The Armenian-American Lobby and Its Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy

Most of the few studies and press articles dealing with the U.S. Armenian lobby have tended to insist on this lobby’s successes, regarded as impressive and disproportionate. This has generated a few problems in its global understanding, especially with regards to its impact on U.S. foreign policy, and has contributed to shape a generalized perception of a “small” lobby, capable of considerable influence on U.S. foreign policy. The main goal of this article is to question this common perception in order to propose a more accurate evaluation of this lobby. Mostly thanks to its influence in Congress, it has succeeded in getting positive results, particularly concerning U.S. financial assistance to Armenia. However, it has also experienced some failures, particularly on issues related to Turkey or American energy policy.     

Campaign Contributions and U.S. Foreign Policy Outcomes: An Analysis of Cuban American Interests

To what extent are ethnic minority interest groups able to influence U.S. foreign policy? Current case study research has identified several factors that may condition the ability of diasporic groups to influence foreign policy toward ancestral “homelands.” To this point, existing studies have been unable to isolate the impact of campaign contributions from other factors that may influence U.S. foreign policy decision making. The current study uses a combination of conditional and standard logistic regression to examine the impact of Cuban American interest group and individual campaign contributions on a series of votes on key amendments in the 108^th and 109^th Congresses. Results from the study support the idea that the Cuban diasporic community in the United States has had an impact on U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba. However, there are significant limits to this influence conditioned in part by issue salience.     

Big Data and U.S. Public Policy

This paper examines the growing recognition of the phenomenon called “Big Data” and the policy implications it poses. It is argued that a core policy issue is personal and organizational privacy. At the same time there is a belief that analysis of “Big Data” offers potentially to provide public sector policy makers with extensive new information that would inform policy at unprecedentedly detailed levels. Despite this potential to improve the policy‐making process data often contain individual identifiable information that would negatively impact American core values such as privacy. This makes the use of these data almost impossible. The paper recognizes that there may be a way to strip individual data from Big Data sets thereby making their analysis more policy useful. This approach is not at this time technically feasible but research is ongoing.     

Foreign Policy and the Democratic Process*

In this paper one of the classical questions in the study of politics will be pursued, viz., whether foreign policy decisions are made in a less democratic manner than policies pertaining to the domestic sphere of fully industrialized and democratic states; and if so, how to account for such a condition. These two queries will be examined in terms of three topics, each of which is explored in a preliminary fashion: (a) the characteristic dimensions of the democratic process; (b) the problems of policy comparability across sectorial boundaries; and (c) possible explanatory hypotheses regarding sectorial variances in the democratic process.     

Policy voting in U.S. House primaries

ABSTRACT

This paper uses exit surveys of voters in four House primaries to ask how well voters are able to use primaries for the purpose of giving policy direction to their congressional parties. The surveys found that nearly half of voters could not recall the names of any candidate and that 11% were uncertain or could not recall for whom they had just voted. The surveys also found that nearly 40% of voters could not offer a political evaluation – that is, a like or dislike having political content – about any candidate, and that fewer than a quarter could offer political evaluations of as many as two candidates. The surveys found no evidence of policy-motivated voting in three of the four primaries, but substantial evidence of it in one. Yet even in that one race, voters split their support among three candidates sharing majority voter opinion on the key election issue and thereby opened the way for nomination of a candidate not sharing majority opinion. The paper concludes from this evidence that voters in these House primaries, and probably more widely, made little use of them for the purpose of giving policy direction to their parties.     

Homeland Security and the U.S. Public Management Policy Agenda

The U.S. has been described as an "uninteresting laggard" in comparative public management policy. The passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002 demands a reevaluation of this label. The Act created the Department of Homeland Security, but also marked a dramatic shift toward greater public personnel flexibility, both for the new Department and the entire federal government. It is tempting to suggest that the Act is an effort to "catch up" with the New Public Management benchmark countries. However, such an argument is overly simplistic and misleading. This article argues that the Act represents a triumph of a preexisting management agenda that was successfully tied to the issue of security during a political window of opportunity. The management agenda of the Bush administration pursues many of the concerns of the Clinton era, but does so with a more top-down and centralized interpretation of flexibility, reflecting an executive-centered philosophy toward government and a willingness to tackle the dominant stakeholder in this area, public service unions.     

Primacy Implementation of Environmental Policy in the U.S. States

Environmental regulation is frequently implemented through asystem that allows states to choose whether to assume primaryauthority, or "primacy," for implementation and enforcement.This study looks at what causes states to assume this authorityin two important areas of environmental policy: air and waterpollution. It finds that in each policy area, primacy assumptionis unrelated to the "greenness" of state environmental policygenerally and negatively related to indicators of policy innovationwithin that area. Rather than being driven by commitment tothe environment, primacy assumption appears to be driven predominatelyby other factors, which differ substantially across the airand water policy arenas. These findings call into question thewidely held view that primacy assumption is an indicator ofstate environmentalism and indicate that a more nuanced viewof what causes states to assume primacy is necessary to fullyunderstand the dynamics of intergovernmental policy implementation.