Development Ballot Measures, Interest Group Endorsements, and the Political Geography of Growth Preferences

In response to rapid population and economic growth, many communities have turned to voter initiatives to resolve their land use disputes. We find that despite strong public concern about growth, voters often support measures that allow or encourage new development. We consider the sources of this support by analyzing patterns of voting on a range of prodevelopment ballot initiatives. These initiatives provide a valuable opportunity to understand how economic self-interest, geography, interest group endorsements, and public goods affect citizen support for development policies. We find that interest group endorsements significantly increase public support for new development. These endorsements help voters evaluate the personal impact of complex development proposals and allow voters to behave in ways that reflect a high degree of sophistication .     

Political Information, Political Involvement, and Reliance on Ideology in Political Evaluation

Many studies have focused on the relationship between political information and the use of ideology. Here, we argue that two “evaluative motivations”—general investment of the self in politics and extremity of partisanship—serve as moderators of this relationship. Specifically, we use data from two recent national surveys to test whether the possession of information is more strongly associated with a tendency to approach politics in an ideological fashion among individuals high in both types of evaluative motivation. Results supported this hypothesis, revealing that information was more strongly associated with ideological constraint and with a tendency to give polarized evaluations of conservatives and liberals among those who highly invest the self in politics and those with more extreme partisanship. As such, this study suggests that information and involvement interact to shape the use of ideology.     

Transparency, Political Polarization, and Political Budget Cycles in OECD Countries

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. While some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies, in contrast we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies. Using a sample of 19 OECD countries in the 1990s, we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low(er) transparency countries, while no such cycles can be observed in high(er) transparency countries. Furthermore, we find, in accordance with recent theory, that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries.     

The Science of Public Administration: Problems,Presumptions, Progress,and Possibilities

Nearly 70 years ago, Dahl noted the difficulty of constructing a science of public administration that was plagued by three interrelated problems: values, behavior, and culture. Underlying all three problems was the presumption that public administration could establish a set of universal principles independent of moral or political ends, individual human differences, or social influences. In discussing these three broad and easily accessible themes, Dahl did more than identify and critique the field's problems and presumptions. He also provided a road map to move the field forward and establish a science of public administration. Drawing on the framework provided by Dahl, this article argues that the field has made considerable progress in recognizing, if not addressing, each problem raised by Dahl. Even so, several current presumptions or omissions are also identified that, if challenged, can provide additional possibilities to advance the science of public administration.     

Money, Time, and Political Knowledge: Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions correctly. Another was given extra time. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11–24%. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents' recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews. Our work also suggests that existing measures fail to capture relevant political search skills and, hence, provide unreliable assessments of what many citizens know when they make political decisions. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate people's capacities for informed decision making.     

Reordering Honours: Perspectives and Possibilities

The UK's honour system is a strange mixture of ancient tradition and Victorian invention, and is drifting into obsolescence. Many of its honours recall a vanished imperial past, or maintain increasingly unacceptable demarcations between classes of recipients. However, the high rate of acceptance of honours and the almost universal existence of similar systems throughout the world suggests that people do still value an honours system. But what form should it take? In 2004 two separate reports looked at most elements of the system and produced recommendations, though their impacts were lost in the shadow of the far more dramatic Butler Report. David Cannadine assesses both honours reports and their prospects for adoption at a time when the policy‐makers and government are preoccupied with other issues. He concludes that the time is right for change — in spite of the inevitable opposition from some quarters — given that both Whitehall and Westminster agree that change is necessary.     

Political Culture, Political System Characteristics, and Public Policies Among the American States

Daniel Elazar's typology of political culture is updated forall states for 1980 using religious affiliation data. On average,the political culture indices do not vary much from simitarmeasures constructed for 1906–1936. The effects of politicalculture on state politics and policy are tested in two ways:(1) by calculating partial correlation coefficients for tendependent variables holding four environmental variables constant(affluence, industrialization, fertility, and liberal politicalideology), and (2) by estimating regression equations withintwo categories of political culture (individualistic and traditionalistic)to gauge the indirect or contextual effects of culture. Thepartial correlation analysis yields the expected outcome—moralisticstates have more interparty competition, higher voter turnout,more policy-relevant parties, and more liberal and innovativepolicies; traditionalistic states show the opposite result.The attempt to assess the contextual effects of political cultureproves less satisfactory. No such effects appear for about halfthe dependent variables, and the contextual effects that arefound correspond only in part to expectations.     

高校思想政治理论课教学改革探微

加强和改进大学生思想政治理论课教学,要创新教育理念,提高大学生对思想政治理论课的重要性和必要性认识;要创新教学内容,增强思想政治理论课教学的针对性和实效性;要创新课堂教学模式,增强思想政治理论课教学的吸引力和感染力.结合思想政治理论课程的教学目标、教学内容、教学方法以及教学载体几个方面,论述了当前高校思想政治理论课程改革的有效途径.     

Conversation,Disagreement and Political Participation

One of the more striking findings in recent work on political discussion among citizens has been that exposure to disagreement in discussion networks demobilises people, making political participation less likely. This runs counter to the expectations of theories of social capital and deliberative democracy, and also to the finding that exposure to cross-cutting views leads to greater tolerance of the opinions of others. This result is of great significance if it proves to be a general finding, holding in a variety of contexts and for a range of forms of political activism. This paper therefore provides a test, analysing a wide range of forms of political activism. The results suggest that it is premature to blame disagreement for demobilisation: in some circumstances, and for some forms of activism, exposure to countervailing views may actually motivate participation.     

Political Positions,Hierarchies and Political Markets: Towards a New Theory on Political Recruitment*

This article adresses itself to the problem of political recruitment. Most recruitment studies are based on models of recruitment where the model presupposes more candidates than positions. Studying local committees we cannot presuppose excess demand for political positions. The article tries to introduce economic theory into the study of political recruitment. With concepts of market, supply, demand and prices, the article discusses recruitment to various types of positions. When we have extreme market conditions with either excess demand or lack of demand, the recruitment processes can best be understood in terms of hierarchical forces. The sales of less important positions in a situation with low demand for these positions could best be understood in terms of market mechanism. Comparing an economic market with a political market, the article finds variation in the transaction structure. The economic markets have a specific transaction structure, with specific obligations linked to transactions, while the political markets have a more unspecified transaction structure with more unspecified obligations linked to the transactions. A less specified transaction structure has lower transaction costs in a hierarchy than in a market. This, the author believes, could explain why some transactions take place in markets while others take place in hierarchies.     

Issue Publics,Campaigns, and Political Knowledge

Building on the growing body of research on campaign learning, this paper considers the way that learning about policy issues depends on the nature of the issue and its relevance for the individual citizen. Specifically, the analysis finds that seniors learned much more than non-seniors about candidate positions on an emerging Social Security issue that was heavily emphasized in the 2000 campaign, but not when the same issue was more familiar and largely ignored by the candidates and press in the 2004 campaign. Yet, even without additional learning or campaign emphasis, seniors still knew more than non-seniors in the later contest. These results suggest that once party positions become familiar to them, issue publics will hold their information advantage across future elections without dependence on further campaign emphasis.     

Membership, Fair Play, and Political Obligation

In recent years a number of theorists have maintained that the obligation to obey the law is best conceived and justified as an associational obligation. Not consent or utility or fair play but membership is the source of political obligation. These theorists are wrong, I argue, but they are wrong in interesting and illuminating ways. For an examination of the advantages and disadvantages of the membership account of political obligation underscores the merits of a rival account of obligation grounded in the principle of fair play.     

Political Support: Social Capital, Civil Society and Political and Economic Performance

This article assesses two main theories of the decline of political support that is found in many western democracies. The first is society centred and built on the concepts of social capital, trust and civil society. The second is politics centred and focuses on the performance of government and the economy. The two theories are not necessarily incompatible, but they are usually treated in a mutually exclusive way. In this article they are tested against a combination of aggregate cross-national comparative data and detailed case studies of four countries that have suffered exceptional decline of political support for politicians, political institutions and the systems of government. The puzzle is that cross-national comparative evidence about a large and diverse number of nations supports social capital theory, whereas in-depth study of four countries that have experienced substantial decline of political support does not. The erosion of support coincides in all four with poor economic and/or political performance. A way of reconciling the two theories and their supporting evidence is suggested, arguing that while social capital is a necessary foundation for democratic support, it is not a sufficient cause.     

Partisanship, Political Control, and Economic Assessments

Previous research shows that partisans rate the economy more favorably when their party holds power. There are several explanations for this association, including use of different evaluative criteria, selective perception, selective exposure to information, correlations between economic experiences and partisanship, and partisan bias in survey responses. We use a panel survey around the November 2006 election to measure changes in economic expectations and behavioral intentions after an unanticipated shift in political power. Using this design, we can observe whether the association between partisanship and economic assessments holds when some leading mechanisms thought to bring it about are excluded. We find that there are large and statistically significant partisan differences in how economic assessments and behavioral intentions are revised immediately following the Democratic takeover of Congress. We conclude that this pattern of partisan response suggests partisan differences in perceptions of the economic competence of the parties, rather than alternative mechanisms.