The president seeks to exert influence in the policymaking process. We examine influence as the relationship of preferences and resources on activities to assess the presidential role in policymaking. The findings show that influence is complex and variable across stages of the policy process. The president's resources appear to aid him in different ways depending upon the specific target. Persuasion as an additional mediating factor provides no increase in explanatory power. We conclude that a variety of theories of influence are correct, each limited to particular stages of the policy process, specific issues or both. Therefore, further analysis is necessary before a more general empirical theory of presidential influence is possible.
The public hearing offers a critical opportunity for committee leaders to affect which issues will be granted time for public scrutiny and which bills will be advanced to the floor with a favorable record. In spite of the fact that the chairs hold this kev to many personal and programmatic successes on Capitol Hill, remarkably little inquiry addresses agenda setting in Congress. Still fewer studies examine the extent to which committee chairs use testimony to assemble a balanced record, to promote or to foil pending initiatives under their control. With the personal reflections of forty-three staff directors and a small complement of chairs this paper presents new evidence on the leaders' role in agenda formation and witness selection. The finding that behavioral differences in managing agendas and testimony do not cluster around acknowledged differences among committees offers an interesting puzzle suggesting productive lines of further inquiry.
One of the ongoing problems with democratic systems concerns who has a voice in decision-making. The least affluent members in society seldom are heard, even though they may have quite a number of grievances. Instead, the popular press is filled with accounts of interest groups gaining inordinate favor from elected officials. For example, as details of the Savings and Loan debacle are uncovered, they reveal intricate relationships between powerful special interests and lawmakers.
This paper examines how differences in the local policy process may affect local growth control policies across jurisdictions. The relationship between levels of citizen mobilization against growth and the content of local land use policy is evaluated. Using census data and the results of a detailed survey of city planning officials, we test hypotheses concerning the determinants of local mobilization against growth and local conflict over growth. We then examine the hypothesis that higher levels of local conflict and anti-growth mobilization lead to qualitative and quantitative differences in local growth control policy content. The findings indicate that local policy is conditioned by levels of citizen mobilization.
Ballot propositions have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, not least because they have become an increasingly important part of the democratic process in the U.S., and the especially in California. Yet voters seem increasingly disenchanted with this process. One way of understanding voter reaction to propositions is to conceive of them as presenting voters with a set of decisionmaking costs which they seek to minimize. Developing hypotheses from this simple basis allows us to make us to make a series of predictions of likely voter turnout on ballot propositions. We find that ballot position, proposition type, and spending patterns have statistically significant impacts upon the decision of voters to express a preference for or against a given proposition.
In recent years, an increasing number of electoral contests for judgeships have departed from the traditional model of small-scale, low-key, and issue-less campaigns. But we know little about how the electorate responds to these "new-style" judicial campaigns. This study examines Ohio voters' responses to five contests for the state supreme court in 1986 and 1988. The labor movement and labor-related economic issues were central to those contests, and we explore responses to the campaigns by comparing the voting behavior of union members with that of other voters. On the whole, union members were considerably more likely to support the labor-endorsed judicial candidates, even with controls for party identification and other relevant variables. Comparisons among the judicial contests and between judicial and non-judicial contests in the two election years provide further evidence that voters were influenced by the unions' message and by economic issues. These results indicate that "new-style" judicial campaigns can be effective in reaching voters and shaping their decisions.
In this paper, I examine the ways in which political elites understand "liberal" and "conservative" labels and groups. Using data from the 1989 CPS Convention Delegate Study, I examine: (1) how elites understand ideological terms; (2) the degree to which elites correctly define ideological labels; and (3) how elites view their ideological counterparts on the ideological spectrum. The results show that the delegates display the characteristics expected from a politically sophisticated portion of the citizenry. This study provides reassurance for those who place emphasis on the role of the activist stratum of society to inform the mass citizenry about politics.
Over the last half century the social sciences have amassed a wealth of data covering a broad range of societies. Never before have scholars enjoyed anything remotely resembling the quantity or quality of information that is now available. Yet in some respects these newly acquired resources represent an embarrassment of riches as our capacities for organizing these data in intellectually constructive ways have not proceeded apace. Of the analytical perspectives embraced by social scientists working in various disciplines, those based on one or another variant of rational choice theory have attracted the greatest attention in recent years. Yet, as critics of rational choice theory (and even some of its adherents) have been at pains to point out, this approach has typically invoked only rudimentary and simplistic assumptions about how people come to possess the preferences they display, and how these preferences translate into behavior in the complex arenas of social life. By developing a shared concern with the formation and maintenance of human preferences, and by placing this understanding in the context of social relationships and cultural milieux, the two works reviewed here hold unusual promise for improving our capacities for building better comparative theories of politics and society. As our initial step in examining these works we want to clarify our use of the term rationality.' Within the social sciences rationality is
In this paper we compare long-term trends of public attitudes toward unification in both West Germany and South Korea, using a generational theory perspective. We show that a long-term trend of attitudinal evolution could be quickly changed or disrupted by circumstantial factors which had rather similar effects on attitudes in the two cases. However, a more salient and enduring factor was that of generation, which made quite significant attitudianal differences in both countries, even though this factor worked in opposite directions in each case. A major finding from the two cases is the fundamentally different dynamic between popular attitudes and elite policies on unification. Compared to the West German case, in the South Korean case we find more often conflict than consensus between government policies and popular attitudes, especially attitudes of young progressives of the generation born after the Korean War.
In the 1970s a combination of Supreme Court rulings and the salience of the crime problem gave the American states an opportunity to revise their death penalty laws. Analysis of both formal policy provisions and the application of those policies reveals that death penalty decisions are closely linked to the climate of public opinion and the rate of murders and nonnegligent homicides.
Olson's "organized interests" theory suggests that economic growth is a function of the dominance of the political system by interest groups that support exclusive-benefit policies likely to create economic inefficiency. Thus far, however, most tests of this model in the American states have been cross-sectional. In this paper I raise questions about the empirical validity of inferences drawn from cross-sectional tests of Olson's thesis. Specifically, I find that: (1) in the postwar era relative state economic growth rates fluctuate substantially from year-to-year; (2) the relationship between state age and economic growth is highly time-dependent, with strong support Olson's thesis limited largely to the 1970s; and (3) previous research testing Olson's model with data from the 1970s may have yielded inferences that would be unsupported for other time periods. These results calls into serious question previous findings of support for the organized interest theory.
In democratic societies, consent may rest as much upon citizens' supportive orientations as upon the satisfaction of policy demands. We tapped citizens' support for Congress and the state legislature in one state, Ohio, and then sought to establish the grounding for variations in citizens' supportive orientations. Our data derive from interviews with a sample of Ohioans in the summer of 1988. We asked, "How strongly do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress [the Ohio legislature] is handling its job?" We construct an analytical model of legislative support, and estimate the effects of independent variables using the survey data.
In this paper, we examine political intolerance within the countries of the European Community (EC). Based on surveys of public opinion in 1988 in the twelve European Community nations, we test several hypotheses derived from theories of citizen socialization to system norms. Our data reveal startlingly low levels of political tolerance in Western Europe. Not surprisingly, we find that those who are more threatened by their political enemies are less likely to tolerate them. Moreover, the more highly educated tend to be more tolerant.We also find that tolerance is more widespread in the newly formed democracies of the EC (e.g., Spain, Portugal, Greece). Those who have enjoyed democracy for a long time seem to take it for granted. Our analysis also suggests that within mature democracies, ideological diversity and strong party-group linkages contribute to political tolerance. Finally, the greater political tolerance in the newly formed democracies reflects the residue of experiences from the democratization era.
The growth and decline of communities have become major policy concerns for all levels of government in the United States. This note relies on two theoretical perspectives and a national sample of cities to analyze the variation in local economic development policies. The evidence suggests that both broader economic or social forces ("structure") and the actions of local political and economic actors ("agency") influence local economic development efforts. Among the best predictors of the economic development policies adopted by a city are its total population, metropolitan status, poverty level, property tax burden, the type of local organization serving as lead actor in promoting economic development, the adoption of an economic development plan, and the presence of a specialized city agency for economic development.
The author attempts to shed light on the nature of the decision-making of Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist. If his decision-making was based on a coherent judicial philosophy rather than result-oriented attempts to achieve the goals of a conservative political agenda, he would have voted consistently to support state autonomy even when it led to a liberal result. Analyzing Rehnquist's voting behavior in cases in which the Supreme Court reviewed a decision of a state court of last resort, the author finds that although the justice was more deferential to the decisions of state courts than any other member of the Burger Court, he clearly favored decisions that had a conservative outcome. The results suggest that Rehnquist valued federalism as a means to a conservative end.
What factors affect ballot measure outcomes? This study uses a data base of citizen-sponsored ballot measures in California cities to examine the effect of two factors-voter turnout and campaign spending-on ballot measure outcomes. The results are examined in light of efforts to reform the initiative process.
The study of campaign finance has been greatly informed by the use of economic models of the contributor-legislator relationship. Predominant among these is the investment theory of resource allocation which predicts that interest groups equate the marginal value of the last dollar provided across recipients. The model, however, is predicated on the existence of an unregulated campaign finance environment. This is clearly antithetical to the federal election arena in which most studies of campaign finance have been conducted. We test the investment model in the unregulated setting of the 1984 and 1986 California Assembly elections. Our results indicate the acceptance afforded the model is justified. Further, the empirical findings in this paper suggest that restrictions on campaign contributions benefit incumbent and major party candidates at the expense of challengers and members of minor parties.
