Jonathan Lewallen  Sean M. Theriault  Bryan D. Jones 《Regulation & Governance》2016,10(2):179-190

The public's approval of Congress is at an all time low. The parties seem to have taken the legislative process hostage for their own electoral gain. Whereas traditional arguments about congressional dysfunction focus on polarized voting coalitions or outputs – particularly legislation – in this article we highlight congressional information processing and how it has changed in this highly partisan era. By coding congressional hearings according to the kind of information on which they focus, we find that members of Congress are receiving one‐sided information to a greater degree and are spending less time learning about potential solutions. We use these results to make numerous recommendations for improving how Congress gathers its information.  相似文献   

    

Amanda L. Robinson  Gillian M. Pinchevsky  Jennifer A. Guthrie 《国际比较与应用刑事审判杂志》2016,40(3):195-208

Physical violence is but one of many tools that may be used to gain greater power within intimate relationships, yet the legal response has been critiqued for failing to recognise and respond to the full spectrum of abusive behaviours, such as coercive control. Using a sample of police officers from the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), the current study utilises hypothetical vignettes to assess police officers’ perceptions of domestic abuse, including those incidents that are not necessarily physically violent, but involve stalking and other coercive, controlling behaviours that are harmful and require intervention. Within- and between-country similarities and differences were analysed. Findings revealed that the majority of officers in both countries possessed a good level of understanding of domestic abuse and how they should respond to it – amidst and beyond the physical violence. However, our analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data also showed that the use of physical violence is at the forefront of many officers’ expectations about domestic abuse, and that when physical violence is absent, the police response is less proactive. Our study finds some support for the idea that non-physical abuse does go “under the radar” to some extent for some officers, and that this is more the case for American officers than their British counterparts. Findings are discussed in terms of context of the research sites and implications for policy, practice and future research.  相似文献   

    

Mileah Kromer  Laura Roselle 《The Journal of Legislative Studies》2016,22(1):30-53

How do members of the US Congress give credit when credit is due for political achievements? Focusing on an important credit giving scenario – credit giving to the president of the United States – this research suggests that credit giving is a form of non-roll call position taking and members give credit in a way that is reflective of individual, institutional, and constituency factors. Using an original data set composed of the official congressional statements concerning the death of Osama bin Laden, findings suggest the proximate decision to issue a statement is related to individual and institutional factors. Within the issued statements, however, credit giving is primarily driven by presidential popularity in the constituency. In addition to being less predictable in their credit giving behaviour, members of the Senate are less likely to give credit than their colleagues in the House of Representatives. Finally, Republican women in the House of Representatives are less likely to give the president credit than other members.  相似文献   

    

Taofang Huang  Sean M. Theriault 《The Journal of Legislative Studies》2013,19(1):41-62

Roll call voting by members of the US Congress has been frequently studied. In contrast, the various decisions leading up to roll call voting are relatively unexplored. This article analyses one of those decisions: when senators announce their final passage vote intention. The authors use the same set of variables to analyse both the timing of the announcement and the final passage vote. They find that different independent variables predict these two different decisions, though the constituency and the senator's institutional setting matter in both. Furthermore, this study corroborates an assumption in the rational choice literature that those members with the most information are the first movers.  相似文献   

    

Bryan W. Marshall  Brett W. Curry  Richard L. Pacelle 《Politics & Policy》2014,42(1):37-76

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James I. Wallner 《The Journal of Legislative Studies》2014,20(3):380-405

This article analyses the extent to which institutional rules constrain member behaviour in the United States Senate by examining the evolution of its parliamentarian. Interestingly, the US Senate parliamentarian has received surprisingly little scholarly attention given the important role she performs in the legislative process. The subsequent analysis thus provides a new understanding of the parliamentarian's role in the legislative process and the interplay between institutional rules and member behaviour in the Senate. To this end, the following analysis is situated within the context of the two primary theoretical approaches to understanding how institutional rules constrain member behaviour: path dependency and majoritarianism. These contrasting approaches provide expectations about the extent to which members will defer to the parliamentarian's interpretation of Senate rules rather than exercising their own discretionary control over those rules. Examining the evolving relationship between the parliamentarian and individual members affirms the centrality of institutional rules as a constraint on member behaviour over the past several decades. Yet such an examination also yields two surprising, and potentially contradictory, observations. First, individual senators in both parties have increasingly deferred to the parliamentarian to interpret the Senate's rules. This is surprising given that the Senate has simultaneously become more individualistic, partisan, and ideological over the same period. Second, the majority party has recently disregarded the norm of parliamentary constraint reflected in past practice and demonstrated a willingness to ignore Senate rules when doing so was necessary to achieve legislative success. This could signify a potential shift in how majorities view the constraints imposed by Senate rules if current trends of legislative dysfunction continue.  相似文献   

    

Andrea Locatelli  Michele Testoni 《European Security》2013,22(3):345-362

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Jim Giblin 《Canadian journal of African studies》2013,47(2):319-326

In 1926, the United States (US) company Firestone Rubber in Akron, Ohio initiated a second practice of segregation in Liberia. The first practice began with the minority regime of the Afro-American settlers over 17 ethnic groups in the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Civil rights were unheard of in Liberia during either of these two periods. This changed when Liberian students travelled to the US on government scholarships, primarily to study in historical black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the 1940s and 1950s. When the Liberian students were exposed to the Civil Rights Movement, they fully understood the injustice of the situation in Liberia. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and others travelled to the Gold Coast for its transition into becoming the nation of Ghana on 6 March 1957. Meetings between King and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah led to collaborative efforts towards ending colonial racism in Africa and segregation in the US. During the Cold War, segregation in the US and Liberia was a source of shame for both nations. Liberian students returning from the US began “sit-ins” in protest against segregated Firestone facilities. The Liberian government responded by enacting its first Civil Rights Act against Firestone in 1958 and ending discrimination, except in segregated schools. This article shows, however, that it took more than another 30 years for the first decolonisation process to end the minority regime after the Civil Rights Acts of 1958, and to end the original form of ethnic segregation, which began in 1847 and ended as a result of the violent civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.  相似文献   

    

Povilas Žielys 《Democratization》2013,20(5):878-898

A growing number of political scientists notice worrying deficiencies of new democracies in Georgia and Ukraine. Looking for possible reasons they usually focus on internal factors. However, external factors may have also played their part. This article draws attention to the US foreign policy which, it is argued, did not further democratic consolidation goals in post-revolutionary Georgia and Ukraine. The Bush administration's policy towards these two countries is described as a manifestation of a new version of the Kirkpatrick doctrine which instructed US foreign-policy makers to choose the lesser evil of the two: unconsolidated, yet pro-American, democracies in the post-Soviet space.  相似文献   

    

Paolo Cecchini 《The international spectator : a quarterly journal of the Istituto affari internazionali》2013,48(3):27-36

The Bush administration has been too quick to dismiss containment as an obsolete hangover of the Cold War. Appropriately modified to operate through international institutions and regional alliances, containment provides the most viable available basis for responding to terrorist threats emanating from rogue regimes and weak states.  相似文献