State (polity)

About: State (polity) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36954 publications have been published within this topic receiving 719822 citations. The topic is also known as: state (polity).

Public Opinion and Policy Liberalism in the American States

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of public opinion on public policy in the American states. We use a new measure of state public opinion, liberal-conservative ideological identification of state electorates, derived from aggregating CBS News/New York Times national opinion surveys. Regression and LISREL are used in the analysis to demonstrate that state opinion is a major determinant of state policy. Citizen preferences are markedly more important than state social and economic characteristics in accounting for patterns of policy liberalism in the states. These results constitute a major challenge to economic development as an explanation of state policy. Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense. -V. 0. Key (1961, p. 7) Popular control of public policy is a central tenet of democratic theory. Indeed, we often gauge the quality of democratic government by the responsiveness of public policymakers to the preferences of the mass public as well as by formal opportunities for, and the practice of, mass participation in political life. The potential mechanisms of democratic popular control can be stated briefly. In elections, citizens have the opportunity to choose from leaders who offer differing futures for government action. Once elected, political leaders have incentives to be responsive to public preferences. Elected politicians who offer policies that prove unpopular or unpleasant in their consequences can be replaced at the next election by other politicians who offer something different. Of course, this picture describes only the democratic ideal. A cynic would describe the electoral process quite differently: Election campaigns

Roots of reform : farmers, workers, and the American state, 1877-1917

Abstract: Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. By Elizabeth Sanders. American Politics and Political Economy. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, c. 1999. Pp. x, 532. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-226-73477-3; cloth, $48.00, JSBN 0-226-73476-5.) This book should have a powerful impact on the content delivered by textbooks and lecturers in survey courses, injecting far more continuity between the Populist and Progressive periods than historians have allowed. The conventional narrative recognizes some linkage between the People's Party's Omaha platform of 1892 and post-1900 reform, but that convention stresses that the social bases and leadership of reform shifted from farms and rural America and third party activists to cities and urban middle classes and Progressive presidents. Elizabeth Sanders powerfully revises this narrative, arguing that "the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians' drive to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism. The periphery generated the bulk of the reform agenda and furnished the foot soldiers that saw reform through the legislature" (pp. 3-4). The first 147 pages of this book cover the period up to 1896 and offer nothing new in a general way, but this reader's impatience with that situation was allayed by Sanders's bold arguments on many particulars. Regarding the Populists' inability to appeal to workers, Sanders dismisses the notion that the Populists bore full responsibility for that failure. Rather, from the Greenbackers on, Sanders asserts, agrarian reformers, including Bryan in particular, issued strong and consistent appeals to "labor" and "workers," but the latter simply did not respond. Although the book's first section is necessary, it is not an easy read. It is rewarding but might have been briefer given the book's density. Sanders rejects the "capitalist-dominance" thesis that views Progressive Era reform as managed by business and political elites. The capitalist response to new regulation was rather "reactive and largely negative" (p. 4), expressing itself mainly through the executive and the Supreme Court. Whereas earlier interpretations also have centered on presidential leadership, intellectuals, or new professionals, Sanders sharply shifts the focus to the regional political economies of the South and West and, especially, to the congressional representatives of these regions. She also argues that the post-1896 Democratic Party constituted the major vehicle responsible for the federal government's regulatory response to the imbalances of the new industrial-financial economy. William Jennings Bryan emerges in this story as a failing presidential candidate--in 1896, 1900, and 1908--but one who exerted great influence over the Democratic platforms, congressional agenda, and Wilson's New Freedom. Building on the agrarian protests from the 1870s on, and stimulated by renewed rural organization after 1900, Sanders argues that periphery agrarians brought significant government action to "the redefinition of trade policy; the creation of an income tax; a new, publicly controlled banking and currency system; antitrust policy; the regulation of agricultural marketing networks; a nationally financed road system; federal control of railroads, ocean shipping, and early telecommunications; and agricultural and vocational education" (pp. 7-8). The evidential heart of this book is analysis of roll-call voting in Congress from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the Taft and Wilson administrations. Dividing the country into economic regions and subregions, Sanders establishes her argument via three categories of Congressional districts, based primarily on per capita value added in manufacturing: core, diverse, and periphery. Time and again, legislators' votes tended to be polarized between manufacturing-business core and peripheral agrarian districts, with legislators from diverse areas divided or siding with the agrarians. …

Challenge to the Nation-State : immigration in Western Europe and the United States

Abstract: This volume presents the latest research by some of the world's leading figures in the fast growing area of immigration studies. Relating the study of immigration to wider processes of social change, the book focuses on two key areas in which nation-states are being challenged by this phenomenon: sovereignty and citizenship. Bringing together the separate clusters of scholarship which have evolved around both of these areas, Challenge to the Nation-State disentangles the many contrasting views on the impact of immigration on the authority and integrity of the state. Some scholars have stressed the stubborn resistance of states to relinquish territorial control, the continued relevance of national citizenship traditions, and the 'balkanizing' risks of ethnically divided societies. Others have argued that migrations are fostering a post-national world. In their view, states' immigration policies are increasingly constrained by global markets and an international human rights regime, membership as citizenship is devalued by new forms of postnational membership for migrants, and national monocultures are giving way to multicultural diversity. Focusing on the issue of sovereignty in the first section, and citizenship in the second, this compelling new study seeks to clarify the central stakes and opposing positions in this important and complex debate.

Dismantling Democratic States

Abstract: Bureaucracy is a much-maligned feature of contemporary government. And yet the aftermath of September 11 has opened the door to a reassessment of the role of a skilled civil service in the survival and viability of democratic society. Here, Ezra Suleiman offers a timely and powerful corrective to the widespread view that bureaucracy is the source of democracy's ills. This is a book as much about good governance as it is about bureaucratic organizations. Suleiman asks: Is democratic governance hindered without an effective instrument in the hands of the legitimately elected political leadership? Is a professional bureaucracy required for developing but not for maintaining a democratic state? Why has a reform movement arisen in recent years championing the gradual dismantling of bureaucracy, and what are the consequences? Suleiman undertakes a comparative analysis of the drive toward a civil service grounded in the New Public Management. He argues that "government reinvention" has limited bureaucracy's capacity to adequately serve the public good. All bureaucracies have been under political pressure in recent years to reduce not only their size but also their effectiveness, and all have experienced growing deprofessionalism and politicization. He compares the impact of this evolution in both democratic societies and societies struggling to consolidate democratic institutions. "Dismantling Democratic States" cautions that our failure to acknowledge the role of an effective bureaucracy in building and preserving democratic political systems threatens the survival of democracy itself.