The 1992, 1994 and 1996 elections: A comment and a forecast

A model of the two-way relationship between elections and the economy, previously estimated on historical data for 1916–1988, is applied to the United States elections of 1992, 1994, and 1996. The 1992 result was a surprise to the model since the economy had performed reasonably well that election year. The midterm elections of 1994 were accurately forecast. The Republicans took control of Congress not because of unusual circumstances but because of a normal midterm cycle. President Clinton's chances in 1996 look dim given the current modest growth rate and an electoral bias favoring Republican presidential candidates. But an alternative model, keyed more to the voters choosing Clinton to balance the Republican Congress, gives him a reasonable chance of reelection.     

Barriers to competition and the effect on political shirking: 1953–1992

Economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents, political parties, and presidents. The broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of “shirking” in congressional voting. The objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time, largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections, thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection. We use a quasi-experimental design that controls for the effects of party, region, electoral safety, presidential control of the White House, and constituency factors, in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll-calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992. We find that “shirking” in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post-1970s phenomenon.     

Attentiveness to television news and opinion change in the fall 1992 presidential campaign

This paper examines the extent to which attention to television news impacted affective evaluations of presidential candidates during the last two months of the 1992 campaign. Our analyses show that attentiveness to campaign news significantly influenced evaluations in a manner consistent with the tone of news coverage for each candidate. We disaggregate the data by party and ideology, however, and discover this effect to be conditional, depending critically on the character and intensity of political predispositions. Throughout the paper we emphasize the interplay between political predispositions and the valence of network coverage, underscoring the contingent effect of media messages. We conclude with a brief discussion of our results and stress the importance of partisan reinforcement, which we found was a major consequence of news media reception during the fall 1992 campaign.     

A party system in transformation: The April 1992 Italian election

This article uses evidence from a survey of Conservative MPs to assess the importance of the divide over European policy in the British Conservative party. One key consequence of the conflict over Europe is its effect on the party leadership. Tensions over EC policy played a very substantial part in Margaret Thatcher's downfall and they continue to affect the premiership of her successor, John Major.     

Forecasts and Preferences in the 1992 General Election

Little attention has been paid to the influence of expectations for victory on the formation of general election preferences in U.S. presidential races. There is good reason to believe, however, that under certain conditions citizens' forecasts of who will win the fall election may influence their preference and their vote. We model preferences during the course of the fall 1992 campaign as a function of two kinds of expectations. First we attempt to identify a component of expectations that is independent of political projection. We discover that expectations based only on information about the race play a prominent role in preference formation early in the fall but decline later as the cost of information drops. Similar results obtain when we include projection in the model of expectations. We conclude that general elections may have some of the same dynamic properties that are observable in primaries. Since early momentum in the fall campaign may influence subsequent preference formation, we contend that leads in early polls are valuable.     

Does Policy Stability Increase the Constitutional Court's Independence? The Case of Italy During the First Republic (1956–1992)

In this paper, we consider thesentences of constitutional illegitimacy bythe Italian Constitutional Court in theFirst Republic (1956–1992) as a measure ofits independence from politicians. We focuson the Court's incidental review and testwhether the Court's independence increaseswhen there is more policy stability, namelywhen politicians are less able to changethe policy status quo by legislation. Wefollow Tsebelis (2002) in assuming thatlegislative policy change is less likelywhen either the number and/or ideologicaldistance of veto players increases. As aproxy for the size of the veto players'Pareto set, we use either the number ofparties in government, or the number ofparties forming a constitutional majorityin Parliament, or the number of effectiveparties in Parliament, or measures ofideological distance based on Laver andHunt (1992). By controlling for the Court'sdegree of internal cohesion, cointegrationanalysis shows that there is a stable andpositive long-run relationship between theCourt's independence and proxy measures ofthe degree of policy stability.     

Explaining the Enhanced HIPC Initiative: A Response to Michaelowa (2003)

Michaelowa (2003, 2002) proposes a political-economy model to explain the re-design of the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt reliefinitiative in 1999. The principal assumption justifying the adoption of thisalternative approach is an alleged paucity, if not non-existence, of applied economic research on sustainable debt levels. This note challenges that assumption.     

A more-than-human political moment (and other natural catastrophes)

Catastrophic events such as wildfires are predicted to increase and intensify because of climate change. This paper speculates on how politics may look within such a context by deploying Rancière's political theorisations. We examine how a posthumanist re-configuration of this humanist notion of politics contributes to thinking about, acting for, and living within a rapidly changing climate. Specifically, we make a case for “more-than-human” political moments using the illustration of wildness – in the form of a wildfire – breaking free of wilderness and burning the settled lands of human habitation. In doing so, we draw on a relational ontology that re-configures agency and speech as “more-than-human”.     

From (Mis)education to Paideia

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to discuss the institutional preconditions of a democratic paideia, both at the social level and the educational level itself; and second, to examine a transition strategy for the move from present miseducation (as it evolved in modernity) to a democratic paideia through an emancipatory education process. A basic tenet of the approach adopted by this paper is that education is intrinsically linked to politics as the very meaning of education is assumed to be defined by the prevailing meaning of politics.