Showing papers in "American Political Science Review in 1987"

The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power

Abstract: Using spatial theory, Shepsle and Weingast argue that the power of congressional standing committees rests on their domination of conference committees. Members of the committees originating legislation dominate conference committee delegations and know that the parent houses must approve or disapprove of conference reports without amendment. This system gives committee members an opportunity to overturn changes in committee bills that were approved on the floor and creates a disincentive for legislators to offer amendments to committee bills in the first place. This conference power is called an ex post veto because it follows floor action. Legislative committees have fascinated scholars and reformers for more than a century. Differences of opinion concerning the role of committees persist, but there is a substantial consensus on a number of stylized facts: Committees are “gatekeepers” in their respective jurisdictions. Committees are repositories of policy expertise. Committees are policy incubators. Committees possess disproportionate control over the agenda in their policy domains. Committees are deferred to, and that deference is reciprocated. There is, however, a troublesome quality to this consensus. The items in this list (and there could undoubtedly be more) describe or label committee power, but they do not explain it. Explanations of these empirical regularities require a theory. In the case of each of these stylized facts, that is, a theory is needed to determine why things are done this way.

Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation

Abstract: Preferences come from the most ubiquitous human activity: living with other people. Support for and opposition to different ways of life, the shared values legitimating social relations (here called cultures) are the generators of diverse preferences. After discussing why it is not helpful to conceive of interests as preferences or to dismiss preference formation as external to organized social life, I explain how people are able to develop many preferences from few clues by using their social relations to interrogate their environment. The social filter is the source of preferences. I then argue that culture is a more powerful construct than conceptual rivals: heuristics, schemas, ideologies. Two initial applications—to the ideology of the left-right distinctions and to perceptions of danger—test the claim that this theory of how individuals use political cultures to develop their preferences outperforms the alternatives.

Political Institutions and Voter Turnout in the Industrial Democracies

Abstract: Differences in voter turnout among industrial democracies are a function of political institutions and electoral law. Specifically, the presence of nationally competitive electoral districts provides incentives for parties and candidates to mobilize voters everywhere, thereby increasing turnout. Disproportionality in the translation of votes into legislative seats provides a disincentive to voting, which lowers turnout. Multipartyism assigns elections a less decisive role in government formation, depressing turnout. By generating more decisive governments, unicameralism provides a clearer link between elections and legislation, increasing turnout. Finally, mandatory voting laws produce a disincentive to not vote. Empirical analyses of average voter-turnout levels in the 1970s and 1960s across 19 democracies are consistent with these expectations, although Switzerland and the United States appear to be outliers. The results have major implications for the way we interpret national differences in voter-turnout rates.

How are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A Hierarchical Model

Abstract: It has long been assumed that foreign-policy attitudes of the mass public are random, disorganized, and unconstrained if they exist at all. Further, foreign-policy thinking has not been found to be structured along standard ideological (liberal-conservative) lines, partisan lines, or class lines. We attempt to move the discussion from a question of whether foreign-policy attitudes are structured to a question of how they are structured. We propose and estimate (using a LISREL model) a hierarchically organized foreign-policy belief structure in which specific policy preferences are derived from postures (broad, abstract beliefs regarding appropriate general governmental strategies). These postures, in turn, are assumed to be constrained by a set of core values about the international community.

What moves public opinion

Abstract: Democratic theory must pay attention to what influences public opinion. In this study the content of network television news is shown to account for a high proportion of aggregate changes (from one survey to another) in U.S. citizens' policy preferences. Different news sources have different effects. News commentators (perhaps reflecting elite or national consensus or media biases) have a very strong positive impact, as do experts. Popular presidents tend to have positive effects, while unpopular presidents do not. In contrast, special interest groups tend to have a negative impact.

Value Change in Industrial Societies

Abstract: Ronald Inglehart has argued that, while most of the major political parties in Western countries tend to be aligned along a social class–based axis, support for new political movements and new political parties largely reflects the tension between materialist and postmaterialist goals and values. This has presented something of a dilemma to the traditional parties, and helps account for the decline of social-class voting. Scott Flanagan takes issue with Inglehart's interpretation in several particulars. Although their views converge in many respects, Flanagan urges conceptual reorientations and adumbrates a different interpretation of post–World War II political development in Europe and Japan.

Networks in context: the social flow of political information

Abstract: We examine the effects of individual political preferences and the distribution of such preferences on the social transmission of political information. Our data base combines a 1984 election survey of citizens in South Bend, Indiana with a subsequent survey of people with whom these citizens discuss politics. Several findings emerge from the effort. First, individuals do purposefully construct informational networks corresponding to their own political preferences, and they also selectively misperceive socially supplied political information. More important, both of these individual-level processes are shown to be conditioned by constraints imposed due to the distribution of political preferences in the social context. Thus, individual control over socially supplied political information is partial and incomplete. Finally, these information-transmitting processes interact with the social context in a manner that favors partisan majorities while undermining political minorities.

Inequality and Insurgency

Abstract: Maldistribution of land in agrarian societies is commonly thought to be an important precondition of mass political violence and revolution. Others argue that because of the difficulty of mobilizing rural populations for political protest, land maldistribution is irrelevant except as part of an inegalitarian distribution of income nationwide. These rival inequality hypotheses have significant implications with respect to the kinds of reforms likely to reduce the potential for insurgency in a society. They are tested using the most comprehensive cross-national compilation of data currently available on land inequality, landlessness, and income inequality. Support is found for the argument that attributes the greater causal import to income inequality. Moreover, the effect of income inequality on political violence is found to hold in the context of a causal model that takes into account the repressiveness of the regime, governmental acts of coercion, intensity of separatism, and level of economic development.

The languages of political theory in early-modern Europe

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Anthony Pagden 1. The concept of a language and the metier d'historien: some considerations on practice J. G. A. Pocock Part I: 2. The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe Nicolai Rubinstein 3. Civil science in the Renaissance: the problem of interpretation Donald Kelley 4. Dispossessing the barbarian: the language of Spanish Thomism and the debate over the property rights of the American Indians Anthony Pagden 5. The 'modern' theory of natural law Richard Tuck Part II: 6. Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the language of Renaissance humanism Quentin Skinner 7. The concept of ordre and the language of classical republicanism in Jean-Jacques Rousseau Maurizio Viroli 8. The language of seventeenth-century republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch or European? Eco Haitma Mulier 9. The civil religion of James Harrington Mark Goldie Part III: 10. Liberty, luxury and the pursuit of happiness M. M. Goldsmith 11. The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the 'Four-Stages Theory' Istvan Hont 12. 'Da metafisico a mercatante': Antonio Genovesi and the development of a new language of commerce in eighteenth-century Naples Richard Bellamy Part IV: 13. The criticism of rhetorical historiography and the ideal of scientific method: history, nature and science in the political language of Thomas Hobbes Gigliola Rossini 14. Saint-Simon and the passage from political to social science Robert Wokler 15. Alexander Hamilton and the language of political science Judith N. Shklar Index.

Television News and Citizens' Explanations of National Affairs

Abstract: Causal beliefs are important ingredients of public opinion. Citizens are able to identify the causes of complex national issues and do so spontaneously. Evidence is presented that individuals' explanations of political issues are significantly influenced by the manner in which television news presentations “frame” these issues. These results are politically consequential, for individuals' explanations of national issues independently affect their assessments of presidential performance.

Political Cleavages and Changing Exposure to Trade

Abstract: Combining the classical theorem of Stolper and Samuelson with a model of politics derived from Becker leads to the conclusion that exogenous changes in the risks or costs of countries' external trade will stimulate domestic conflict between owners of locally scarce and locally abundant factors. A traditional three-factor model then predicts quite specific coalitions and cleavages among owners of land, labor, and capital, depending only on the given country's level of economic development and its land-labor ratio. A preliminary survey of historical periods of expanding and contracting trade, and of such specific cases as the German “marriage of iron and rye,” U.S. and Latin American populism, and Asian socialism, suggests the accuracy of this hypothesis. While the importance of such other factors as cultural divisions and political inheritance cannot be denied, the role of exogenous changes in the risks and costs of trade deserves further investigation.

Residential Mobility and Voter Turnout

Abstract: We examine the characteristics of a largely ignored low-turnout group—people who have recently moved. We find that neither demographic nor attitudinal attributes explain their lower turnout. Instead, the requirement that citizens must register anew after each change in residence constitutes the key stumbling block in the trip to the polls. Since nearly one-third of the nation moves every two years, moving has a large impact on national turnout rates. We offer a proposal to reduce the effect of residential mobility on turnout and estimate that turnout would increase by nine percentage points if the impact of moving could be removed. The partisan consequences of such a change would be marginal.

The core of the constitution

Abstract: It is often argued that the United States Constitution was designed so as to create a stable political order. Yet in the literature on the formal theory of democracy, there has been very little examination of constitutional provisions for their stability-inducing properties. In this paper we demonstrate that bicameralism and the executive veto tend to create stability, that the legislative override of the executive veto tends to undermine this stability, and that the interaction of bicameralism and the executive veto is likely to produce stable outcomes despite the destabilizing impact of the veto override.

Institutional Structure and the Logic of Ongoing Collective Action

Abstract: Work by Axelrod, Hardin, and Taylor indicates that problems of repeated collective action may lessen if people use decentralized strategies of reciprocity to induce mutual cooperation. Hobbes's centralized solution may thus be overrated. We investigate these issues by representing ongoing collective action as an n-person repeated prisoner's dilemma. The results show that decentralized conditional cooperation can ease iterated collective action dilemmas—if all players perfectly monitor the relation between individual choices and group payoffs. Once monitoring uncertainty is introduced, such strategies degrade rapidly in value, and centrally administered selective incentives become relatively more valuable. Most importantly, we build on a suggestion of Herbert Simon by showing that a hierarchical structure, with reciprocity used in subunits and selective incentives centrally administered, combines the advantages of the decentralized and centralized solutions. This hierarchical form is more stable than the decentralized structure and often secures more cooperation than the centralized structure. Generally, the model shows that the logic of repeated decision making has significant implications for the institutional forms of collective action.

Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn't.

Abstract: Essays examine antipoverty policies of the last twenty years and discuss welfare, health care for the poor, job training, education programs, family structure, and civil rights.

Residues of a Movement: The Aging of the American Protest Generation

Abstract: The theory of political generations asserts that enduring and relevant political consequences result from critical experiences during the formative years. This study draws on a national three-wave panel study of young adults surveyed in 1965, 1973, and 1982 to test the theory with respect to the Vietnam era protest movement. College-educated protestors and nonprotestors are compared with themselves and with each other over time. Generational effects are categorized into absolute, relative, and equivalent continuity. Very strong continuities emerge for attitudes associated with the protestors' political baptism. Although erosion effects appear in more contemporary affairs, the protest generation remains quite distinctive. However, its limited size dampens the generation's political impact and qualifies the general thesis in a fashion that probably characterizes other examples of political generations also.

Why are Congressional Committees Powerful

Abstract: In “The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power” (this Review, March 1987) Kenneth Shepsle and Barry Weingast made the case that congressional committees are powerful not so much because of members' deference to them as because of the committees' ex post veto, a potential negative committees might deliver, say, at the conference committee stage of lawmaking. But Keith Krehbiel argues that congressional committees have, in fact, never possessed an uncircumventable ex post veto and are very much constrained by their parent chambers. In response, Shepsle and Weingast defend their model of the foundations of committee power.

Elite Ideology and Risk Perception in Nuclear Energy Policy

Abstract: Changing U.S. attitudes toward new technologies are examined, as are explanations of such changes. We hypothesize that increased concern with the risks of new technologies by certain elite groups is partly a surrogate for underlying ideological criticisms of U.S. society. The question of risk is examined within the framework of the debate over nuclear energy. Studies of various leadership groups are used to demonstrate the ideological component of risk assessment. Studies of scientists' and journalists' attitudes, media coverage of nuclear energy, and public perception of scientists' views suggest both that journalists' ideologies influence their coverage of nuclear energy and that media coverage of the issue is partly responsible for public misperceptions of the views of scientists. We conclude with a discussion of the historical development of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the relation of this movement to the public's declining support for nuclear energy.

Who Works with Whom? Interest Group Alliances and Opposition

Abstract: Interest-group interactions may be examined in ways comparable to the analysis of conflict and coalition in other areas of political science. We seek to measure and compare the structure of interest-group participation and conflict in four domains of U.S. domestic policy: agriculture, energy, health, and labor. Data are drawn from a survey of 806 representatives of organizations with interests in federal policy, supplemented by interviews with 301 government officials in the same four domains. Several types of data are adduced regarding the intensity and partisanship of group conflict in each domain and the range and variety of group participation. Coalitional patterns are described and the mutual positioning of different kinds of organization—peak-association groups versus more specialized trade, professional, or commodity groups, for example—are examined.

Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences

Abstract: Carlos Waisman has pinpointed the specific beliefs that led the Peronists unwittingly to transform their country from a relatively prosperous land of recent settlement, like Australia and Canada, to an impoverished and underdeveloped society resembling the rest of Latin America. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Public Opinion and the U.S. Supreme Court: FDR's Court-packing Plan

Abstract: I show the intimate connection between the actions of the justices and support for the Supreme Court during one of the most critical periods of U.S. political history, the four months of 1937 during which Franklin D. Roosevelt sought legislation to “pack” the high bench with friendly personnel. Over the period from 3 February through 10 June 1937, the Gallup Poll queried national samples on 18 separate occasions about FDR's plan. These observations constitute the core of my analyses. I demonstrate the crucial influence of judicial behavior and the mass media in shaping public opinion toward the Supreme Court. This research illuminates the dynamics of public support for the justices, contributes to a clearer understanding of an important historical episode, shows the considerable impact of the mass media on public attitudes toward the Court, and adds more evidence on the role of political events in the making of public opinion.

Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities

Abstract: What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they-and should they-hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can universal laws be discovered? Questions like these have been asked with increasing urgency in recent years, as some philosophers and researchers have perceived a "crisis" in the social sciences. "Metatheory in Social Science" offers many provocative arguments and analyses of basic conceptual frameworks for the study of human behavior. These are offered primarily by practicing researchers and are related to problems in disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and philosophy of science. While various points of view are expressed in these nineteen essays, they have in common several themes, including the comparison of social and natural science, the role of knowledge in meeting the demands of society and its pressing problems, and the nature and role of subjectivity in science. Some authors hold that subjectivity cannot be studied scientifically; others argue that it can and must be if progress in knowledge is to be made. The essays demonstrate the philosophical pluralism they discuss and give a wide range of alternative positions on the future of the social and behavioral sciences in a postpositivist intellectual world.

Political Context and Attitude Change

Abstract: Political context has an important impact on individual attitude change. This is an analysis of the dynamic effects of contextual variables. Drawing on data taken from the American National Election Study (ANES) panel study, we demonstrate that the environment shapes the way the citizen views politics. While varying in degree, the results hold for a broad (county-level) and a narrow (residential neighborhood-level) definition of the relevant context. The patterns involved suggest that citizens' evaluations of candidates and parties are most directly influenced by what their neighbors are saying at the moment, that is to say, the content of current discussion. In contrast, citizens' self-identification evinces sensitivity to the more stable partisan character of the environment. The results indicate that the impact of social influence is crucially dependent on the nature of contemporary political debate and that the social setting serves as an intervening mechanism in the broader communication system and not merely as an exogenous source for political information.

Asymmetric information and the coherence of legislation

Abstract: Legislators' beliefs, preferences, and intentions are communicated in committees and legislatures through debates, the proposal of bills and amendments, and the recording of votes. Because such information is typically distributed asymmetrically within any group of decision makers, legislators have incentives to reveal or conceal private information strategically and thus manipulate the collective decision-making process in their favor. In consequence, any committee decision may in the end reflect only the interests of a minority. We address a problem of sharing information through debate in an endogenous, agenda-setting, collective-choice process. The model is game theoretic and we find in the equilibrium to the game that at least some legislators have incentives to conceal private information. Consequently, the final committee decision can be "incoherent" by failing to reflect the preferences of all committee members fully. Additionally, we characterize the subset of legislators with any incentive to conceal data.

Democratic Representation and Partisan Bias in Congressional Elections

Abstract: The translation of citizen votes into legislative seats is of central importance in democratic electoral systems. It has been a longstanding concern among scholars in political science and in numerous other disciplines. Throughout this literature, two fundamental tenets of democratic theory, partisan bias and democratic representation, have often been confused. We develop a general statistical model of the relationship between votes and seats and separate these two important concepts theoretically and empirically. In so doing, we also solve several methodological problems with the study of seats, votes, and the cube law. An application to U.S. congressional districts provides estimates of bias and representation for each state and demonstrates the model's utility. Results of this application show distinct types of representation coexisting in U. S. states. Although most states have small partisan biases, there are some with a substantial degree of bias.

State Political Culture and Public Opinion

Abstract: Do the states of the United States matter (or are they of no political consequence)? Using a data set with over 50 thousand respondents, we demonstrate the influence of state political culture on partisanship and ideology. For individuals, we find that the state of residence is an important predictor of partisan and ideological identification, independent of their demographic characteristics. At the aggregate level, state culture dominates state demography as a source of state-to-state differences in opinion. In general, geographic location may be a more important source of opinion than previously thought. One indication of the importance of state culture is that state effects on partisanship and ideology account for about half of the variance in state voting in recent presidential elections.

Crisis Bargaining, Escalation, and MAD

Abstract: Although incomplete information is recognized to be an essential feature of crises, game-theoretic formulations have not generally modeled this explicitly. This paper models a mutually assured destruction (MAD) crisis as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information, sufficiently simple that its equibria may be found. These provide better game-theoretic foundations for the notions of resolve and critical risk and their role in crises and also make it possible to compare the bargaining dynamics of this model with those of descriptively richer, but incompletely specified models, revealing several inconsistencies: several analyses of MAD conclude that the state with the greatest resolve in this contest of resolve will prevail. Many models based on critical risks suggest that a state is less likely to escalate, the greater its adversary's resolve. In our model, however, the state with the weakest resolve sometimes prevails, and some states prove more likely to escalate if their adversaries' resolve is greater.

Guns and Butter and Government Popularity in Britain

Abstract: Britain under the government of Prime Minister Thatcher provides a unique opportunity to probe the effects of both war and macroeconomic performance on government popularity Monthly ratings for Thatcher and Conservative-party support (June 1979 to July 1985) are examined by way of Box-Tiao intervention models The model that best captures the impact of the Falklands War of 1982 is of the gradual-temporary variety: popularity gains accrued through the three-month war shrink in a geometric fashion Nevertheless, they prove to be worth over five percentage points for the Conservative party a year later, in the 1983 election Macroeconomic performance, meanwhile, is found to have an asymmetric effect on government popularity, with unemployment strongly significant but inflation not significant at all Apparently, the British public is punishing failure (on employment) while letting success (on inflation) go unrewarded Qualifications of the positive effect of war and the negative effect of macroeconomic performance are suggested

Agendas and the Control of Political Outcomes

Abstract: A considerable theoretical literature argues that if everyone votes sincerely, then an agenda setter has near dictatorial influence on final outcomes, whereas if everyone votes strategically, then an agenda setter's power is considerably reduced. This literature assumes that all feasible agendas are of a special type called amendment agendas. But actual legislative and committee agendas—notably those found in Congress—often are not of this type. Once we expand the domain of feasible agendas to include all types allowed by common parliamentary practice, the influence of agendas on legislative outcomes expands, even with strategic voting. Besides showing with counterexamples that previous results do not extend to a more realistic domain of agendas, we prove some theorems that specify the limits (such as they are) of an agenda setter's power.

Participation and Purpose in Committee Decision Making

Abstract: Participation in committee decision making is an important form of legislative behavior but one we know little about. I develop a model of committee participation and test it using data drawn from staff interviews and records of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The analysis confirms that congressmen are purposive actors, but it also shows that different interests incite participation on different issues and that motivational effects vary in predictable ways across legislative contexts. If members are purposive, however, they also face a variable set of opportunities and constraints that structure their ability to act. Members and especially leaders of the reporting subcommittee, for instance, enjoy advantages in terms of information, staff, and lines of political communication. At the same time, freshman status entails behavioral constraints despite the reputed demise of apprenticeship in legislative life. Understanding such patterns of interest and ability, I conclude, should permit us to illuminate several larger questions regarding decision making and representation in a decentralized Congress.