Showing papers in "Political Science Quarterly in 1981"

Cities by Contract: The Politics of Municipal Incorporation.

Abstract: The battle line in the urban conflict lies between the central city and the affluent suburb. The city, needing to broaden its tax base in order to provide increasingly necessary social services, has sought to annex the suburb. The latter, in order to hold down property taxes, has sought independence through incorporation.\"Cities by Contract\" documents and dissects this process through case studies of communities located in Los Angeles County. The book traces the incorporation of \"Lakewood Plan\" cities, municipalities which contract with the county for the provision of basic--which is to say minimal--services.The Lakewood plan is shown in this book to be a precursor of the full-scale tax revolt that was to break out a generation later. Miller points out that the settlers of these communities \"voted with their feet\" for lower taxes, lower levels of government spending on welfare and other social services, and a lower degree of bureaucratic intrusion into their affairs, much as in 1978 Californians statewide were to express the same desires and objectives at the ballot box by overwhelmingly backing the Jarvas-Gann initiative, Proposition 13.The book is one of the first on urban politics to combine the modeling techniques of microeconomics with the statistical analysis of data taken from interviews and documents. Still, the essential messages of the book are fully carried by its prose arguments and by the case studies.

The Social Bases of an Urban Political Machine: The Case of Palermo

Abstract: The Italian South (Mezzogiorno) is ideal terrain for studying the relationship between clientelist politics at the local level and the processes of economic and political development. Much of the literature on this topic points to the eventual inflationary consequences of clientelism as a means of mobilizing political consent, concluding that clientelist political systems can be sustained over time only in the presence of a constantly expanding resource base. ' In the Italian context, observers of clientelist politics have emphasized the massive transfer of resources from the national government to the underdeveloped South; this substitution of public resources by the center for scarce local resources, it is held, has provided the economic underpinning for clientelist power at the local level.2 This approach focuses on the role of the dominant Christian Democratic party (DC) as a mediator between the resources of the center and the needs of a resource-scarce periphery. While not denying the importance of the resources of the state in sustaining

Changes in American Voter Turnout, 1964-1976

Abstract: The ongoing decline in voter participation has disturbed many observers of American politics. Journalists and other commentators are fond of employing the national level of turnout as a kind of barometer of the health of the political system. At the very least, this measure serves to gauge the proportion of the population to which elected officials are accountable at the polls. Yet the size of the electoral universe has less impact on the policy process than does the identity of those who compose it. In the current debate over the causes and consequences of nonvoting, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the shifting demography of voter participation. To appreciate fully how the increase in nonvoting potentially affects the allocation of power in the United States, it is necessary to disaggregate the national trend into its component parts. In its broad contours, the scope of the phenomenon is clear enough. The proportion of the voting-age population casting ballots in presidential elections has fallen from a postwar peak of 62.8 percent in 1960 to a trough of approximately 53.9 percent in 1980, the lowest level since 1948. In a number of respects, the decline appears baffling. It has long been known that the affluent are the most likely to vote. During the last quarter-century, educational attainment and living standards have risen dramatically for the population as a whole, while great strides have been made toward reducing the size of the impoverished underclass. Moreover, many of the legal barriers that long impeded registration and voting, particularly in the South, have recently been swept away. One would therefore expect the contemporary period to have been marked by increasing voter participation. Indeed, the increase in educational levels, independent of other fac-

Voluntary Retirement, Incumbency, and the Modern House

Abstract: In the last decade, students of the Congress have placed great emphasis on the analysis of membership change. Most of the work has centered on the House of Representatives, and the two primary topics have been the development of service into a profession or career and the advantages of incumbency. Aspects of one or both of these themes have been studied by a variety of political scientists, and "career" and "incumbency" have been treated as critical elements in explaining the character and performance of the modern Congress as well as the behavior of its individual members. ' In large part the results of this research have been compatible and reinforcing. Admittedly, there have been important differences in findings for the House and Senate and disagreement about causes. Nevertheless, notions of the development and impact of the incumbency effect have, in general, fit neatly with notions of the development and impact of service in the Congress as a career. It is thus ironic that within a short time after students of the Congress have discovered career and incumbency and have begun to treat them as key,

The Origins of Massive Retaliation

Abstract: On 4 November 1952 the American voters elected Dwight D. Eisenhower president with a clear "mandate for change" in foreign and defense policy. The Truman administration's national security policies over the previous two years had alienated the people and the Congress. Truman's decision to commit American forces to check the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 had initially commanded great popular support. So too had the broad and expensive military buildup that the administration had begun after the outbreak of hostilities. But enthusiasm for both the war and the rearmament drive that accompanied it had waned considerably by 1952. Voter frustration at the apparently deadlocked fighting in Korea proved especially potent, and the Republicans exploited it skillfully. They were probably headed for victory in any case when on 24 October Eisenhower promised if elected to visit the battlefield in Korea. This pledge, which seemed to indicate that Eisenhower would take a fresh look at a stalemate the Democrats seemed willing to ignore, quickly became the most effective slogan of the campaign. On its strength, in the last ten days before the election, probable victory became a landslide.' Beyond benefiting from Truman's difficulties, Eisenhower also won support on the basis of his campaign pledges for new departures in policy. Chief among these was his promise to lower federal spending in general and defense spending in particular. The military budget, since it consumed about 70 percent of federal expenditures, was the most obvious target for spending reductions. Through the

"Dont't Tread on Me": Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in the Eighties

Abstract: Public opinion on national security issues has proven to be extraordinarily changeable. At the beginning of the 1970s it turned extremely "dovish" on such matters as reduction of the American defense budget and the defense of United States's overseas allies. Indeed it reached a level of dovishness unprecedented since the early days of the cold war, inspiring some of us to write articles with grandiloquent titles like "The Revolt of the Masses" and "The Americans' Retreat from World Power."' Coming as it did after a period of stability at a moderately "hawkish" level from the early 1950s well into the 1960s, and following the wrenching tragedy of Vietnam, it looked for a time as though public opinion might well stabilize on a new and relatively dovish consensus, forcing a sharp and long-lasting reduction in the American military establishment and alliance commitments. Furthermore, many Americans, including "elite" professionals, admitted to having changed their minds about preferred security policies and elaborated what appeared to be convincing reasons

Presidential Press-Conference Schedules: Who Hides, and When?

Abstract: Variations in approaches to key routines reveal important differences both between presidents and in the evolution of the modern presidency. As Hugh Heclo correctly observes, crisis events have received a disproportionate amount of attention by presidential scholars.' For Richard Neustadt, schedules take on a specific importance as one of the traditional constraints on presidents-and a constraint that was substantially reduced in the 1960s.2 A president and his staff feeling unconstrained by any necessity for fixed schedules can rather easily, as in the Johnson presidency, fall in to a "chicken little" syndrome in which frenzied White House activities replace more structured routines. Important questions can be asked regarding the scheduling of press conferences as one aspect of presidential routines. Do some presidents tend more than others to hide from press conferences during difficult situations, such as a Cuban missile crisis or urban riots? Do all presidents, or some more than others, seek to avoid interaction with the press as their popularity undergoes a major slide in the polls? Have some presidents simply stuck to their schedules regardless of events? Historically, has the creation of press conferences as primarily televised events altered their regularity in use? Both individual

The Brittle Mandate: Electoral Dealignment and the 1980 Presidential Election

Abstract: In the wake of the 1980 presidential balloting, an important debate has sprung up over what the election results actually mean and what their long-term consequences are likely to be. On the one side are those who argue that a marked ideological change has occurred in the United States in recent years the populace has "swung to the right" and that Ronald Reagan and the Republicans are building what is likely to be a lasting new majority on the more conservative public mood. On the other side are proponents of the view that the election was simply the rejection of an ineffective president who had to confront some intractable problems, and that at most the GOP won "an opportunity" to show that it could govern successfully. This is not the first time in modern politics, of course, that some observers have detected the emergence of a coherent new majority. In the Eisenhower years, many concluded that the growing post-World War II prosperity, manifested in the burgeoning new suburbs, was prompting a long-term shift to the Republicans.' Then, between 1968 and 1973, a number of students of American

The Centralizing Effects of Austerity on the Intergovernmental System

Abstract: Even though the attractiveness of devolving public decision making and policy implementation to state and local governments is widely acknowledged, changes are occurring in the U.S. system of intergovernmental relations that are eroding local autonomy and centralizing authority. This is not a new observation. In recent years, observers of intergovernmental relations have noted that the discretionary portion of local government budgets has been declining in proportion to the growing presence of federal funding. But now the processes of erosion of state and local autonomy and centralization of authority appear to be accelerating as resource scarcity and the structure of federal grants, in combination, are causing subtle, yet fundamental, changes in the scope and role of state and local governments.'

Black Power and the Transformation from Protest to Policies

Abstract: In a retrospective examination of black power in 1977, Dianne Pinderhughes analyzed a sample of the speeches and writings of individuals and organizations that had been prominent in the development and articulation of the concept. She found that there was only a narrow area of common agreement on the elements of black power and that on close examination even in this narrow area the common elements were so vague and general "as to be meaningless as far as giving specific direction to participants at the grassroots level."' Joel Aberbach and Jack Walker found similar evidence at the grassroots level. In their study of the attitudes of a sample of Detroit residents, black and white, they found that the overwhelming majority of whites evaluated black power negatively, while opinion among blacks was divided: 42.2 percent were favorable and 49.6 percent were unfavorable. Those who evaluated it favorably saw black power as a call for black unity and an expression of a desire for a fair share of society's opportunities; those who viewed it unfavorably saw it as meaningless.2 And in the early scholarly commentaries on the meaning of black power, one finds similar disagreement.3 Thus, at the elite level, at the

Search for security : Saudi Arabian oil and American foreign policy, 1939-1949

Abstract: Miller shows how the American stake in Saudi Arabian oil challenged the United States to create closer ties with the Saudi kingdom, compelling the move from isolation to involvement with the Middle East. He describes the growing awareness of the stratehic importance of Saudi Arabia, U.S. shrinking oil reserves and the focusing of America on gaining access to the king's oil, and the continued efforts of U.S. officials after World War II to develop Arabian oil even in the emerging cold war.Originally published in 1980.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.