bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Toward Better Theories of the Policy Process
Authors: Sabatier Paul A. 
Published: May 2006

Any theory of the manner in which governmental policies get formulated and implemented, as well as the effects of those actions on the world, requires an understanding of the behavior of major types of governmental institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, chief executives), as well as the behavior of interest groups, the general public, and the media. The dominant paradigm of the policy process, the stages heuristic popularized by Jones (1970), Anderson (1975), and Peters (1986), has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced, in large part because it is not a causal theory. In the course of their empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena that need to be incorporated into theories of the policy process. The development of such theories requires an integration ‘of both political scientists’ knowledge of specific institutions and behavior and policy scholars' attention to policy communities, substantive policy information, etc.Innovations by Policy Scholars in Understanding the Policy ProcessAt least since World War II, most political scientists have tended to focus on either a specific type of institution (legislatures, the presidency, courts, interest groups, administrative agencies, local governments, political parties) or on specific types of political behavior outside those institutions (public opinion, voting, political socialization). These have become the standard subfields within the discipline.In contrast, scholars interested in public policy have not been able to stay within these subfields because the policy process spans all of them. In the course of empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena often neglected by political scientists without a policy focus:a) The importance of policy communities/networks/subsystems involving actors from numerous public and private institutions and from multiple levels of government;b) The importance of substantive policy information;c) The critical role of policy elites vis-a-vis the general public;d) The desirability of longitudinal studies of a decade or more;e) Differences in political behavior across policy types.
Political Science and the Savings and Loan Crisis
Authors: Moe Ronald C. 
Published: May 2006

The juxtaposition of “political science” with the “savings and loan crisis” is interesting in part because it appears a peculiar pairing. What does, or should, political science as an academic discipline have to do with the current crisis in the savings and loan industry? A case can be made, and indeed is arguably the present dominant view within the discipline, that political scientists ought not to seek to be involved in any systematic way with public sector management problems or with governance generally. Following this reasoning, political science ought not to be interested in the savings and loan crisis other than, possibly, to study it after the fact as a political phenomenon.There are other political scientists, however, who are uneasy with this passive view of the discipline. They have seen the emergence of a massive institutional crisis in the financial system of the nation and no one has thought to seek their advice and counsel towards a solution to the crisis except for them to participate as taxpayers in picking up the bill. But of even greater concern to many of the thoughtful in these ranks is the realization that if someone were to call upon the discipline for advice and assistance, the discipline might have little to contribute. Few of the leaders in our discipline have expertise in the management of complex fields. Indeed, it is unusual today to find political scientists with any experience at all in governmental institutions or affairs. The estrangement between political science and the governance process of the Republic appears nearly complete.
Building a Strong Legislature: The Western Experience
Authors: Axelrod Robert 
Published: May 2006

The Western democracies have gradually developed their legislative institutions over many centuries. Today the Soviet Union is building its own powerful legislature. Perhaps a look at the Western experience will be of interest to Soviet citizens who are currently thinking about how to make their own legislature an effective part of the democratic process.Of course the Soviet Union is quite different from the Western democracies in many ways, including not only its political system, but also its economic system, its multinational character, and its social and cultural history, and the Western experience cannot be applied mechanically to such a different setting. But precisely because the Soviet Union is undertaking such bold experiments in restructuring, concrete experiences of others might be useful in suggesting ideas about legislative procedures, competitive elections, constituency relationships, and social norms.Legislatures were originally developed in Britain, and later in France, because the kings constantly found themselves short of money. After trying many methods of raising money by command, they eventually realized that they would have to attain the support of broader and broader segments of the society.
Otto I.Q. Besser-Wisser: An Appreciation of the Pioneer of Post-Distanciationalist Politometrics
Authors: Manteltasche Dagobert D. 
Published: May 2006

The death occurred on July 12, 1999, at a tragically young age, of Otto I.Q. Besser-Wisser, probably the most influential political thinker and analyst of our times.He was born in 1906 on the island of Helgoland, where the bustling streets and crowded, busy marketplaces formed his early experience of life in a large and cosmopolitan urban metropolis. He was later to convert these young impressions into the central principles of physical and social distanciationalist politometrics, which have dominated Western political science ever since. In spite of its subsequent theoretical variations, refinements, and developments—in the form of neo-distanciationalism, post-distanciationalism, post-neodistanciationalism, and neo-postdistanciationalism—the essential core of Besser-Wisser's formulation is so simple, and yet so heuristically and ontologically valuable in the theoreticization of the politico-urban-time continuum, that it is puzzling that it took mankind two millennia to develop. The answer is, of course, that just as it took pure genius to uncover the principles of things such as gravity, the unconscious mind, the jet engine, and Guinness, so only someone of Besser-Wisser's uncommon genius and almost supernatural analytical perspicacity could go straight to the very heart of one of the simple yet eternal truths of the human condition.
Civil Society: Effective Tool of Analysis for Middle East Politics?
Authors: Bellin Eva 
Published: May 2006

Does the Middle East's presumed “exceptionalism” imply the disutility of “civil society” as a tool for political analysis? Although the term has gained wide usage in other areas of the world, the Middle East specialists have shown some reluctance to employ it in their own region. This reluctance stems in part from the perception that the term is ambiguous and politically loaded. Historically, “civil society” has signified everything from the peaceable society human beings enjoy under the protection of a Leviathan state (Hobbes), to the stratum of private associations that schools citizens in civic virtue (Tocqueville, Montesquieu), to the constellation of cultural institutions that guarantee the ideological hegemony of the ruling class (Gramsci). In contemporary political debate, the term has become a normative football, representing a bulwark of freedom and anti-totalitarianism to the survivors of communism's fall in Eastern Europe while signifying the spearhead of Western imperialism to those suspicious of efforts to “export democracy” to the developing world.But reluctance to use the term in the analysis of Middle Eastern politics goes beyond the problematic nature of the term itself and derives from a vision of the Middle East as somehow inhospitable to “civil society.” The Middle East is seen as riven by primordial cleavage, dominated by rent-swollen, power-mon-gering states, unpracticed in reverence for individual freedom and civil liberties. Sociology, economics, politics, and culture conspire to sabotage the development of civil society in the region and so, the reasoning goes, the term is best renounced to check premature expectations of its realization.
Whose Liberalism? Which Islam? Leonard Binder's “Islamic Liberalism”
Authors: Parens Joshua 
Published: May 2006

For many students of contemporary Arab politics, the most pressing question is whether Islam will become democratic. One need only point to the case of Algeria to find ready evidence that Islamic movements have already become highly democratic, although frustrated in their electoral objective. Leonard Binder (1989), however, asks a far more pressing question: Will Islam become liberal?As Tocqueville shows, democracy or the love of equality comes easily to citizens of modernity. The love of liberty, however, is a far more difficult love to cultivate. Yet, without this love of liberty, modern democracy comes to embody arguably the most oppressive tyranny in the history of the human race, the tyranny of the majority. In the aristocratic past, such an extraordinarily powerful and omnipresent tyranny was not possible. Thus, it becomes apparent just how pressing is Binder's question about the prospects for Islamic liberalism.Although Binder's answer to this question could hardly be characterized as overly optimistic, Binder does harbor some hope for Islamic liberalism. He proposes a synthesis of Fazlur Rahman's Gadamerian version of Islam and the pragmatic liberalism of Richard Rorty. Although it is not difficult to show an affinity between Gadamer and Rorty, it is difficult to show that Islam is tending in the direction of acquiring Rahman's understanding of it. It is even more difficult to show that pragmatism is truly liberal. Although Binder points the way to an “Islamic pragmatism,” I hope to show that he fails to point the way to an “Islamic liberalism.” Binder's pragmatism cannot avoid the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns us can be fought only with the love of liberty.
Comparative Middle East Politics: Still in Search of Theory
Authors: Bill James A. 
Published: May 2006

In a 1985 American political science roundtable analyzing the state of the field of comparative politics, the participants concluded that Middle East studies lagged behind most other area studies in the generation of theory (PS 1985). They determined that scholars of Latin America, Asia, and Africa had traversed a greater distance along the road to theory than had analysts of the Middle East. Today, almost a decade later, despite some promising developments, the situation remains basically unchanged.From the Rigor of Metatheory to Theoretical Rigor MortisIn the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of comparative politics emphasized issues of philosophy of science and the logic of theory construction. They spent an inordinate amount of time debating metatheory, i.e., they theorized about theory. Although this exercise yielded important intellectual advances, it ultimately degenerated into a sterile exercise in logic for its own sake, and its formulations remained divorced from the empirical world. Partially in reaction to this preoccupation with metatheory, many comparativists in the 1980s abandoned theoretical concerns and focused instead upon empirical investigation and data collection. The result has been the generation of uneven, disconnected, and unrelated stagnant data deposits.
The Study of Campaign Consultants: A Subfield in Search of Theory
Authors: Thurber James A. 
Published: May 2006

The central theme of thisPSsymposium is that political consultants are important in politics, that they have an impact on campaigns and elections. This is not news to political consultants or candidates running for office. Candidates and consultants know they need each other and the rapid growth and diversification of the profession reveals that sense of interdependence (see Thurber 1995). Though professional political consulting outside of political party organizations has been around since the 1930s, it has only recently sparked interest among political scientists. Why have consultants been ignored by political scientists? Why have consultants ignored political scientists (see Thurber and Nelson 1995)? Why is there little or no theory related to political consultants? Why do we know so little about the profession of political consultants? What subfield houses the study of political consulting: elections and voting behavior, political parties, political communications, political advertising, campaign management?Political scientists have studied campaigns, elections, and political parties from a variety of views and methodologies, but few have focused on political consultants and their influence. Political campaigns are efforts to win elections to public office by informing the voters of a candidate's issue positions, by persuading the electorate to vote for a candidate, by activating partisans, and by mobilizing supporters. Election campaigns are combats over ideas and ways to persuade groups of voters to support those ideas. Studies have treated campaigns as symbolic events, as propaganda activities with the power to change voter preferences, and as a determinant variable in elections, but there is little consensus among political scientists about the role consultants play in campaigns.
The Politics of Universal Health Insurance: Lessons from Past Administrations?
Authors: Marmor Theodore 
Published: May 2006

There is a remarkable consensus that American medical care—particularly its financing and insurance coverage—needs a major overhaul. The critical unanimity on this point—what Paul Starr has rightly termed a “negative consensus”—bridges almost all the usual cleavages in American politics—between old and young, Democrats and Republicans, management and labor, the well paid and the low paid. We spend more on and feel worse about medical care than our economic competitors, with nine out of ten Americans (including Fortune 500 executives) telling pollsters that our health system requires substantial change. That is the good news for medical reformers in the Clinton administration, the Congress, and the polity at large.The bad news for these reformers is that, for a variety of ideological and institutional reasons, American politics makes it very difficult to coalesce around a solution that reasonably satisfies the requirements for a stable and workable system of financing and delivering modern medical care. We have no assurance that the rare agreement on the seriousness of the nation's medical ills will generate the legislative support required for a substantively adequate and administratively workable program of reform.
Federalism and Health Care
Authors: Gray Virginia 
Published: May 2006

Among the many issues in the national health care debate is the role of the states. Some have asked whether the states can tackle health care on their own and have answered with a resounding “no.” Deborah Stone (1992), for example, argues that health care is too big a challenge for the states to handle: they lack sufficient autonomy from the federal government in certain areas and sufficient power over private interests in others.But apparently, states are undeterred by such thinking. In the early 1990s, three states—Minnesota, Washington, and Florida—passed comprehensive bills incorporating elements of managed competition. Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont had already enacted (but not implemented) major reforms based upon different philosophies. And Hawaii led the way in 1974 with its enactment of an employer mandate.Today, reform activity is everywhere. In 1993, 1,850 health care reform proposals were introduced in state legislatures; this year virtually every governor is working on some health care initiative. Even Lowell Weicker, Jr., governor of Connecticut, home to the nation's largest insurance companies, has announced his intention to provide universal coverage by 1997. The states are definitely not waiting around to see what the feds will do.
Pork Barrel Spending—On the Wane?
Authors: Andres Gary J. 
Published: May 2006

Is pork barrel spending on the wane? Many think it is, including reformers inside and outside of Congress. Citing the recent decline of earmarks in House appropriations bills for projects in members' districts, reformers suggest that a new era of congressional spending practices is dawning.This article argues instead that the rise in number of earmarks in the last decade as well as the recent decline depends on whether Congress and the executive branch are controlled by the same or different parties. It further predicts that the Republican takeover of the House and Senate after the 1994 congressional elections could lead to a resurgence of earmarking, in a different form, as long as the Democrats control the White House.Among scholars, pork barrel spending analysis represents a venerable specialty in the profession, generating some of the most engaging debates and finest research in recent years. This literature analyzes how members of Congress create institutions and use legislative rules to enhance their electoral goals. While not mutually exclusive, the two dominant approaches in recent years are the “distributive” and “informational” models of congressional policy making. (For a good review of the last two decades of scholarly research on the subject, see Krehbiel 1991).Reformers in the 103rd Congress were emboldened by the success of groups such as the “pork busters,” an informal group led by Representative Harris Fawell (R-IL), who routinely offered amendments to cut pork and unnecessary directed spending in appropriations bills.
Alternative Voting Systems for Representative Democracy
Authors: Zimmerman Joseph F. 
Published: May 2006

The ideal electoral system in a representative democracy is one allowing all eligible citizens to cast an equally weighted vote, and for united groups of voters, except very small ones, to elect one or more of their candidates to a governing body. Approximate proportional representation on governing bodies would be a happenstance and not deliberate. Majority/plurality electoral systems, however, favor the dominant group and often leave women and minority groups with no direct representation.Designers of electoral systems historically have employed various devices to reduce the influence of opposition political parties or groups and to make it difficult for them to elect their candidates to a governing body. Growing concern that numerous black citizens were prevented from voting in southern states resulted in the U.S. Congress using the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (79 Stat. 437, 42 U.S.C. § 1973), a statute applying to a state or local government meeting two criteria. The Congress in 1975 employed the Fourteenth Amendment to extend the Act's (89 Stat. 438, 42 U.S.C. § 1973) protection to language minorities defined as “persons who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives, or of Spanish heritage.”The Act has eliminated invidious discrimination against protected groups, yet many law-making bodies are still unrepresentative of their respective constituencies.
Women's Underrepresentation and Electoral Systems
Authors: Rule Wilma 
Published: May 2006

Women's parliamentary representation in the 27 long-established but “unfinished democracies” (Haavio-Mannila et al. 1985) of the world varies between 2.3% in Japan's lower house to 39.0% in unicameral Finland. Women state legislators in the United States range from 4% in Kentucky to 39% in Washington in the lower house. Women are 11% of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The causes of this variation are primarily the electoral arrangements by which legislators are chosen and, secondarily, the political, economic, and social context.Favorable societal conditions will not substitute for unfavorable electoral systems for women to reach their optimal representation in parliament and local legislatures. But unfavorable contextual conditions—including cultural biases and discriminatory practices—can be overcome to a great extent by alternate electoral systems. Electoral arrangements are not neutral; they are the means used to exclude or include groups. The arrangements are amenable to change faster than social biases and other barriers to women's election opportunity and fair representation.Democracy falls short when women of whatever color or ethnic group cannot cast an effective vote to elect representatives of their choice or to enact laws they believe are critically needed. When there are higher proportions of women in parliament, for example, more laws are enacted that benefit children (Lijphart 1991).
The House GOP's Civil War: A Political Science Perspective
Authors: Connelly William F. , Pitney John J. 
Published: May 2006

In 1997, just two years after their impressive show of unity on the Contract With America, the House Republicans were apparently turning into the House of Atreus. Squabbles high and low divided their leadership, demoralized their rank and file, and delighted their Democratic opponents. Many political commentators blamed this turmoil on the personal shortcomings of Speaker Gingrich and other top lawmakers. Such explanations did make some sense. At least part of the trouble stemmed from the Speaker's ethics problems and the leadership's poor political judgments about disaster-relief legislation.But the House GOP's summer of discontent was neither a purely personal affair nor a total departure from the party's history: House Republicans suffered from serious factionalism during their long journey in the political wilderness (Connelly and Pitney 1994, ch. 2). While lacking in liberals and ethnic minorities, they still found many things to fight about, such as political strategy, institutional loyalty, and generational outlook. As Rohde (1991, 152–53) demonstrated in detail, House Republicans consistently had lower party-unity scores than Democrats throughout the Reagan years.After they won their majority, swift House Republican action on the Contract left the widespread impression that they had turned into a lean, mean, quasi-military machine. That impression was misleading. According to an excellent analysis by James G. Gimpel (1996, 18), the Contract was a consensus document: party leaders included only items that already commanded broad agreement within the party (e.g., a balanced-budget amendment) and they excluded items that would stir dissent (e.g., anti-abortion legislation).
Cooperation Through Threats: The Northern Ireland Case
Authors: Brams Steven J. , Togman Jeffrey M. 
Published: May 2006

On February 9, 1996, after a seventeen-month cease-fire, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) set off a bomb in East London. Less than a week later, the London police found and destroyed a bomb that the IRA had left in a telephone booth in the West End. A few days later, another IRA bomb went off on a doubledecker bus. The British government, under the leadership of John Major, asserted that it would have no official contact with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, until the paramilitary activities stopped. The government also deployed 500 additional troops in Northern Ireland. In October 1996, the IRA detonated two bombs at the British Army's headquarters in Lisburn, bringing the violent conflict back to Northern Ireland for the first time since the cease-fire.On May 1, 1997, Tony Blair was elected Great Britain's prime minister. His election brought a renewed sense of optimism and good will to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Responding to Blair's overtures, including his warning that “the settlement train is leaving, with or without them” (Hoge 1997a, A7), the IRA announced on July 19, 1997, that they had “ordered the unequivocal restoration of the cease-fire” (Clarity 1997c, 1). Soon thereafter, Sinn Féin was invited to participate in the peace talks, which reconvened on September 15, 1997.