bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Savings-and-Loan Bailout: The Mismatch Between the Headlines and the Issues
Authors: Kettl Donald F. 
Published: May 2006

In the twentieth century, the savings-and-loan crisis rivals only the bank failures of the Great Depression and the hyperinflation of the 1970s in threatening Americans' confidence in their financial institutions. The costs promise to be truly astronomical. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates that at least $325 billion, probably much more, and at worst perhaps $500 billion, will be needed over the next thirty years to fund the bailout (Bowsher, 1990a, p. 15). Five United States Senators, the so-called “Keating five,” stand sullied in the fallout.With such high costs and malfeasance, a host of villains but no fingerprints left at the scene of the crime, the bailout's problems are legion. The amount of money involved demands tight control, but the huge potential for political blame discourages any elected official from wanting to come close to the issue. Seats on the congressional banking committees, once prized plums because they often attracted PAC money, are now difficult to fill.
The Regency of the Proletariat in Crisis: A Job for Perestroika
Authors: Ollman Bertell 
Published: May 2006

The discussion of Perestroika has suffered on the whole from inadequate attention paid to the nature of Soviet society. Yet, it is only upon knowing the kind of society we have before us that we can grasp the specificity of its problems and the possibilities within the system for resolving them. Hence any serious inquiry into Perestroika and Glasnost must begin by determining the best way to characterize the Soviet Union.There has probably never been a society anywhere that has been burdened with so many different names: “socialism,” “communism,” “actually existing socialism,” “state socialism,” “bureaucratically deformed socialism,” “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “workers' state,” “people's democracy,” “state capitalism,” “totalitarianism,” “red fascism,” and there are others. The problem of finding the right label, of course, is a reflection of the difficulty people have had in deciding which one or few of its attributes have been decisive in giving the Soviet Union its distinctive character, including too its real history and potential for future change.
The Study of Politics: What Does Replicability Have to Do with It?
Authors: Feldblum Miriam 
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this rejoinder is twofold. The first is to question the call to extend a “replication standard” for qualitative research in political science. (See Golden, 1995a). The second is to question how useful the focus on “replicability” is for research in political science in general (see King, 1995a, and the debate on “Verification/Replication” in PS, 1995 28(3): 443–99).What underlies a replication standard for qualitative research? I believe that the call for a replication standard for qualitative research is applicable to only certain kinds of research, and that, even within its own limitations, is probably misguided. For the most part, when proponents of a replication standard have anticipated dissension over the requirement of replication for qualitative research, they have pointed to logistical, pragmatic, and privacy burdens that such a requirement may impose on researchers.In contrast, my main contention concerns the very conceptualization of research as replicable. I argue that the assumptions underlying a replication standard are strongly and narrowly positivist. The replication standard itself is reductionist, and its use would marginalize a portion of the qualitative research now being conducted in political science.
Introduction
Authors: Cantori Louis J. 
Published: May 2006

The study of Middle Eastern politics shares the problems of area studies in general in political science. Area specialists emphasizing the language and culture of other peoples have been pressured by behavioralists to “objectify” their studies and place all peoples in the context of universals of human political behavior. The result is that the specialized knowledge of non-European peoples and regions especially have had an uneasy relationship with the political science discipline. Post-behavioral political science for a time in the 1970s recognized that the purported scientific universals of the discipline were really the ethnocentric ones of the value assumptions of European and American political science. In the 1980s and continuing to the present, these earlier “scientific” or explanatory universals of political science now arguably have been replaced by the no less ethnocentric ones of democratization and “marketization.” These concepts are examined in the following essays.Middle Eastern political science has shared the preceding problems but has added to them two additional factors. The first is that the languages and culture of the Middle East are difficult and complex. As a result, the development of a social science consciousness in political research has occurred most importantly only since the 1970s. The second is that the study of Middle Eastern politics is embedded in the historical attitude of American and European culture toward Islam and Arabism. Historically, Islam expanded at the expense of Christian Europe in the eighth century. This adversarial relation continued when European Christians mounted forays into the Moslem Near East in the Crusades of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; with the fall of Christian Constantinople to Moslem siege in the fifteenth century; and to the near defeat of Christian Vienna by Moslem attack in the seventeenth century.
The Old Orthodoxy and the New Orthodoxy in the Study of Middle Eastern Politics
Authors: Cantori Louis J. 
Published: May 2006

It is said that the old political science attempted to be explanatory and the new political science is interpretive. A key question then is what is the meaning of political interpretation. Does it mean that political analysis is simply subjective and that intellectual anarchy reigns? The old political science had its apparent orthodoxy of the canons of the scientific method. The new orthodoxy refers to these and resembles the old in its underlying liberal, pluralist value assumptions.The old orthodoxy in comparative politics focuses on develop-mentalism; the new orthodoxy emphasizes democratization, market-oriented economics, rational choice theory, and political economy. Developmentalism stressed the importance of the welfare of the individual as well as at the same time the need for secularization and political participation. Developmentalism was also teleological. The goal was to achieve secularization and participation, in the process replicating the advanced industrial states from which the ideas originated. The values implicit in developmentalism were obscured by the old orthodoxy's patina of behavioralism and “scientific objectivity.”The new orthodoxy has abandoned behavioralism and “scientific objectivity,” but in neither a systematic nor a philosophical way. Instead, the validity of the criticisms seems to be tacitly conceded even while the spokespersons of the new orthodoxy operate within a “new” scholarly and foreign policy culture that shows evidence of having characteristics similar to those of the old.
What Political Scientists Can Learn from the 1993 Electoral Reform in New Zealand
Authors: Nagel Jack H. 
Published: May 2006

In November 1993, 100 years after becoming the first nation to enfranchise women, New Zealand again made electoral reform history as its citizens voted by a 54–46 margin to replace their venerable, U.S.-style first-past-the-post (FPP) method of electing legislators with a new mixed-member proportional (MMP) system. Political scientists in the United States and elsewhere may find New Zealand's decision instructive in six ways:• as a harbinger of a wider movement toward electoral reform in established democracies and of a global trend toward mixed-member legislatures;• as a demonstration of how constitutional reform can overcome entrenched interests;• as a symptom of political backlash against the imposition of orthodox economic policies of the sort advocated by the IMF and other international agencies;• as a partial repudiation of the Westminster model that U.S. reformers have often taken as their ideal;• as the source of a new method of ensuring fair and effective representation for a minority ethnic group; and• as an example of how political scientists can play influential roles as institutional designers and public educators.
The Effectiveness of the Political Consultant as a Campaign Resource
Authors: Medvic Stephen K. 
Published: May 2006

Professional political consultants have acquired a mythic ability to single-handedly deliver victory for their client-candidates. Yet, among political scientists, factors other than consultant use appear to explain the difference between electoral success and failure. To this point, however, little quantitative work has been done to measure the impact political consultants have on American elections. In this article I will examine the relative influence political consultants and financial support from the political parties can have upon U.S. House elections.Definitions and DataFor my purposes, a political consultant is anyone who worked in two or more congressional and/or statewide campaigns during the most recent campaign cycle, was among the highest grossing consultants in his/her field, or was a member of the American Association of Political Consultants. This operationalization is based on Larry Sabato's definition of a political consultant as “a campaign professional who is engaged primarily in the provision of advice and services (such as polling, media creation and production, and directmail fundraising) to candidates, their campaigns, and other political committees.” Noting that not every campaign staffer who is paid for his/her work qualifies as a consultant, Sabato narrowed the category of professional political consultants to “the relatively small and elite corps of interstate political consultants who usually work on many campaigns simultaneously and have served hundreds of campaigns in their careers” (1981, 8). The operational definition employed here focuses attention on only those campaign operatives who are “political consultants” in the most meaningful sense of the phrase.
There He Goes Again: The Alternating Political Style of Bill Clinton
Authors: Greenstein Fred I 
Published: May 2006

Some political leadership styles are of a piece. Jimmy Carter's is a case in point. Both in the comments he privately jotted on the margins of memos from his aides and in his public discourse, Carter exhibited a common concern for detail and insistence on the correctness of his own positions. Other styles are layered, as in that of Dwight Eisenhower, whose apoliltical public demeanor concealed an analytically detached political sophisticate who obtained results by indirection (Greenstein 1982).The political style of President Bill Clinton is neither unitary nor layered. It alternates. The tempest over whether Clinton was involved in a dalliance with a White House intern is a reminder of his tendency to oscillate between an uninhibited, anything-goes approach to leadership and a more measured operating mode in which he sets attainable goals and proceeds skillfully in his efforts to realize them.The pattern is recurrent. After his election as governor of Arkansas in 1978, Clinton instituted a substantial increase in automobile licensing fees, peopled his administration with bearded political activists, and otherwise failed to conform to the political mores of his state. As a result, he was voted out of office two years later. He then spent the next two years stumping the state and promising to remedy his ways. He was returned to office, serving from 1983 to 1993 and establishing a reputation as a pragmatic and effective state executive (Maraniss 1995).
Monica Lewinsky's Contribution to Political Science
Authors: Zaller John R. 
Published: May 2006

The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, public opinion is initially responsive to media reports of scandal, the public's concern with actual political achievement reasserts itself. This lesson, which was not nearly so clear before the Lewinsky matter as it is now, not only deepens our understanding of American politics. It also tends, as I argue in the second half of this article, to undermine the importance of one large branch of public opinion research, buttress the importance of another, and point toward some new research questions.Whatever else may have transpired by the time this article gets into print, the Lewinsky poll bounce is something worth pondering. In a half-dozen commercial polls taken in the period just before the story broke, Clinton's job approval rating averaged about 60%. Ten days later, following intensive coverage of the story and Clinton's State of the Union address, presidential support was about 10 percentage points higher.
National Health Reform: An Idea Whose Political Time Has Come?
Authors: Brown Lawrence D. 
Published: May 2006

Health care, like many other arenas of social policy, offers plentiful evidence both to those who picture the policy process as highly dynamic and innovative and to those who prefer to portray it as beset by deadlock and stalemate. Over the last two decades federal policymakers have invented an array of programs designed to make the system more efficient—health maintenance organizations, peer review organizations, health systems agencies, certificate-of-need, a prospective payment system, resource-based relative-value-scale fee schedules, to name the most prominent—but they have been unwilling to extend health coverage to the 17% or so of the nonaged population that lacks it or to change the nation's mixed public-private health insurance system in basic ways.This pattern is less paradoxical than it may seem at first glance. A diffuse concern about the rising costs of care could well support a string of (largely ineffective) programs that apply gentle brakes without disturbing the system deeply, but benefit-expanding measures and still more federally sponsored programs to achieve a better balance between benefits and costs have met solid political obstacles. The public, fairly content with the system but poorly informed about its workings, wants immediate access to good care at “affordable” rates and rarely cares to hear about tradeoffs among these goals.
Questioning the Conventional Wisdom on Public Opinion Toward Health Reform
Authors: Jacobs Lawrence R. , Shapiro Robert Y. 
Published: May 2006

Ample evidence confirms that public opinion influences the policy-making process. Research suggests that public preferences are not simply translated into government policy; rather, policymakers' response to public opinion is conditioned or mediated by political and institutional processes (Jacobs, 1993a, 1993b, 1992a, 1992b; Jacobs and Shapiro, 1994a, 1994b; for discussion of this research see PS, March 1994, 9–38).The passage and designing of health reform will depend in important respects on public attitudes toward health care and health reform. The interpretation of public opinion by the media and other political observers, however, is not a neutral process dictated by scientific methods; it is the product of institutional and political struggles for position and power.Conventional wisdom regarding the public's health reform attitudes holds that Americans are narrowly self-interested, unambiguously antitax, and unwavering opponents of government regulation. Are these three sets of assumed attitudes supported by the available empirical evidence?Here we take an historical approach to studying public opinion—one that identifies the patterns and trends of Americans' responses to identically worded questions asked in national opinion surveys.
Neglected Institutions: Politics, Administration, and Health Reform
Authors: Morone James A. 
Published: May 2006

Americans have been debating national health insurance throughout the twentieth century. The content of this elusive reform has evolved far more than the tone of the debate. When Theodore Roosevelt championed health care reform (during the 1912 presidential campaign) he wanted to build a hardy stock of Anglo Saxons—health insurance would help deliver white America from race suicide (Dyer 1980; Ross 1913, 299–304). More than thirty years later, President Truman made health insurance the major domestic issue of his presidential campaign; his goal was an extension of the New Deal social welfare state (Starr 1982). Today, the reform that was once condemned as too costly is widely prescribed as cost control.While the reform itself has changed, the debate that surrounds it remains entirely predictable. Theda Skocpol describes the contestants: On one side, self-confident, neo-Progressive experts touting rationalizing schemes. On the other, conservative critics deploying “ideological, emotionally charged arguments” (Skocpol 1994). The shrill rhetoric of opposition has alternately bemused and baffled observers. Compulsory insurance was “a dangerous device … announced by the German emperor” (in 1918), a force representing “social theory … socialism, even communism” (in 1932), “the keystone to the arch of socialism” and “a threat to every area of freedom as we have known it (by the 1960s).
The Usefulness of Senate Confirmation Hearings for Judicial Nominees: The Case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Authors: Comiskey Michael 
Published: May 2006

In the September 1993 pages of this journal, I asked whether senators can illuminate the political and legal beliefs of Supreme Court nominees by questioning them at confirmation hearings (Comiskey 1993). Many observers of the confirmation process believe that a nominee's testimony can produce insights into the nominee's views that go beyond what is available from the nominee's public record. While such testimony has often proved barren in the past, these observers often express the view that better questioning of nominees can bring forth greater insights in the future (Carter 1988; Melone 1991; Rees 1983; Ross 1987). By contrast, I concluded that the political context in which Supreme Court nominations occur, the motives of participants in the confirmation process, and the incentives facing these participants will likely continue to inhibit illuminating testimony by nominees.Since my previous paper was written before last summer's hearings on the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this article examines those hearings. In some respects, her testimony resembled that of most recent nominees. In at least one respect—her candor on abortion—her testimony was a major departure from that of all recent nominees with the partial exception of Robert Bork.
Gerrymandering: Out of the Political Thicket and Into the Quagmire
Authors: Rush Mark E. 
Published: May 2006

The term gerrymandering always evokes spirited partisan debate and political controversy. Yet, when we begin to scratch at the surface, we see that there is more to gerrymandering than debates about cartographical aesthetics. The issue goes directly to the heart of theories of democracy and representation and is replete with controversy, irony, and inconsistency.My key point is that resolving the gerrymandering issue is distinct from, and therefore may not result in, improving representation. This point is due to the fact that neither jurists nor scholars have been able to set forth a clear and consistent definition of representation.Terminology:The term gerrymander must be distinguished from redistricting. The latter is the process by which congressional and legislative district lines are redrawn in order to balance their populations in the wake of the decennial census. The former uses redistricting for partisan ends by dividing concentrations of voters to prevent their coalescing into a majority in a district, or by concentrating so many group members into a district that their electoral strength is diluted because the extra votes could have been used to help elect a sympathetic candidate elsewhere. It is this notion—the dilution of voting power as a result of partisan cartography—that has made the term gerrymander so controversial.
Democratic Transition? The 1997 Mexican Elections
Authors: Klesner Joseph L. 
Published: May 2006

Mexico's 1997 midterm elections promise to democratize Mexico's autocratic and centralized presidentialist regime and thereby change Mexican politics profoundly. The electoral blow dealt the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) by voters on July 6 brings an elected mayor to the world's largest city, places more non-PRI governors into Mexican state houses assuring that demands for decentralization will intensify, and takes from President Ernesto Zedillo the congressional basis for the six-year dictatorship that the Mexican presidency has been since the 1930s. Surely the struggle for democracy in Mexico is not over, but a critical battle has been won by democrats of all ideological persuasions. Zedillo himself claimed, in an address to the nation made shortly after the preliminary electoral figures appeared on election night, to be pleased by the progress made by his nation, saying that the day had been a “great democratic fiesta” (Zedillo 1997, 7).Unlike most elections, the critical issues facing Mexican voters in 1997 had little to do with public policy. Although Mexico is a dozen years into a neoliberal economic restructuring program that has had great consequences for the distribution of income, for the number of Mexicans living in poverty, and for the penetration of foreign capital, goods, and services into the Mexican economy (see Otero 1996), neoliberalism was only peripherally an issue in this election. Both major parties of opposition campaigned on the issue of tax relief, specifically promising to lower Mexico's value added tax from 15% to 10% (Mayolo and Luna 1997, A1; Chacón Albarrán 1997).
“Nation” and “Nationalism”: The Misuse of Key Concepts in Political Science
Authors: Barrington Lowell W. 
Published: May 2006

One of the essential atarting points of any branch of science is a consistent, broadly understood terminology. Generally accepted definitions of key terms within a discipline are important in order to judge claims by scholars about a given topic. Fortunately, among those who work on the topic of nationalism, there is a growing convergence of definitions of “nation” and “nationalism.” Unfortunately, both terms are often still misused, used loosely, or used inconsistently, especially among those in political science who discuss these terms in passing. Authors of introductory textbooks, who are careful in their usage of other terms, often use these two words in varying—and even contradictory—ways in different parts of the same book. Because of their importance for the discipline, however, political scientists should be very mindful of their use of the terms “nation” and “nationalism.”In this article, definitions for “nation” and “nationalism” are proposed, with each definition followed by sections on common ways the terms are misemployed in political science. I provide examples of both misuses and “loose uses.” While the line between misuse and loose use is somewhat fuzzy (a point reinforced below in the discussion of nations vs. ethnic groups), I consider a misuse to be one in which the term is used in a way that is completely outside how the term is used by nationalism scholars. A loose use is one in which the author has captured only part of the concept or has stretched the meaning of the term to an extreme degree.