bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Political Consultants and Democratic Governance
Authors: Petracca Mark P. 
Published: May 2006

The United States faces a monumental challenge to the practice of democratic governance. This challenge stems, in part, from significant changes in the conceptualization and practice of political campaigning and from the revolutionary effects of the technology deployed in contemporary campaigns (see Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988). Two of the main forces behind this transformation are the rise of professional political consultants and the technology that they deploy in pursuit of electoral success (see Sabato, 1981 and Luntz, 1988). Even before the new president has a chance to settle into the office attention is being focused on the 1990 congressional mid-term elections and on the presidential election in 1992. Indeed, the “permanent campaign” now characterizes the essence of American electoral politics in the final quarter of the 20th century (Blumenthal, 1982).Despite the meteoric rise to prominence ot political consultants in American political campaigns, political scientists have devoted surprisingly little attention to their analysis. This oversight is difficult to comprehend given the extraordinary penetration of consultants into the primary fabric of the American electoral system, the vast sums of money spent on consultant services by candidates, and the assumptions that we have about the considerable influence they wield. This analytic silence may be attributable to a number of factors. First, compared to voters, PACs, or interest groups, consultants are far more difficult to study. There are no readily available data sources to either identify consultants or document their activities.
Political Influence, the News Media and Campaign Consultants
Authors: Sabato Larry 
Published: May 2006

Editor's Note: The following comments are excerpted from Sabato's remarks at the Roundtable on Political Consultancy and, Governance during the 1988 APSA Annual Meeting.The 1988 election points out a number of important facts about and principles of consultancy. In early September, for example, we learned that Michael Dukakis couldn't live without John Sasso. Dukakis brought Sasso back into the campaign, and it was heralded as Dukakis' resurrection. In doing this, Sasso became as important to Dukakis as Jim Baker was to George Bush. This raises certain questions. One wonders, for instance, whether the press reaction would have been quite the same had this been Bush bringing back a disgraced political consultant. It was interesting to see the press spin on it, which I was that Sasso's rehiring was a very good thing, overdue, and necessary. Given what Sasso did and how he did it in the Biden incident, I think you could have put another spin I on that story.On the other hand, if you ever doubt the power of some political consultants, then simply cite Dan Quayle as an example. I'm convinced that Roger Ailes, and to a lesser extent, Bob Teeter, were primarily responsible for putting Dan Quayle's name on the potential selection list. It's pretty well known that George Bush did not have a close and continuing relationship with Dan Quayle; they didn't know each other very well. So, how did the Quayle pick happen? Well, Bob Teeter, Bush's pollster, and Roger Ailes, his media consultant, had both handled Dan Quayle's previous congressional campaigns in Indiana. And they knew just how attractive and malleable Dan Quayle was.
Theodore J. Lowi and Juridical Democracy
Authors: Ginsberg Benjamin , Sanders Elizabeth 
Published: May 2006

By selecting Theodore J. Lowi to serve as its President, the American Political Science Association has recognized his extraordinary scholarly and professional contributions. Indeed, Lowi's work has played a singularly important role in the intellectual development of the profession during the past two decades. He was recognized in an American Political Science Association survey as the most significant political scientist of the 1970s, and continues in every study to be the single most frequently cited member of the profession. At the same time, as a truly gifted teacher, Lowi has inspired large numbers of graduate and undergraduate students, many of whom have followed in his professional footsteps.Lowi was born in Gadsden, Alabama in 1931. Much of his family lived in Marks, Mississippi (a city named for Lowi's great-uncle), and Lowi may be said to have considered—but rejected—Marksism in his youth. He chose, instead, to enter Michigan State University on a music scholarship. At Michigan State, Lowi played the oboe in both the marching band and orchestra before receiving his B.A.
Rejoinder to Dye and Zeigler
Authors: Parenti Michael 
Published: May 2006

Professors Dye and Zeigler (D&Z) take the easy way out. They invite the reader to think of their present critic as one of those “academic Marxists” in the grip of a “secular religion” “insulated from world events, spinning out theoretical webs.” This approach enables them to rest secure in their ideological assumption that, while their critic is a hopeless ideologue, they themselves are value-free social scientists arguing closely from evidence.Yet they continue to ignore evidence they do not find agreeable agreeable—as with the numerous examples of capitalist militarism and aggression I proffered. I noted other variables that could measure militarism, including treaties, overseas bases, striking power, mobility, levels of technology, etc. Given this opportunity to respond to these specifics, D&Z choose not to. One is tempted to conclude that they fail to answer because they have no answers.
Policy Models and Equal Educational Opportunity
Authors: Stewart Joseph 
Published: May 2006

If anyone doubts that policy analysis is like a hot dog—its contents are both variable and suspect— Sabatier's essay in this issue should remove those doubts. His outlines of the open systems/funnel of causality, rational actors within institutions, policy streams, and advocacy coalitions approaches make pellucid that adherents to any one of these perspectives will examine different variables in searching for truth, beauty, or at least explanation in public policy-making. A full illustration of how each of these lens, when focused on the same policy area, would yield a somewhat different image would require a volume of significant length. While the profession waits for Sabatier to produce such a volume, perhaps we can be satisfied with a brief discussion of how the pursuit of equal educational opportunity would be viewed through a pair of these lenses. The rational actors within institutions and advocacy coalition lenses are used to examine this important policy area.When the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the “separate but equal” interpretation of the constitution (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) and followed that quickly with a decision ignoring the “but equal” part of the phrase in public education (Cumming v. County Board of Education, 1899), racially segregated schools were legitimized. What followed was a long war, waged most obviously by the legal arm of the NAACP (Tushnet, 1987), which led to the Supreme Court's reversal of the Plessy decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, 1955). At that point policy-making in the area of equal educational opportunity shifted from a focus on overturning a loathsome judicial precedent to implementing a favorable one. Initial euphoria led to overly optimistic predictions about the speed with which segregated school systems could be dismantled.
Thoughts on Legislative Ethics Reform and Representation
Authors: Simmons Charlene Wear 
Published: May 2006

This article explores the complex and contradictory nature of representative government and its impact on elected officials seeking to balance the public interest with their own private concerns. “Ethics in government” controversies occupy a gray area of public-private overlap which is particularly uncertain today as the press and the public's expectations of acceptable official behavior appear to be changing. Popular pejoratives directed at elected officials include “conflict of interest,” “special interest,” and “undue influence” in contrast to the “public interest.” These terms encompass key representational functions whose precise meaning is unclear.The uncertainty lies in our inadequate understanding of the nature of representation, that complex interaction between governmental institutions and individual behavior. As Heinz Eulau contends, “… none of the traditional formulations of representation are relevant to the solution of the representational problems which the modern polity faces.” These conceptual limitations hamper our ability to craft “ethics” laws defining appropriate legislative behavior without distorting essential representative functions and responsibilities.The following discussion explores two contradictory notions of representation: the “trustee” and the “delegate.” Each model inherently favors particular decision-making biases and creates potential conflicts of interest. Important trade-offs are implicit in promoting one model over the other. The analysis also implies that rational and ethical decision-making can result from institutional processes which are designed to check and balance self-interested individual representative behavior.
Creationism, Evolution and the Courts
Authors: O'Connor Karen , Ivers Gregg 
Published: May 2006

The separation of religion and state is a fundamental principle of American constitutional democracy, but agreement over the proper relationship between God and Caesar is a far from settled matter. The concern of the framers of the Constitution for religious freedom is reflected in the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise of religious beliefs. The language employed is enigmatic, reflecting the delicate balance that the Constitution seeks to strike among the individual, the state and religion. The mosaic of religious groups in colonial America and the concern by the Founders to protect their religious freedom was “one of the forces that ultimately led to the adoption of a secular Constitution that included specific mention of free exercise and disestablishment” (Pfeffer, 1977: 13).As the branch of government whose responsibility it is to decide the constitutionality of federal and state laws that challenge the relationship between religion and the state, the judiciary is faced with the unenviable task of adjudicating disputes that fall within the language of the First Amendment. Since the 1940s, when it first began applying the religion clauses to the states, the Court has ruled on the constitutionality of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, government assistance to parochial schools as well as general issues of what the state may legitimately demand from an individual without impinging on the free exercise of his or her religious beliefs. The aim of the Court has been to strike a balance between respect for the role of religion in American public life while prohibiting state preference for any religious faith. It is hardly surprising, then, that the fruits of its labors have been greeted with less than unanimous satisfaction from the competing interests of religious and non-religious groups. To expect anything more would be to discount the complex question of what limits the Constitution places on religion as a moral and educational component in our public and social order.
The Politics of Textbook Adoption
Authors: Currey Virginia 
Published: May 2006

An implicit understanding, seldom bluntly articulated, has come apart. The federated sovereign states, nearly four centuries in building since the first European colonizations, are grappling with a dilemma not only in institutional processes and structures but also about consensus on dominant ideology.Nothing illustrates the strange unraveling of federalism's implicit and pragmatically informal truce better than the present Great Textbook Controversy. In essence, it is a new states' rights fuss about super states versus small states versus a national insistence on uniform high standards in public education.Public educational institutions have long represented the American Dream to our nation of newcomers and ever-mobile population. The First Amendment's No Establishment “Wall” meant that parents of diverse value systems could build a new community consensus around common needs at the school. By mid-twentieth century the U.S. high school had become the most important rite of passage into full U.S. citizenship and adulthood. No wonder, then, that each “blow” to the most cherished and legitimizing institution of individual communities has aroused such emotion. The local high school was the way into the great continental economy and culture.
Socialism and Equality in Cross-National Perspective
Authors: Dye Thomas R. , Zeigler Harmon 
Published: May 2006

It is widely asserted that socialist economies are equalitarian. The distinguished Yale political scientist Charles E. Lindblom labels this proposition undeniable:It is in communist provision of … some degree of equality in the distribution of income and wealth that the communist claim to approximate the humanitarian vision … seems undeniable. On these fronts communist systems have to be credited with great accomplishments, on the whole probably greater than those of the polyarchies [capitalist democracies] (Lindblom, 1977, p. 226).Lindblom's influential work, Politics and Markets: The World's Political Economic Systems, expresses the conventional wisdom in academic circles that communist regimes trade freedom and economic prosperity for a leveling of economic benefits, and that capitalist nations opt for freedom and economic prosperity at the sacrifice of equality. Capitalism achieves higher economic growth rates by providing individual incentives for work, productivity, initiative, and enterprise; these incentives necessarily entail inequalities. Socialism, by eliminating private ownership of the means of production, achieves a leveling of wealth and income.
Can the Senate Examine the Constitutional Philosophies of Supreme Court Nominees?
Authors: Comiskey Michael 
Published: May 2006

In the last 40 years, universal recognition of the Supreme Court's important policy-making role, the prevalence of divided government, and heightened conflict over value-laden issues such as abortion and school prayer have led to ever more elaborate Senate review of Supreme Court nominations (Freund 1988; Ross 1987, 116-23). Senate hearings into nominees' views on constitutional issues comprise the most visible element in the expanded confirmation process. Yet most recent nominees have won Senate approval while revealing little of their legal or political philosophies. As Powe (1976, 893) has concluded, “Senate questioning [of nominees] has proved astonishingly ineffective in eliciting the desired information.” The ability of nominees to hide their beliefs on vital constitutional questions raises serious doubts about the Senate's ability to give informed consent to presidents' Supreme Court nominations.This article examines confirmation hearings on recent, pre-Clinton Supreme Court nominees to answer two questions. First, given the recognized importance of Supreme Court appointments and the correspondingly systematic scrutiny of nominees, how do nominees get away with revealing so little of their views on vital constitutional issues? Second, given the answers to the first question, can the hearings be reformed so that senators may air a nominee's views more thoroughly and give—or withhold—truly informed consent to these nominations?
George Bush and the Costs of High Popularity: A General Model with a Current Application
Authors: Brace Paul , Hinckley Barbara 
Published: May 2006

People worry about the public-relations presidency: an institutional pattern of action giving high priority to public support, especially as shown by the opinion polls. These worries have been accentuated by actions in the White House and news media. “I don't live by the polls,” Bush told reporters early in 1990, parrying the implication that he did live by them. Daily polls that benefitted the White House were taken during the six months before the Gulf War by the Wirthlin Group (Ronald Reagan's second-term pollster) on behalf of “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” These included very sophisticated tracking and feedback devices. Bush, in fact, became the first president to mention his own popularity polls in a State of the Union address in January 1992. Yet, Bush could as well have accused reporters of living by the polls. Each change in his public approval ratings was accompanied by featured news stories. At the close of the war, even before the planes had returned to their bases, commentators began speculating on how soon the president's popularity would fall.Several things stand out from Bush's approval ratings in his first three years in office. His polls were strikingly high in absolute terms and relative to the polls of his predecessors at the same points in their administrations. Another notable feature was that they were more erratic. Where Reagan's polls changed by more than five percentage points only twice in the same period, Bush's changed by this amount 13 times, leading modern presidents in this kind of fluctuation. Bush's approval ratings climbed with the invasion of Panama in January 1990, fell the next month, and then fell further.
Ethnonationalist and Political Attitudes Among Post-Soviet Youth: The Case of Russia and Ukraine
Authors: Robinson John P. , Gurr Ted Robert , Kurbanov Erjan , McHale Stephen , Slepenkov Ivan 
Published: May 2006

For some 70 years, peoples of highly diverse origins and cultures were part of a political system called the Soviet Union. The leadership of the Soviet Union took great pride in attempting to organize that diversity into a “melting pot,” in which citizens of each ethnic background were to enjoy the same basic rights and privileges. Extraordinary political effort was expended by Soviet leaders to promote and advertise the success of this union of equals.We will provide an empirical assessment of the attitudes of youth in two former Soviet republics, how they now see each other, and how they feel various minorities in each new republic should be treated politically. It involves the use of a common instrument in each of these new states that was designed to measure how each ethnic group feels about the other former Soviet peoples and basic ethnic policies in their own states. In addition, data on a variety of other political and social issues are examined, primarily to examine whether certain quality of life indicators are more positively responded to in a former Soviet republic than in Russia proper.
The Uses and Abuses of Registration and Turnout Data: An Analysis of Piven and Cloward's Studies of Nonvoting in America
Authors: Bennett Stephen Earl 
Published: May 2006

A large corpus exists detailing the reasons for low turnout in American elections. It is not surprising that scholars disagree over the factors responsible. What should concern us is the extent to which single-factor explanations lead to serious misunderstanding of this phenomenon.Piven and Cloward recently continued their crusade to relax registration statutes (1989: see also 1988a, 1988b). They contend that the most important causes of low turnout are “legal-institutional” features of American politics, especially personal registration laws. They assert that American turnout is lower than in most western democracies and what it had been in this country during the late-nineteenth century because registration laws keep many people, particularly those in the lower social orders, from voting. Eliminate registration, or shift the burden from individual to government, and the low turnout problem will be solved, so Piven and Cloward argue.
A Rejoinder to Piven and Cloward
Authors: Gans Curtis B. 
Published: May 2006

The terms are not as Cloward and Piven have stated them, between one theory that holds that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote and another that holds that registered voters are going to the polls less and less, but rather whether registration barriers or lack of motivation is the primary cause of nonparticipation. It is also about the public policy implications of that debate—whether one engages in a unitary attack on registration barriers or a multi-faceted approach to nonparticipation, which includes but is not limited to barrier removal.In the inexact world of voting statistics nothing will be fully solved without a full-validation study of Census-reported registration and voting figures, and state aggregate data on registration.There are three issues involved: whether the state official registration rolls are inflated; to what degree; and whether they are progressively inflated. On the first there is broad agreement, which includes myself and the disclaimer I issue in each of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate's reports on registration and turnout.
Symposium on the Work of Samuel Lubell
Authors: Lamis Alexander P. , Ladd Everett C. , Schneider William , Meyer Philip , White John K. 
Published: May 2006

For several generations of readers, Samuel Lubell served as a vivid chronicler and analyst of the complex and varied currents of the American electoral scene. The first of Lubell's books, The Future of American Politics, was his most famous and went through several revised and updated editions, the last in 1965. When the book first appeared in the spring of 1952, V. O. Key, Jr., immediately hailed it in The Saturday Review, writing that “Mr. Lubell has produced by a wide margin the most perceptive general analysis of American politics of the Roosevelt Revolution and the Fair Deal.” (April 12, 1952, p. 31).Lubell wrote four more books in this field, each in its own way charting the course of American politics from the Eisenhower years (The Revolt of the Moderates in 1956), through the turbulent Sixties (White and Black: Test of a Nation in 1964, revised in 1966, and The Hidden Crisis in American Politics in 1970), ending with President Nixon's triumphal re-election (The Future While It Happened in 1973).
The Deeper Structure of the Savings and Loan Disaster
Authors: Redburn F. Stevens 
Published: May 2006

The U.S. savings and loan debacle is, or should be, of great interest to political scientists. Any public policy failure as costly as this one deserves study for that reason alone. Analysis of its origins and development may reveal why it has been so intractable. Such analysis also may illuminate a broader class of regulatory policy problems that the political process tends to manage poorly.Most writing about the savings and loan crisis has focused on its proximate causes. The deeper political roots of the thrift debacle have not been identified. As someone who has tracked the development of the thrift crisis and analyzed deposit insurance issues since 1986, I am convinced that the problems have a deeper structure, rooted in the organization of the U.S. political/regulatory system and its interaction with private markets. More specifically, the potential for this disaster was inherent in the original 1930s' design of deposit insurance and its associated regulatory policies. At this level of analysis, the challenge to policymakers posed by the thrift disaster can be appreciated and its similarities or differences with other regulatory problems examined.