Self-Interest,Symbolic Politics,and Public Attitudes Toward Gun Control

Numerous studies have found that immediate and tangible self-interest has a minimal influence on public attitudes toward many policy issues. We examine public attitudes toward gun control in order to determine whether gun owners exhibit distinctive policy preferences. Our results indicate that self-interest strongly influences public preferences on gun control and that banning handguns evokes stronger self-interest effects than banning assault weapons or imposing a waiting period on purchases of firearms. We conclude by discussing why gun control evokes self-interested calculations among gun owners, the implications of our findings for self-interest theory, and suggestions for further lines of research.     

Millian Liberalism and Extreme Pornography

How sexuality should be regulated in a liberal political community is an important, controversial theoretical and empirical question—as shown by the recent criminalization of possession of some adult pornography in the United Kingdom. Supporters of criminalization argue that Mill, often considered a staunch opponent of censorship, would support prohibition due to his feminist commitments. I argue that this account underestimates the strengths of the Millian account of private conduct and free expression, and the consistency of Millian anticensorship with feminist values. A Millian contextual defense of liberty, however, suggests several other policy approaches to addressing the harms of pornography.     

Politics as Theory and Politics as Practice

In 1962, the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick published his seminal work In Defence of Politics. Fifty years on, formal political processes have never been in greater need of defending. In this article, former Home Secretary David Blunkett MP argues that in order to defend politics we need to change the way in which we ‘do’ our politics. In a 21st century response to Professor Crick's challenge to defend the role of politics in providing a counterweight to the financial markets and economic imperialism, Blunkett considers how it is possible to renew political democracy as a force for progressive change. The last five years of political and financial turmoil have seen politics smeared and even, in the case of Greece and Italy, elected governments removed and replaced by technocrats. With the power of government behind the people, it would be possible to foster a whole new spirit of seeing the political process as a way of organising, advising and yes funding a demand for something better from big institutions both public and private.     

Politics and Correctness

It is important that discussions of 'political correctness' within the discipline of political studies should not just replicate the crude conceptions of both 'politics' and 'correctness' that characterise the disputes that are gathered under that name. As a properly political phenomenon, 'political correctness' calls for careful and critical discussion by political scientists In this paper, the conceptualisations of 'politics' and 'correctness' in these disputes are examined In addition, the idea and practice of 'cultural' or 'discursive' politics is discussed, and the connection with disputes about the academic curriculum is examined.     

Politics and television

Texts reviewed:

Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch and Julian Ives (1978) The Challenge of Election Broadcasting, Leeds University Press.

Tom Burns (1977) The BBC: Public Institution and Private World, Macmillan Press.

Grace Wyndham Goldie (1977) Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936–76, Bodley Head.

Philip Schlesinger (1978) Putting ‘reality’ together: BBC News, Constable.

Michael Tracey (1977) Producing Political Television, Routledge Direct Edition.     

Politics and Administration

This article develops a theory of the administration and effectiveness of government programs. In the model, a bureaucrat chooses a mechanism for assigning a good to clients with uncertain qualifications. The mechanism applies a costly means test to verify the client's eligibility. A politician exercises oversight by limiting the bureaucrat's testing resources and the number of clients to be served. The model predicts the incidence of common administrative pathologies, including inefficient and politicized distribution of resources, inflexibility, program errors, and backlogs. When the politician favors marginally qualified clients, per capita spending is low and error rates are high. When the politician favors highly qualified clients, per capita spending is higher and error rates are lower. In the latter case, the bureaucrat may also use discriminatory testing, which allows the politician to target favored clients. Such targeted programs increase budgets and reduce backlogs, but they also increase error rates.     

When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics

Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996, 1998 ) and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999 ; Coleman 1999 ), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions—incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence—and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices.     

Rational Choice and Politics

The rational-choice approach brings scientific deductive methods to bear on politics. Appropriate methods are derived from physics, when actors interact probabilistically but non-rationally, and from game theory when they interact rationally. Collective action problems occur in the provision of public goods. As policies are themselves public goods, this leads to the game-theoretic analysis of voting, bureaucracy and lobbies. It is inconsistent to believe that economic actors are basically self-interested but that political actors are not. Rather, one should treat people as equally (not necessarily wholly) self-interested in each sphere. The paradoxes of social choice are then shown to have important implications for political science.     

Politics and the State

Political theorists disagree about whether 'politics' and 'the political' should bedefined narrowly or broadly. Defenders of broad conceptions argue that narrow definitions exclude phenomena that ought to be included and lead us to misunderstand the relationship between different forces in society. Defenders of narrow conceptions argue that broad definitions collapse the distinction between the social and the political, and deprive politics of any distinctive identity. I shall argue that neither of these arguments is successful and that disputes over whether we should adopt a narrow or a broad view of politics are, for the most part, merely verbal.