What is the price of federalism? Does it result in governmental interconnections that are too complex? Does it create overlapping responsibilities? Does it perpetuate social inequalities? Does it stifle economic growth? To answer these questions, Paul Peterson sets forth two theories of federalism: functional and legislative. Functional theory is optimistic. It says that each level of the federal system is well designed to carry out the tasks for which it is mainly responsible. State and local governments assume responsibility for their area's physical and social development; the national government cares for the needy and reduces economic inequities. Legislative theory, in contrast, is pessimistic: it says that national political leaders, responding to electoral pressures, misuse their power. They shift unpopular burdens to lower levels of government while spending national dollars on popular government programs for which they can claim credit. Both theories are used to explain different aspects of American federalism. Legislative theory explains why federal grants have never been used to equalize public services. Elected officials cannot easily justify to their constituents a vote to shift funds away from the geographic area they represent. The overall direction that American federalism has taken in recent years is better explained by functional theory. As the costs of transportation and communication have declined, labor and capital have become increasingly mobile, placing states and localities in greater competition with one another. State and local governments are responding to these changes by overlooking the needs of the poor, focusing instead on economic development. As a further consequence, older, big cities of the Rust Belt, inefficient in their operations and burdened by social responsibilities, are losing jobs and population to the suburban communities that surround them. Peterson recommends that the national government adopt policies that take into account the economic realities identified by functional theory. The national government should give states and localities responsibility for most transportation, education, crime control, and other basic governmental programs. Welfare, food stamps, the delivery of medical services, and other social policies should become the primary responsibility of the national government.

The Price for Federalism

COPS and crime

Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.

A combination of technological change, methodological drift and a certain degree of intellectual sloth, particularly with respect to philosophy of science, has allowed contemporary quantitative political analysis to accumulate a series of dysfunctional habits that have rendered much of contemporary research more or less meaningless. I identify these ‘seven deadly sins’ as: Garbage can models that ignore the effects of collinearity; Pre-scientific explanation in the absence of prediction; Excessive reanalysis of a small number of datasets; Using complex methods without understanding the underlying assumptions; Interpreting frequentist statistics as if they were Bayesian; A linear statistical monoculture that fails to consider alternative structures; Confusing statistical controls and experimental controls. The answer to these problems is not to abandon quantitative approaches, but rather engage in solid, thoughtful, original work driven by an appreciation of both theory and data. The article closes with su...

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Seven deadly sins of contemporary quantitative political analysis

It is commonly believed that learning is enhanced through the use of technology and that students need to develop technology skills in order to be productive members of society. For this reason, providing a high quality education includes the expectation that teachers use educational technologies effectively in their classroom and that they teach their students to use technology. In this chapter we have organized our review of technology integration research around a framework based on three areas of focus: (1) increasing access to educational technologies, (2) increasing the use of technology for instructional purposes, and (3) improving the effectiveness of technology use to facilitate learning. Within these categories, we describe findings related to one-to-one computing initiatives, integration of open educational resources, various methods of teacher professional development, ethical issues affecting technology use, emerging approaches to technology integration that emphasize pedagogical perspectives and personalized instruction, technology-enabled assessment practices, and the need for systemic educational change to fully realize technology’s potential for improving learning. From our analysis of the scholarship in this area, we conclude that the primary benefit of current technology use in education has been to increase information access and communication. Students primarily use technology to gather, organize, analyze, and report information, but this has not dramatically improved student performance on standardized tests. These findings lead to the conclusion that future efforts should focus on providing students and teachers with increased access to technology along with training in pedagogically sound best practices, including more advanced approaches for technology-based assessment and adaptive instruction.

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Technology Integration in Schools

Both local and national political considerations may play a role in determining the distribution of intergovernmental grant funds. This article focuses on the Community Oriented Policing Services program from 1993 to 1997 to examine how local politicians weigh their electoral desires against community needs in their decisions to apply for grants and how national politicians and bureaucrats similarly determine their responses to cities’ requests. Due to electoral pressures, mayors were more likely than city managers to seek the short-term grants. National party politics also seemed to affect the allocation of grant funds. Finally, community needs played a role, as cities with high crime rates, police-funding shortages, and the ability to support the new officers after the grants expired were more likely to request grants. Communities with larger minority populations were less likely to request grants and were given fewer funds.

Means, Motive, and Opportunity: Politics, Community Needs, and Community Oriented Policing Services Grants

Self-reflective political scientists have extensively reviewed the history of the discipline and argued over its future, but to date there has been little effort to systematically survey undergraduate scope and methods courses (for an exception see Thies and Hogan 2005). This lack of data leaves the discipline unable to assess how much we are teaching undergraduates about the scope of political science or, indeed, what we mean by the scope of the discipline. Similarly, though there have been many battles waged over the appropriateness of various methodologies, it is not clear how much of this discussion, or how many of these methods, make it into the undergraduate classroom. Survey results from a nation-wide sample of political science departments indicate that most departments require a scope and methods course of their majors and that, while there is a great deal of variety in topics covered, some common themes exist and some common assignments are used.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40647542.pdf

What We Mean by Scope and Methods: A Survey of Undergraduate Scope and Methods Courses.

Scholarship on Supreme Court opinions has tended to focus on outcomes and majority opinions. This research examines the themes of justices' concurrences. The authors first ask what goals are repeatedly pursued in concurrences? The authors suggest that concurrences pursue at least one of the following activities: ground laying, weakening, signaling, or preserving. After establishing this typology of concurring behavior, the authors next ask, under what conditions do justices illustrate these behaviors? The authors code the 547 concurrences written by Rehnquist Court justices between the 1991 and 2001-2002 terms and hypothesize that a number of institutional and attitudinal variables may contribute to variation in concurring behavior. Applying logistic regression, the authors conclude that several factors, most notably citations to previous cases, the number of justices joining the concurrence, judicial ideology, workload, and the extent to which the author joins the majority opinion, are important predicto...

Disagreement on the Rehnquist Court: The Dynamics of Supreme Court Concurrence

Rapid growth in the use of internet-based instructional technology (IT) necessitates greater attention to the pedagogical implications of this transition. Though much of the literature on the uses of IT focuses on outcomes and student learning, we also need to ask whether and how different technologies force us to reconceive the boundaries for both student learning and academic honesty. One IT tool, the web quiz, demands this reconception by creating the possibility for an iterative game where typically only a single-shot game had existed in the past. This change in rule structure calls for the reassessment of definitions of learning and cheating that were developed in a previous era. I review the literature on IT, student learning, and academic honesty, as well as empirical classroom data to develop a typology of behavioral responses to the web quiz environment. Specifically, I identify five behavioral options for students presented with web quiz assignments, four of which would be considered “c...

A New Honesty for a New Game: Distinguishing Cheating from Learning in a Web-Based Testing Environment

Justices’ goals when writing concurrences continue to elude scholars. This project extends Baum’s contention that justices’ goals are bifurcated. The authors argue that justices use concurrences as...

Charles C. Turner

Papers

Means, Motive, and Opportunity: Politics, Community Needs, and Community Oriented Policing Services Grants

What We Mean by Scope and Methods: A Survey of Undergraduate Scope and Methods Courses.

Disagreement on the Rehnquist Court: The Dynamics of Supreme Court Concurrence

A New Honesty for a New Game: Distinguishing Cheating from Learning in a Web-Based Testing Environment

The Rise of the Choral Court: Use of Concurrence in the Burger and Rehnquist Courts