bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The End of the Cold War, Attitude Change, and the Politics of Defense Spending
Authors: Russett Bruce , Hartley Thomas , Murray Shoon 
Published: May 2006

Throughout the Cold War, United States national security policy, and the public attitudes that supported it, seemed anchored in the great ideology and power rivalry with the Soviet Union. A basic component of that policy, the ups and downs of American military spending, was largely predictable by changes in the level of Soviet military spending and by public preferences, as expressed in opinion surveys, for increases or decreases in American military spending. Public beliefs about the appropriate level of military spending, moreover, appeared firmly rooted in a larger set of foreign policy beliefs. Attitudes toward the Soviet Union, toward the circumstances justifying the use of military force internationally, and toward cooperating with other countries were all part of a stable and well-defined system of beliefs. In turn, foreign policy attitudes frequently were predictable from a reasonably coherent set of attitudes toward domestic policy.The end of the Cold War brought remarkable changes in both policy and attitudes. The major anchoring point for the rivalry—the Soviet Union itself—has ceased to exist, and Russia no longer poses the same level or kind of military threat. Rationales for U.S. military spending, for the use of military force abroad, and for international cooperation have likewise changed. But in some respects they have not changed so greatly. These historic events present us with an extraordinary opportunity to study the structure of Americans' foreign policy beliefs and the dynamics of attitude change. They also provide a chance to speculate about how changed and stable attitudes may affect national security policy.
The Comparative Politics of Eastern Europe
Authors: Nelson Daniel N. , Bentley Samuel 
Published: May 2006

During 1989, as Eastern Europe's communist regimes abdicated power in the face of popular coups, Daniel Nelson was asked by a journalist if such changes meant a career change for scholars of communist systems. He answered affirmatively: if such scholars had examined these regimes only as communist systems; yet, for scholars who had studied politics in the arena of Eastern Europe, he said, a full and challenging career lay ahead.This speculation has since given way to certainty. Comparative communism as a subfield of political analysis passed away during 1989, while the comparative politics of Eastern Europe was rejuvenated.The Birth and Death of Comparative CommunismWithin a few years after Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated changes that he could not control, practitioners of comparative communism were confronted with new conditions for their research and analysis. Notwithstanding the continuation of communist rule in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Southeast Asia, the subfield lost its raison d'etre. Most of the premises that had generated a subfield of comparative endeavors, no matter how rudimentary they may have sometimes been, became moot.Comparative communism had come and gone. But, what had comparative communism sought to accomplish? How well did scholars and policy-analysts succeed? Was there any lasting contribution to political studies?In the late 1940s when communist parties gained power in Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, the impression was that a single form of totalitarian government had been imposed from Moscow. The “Soviet bloc” aggregated all states' and leaders' behavior within the image of rigid uniformity. Consequently, broadly comparative analyses and rigorous tests of hypotheses were unnecessary. Most scholarly attention appeared to be driven by Western foreign policy interest.
Leo Strauss and the Straussians: An Anti-democratic Cult?
Authors: Smith Gregory Bruce 
Published: May 2006

In both scholarly and popular venues, the political philosopher Leo Strauss has emerged as the alleged father of an anti-democratic cult at odds with the principles of American democracy. The relative suddenness and uniformity of this recently evolving sentiment is intriguing. Certainly, Strauss's name and those of his self-avowed “followers” have surfaced in public before recent years. That Strauss was a controversial and iconoclastic scholar during his lifetime is certainly true, but primarily on issues such as how to read Machiavelli or the appropriate way to approach the study of the social sciences. His recent public impact, especially since his death, was therefore hardly predictable. Strauss simply was not a public man. He seldom declaimed in public, and despite a sense of professional obligation to his university and his students, clearly preferred the withdrawn, quiet, contemplative life. He showed no desire to have a public persona.It is difficult to explain, therefore, how Strauss could occasion such intemperate remarks as those printed in the New York Times, under the heading “Undemocratic Vistas: The Sinister Vogue of Leo Strauss.” Author Brent Staples stated that “Leo Strauss contended that the Philosopher-kings (himself included) were born to rule, servants were born to serve and that only disaster came of letting the rabble get above its station. Strauss, then, was unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. His ideas have survived him and crept into vogue in American politics.”
The Electoral Lock Thesis: The Weighting Bias Component
Authors: Berthoud John E. 
Published: May 2006

In the September 1996 issue of PS, I.M. Destler analyzes the supposed “electoral lock” that Republicans have on the Presidency due to the dynamics of the Electoral College. Under Destler's analysis, there turns out to be no great advantage in the system for either party. Destler speculates that the reason is that there are offsetting effects. On the one hand, Republicans do well in smaller states which because of the weighting bias of the electoral college system are disproportionately represented (each state, of course, has one vote for each U.S. Representative and one vote for each Senator, the latter element giving a disproportionate voice to the smaller states). Democrats, on the other hand, have been doing better in the bigger states where the winner-take-all principle helps boost their electoral college totals.The electoral college is of course a perennial target of reformers who see it as unfair and confusing. While defenders of the electoral college argue its merits on many grounds, there are many significant problems, and few are as serious as the small state bias. Figure 1 shows this bias by comparing the actual votes that each state gets during elections in the 1990s (and 2000) with the votes each would get if the 538 electoral votes were allocated on a strictly proportional basis (the states are sorted by their non-biased electoral votes). Certainly, giving extra weight to one state over another—violating the one person-one vote principle—is more problematic than the second issue raised by Destler: the winner-take-all aspect.
Party Government and the Contract With America
Authors: Riley Russell L. 
Published: May 2006

American voters issued mixed signals in November 1994 about the preferred role of party in the nation's governing structures. Accordingly, those political scientists who advocate party government for the United States—disciplined parties committed to coherent governing programs consciously patterned on the parliamentary model—were left to debate whether the midterm election results were a glass half empty or half full.The bad news for advocates of a “more responsible two party system” was that the voters rejected at their earliest opportunity the necessary precondition for party government in the United States: single party control of the nation's elected institutions (Committee on Political Parties 1950). By turning Congress over to the Republicans, the electorate terminated an experiment in which the entirety of the elected federal policy-making structure had been entrusted to the Democrats. That exercise of single party control was brief—and increasingly rare. In the half century since the end of World War II, one party has held the White House and both chambers of Congress just 21 years. In the last quarter century only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have presided under these conditions. American voters, then, apparently returned in 1994 to comfortable form in restoring divided government, commensurately discomforting those who see in parties the remedy for a host of ills associated with separated institutions sharing powers.Yet there were also promising developments in 1994 for party government advocates. At the top of the plus side of the ledger was the way in which House Republicans shed their status as a “permanent minority.”
Political Science Then and Now: Thoughts on Henry Jones Ford
Authors: Hargrove Erwin C. 
Published: May 2006

I remember an afternoon graduate seminar in 1958 at Yale when Bob Dahl asked a question: “How would we best go about ‘testing’ the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America?” Two answers were offered. “Survey research can do it all,” many argued. I put my hand up and offered an alternative. We would do well to study American history, the culture of politics, and political sociology, then and now. One does not “test” Tocqueville all at once, and never fully. One continually matches his insights against what one knows and understands about our politics. Dahl accepted both answers and we then went on to other things. I recalled the question when I recently reread Ford.Ford, along with James Bryce, was one of the first political scientists to attempt an analysis of the central dynamics of American political institutions. In The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), he set a model followed by Arthur Bentley, Arthur Holcombe, Wilfred Binkley, Pendleton Herring, D.W. Brogan, and Clinton Rossiter, all leaders in American political science. The art was to write a perceptive book about U.S. politics that was grounded primarily in historical materials and analyzed the connections among society, politics, and government.
South Carolina: The Christian Right Wins One
Authors: Guth James L. 
Published: May 2006

Early in the 1994 campaign, South Carolina Democratic humorists quipped that only two skills were required to win a Republican gubernatorial nomination—speaking in tongues and handling snakes (Carney 1994). The reference, of course, was to the expanding role of conservative Protestants in the state's Republican Party. Unfortunately, Democratic strategists understood the dynamics of conservative Protestantism no better in South Carolina than elsewhere, and on November 8, the joke was on them.David Beasley, a born-again Southern Baptist (but converted in an independent Fundamentalist church), received strong backing from Pentecostal and Charismatic activists and votes from conservative Protestants of all stripes, first winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination and then defeating a popular Democratic lieutenant governor for the state's top post. Beasley's success proves that identifying with a Christian Right movement organization is not an insuperable barrier to political success. His victory also brings into focus the broader role of conservative Protestants in South Carolina's continuing development into one of the nation's most Republican states.
Public Support for Environmental Protection: Objective Problems and Subjective Values in 43 Societies
Authors: Inglehart Ronald 
Published: May 2006

Policies designed to solve environmental problems are unlikely to succeed unless they have broad public support, but the motives for mass support are poorly understood. The problem is global in scope, but most of the relevant public opinion research done so far has been carried out in advanced industrial societies, usually Western democracies. Moreover, much of this research is limited to the tip of the iceberg, focusing on what people think about environmental problems without probing into why they think it or how deeply they are committed.The analysis of mass attitudes toward environmental problems in this article uses evidence from representative national surveys of countries representing the entire developmental spectrum, from rich to poor nations, including not only Western democracies but authoritarian regimes and recently emerging democracies from the former communist bloc. The data come from the 1990–93 World Values survey, carried out in 43 countries containing 70% of the world's population. Our goal is to determine why given publics are—or are not—sufficiently concerned about environmental problems that they are willing to make financial sacrifices and undertake other actions in order to help protect the environment.
Why Americans Hate Politics and Politicians
Authors: Nelson Michael 
Published: May 2006

Do psychiatrists still use word-association techniques with their patients? I sometimes do word association with my students, usually on the first day of my introductory American government classes at Rhodes College. The first word I say is “politics,” and here is what they come back with: corrupt, dirty, games-playing, ego trip, a waste. (The nicest thing I heard the last time I did this was “boring”.) Here is what they say in response to “politician”: selfish, ambitious, mediocre, unprincipled.The teacher in me wants to despair when students associate words like these with politics. I know, as did Aristotle, that politics is a vital and sometimes noble human activity. I know that politics was at the heart of our birth as a nation. (As John Roche [1961] has pointed out, the founding fathers may be described in many ways, but no description is accurate that leaves out the word “politician.”) I know that politics was the vehicle that integrated generations of our immigrant ancestors into the mainstream of American society—the job on the city road crew that my German grandfather got from the Frank Hague machine in Jersey City is the reason that my father and then I were later able to build careers of our own in the private sector. And I know that it is politics that secures the basic freedoms that allow my students to say critical things about politics.
Two Perspectives on Tenure
Authors: Pilant Denny E. , Ellison Brian A. 
Published: May 2006

Here, two college professors explore the dilemma of tenure, and ultimately argue for a change in the way tenure is promoted and perceived within the academy. One professor—an associate dean and former department head—has over 35 years of experience with the academy and has observed the best and worst aspects of tenure. The other, currently teaching his third semester of classes, has a perspective on tenure based more on expectations than experience. The perspectives differ, but at the same time provide insight into the two sides of tenure—one that views tenure as a public good needed to protect academic freedom and the other which sees it as a menace that protects incompetence.As a young professor, I was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War at a university in very conservative section of the Midwest. My public stand against the war was criticized on local radio, television, and in the newspaper. In that Midwestern city, the war could be seen in two ways: through the eyes of the patriotic American or those of the traitor. The community made clear its attitude toward opposition to the war. Being an untenured assistant professor, I was most fortunate that the department head and academic dean were devoted defenders of academic freedom. If these academic administrators had not held their respective positions during the Vietnam War, there is no doubt my contract would have expired without renewal.
Tenure and the Constitution of the University
Authors: Turner Stephen 
Published: May 2006

Should university professors be exempt from the job insecurity that afflicts much of the population? As businesses become leaner and meaner, shouldn't universities do the same? After all, Universities have become expensive. Wouldn't abolishing tenure make change possible—especially by eliminating deadwood?These are fair questions. One answer is that a great many savings of the same kind that have become commonplace in business are already extensively employed by universities. For example, much of the teaching at our universities, is done by poorly paid part-time employees or graduate students, and as older faculty retire, they are often not replaced. So universities HAVE been part of the larger trends. In many respects, universities were, in fact, leaders in shifting work to part-timers.Why shouldn't university presidents be like corporate CEO's and (as they were in the 19th century) able to hire and fire at will? Wouldn't a workforce responsive to changing organizational goals be good for universities? These questions look like two parts of the same question, and surely many people outside the university do not see the two questions as distinct. Indeed, perhaps precisely because of the way in which organizational change is occurring in business presently, the two problems seem to be one.The two issues are not the same, and separating them is crucial to understanding the role of tenure in universities.
Rating the Rating: An Analysis of the National Research Council's Appraisal of Political Science Ph.D. Programs
Authors: Jackman Robert W. , Siverson Randolph M. 
Published: May 2006

Not surprisingly, the ratings of doctoral programs in the United States by the National Research Council (NRC 1995) are controversial. Some interpret the ratings as an indicator of relative program quality; others view them as little more than a gauge of the size and age of graduate programs, and still others deem them to be simply a popularity barometer.Employing data assembled in the NRC report, we examine whether the political science program ratings reflect two general sets of characteristics—the size and the productivity of faculty.All other things equal, program quality should vary directly with faculty size, and indeed size is emphasized as a key explanatory factor in the NRC report. The logic is straightforward. Very small departments lack the means to field a range of graduate courses of sufficient breadth to form the basis of a serious program. Larger departments enjoy the increased resources that allow for greater program depth and breadth. In addition, holding quality concerns constant, larger programs should on average receive higher ratings simply because they include more faculty.
Schematic Politics
Authors: Roelofs H. Mark 
Published: May 2006

Can philosophically inclined political scientists, as well as quantifying behavioralists, use diagrams? Of course … and have at least since Plato depicted Socrates drawing lines in the sand below the walls of Athens. Nothing will more quickly or comprehensively convey the relationships between the elements within a complex idea than a carefully constructed, skillfully rendered schematic diagram.A few years back, I published a book on American politics (Roelofs 1992b). Some readers found it interesting, but others seemed unable to credit—much less to critique— its central claim: to have presented a detailed, integrated, and comprehensive account of the American political system as a conceptual whole. Apparently, for these readers, my argument was so extended, the elements to be connected within it so numerous (and sometimes individually so strange), they simply lost sight of my overall intent.In a phenomenological perspective, the American political system, viewed comprehensively, is an Idea, extraordinarily complex, and filled with ingenious devices as well as major contradictions and paradoxes. Yet it is still a single system, as the diagram I have now developed to illustrate the argument of my book (Figure 1) attempts to show.
Fair Division: A Format for the Debate on the Format of Debates
Authors: Lax Jeffrey R. 
Published: May 2006

In 1960, a televised presidential debate, four of them in fact, occurred for the first time. This came to seem, despite initial expectations, a mere blip in electoral history until the debates of 1976. During the intervening era, strategic political maneuvering was limited almost solely to the question of whether to debate, the answer always being resoundingly negative. In 1964, 1968, and 1972, the front-runner declined the invitation to debate to preserve his status as such (Alexander and Margolis 1978, 19). By 1980, the simple tactical choice of whether to debate had matured into an intricate series of strategic decisions—a yes/no question had been transformed into a debate on debates and their format. Concerns ranged from the number of debates and their timing to the use of props. By 1984, debates had become a campaign staple, and, by 1996, the debate over debate format had become a “campaign ritual” (Lewis 1996a). No current commentator is surprised, as was one of the panelists in one of the 1980 debates, by “how much the format is the debate” (Golden 1980). An editorial described the situation one year (and, without context, it is difficult to tell which) as follows:A standard was set for participation by minor candidates—and then faithlessly abandoned. The major candidates maneuvered … baldly for advantage…. There was endless bickering about format and bargaining over the questioners. All of which produced wide public cynicism. There has to be a better way. (“Repair” 1980)I will argue that there is indeed a better way to handle this metadebate.
An Effective Congress and Effective Members: What Does it Take?
Authors: Sinclair Barbara 
Published: May 2006

What are the skills needed to serve effectively in Congress and how do politicians acquire them? Learning to be a member of Congress is unlike learning to be a plumber or a brain surgeon; there is no prescribed course of study and no certification process. The criteria by which we judge whether a brain surgeon or a plumber is good at his or her job are relatively clear and uncontroversial; there is less consensus about what constitutes doing a good job as a member of Congress. Thus, the question that begins this essay cannot be answered simply and directly.The question can be approached by examining the job of Congress, how Congress has organized itself to do its job and then considering the skills members need to function effectively in that environment. First, however, we must decide what we mean by effectiveness. Members can be considered to function effectively when their behavior furthers their individual objectives. Alternatively, effectiveness can be defined relative to the objectives of the institution, and members can be considered to function effectively when their behavior furthers the Congress's capacity to do its job well. These two different ways of defining effectiveness lead to another important question: are the skills needed to get to, remain in, and get ahead in Congress the same ones needed to make Congress institutionally effective?
Accentuate the Negative: Contemporary Congressional Campaigns
Authors: Elving Ronald D. 
Published: May 2006

Campaigning in the final days before Oregon's special Senate election in January 1996, Democratic nominee Rep. Ron Wyden was introduced at each event with a song written in 1944 and recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive … E-lim-in-ate the negative…”The sudden enthusiasm with which Wyden embraced his new theme song struck more than a few Oregonians as ironic. Wyden had adopted his positive campaign posture after reading polls that showed a plurality of voters more concerned about the negative tone of the campaign than about any other issue. That negative tone had largely been established by Wyden himself (Wells 1996).The Wyden campaign—both on the attack and on the defensive, in repentance and in victory—offers a microcosm for the state of campaigning for Congress in the mid-1990s.Wyden, an eighth-term member from Portland, won his Senate nomination in November over another House Democrat from a more rural district who was unable to raise comparable amounts of cash. His Republican rival, state Senate President Gordon Smith, had made himself wealthy in food-packaging and won the nomination by heavily outspending two statewide officeholders (Gruenwald 1995).