Using state polls to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes

This paper uses pre-election polls to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in the states and the Electoral College. The approach is notable in three ways. First, we employ state-level polls to predict voting outcomes in the states; second, we associate probabilities with alternative election outcomes, and third, we identify states most likely to be pivotal in the Electoral College. Using information available on the day before the election, we estimated that the probability of a Republican victory in the Electoral College in the 2004 election was 47.27%.     

Market structure and disempowering regulatory intermediaries: Insights from U.S. trade surveillance

Public agencies outsource a wide variety of tasks to nonstate actors, or what can be referred to as regulatory intermediaries. In certain circumstances, these agencies may seek to disempower those regulatory intermediaries by reclaiming, duplicating, or transferring the outsourced task. When will these disempowerment attempts be successful? This article presents the Market Structure Hypothesis, which contends that the level of competition between regulatory intermediaries will, all things equal, determine whether disempowerment attempts succeed. To test this hypothesis, this article examines the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's attempts to acquire the independent capacity to conduct nationwide trade surveillance in the 1980s (Market Oversight Surveillance System) and 2010s (Consolidated Audit Trail). Evidence derives from archival materials, a Freedom of Information Act Request, and 60 interviews in Oxford, London, Toronto, New York City, and Washington, DC. The empirical results corroborate the hypothesis' expectations, contributing to our understanding of public-private partnerships and shedding new empirical light on an understudied topic of securities regulation.     

Welfare policymaking and intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender in U.S. state legislatures

Welfare policy in the American states has been shaped profoundly by race, ethnicity, and representation. Does gender matter as well? Focusing on state welfare reform in the mid‐1990s, we test hypotheses derived from two alternative approaches to incorporating gender into the study of representation and welfare policymaking. An additive approach, which assumes gender and race/ethnicity are distinct and independent, suggests that female state legislators—regardless of race/ethnicity—will mitigate the more restrictive and punitive aspects of welfare reform, much like their African American and Latino counterparts do. In contrast, an intersectional approach, which highlights the overlapping and interdependent nature of gender and race/ethnicity, suggests that legislative women of color will have the strongest countervailing effect on state welfare reform—stronger than that of other women or men of color. Our empirical analyses suggest an intersectional approach yields a more accurate understanding of gender, race/ethnicity, and welfare politics in the states.     

U.S.-China Space Cooperation: Balancing Act between the U.S. Congress and President

There are a growing number of U.S. space scientists and managers calling for reinitiating cooperation with China in space. It is well-known that investigations of the U.S. Congress into various allegations involving China have resulted in a series of laws curtailing space cooperation between these two countries. By surveying the concurrent political developments within the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, this article attempts to reveal the domestic compulsions that propelled changes in the U.S. space policy towards China. The fundamental impetus is the power struggle and differences between the U.S. president and Congress in their perception of U.S. economic interests and national security in the context of space technology that strained these relations. Recent U.S. presidents who inherited this situation added to the discourse based on their own perceptions about outer space and China. These perceptions either found congruence with the policy of the U.S. Congress or led to finding ways to circumvent its legal restrictions. Based on these developments, it is concluded that the view of the U.S. president has alternated between necessary, desirable, and objectionable on the issue of U.S.-China space cooperation, and the U.S. Congress has thus shifted from supporting to restricting and then legally banning cooperation.     

Healthtown, U.S.A

The landscape of health care is about to change. Under the Clinton proposal every American will choose one of three basic kinds of health plan--HMO, fee-for-service or a combination. The big questions are how much you will pay and how you will choose your doctors. Lost already? Here's a tour of Healthtown, U.S.A.     

National security and surveillance: the public impact of the GCSB Amendment Bill and the Snowden revelations in New Zealand

Abstract

In New Zealand, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extraordinary scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance capabilities and the facilitating role of the Five Eyes alliance converged with increasing public concerns about the Government Communications Security Bureau Amendment and Related Legislation Bill in 2013. This generated an intense and sustained debate in the country about surveillance policy. It was a debate in which Prime Minister John Key has featured prominently. While apparently unable to clearly refute Snowden’s claims concerning mass surveillance in New Zealand, Key’s vigorous public interventions helped counter the short-term political and diplomatic fallout. However, the long-term impact of public concerns over the surveillance policies of the Key government may be much harder to predict in what is an intimate democracy, and the prospect of substantial political blowback cannot be ruled out.     

U.S. State Budget Directors: Characteristics, Experience, and Attitudes

Much literature exists on state government budgeting, but until now, none existed on state budget directors. This article reports on a survey of these individuals. Their ages, genders, race, education, and work experience are reported. Their work week is discussed in terms of number of hours worked and interactions with their staff, the governor, and the legislature. Attitudes about the job and about their personal lives as related to their jobs are discussed. Their plans for when they leave office are considered. The characteristics and attitudes of the directors are compared with data about their respective states in search of possible linkages.     

Terrorism,gender, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

The 2016 U.S. election provides the opportunity to assess how gender, party, and experience shape candidate evaluations when terrorist threat is elevated. The presidential contest featured the first woman major party nominee (Hillary Clinton), a major party nominee without political experience (Donald Trump), and terrorism was salient. We argue that security threats dampen public confidence in Democratic women running for office, yet an experience advantage could countervail against those tendencies. We test expectations using the 2016 ANES and two experimental studies. We first affirm that individuals worried about terrorism held lower evaluations of Clinton and higher evaluations of Trump. We then test an active manipulation of the salience of national security experience and find that it mitigates Clinton's disadvantage, but only in the absence of a counter-message. The results underscore the difficulty that Democratic women face in overcoming the negative influence of party and gender stereotypes when running for office in times of terrorist threat.     

Internet Taxation and U.S. Intergovernmental Relations: From Quill to the Present

One of the most contentious issues involving federal, state,and local relations today is Internet taxation. Internet taxationis a significant battleground because it involves issues ofgreat import to federalism, including state and local autonomyand revenue adequacy. Since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 decisionin Quill v. North Dakota, the taxability of online transactionshas been governed by the court's physical presence nexus rule.This nexus rule has recently been called into question by variousorganizations, corporations, and elected officials. Proposalsto alter the nexus rule abound from various sources. This articleexamines the roles played by these various actors in the Internettaxation debate and explores the potential implications of changesto the nexus for federalism and intergovernmental relations.     

Introduction: Social Media,Political Marketing and the 2016 U.S. Election

This essay introduces the contributions of the volume “Social Media, Political Marketing and the 2016 U. S. Election.” Using a variety of methodological approaches, the authors investigate the communication strategies of the Democratic and Republican candidates for president together with the responses of their audience. Collectively, this research offers insights into how new communication technologies are changing both political marketing and the ways candidates and voters interact.     

Drugs,law, people,place and the state: ongoing regulation,resistance and change

We introduce this special issue firstly by tracing drugs from their traditional, cultural and religious uses through to their roles as commodities in colonial relations and now the global economy. We secondly explore the shifting nature of drugs and drug use in different places and times as shaped by politics, especially state regulation and the law. Thirdly, given the complexity as well as contingency of drugs, we survey a wide range of relevant theoretical approaches, but suggest that a critical analysis attend to their spatial framing and geography. Fourthly, and finally, we summarize the eight papers comprising this collection.     

Relationship between the retirement, disability, and unemployment insurance programs: the U.S. experience

This article was prepared initially for an international conference of social security program administrators and researchers. They examined the reasons for, and implications of, a recent trend in several European countries toward making it easier to qualify for retirement or disability benefits as a way of alleviating long-term unemployment. The article notes that the United States has not followed this trend. Instead, this country has continued to use temporary extensions of unemployment insurance benefits as a way to help the long-term unemployed during recessionary periods. Since the mid-1970's, the emphasis in retirement and disability insurance programs has been to strengthen the financial integrity of these programs rather than to expand eligibility. Described here are the progression of extended benefit provisions of unemployment insurance through the most recent recession, the historical development of early retirement features in the social security program, and the more recent attention that has been paid to the financing issues that have played a central role in legislation during the late 1970's and early 1980's. Unemployment experience and trends toward early retirement are examined, along with the role of public and private employee pension plans that supplement social security retirement benefits. Preliminary data from the Social Security Administration's New Beneficiary Survey show the prevalence of such pension coverage for recent retirees and the extent to which these pension benefits were claimed before normal retirement age.     

Polarization,candidate positioning,and political participation in the U.S.

Although there is clear evidence of growing ideological divides between the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is a lack of consensus about how this polarization impacts political participation. Using data from the 2010–2018 election cycles, we test how candidates’ distances from each other and distances from constituents are related to both voting and non-voting behavior. We fail to find evidence that the distance between candidates in and of itself depresses activity. Distance from a copartisan candidate can lower the likelihood of participation, but this is often offset by the greater likelihood of participation that comes with increased distance from an outparty candidate. Together, these results suggest that rather than demobilizing potential voters, polarization is instead motivating individuals by clarifying which candidate they do not want. Such findings are consistent with evidence of significant levels of negative partisanship and offer further insight into how candidate positioning impacts the electorate.     

Introduction: Immigration and U.S. Integration, Policy Reforms, and Economic Change

The economic and political ramifications of immigration will become increasingly evident in the United States during the coming decade, particularly in view of recent immigration policies that guarantee that the magnitude and diversity of the inflow will continue to grow. This symposium presents research that examines the role of immigrants in industrial restructuring and evaluates the effects of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The importance of English language skills for economic advancement, and of government-supported training for refugees, are also examined. Together, this body of research directs our attention to the need for a more active public and private sector role in assisting all U.S. workers prepare for the demands of the labor market of the future.