevertheless our findings indicate that the decline occurred throughout all age cohorts and suggest the potency of dealigning period forces. These forces simply had their strongest effect on those voters with predictably the least resistance, the youngest cohorts.
Some Properties of Divisor Methods for Legislative Apportionment and Proportional Representation
Authors: Carter Cyril
Published: May 2006

Some rather elegant properties of linear divisor methods are derived and used to establish upper and lower bounds on the possible variation between apportionment and exact quota entitlement. A probability distribution is derived for this variation, and it is shown that the probability of the variation exceeding one seat is very small with the major fractions linear divisor method.

A less rigorous analysis of the nonlinear equal proportions method shows that in practice it is very similar to the major fractions method, but with a very slight bias in favor of small parties (or states). It is concluded that there is no “best” apportionment method, but a knowledge of the properties of the various methods enables a political choice of the most appropriate method.
Advocacy Politics in Presidential Parties
Authors: Bruce John M. , Clark John A. , Kessel John H.
Published: May 2006

Analysis of data from a 1988 survey of presidential parties demonstrates that campaign leaders are better understood as true believers than as either representatives or vote maximizers. Analysis of leaders' attitudes reveals four issue groups in both the Republican and Democratic parties. The dominant coalition in the Republican party is slightly more conservative, and that in the Democratic party is slightly more liberal, than the party median. Comparison with similar 1972 data shows stable patterns of issue advocacy and intraparty cohesion over this time period but somewhat increased issue distance between the parties in 1988.
Eschewing Obfuscation? Campaigns and the Perception of U.S. Senate Incumbents
Authors: Franklin Charles H.
Published: May 2006

Campaigns play a central role in a democracy. I examine the effect of campaigns on the perception of the ideological positions of incumbent senators. The results demonstrate that incumbents affect voter perception both through their actions in office and on the campaign trail. Using the 1988 Senate Election Study, I find that the perceived location of incumbents depends on their roll call voting records, the perceived position of their party and the voter's own position. More crucial is the finding that candidates can affect the clarity of these perceptions through their campaign strategies. Incumbents who stress issues increase the clarity of voter perceptions, while challengers' attacks on incumbents reduce clarity. While elections alone increase clarity, these effects are small in comparison to the effect due to candidate campaign strategies. The results remind us that to understand the politics of elections we must incorporate candidate strategy in our models.
Roles, Rules, and Rationality in the New Institutionalism
Authors: Searing Donald D.
Published: May 2006

I seek to reinvigorate the study of politicians' roles by showing how motivational role theory can be used to examine the impact of goals and incentives upon behavior and thereby integrate economic and sociological perspectives. I address three reasons for the recent neglect of politicians' roles—changes in interdisciplinary tastes, conceptual and theoretical muddles, and failures to demonstrate consequences for behavior—and find them unconvincing. I further argue that the most promising framework for the new institutionalism is one that incorporates not just formal but also informal institutional structures (like roles and norms), a framework that incorporates, rather than excludes, political behavior.
Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation
Authors: Warren Mark
Published: May 2006

Democratic theories that argue for expanding the scope and domain of democracy assume that democratic experiences will transform individuals in democratic ways. Individuals are likely to become more public-spirited, tolerant, knowledgeable, and self-reflective than they would otherwise be. This assumption depends on viewing the self as socially and discursively constituted, a view that contrasts with the standard liberal-democratic view of the self as prepolitically constituted and narrowly self-interested. The importance of the social and discursive view of the self is that it highlights how standard assumptions about the self help to justify limits to democratic participation. As now conceptualized, however, the transformational assumption does not meet standard objections to expanding democracy. I sketch an approach that distinguishes classes of interests according to their potentials for democratic transformation, and strengthens—by qualifying—transformative expectations in democratic theory.
Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War
Authors: Lake David A.
Published: May 2006

Democracies are less likely to fight wars with each other. They are also more likely to prevail in wars with autocratic states. I offer an explanation of this syndrome of powerful pacifism drawn from the microeconomic theory of the state. State rent seeking creates an imperialist bias in a country's foreign policy. This bias is smallest in democracies, where the costs to society of controlling the state are relatively low, and greatest in autocracies, where the costs are higher. As a result of this bias, autocracies will be more expansionist and, in turn, war-prone. In their relations with each other, where the absence of this imperialist bias is manifest, the relative pacifism of democracies appears. In addition, democracies, constrained by their societies from earning rents, will devote greater absolute resources to security, enjoy greater societal support for their policies, and tend to form overwhelming countercoalitions against expansionist autocracies. It follows that democracies will be more likely to win wars.
Politics and the Structural Dependence of the State in Democratic Capitalist Nations
Authors: Swank Duane
Published: May 2006

I explore empirically a central claim of the structural dependence thesis, namely, that capitalists' ability to disinvest fundamentally conditions policy choices in democratic capitalist systems. Utilizing time-series data for 16 affluent democracies from 1965 to 1984, I find that, indeed, low rates of business investment are associated with reductions in corporate tax burdens and that these reductions are more pronounced in periods of economic crisis. Moreover, low rates of capital formation engender cuts in personal income taxes during periods of economic stress. However, I also find that the magnitude of responsiveness of taxation to low rates of investment is relatively small and that analyses of the political context of investment and taxation indicate that governments have choices. The responsiveness of corporate tax burdens to capital formation may, under some governments, be part of a policy mix designed to maintain adequate investment and to address the demands of core constituencies.
The Theodicy of theSecond Discourse: The “Pure State of Nature” and Rousseau's Political Thought
Authors: Scott John T.
Published: May 2006

Since Rousseau, and perhaps because of him, political theory has often been characterized by a disjunction between considerations of human nature and questions of justice and law. Yet, reexamining theSecond Discourseas a theodicy forces us to rethink how the essential questions of political theory are related just where they seem to become separated. The core of the theodicy is Rousseau's view that we are, by nature, physical beings embedded unproblematically in nature—good, or ordered, beings in a good, or ordered, whole. Although Rousseau presents his explicitly political thought as a juridical doctrine seemingly separated from his understanding of human nature and history, his political thought is founded upon his portrait of man's existence in the “pure state of nature.” This portrait serves as a positive formal model to enable us to remake our corrupted existence through the legitimate state—itself modeled by Rousseau on the divine or natural whole.
Political Business Cycles in the Public Mind
Authors: Suzuki Motoshi
Published: May 2006

Numerous studies have sought to discover political business cycles in macroeconomic variables. Although voters' subjective economic expectations have been shown to influence their electoral decisions, no existing research has attempted to uncover cyclical patterns in citizens' economic expectations. Using survey data, I seek to determine whether expectations shift to benefit the incumbent president's electoral interest. The analyses show that the percentage of the public predicting an economic upturn increases before a presidential election. One explanation for the findings is that voters might extrapolate cyclical expectations from macroeconomic conditions that contain election-driven cycles. Yet the analyses show that expectational cycles still appear when the macroeconomic conditions are held constant. I conclude by drawing an explanation without recourse to macroeconomic cycles.
Constitutional Law in 1959–1960
Authors: Fellman David
Published: May 2006

The personnel of the Supreme Court remained unchanged during the 1959 Term. From the point of view of the decisions rendered in the public law field, this was an undistinguished Term. Few of the constitutional cases are likely to hold an important place among the precedents, and a considerable number of well-argued decisions turned entirely upon private law questions. But there was no dearth of writing, during the period under review, about the Court as an institution and about the Justices who sit there.

Note may be made at this point of the latest chapter in the long dispute over the so-called tidelands. In 1947 the Supreme Court had ruled that, as against the claims of California, the United States possessed paramount rights in lands underlying the Pacific Ocean seaward from the low-water mark. Similar rulings were made in 1950 as regards the claims of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico. But with the enactment in 1953 of the Submerged Lands Act, the United States relinquished to the coastal states all of its rights in all lands beneath navigable waters within the three-mile limit, and in excess of that limit within state boundaries as they existed at the time a state became a member of the Union, or as theretofore approved by Congress. The limit of the grant was three leagues (about ten and one-half miles) in the Gulf of Mexico and three geographical miles in the Atlantic and Pacific. The actual extent of the claims of the coastal states involved in the question was therefore left to be settled by litigation.
Bargaining in a Three-Person Game
Authors: Riker William H.
Published: May 2006

Games are paradigms of many political events, especially those that involve partial or complete conflicts of interest among the participants. As paradigms, they display in relatively simple social interaction the same fundamental forces found in the more complex interactions of the grander political events whose structure they share. This is the feature of games that makes them attractive vehicles for both theorizing and experimentation in the social sciences. The scientific expectation is that, by studying the quasi-political interaction of games—where the variations among institutional, psychological, and ideological components of behavior are minimized—one will be able to understand more profoundly the basic political activities of bargaining, forming coalitions, and choosing strategies. This more profound understanding is a consequence of obtaining answers to the following questions:

(1) What is the mathematical solution, that is, what amount of utility can players be expected to obtain, when it is assumed that players are rational and wish to maximize utility?

(2) What is the strategy (or method of playing) that will ensure players of achieving the solution?

An answer to the first question indicates what may be anticipated as the outcome of political events. If we know it, then, if also we can assume players are rational maximizers of utility, we can predict the political future with some confidence. An answer to the second question (about strategies) permits political engineers to give advice to politicians about how to behave successfully.
Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities
Authors: Lineberry Robert L. , Fowler Edmund P.
Published: May 2006

A decade ago, political scientists were deploring the “lost world of municipal government” and calling for systematic studies of municipal life which emphasized the political, rather than the administrative, side of urban political life. In recent years, this demand has been generously answered and urban politics is becoming one of the most richly plowed fields of political research. In terms originally introduced by David Easton, political scientists have long been concerned with inputs, but more recently they have focused their attention on other system variables, particularly the political culture and policy outputs of municipal governments.

The present paper will treat two policy outputs, taxation and expenditure levels of cities, as dependent variables. We will relate these policy choices to socio-economic characteristics of cities and to structural characteristics of their governments. Our central research concern is to examine the impact of political structures, reformed and unreformed, on policy-making in American cities.
Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification
Authors: Parenti Michael
Published: May 2006

A question that has puzzled students of ethnic politics can be stated as follows: in the face of increasing assimilation why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics with about the same frequency as in earlier decades? On the basis of his New Haven study, Robert Dahl observes that “… in spite of growing assimilation, ethnic factors continued to make themselves felt with astonishing tenacity.” Nevertheless, he asserts, “the strength of ethnic ties as a factor in local politics surely must recede.” Dahl sets up a “three-stage” model to describe how political assimilation will follow a more general social assimilation. However, one of his co-researchers, Raymond Wolfinger, demonstrates in a recent article in this Review that ethnic voting patterns persist into the second and third generations, and that “at least in New Haven, all the social changes of the 1940's and 1950's do not seem to have reduced the political importance of national origins.” The same observation can be made of religious-ethnic identities, for as Wolfinger notes, citing data from the Elmira study, social mobility in no way diminishes the religious factor as a determinant of voting behavior; in fact, in the case of upper and middle class Catholics and Protestants, religion seems to assume a heightened importance as a voting determinant. Wolfinger marshals evidence to support the arresting proposition that, melting pot or not, ethnic voting may be with us for a long time to come, a finding which craves explanation.

Part of the reason for the persistence of ethnic voting may rest in the political system itself. Rather than being a purely dependent variable, the political system, i.e., party, precinct workers, candidates, elections, patronage, etc., continues to rely upon ethnic strategies such as those extended to accommodate the claims of newly-arrived ethnic middle-class leadership; as a mediator and mobilizer of minority symbols and interests, the political system must be taken into account.
Mass Movement and Democracy: Sokagakkai in Japanese Politics
Authors: White James W.
Published: May 2006

With a claimed membership of over 12 million members, possession of over 1000 seats in local and national legislative assemblies, a widespread domestic reputation, and a sensationalistic treatment in the foreign press, the Sokagakkai has come in recent years to be a subject of some academic, and much religious and political interest in both Japan and the United States. An organization of lay believers of the Sho sect of Nichiren Buddhism (noted for its intolerance and vigorous propagation methods), the Sokagakkai has gone into Japanese politics with a striking degree of success; the extent to which it has brought its religious characteristics into the political sphere and the question of whether such religious groups should be in that sphere at all are at present the focus of considerable debate in Japan.

Most criticisms of the Sokagakkai have to date concentrated upon its religious activities, its doctrinal truth or falsehood, its alleged militaristic tendencies, and the proper place of religion in the political system of a secular state, I would like to touch on some of the social (or antisocial) functions performed by the Sokagakkai in Japanese society, as proclaimed by the Gakkai itself and as evidenced in the Gakkai's performance, and on the implications of these social functions for the Japanese political process.

As its name, the “Value-Creation Society,” suggests, the Sokagakkai postulates pursuit of absolute happiness by means of the creation of certain values in one's life as the proper direction of human life. So that all men may be able to achieve this happiness, the Gakkai emphasizes equality of all men; so that they may be fully able to enjoy their values, the Gakkai stresses freedom. Absolute freedom, equality, and happiness may be sought by the individual through religious faith; the agency for the realization of these ideals for society and the world is the political system.
Conditions for Party Leadership: The Case of the House Democrats
Authors: Froman Lewis A. , Ripley Randall B.
Published: May 2006

Political power in Congress, all observers agree, is highly decentralized. The factors chiefly responsible for this are also well known: weak national parties (in the Congress this results in strong constituency ties and weak leadership sanctions over members) and a highly developed division of labor through the committee system. A leadership endowed with few opportunities to punish and reward, coupled with specialization by policy area, inevitably produces an institution with numerous and disparate centers of power. Just as inevitably the politics of such an institution is compounded of persuasion, bargaining, and log-rolling.

As weak as the legislative parties are, however, they still provide the major organizing force in Congress. Roll-call vote analyses have demonstrated this, and a recent study of the House Whip organizations also bears it out. Generally speaking, the single most important variable explaining legislative outcomes is party organization.
Does a “Divisive” Primary Harm a Candidate's Election Chances?
Authors: Hacker Andrew
Published: May 2006

It is a rare election year when the nation's attention is not focussed on at least one party primary where the struggle for the nomination is highly competitive and the result a matter of doubt until the last precincts are reported. In many such cases the other party has settled on its own standard-bearer and thus sits back contentedly while the opposition wages its internecine battle before a rapt public. In recent years as varied personages as Estes Kefauver, Richard Nixon, and Charles Percy found themselves engaged in a hard-fought primary campaign to secure their nomination or renomination for state office.
A Revised Theory of Winning in House-Senate Conferences
Authors: Strom Gerald S. , Rundquist Barry S.
Published: May 2006

The question, “Who wins in House-Senate conferences?” has largely been answered for recent Congresses. But the question, “Why does the Senate win?” has not been adequately answered. The research reported here presents and tests some necessary conditions of a theory that provides an answer to this question. The Senate wins because it is most frequently the second acting chamber and, because it has constitutionally derived power over House decisions, giving it the capacity to get the adjustments it makes in House bills accepted in conference. In the minority of cases in which the Senate acts first, the House “wins” in conference. Unlike earlier attempts to explain conference outcomes, the theory proposed here is consistent with the overall pattern of House dominance in the legislative process.
Domestic Institutions and International Bargaining: The Role of Agent Veto in Two-Level Games
Authors: Mo Jongryn
Published: May 2006

Putnam's (1988) conjecture that negotiators can benefit from their domestic constraints implies that they may want to impose domestic constraints on themselves by granting veto power to an agent. I show that a negotiator's decision to employ an agent as veto player depends on the kinds of information available to the foreign country and the alignment of preferences between the negotiator and the agent. When the foreign country has incomplete information about the negotiator's preferences and the negotiator has preferences too divergent from those of the agent, the negotiator will not give veto power to the agent. However, this applies only to an agent with extreme preferences, and a surprisingly large number of agent types will receive veto power. The attractiveness of the agent veto to the negotiator is in part due to its informational effect. By granting veto power to an agent, the negotiator can transmit more information to the foreign country and capture informational gains that would be lost in the absence of the agent veto.
Fully Proportional Representation
Authors: Monroe Burt L.
Published: May 2006

Even though voters can have complex preferences over multiple candidates or parties, all extant electoral systems provide political representation based solely or primarily on voters' first preferences. I present a new concept of proportional representation that takes account of voters' preferences over the full list of alternatives—fully proportional representation (FPR)—and schemes for its implementation. I outline a “pure” FPR scheme, but because this scheme would have several undesirable features when used by real voters, I also discuss modifications that account for these difficulties. Although there are a variety of interpretations of the role played by voting in democracy, several can be shown to suggest FPR as a normative ideal. Fully proportional representation provides us with new ways to conceptualize existing electoral systems, a new standard against which alternative systems can be evaluated, and several feasible alternatives for approximating this new ideal.
Theorizing Difference: Voices from the Margins
Authors: Preston Larry M.
Published: May 2006

Theorists of widely different persuasions are making serious efforts to understand difference and to bring the concerns and ideals of others within the reach of intellectual and political visions. Yet this attention to difference continues to be examined almost entirely through precise, rigorous, and sophisticated theoretical language. This is only appropriate if we presume that this language, the language-of-theory, is able to represent—and serve as the master interpreter of—all ideas and ideals, all senses of self and politics. I believe that this presumption is deeply flawed. Theoretical language passes over and distorts the differences it would understand. Theory more attentive to difference needs to gain access to the meanings that circulate within different lives, especially as reflected in literary writing of those who, themselves, speak and write from sites of difference.
The Dynamics of Aggregate Partisanship
Authors: Box-Steffensmeier Janet M. , Smith Renée M.
Published: May 2006

Despite extensive research on party identification, links between partisanship at the individual and aggregate level have largely been ignored. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the dynamics of aggregate partisanship. To remedy this, we identify a set of ideal types that capture the essential arguments made about individual-level party identification. We then combine the behavioral assumptions for each type with existing results on statistical aggregation to deduce the specific temporal pattern that each type implies for aggregate levels of partisanship. Using new diagnostic tests and a highly general time series model, we find that aggregate measures of partisanship from 1953 through 1992 are fractionally integrated. Our evidence that the effects of a shock to aggregate partisanship last for years—not months or decades—challenges previous work by party systems theorists and students of “macropartisanship.” Our arguments and empirical evidence provide a conceptually richer and more precise basis for theories of issue evolution or endogenous preferences—in which partisanship plays a central role.
Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate?
Authors: Ansolabehere Stephen , Iyengar Shanto , Simon Adam , Valentino Nicholas
Published: May 2006

We address the effects of negative campaign advertising on turnout. Using a unique experimental design in which advertising tone is manipulated within the identical audiovisual context, we find that exposure to negative advertisements dropped intentions to vote by 5%. We then replicate this result through an aggregate-level analysis of turnout and campaign tone in the 1992 Senate elections. Finally, we show that the demobilizing effects of negative campaigns are accompanied by a weakened sense of political efficacy. Voters who watch negative advertisements become more cynical about the responsiveness of public officials and the electoral process.
Understanding Political Change in Post-Soviet Societies: A Further Commentary on Finifter and Mickiewicz
Authors: Miller Arthur H. , Reisinger William M. , Hesli Vicki L.
Published: May 2006

Modernization theory suggests that in the post–World War II period increased education promoted public support for democratic principles and an individual opportunities society in the former Soviet Union. Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992), however, based on a 1989 survey in the Soviet Union, found that the less well educated were more supportive of individual locus of control than were the better educated. Examining survey data collected in the former USSR during 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1995, we find consistent reconfirmation of the modernization theory, despite a major decline in support for an opportunities society that occurs between 1992 and 1995. This recent increase in preference for socialism is explained by rising nationalism, growing nostalgia for communists, and disillusionment with certain aspects of the market economy, particularly the perceived growth of social inequality.
The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies
Authors: Huber John D.
Published: May 2006

I present a formal model of the confidence vote procedure, an institutional arrangement that permits a prime minister to attach the fate of a particular policy to a vote on government survival. The analysis indicates that confidence vote procedures make it possible for prime ministers to exercise significant control over the nature of policy outcomes, even when these procedures are not actually invoked. Neither cabinet ministers, through their authority over specific portfolios, nor members of parliament, through the use of no-confidence motions, can counteract the prime minister's policy control on the floor of parliament. The analysis also illuminates the circumstances under which prime ministers should invoke confidence vote procedures, focusing attention on the position-taking incentives of the parties that support the government, rather than on the level of policy conflict between the government and parliament.
A Dynamic Theory of Collective Goods Programs
Authors: Baron David P.
Published: May 2006

A collective goods program, such as an entitlement program, distributes benefits and costs according to constituents' characteristics. This paper presents a dynamic theory of the legislative choice of collective goods programs based on a sequential model of proposal-making and voting in a majority-rule legislature where the status quo in a session is given by the program last enacted. A stationary Markov perfect equilibrium is characterized for a unidimensional collective goods program and yields a generalized median voter theorem, comparative statics on preferences and legislative procedures, and a characterization of the dynamics of such programs. Equilibrium programs can expand or contract over time, but they ultimately converge to the median. On the path to that point, legislators may act strategically to address the durability problem—that a future legislature can undo the actions of the present legislature—by strategically positioning the status quo to limit the changes that future legislatures can make.
Campaign Contributions and Access
Authors: Austen-Smith David
Published: May 2006

An important and pervasive view of campaign contributions is that they are given to promote access to successful candidates under circumstances when such access would not ordinarily be given. In this story, access is valuable as it offers groups the opportunity to influence legislative decisions through the provision of policy-relevant information. Under complete information regarding donors' policy preferences, I argue that this model predicts a negative relationship between contributions and the extent to which the groups' and the recipient legislators' preferences are similar. However, one of the more robust empirical findings in the literature is that this relationship is positive. Relaxing the informational assumption on donors' preferences, I reexamine the access story with a model in which campaign contributions can act as signals of policy preference and the (informational) value of access to any agent is endogenous.
The Enactment of Mothers' Pensions: Civic Mobilization and Agenda Setting or Benefits of the Ballot?
Authors: Sparks Cheryl Logan , Walniuk Peter R. , Skocpol Theda
Published: May 2006

In thisReviewin 1993, Skocpol, Howard, Lehmann, and Abend-Wein analyzed the rapid enactment of mothers'pension laws in the American states in the 1910s. They concluded that the widespread federations of women's voluntary groups exerted a powerful influence on these enactments even before most American women had the right to vote. Sparks and Walniuk challenge these conclusions, noting that all 10 equal-suffrage states are among the 29 that passed mothers' pensions before 1916, and presenting new measures of suffrage endorsement and suffrage pressures in regression analyses suggesting that women's votes—actual and potential—played a major role in leading some states to adopt mothers' pensions earlier than their normal patterns of legislative change would predict. In response, Skocpol defends the 1993 conclusions. She adduces that the aggregate pattern of enactment of mothers'pensions corresponds much more closely to endorsements by women's groups than to suffrage timing and puts forth reasons to doubt the validity and significance of Sparks and Walniuk's tests.
Civic Virtue and Self-Interest
Authors: Duncan Christopher M. , Burtt Shelley
Published: May 2006

In this Review in 1993 Shelley Burtt critiqued contemporary republican theorists who urge a reinvigorated citizenry steeped in the ideal of civic virtue. Christopher Duncan finds the essence of Burtt's argument to be that such a revival is not feasible given the level of self-sacrifice required from citizens. He suggests, however, that contemporary republican theorists, like their ancient predecessor Aristotle, are not calling for altruism or the forsaking of self-interest. Rather, virtuous political participation rightly understood is, in fact, among the highest forms of self-interested behavior. Burtt replies that her earlier remarks discussed a part of the republican revival that had little to do with an Aristotelian politics of virtue, which indeed offers an attractive account of political life as a crucial element in individual self-fulfillment. But she notes also that liberalism rightly reminds us of the dangers of public mobilization and concentrated power; moreover, the political and practical obstacles to private reeducation of the citizenry remain.