Comparing absentee and precinct voters: A view over time

This paper examines the trend in absentee voting over the last 30 years in California. With the liberalization of absentee voting laws and practices, an increase in the numbers of absentee voters quickly followed. Absentee voters have already demonstrated their ability to influence the outcomes of local elections. An open question is what will become of absentee voters in the future. If they are the model for voting at home, and if technological advances allow such, then the behavior of current absentee voters may be indicative of the future electorate. The increasing trend of voters opting for absentee ballots is analyzed by using GLS on a random-effects time-series cross-section model with county-level data. The focus is on identifying structural factors such as changing voter demographics that have influenced the decision of voters to cast absentee ballots. Thirty-three recent statewide elections in California are the basis for this analysis, covering the statewide primary and general elections from November 1962 through November 1994. We find that the impact of demographics and time trends on absentee voting differ between general and primary elections. In addition, we find that a 1977 liberalization law in California had the effect of accelerating the usage of the absentee format. Finally, we conclude that absentee and precinct voting are substitutes in general elections but complements in primary elections.     

Plus ça Change,Plus C’est La Même Chose? A review of Paul Sabatier’s “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein”

Paul Sabatier’s 1988 Policy Sciences paper, “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein” (21:129–168), introduced the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to the policy discipline. Over the past 30 years, the ACF has become a generalizable theory of policy change. Another feature is the ongoing critical self-assessment and revisions of the framework’s theoretical and empirical assumptions. As a result, there have been many reviews of the ACF. However, the popularity of Sabatier’s contribution and the most cited article in this journal is its wider significance beyond the ACF. A bibliometric analysis of 737 peer-reviewed publications citing this paper is undertaken. This is followed by a summary chronicling ACF reviews and scholarship comparing the ACF with other policy process theories and frameworks.     

THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The seventeenth annual conference of the Australian Regional Groups was held in Canberra on 11th—13th November, 1974. The general topic was "Public Administration in Co-operative Federalism". We publish in this issue the papers presented at the conference and a summary of the discussion. The conference chairman was Mr Walter Ives, Secretary of the Australian Department of Agriculture. On the first evening, The Honourable Sir John Kerr, K.C.M.G., K. St. J., Q.C., Governor-General of Australia, delivered the Sir Robert Garran Oration, with the title, "Ethics and Public Office". Dr R. L. Wettenhall, President of the Australian Capital Territory Group, was in the chair.     

Pedagogy for policy analysis and management

This essay presents two pedagogical models found in public policy programs, and attends (less exhaustively) to the managerial environment in which they coexist. The models are, of course, lecturing in all its various versions, and the cluster of teaching practices called case‐method teaching, student‐centered learning, active learning, experiential learning, discussion‐based teaching, and the like. The central question addressed is: How can it be that we still don't know which is better, or which is better for what, if know means anything like what it means in the larger policy analytic paradigm? Research comparing practices can improve our choices and outcomes.12 12

1 Thanks to myriad colleagues (especially) John Boehrer, J. Mark Schuster, Eugene Bardach, and David Kirp, plus my cohort of 2005–06 Presidential Chair Fellows and that program's very committed leader, Steve Tollefson, for discussions of pedagogy that have reminded me over the years that teaching could be an intellectually demanding, rigorous, and collaborative enterprise, and to Robert MacCoun for comments on drafts of this paper.

     

A Simple Distribution-Free Test for Nonnested Model Selection

e-mail: kevin.clarke{at}rochester.edu This paper considers a simple distribution-free test for nonnestedmodel selection. The new test is shown to be asymptoticallymore efficient than the well-known Vuong test when the distributionof individual log-likelihood ratios is highly peaked. MonteCarlo results demonstrate that for many applied research situations,this distribution is indeed highly peaked. The simulation furtherdemonstrates that the proposed test has greater power than theVuong test under these conditions. The substantive applicationaddresses the effect of domestic political institutions on foreignpolicy decision making. Do domestic institutions have effectsbecause they hold political leaders accountable, or do theysimply promote political norms that shape elite bargaining behavior?The results indicate that the latter model has greater explanatorypower. Authors' note: This work was supported by National Science FoundationGrant SES-0213771. I thank Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee forgraciously sharing their data and code. I also thank Bear Braumoeller,Curtis Signorino, Tasos Kalandrakis, participants in the NorthEastMethodology Program, New York University, 2003, and the reviewersfor their comments. Errors remain my own. Supplementary materialsare available on the Political Analysis Web site.     

STATESMEN IN DISGUISE*

It is a daunting honour to tread in the illustrious footsteps of those who have previously delivered this Oration. It is also a personal pleasure, because Sir Robert Garran was the gracious and tolerant chairman of the Canberra University College Council that gave me my first academic post. Impressive but totally unpretentious, Sir Robert was a man that I could look up to, literally as well as figuratively. In 1938, however, I was scarcely aware that Garran had been the first Commonwealth public servant, a permanent head for thirty-one years and, as Attorney-General John (later Sir John) Latham put it a few days after Garran retired in January 1932, "guide, philosopher and friend to every Federal Cabinet" during those years¹     

The pits and the core: Simple collective decision problems with concave preferences

This essay extends the theory of simple collective decision problems to spatial games in which (contrary to the traditional assumption) each agent's preferences are concave, in the sense that the alternatives that the agent does not prefer to any particular reference alternative together constitute a convex set. Such concave preferences might characterize decision problems in which, say, a site must be selected for some obnoxious facility, such as a prison, garbage dump, or facility for managing hazardous materials. The results indicate that, under these conditions, the (weak -)core can be structurally unstable, changing discontinuously with apparently minor perturbations of the decision problem. The main theorem identifies a curious property of the core when the set of feasible alternatives is compact and convex and each agent's preferences are strictly concave. Namely, a point in the feasible set's interior can belong to the core only if there is no feasible alternative that makes every member of any winning coalition strictly worse off. In this sense, an interior point belongs to the core only if it lies in the pits.A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the West Coast Conference on Small Groups Research, Stanford University, 17 April 1985, and the Experimental Social Choice Workshop, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, 20–21 June 1985. This material is based on work supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (Grants SES 83-12123 and SES 84-10094), the Real Estate Center and Department of Decision Sciences of The Wharton School, and the Research Fund of the University of Pennsylvania.     

Attitudes of Canadians toward affirmative action: Opposition,value pluralism,and nonattitudes

Set against a backdrop of current public policy and case law, this study investigates Canadian attitudes toward affirmative action among both citizens and decision makers. We find low levels of support for such programs across a variety of contexts and intended beneficiaries, but we also discover that opinion on both sides of the issue is rather soft, for large portions of those taking positions on the matter are willing to reconsider their views when prompted. We interpret this finding as an indication of what Philip Converse has called nonattitudes. Thus, a substantial portion of Canadians appear to hold no genuine attitudes on the question of affirmative action and are relatively open to persuasion. In contrast, the preferences of those with stable attitudes are rooted in the tradeoff between values of equality and merit. Implications for policy activists in this issue area are discussed.The research reported here is part of a large project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant No. 411-85-001). The Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto has provided a home, and indispensable support, for the Charter Project. This research was also facilitated by a contribution from the Solicitor General of Canada to the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto. Our thanks also go to Robert Vipond for his help in clarifying our concepts.     

Last Thoughts on <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Last Intellectuals</Emphasis>

Over twenty years ago my book The Last Intellectuals put into circulation the phrase “public intellectual.” The term unexpectedly enjoyed great success. It encapsulated a new division between a professional or academic intellectual focused on his or her specialty and an intellectual orientated to a larger public. The former tend to disappear into the university, while they latter write for the educated public. In the twenty years since its publication, my book has been sharply challenged. Moreover the emergence of African-American and women intellectuals, and well as new developments such as Internet, have possibly undermined my thesis. Yet these phenomena amount to revisions, not refutations, of my thesis. Moreover the role of intellectuals in France and Germany suggest that the same process of academization is taking place in other advanced industrial nations. What is called for is not nostalgia or its opposite, a celebration of everything that happens, but a consideration of the real shifts that affect the lives and work of intellectuals.

The Mechanics of Responsibility in Government

Robert Garran was Premier Reid's legal and constitutional adviser at the Premiers' Conference in Melbourne in 1899. If Alfred Deakin is to be believed, while there Garran performed in classical fashion the duties of the competent administrator. Out of sight in an adjoining room, he and a financial adviser, Mr Coghlan, awaited Premier Reid who would withdraw from the conference room from time to time for consultation with his advisers. Then Reid would return 'freshly primed to reopen the debate' presumably stating the propositions with which he had been recently furnished. In later years his scholarly and incisive work on the Constitution was a source of sound advice to all those concerned to understand the workings of the organic law under which we live. I acknowledge my debt to his work and I am honoured to deliver an oration that bears his name.     

Prolegomena to policy sciences

Establishment of policy sciences as a new supradiscipline involves a scientific revolution, requiring fargoing innovations in basic paradigms. Particularly essential are: (1) Integration between various disciplines, and especially of social sciences with analytical decision approaches; (2) bridging of the pure vs. applied dichotomy; (3) acceptance of tacit knowledge as a scientific resource; (4) changes in interface between science and values; (5) broad time perspectives; (6) focus on metapolicies; (7) commitment to policymaking improvement; and (8) concern with extrarational and irrational processes, such as creativity.Unique subjects of policy sciences, opened up by these paradigms, include, among others: (a) Policy analysis, which involves critical changes in systems analysis so as to permit application to complex policy issues; (b) policy strategies, involving determination of postures and main guidelines for specific policies, such as on degrees of incrementalism vs. innovation and on attitudes to risks; and (c) policymaking system redesign, including evaluation and improvement of the policymaking system, e.g., through changes in one-person-centered high-level decisionmaking, development of politicians, and institutionalization of social experimentation.Development of policy sciences requires many innovations in research, teaching, and professional activities. It constitutes a main effort to reconstruct the role of intellectualism and rationality in human affairs and, therefore, justifies intense efforts.Parts of this article are based on papers delivered at the 136th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Boston, 26–31 December 1969) and at the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (New York, 2–6 September 1969).     

Barriers to the widespread utilization of residential solar energy: The prospects for solar energy in the U.S. housing industry

Residential solar energy applications can provide a significant fraction of the U.S. energy budget. However, to do so, they must be combined with other energy-conserving strategies and diffused rapidly throughout the housing industry. Discussed are the potential resistances to the diffusion of solar energy within the U.S. housing industry; implications for the application of residential solar energy are treated.Richard Schoen is an architect and faculty member of the University of California at Los Angeles' School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is also a staff consultant to the Solar Energy Team at Caltech.An earlier version of this paper was prepared and delivered at the International Solar Energy Conference, Le soleil au service de l'homme, Paris, July 2–6, 1973.Alan Hirshberg is an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a consultant to the City of Pasadena, California, and also a member of the Solar Energy Team of the Environmental Quality Laboratory, Dabney Hall, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109.     

Making Citizens Smart: When do Institutions Improve Unsophisticated Citizens’ Decisions?

Many scholars lament citizens’ lack of political sophistication, while others emphasize that information shortcuts can substitute for sophistication and help citizens with their political choices. In this paper, I use experiments to assess whether and under what conditions institutions can substitute for sophistication and enable even unsophisticated citizens to make informed decisions. The results of my experiments demonstrate that institutions, such as a penalty for lying or a threat of verification, can help both sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens to make more informed decisions. Further, my results suggest that institutions may, under certain conditions, level the playing field between sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens.

Pope Benedict XVI Confronts Religious Relativism

Pope Benedict XVI’s inflammatory speech at Regensburg highlights a subtle difference between Benedict and John Paul II. John Paul called Muslims and Jews “sons of Abraham,” and he organized high-profile interfaith events. Benedict is more skeptical of interreligious dialog and more confrontational toward Islam than was his predecessor. This shift in tone toward Islam stems from changed historical circumstances. Islam has replaced communism as Europe’s biggest ideological challenge. But, there are also subtle theological differences between the two Popes. John Paul was trained by Dominicans, and throughout his papacy, he was a champion of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Augustine, with his bleaker view of non-Christian cultures, is the dominant influence on Benedict. Benedict believes that theologies of religious pluralism, which lead to metaphysical and religious relativism, have replaced liberation theologies as the most serious threats to Catholic orthodoxy.

Book Reviews

Small Firms and Local Economic Networks: The Death of the Local Economy?. James Curran and Robert Blackburn, 1994. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 210 pp.; £29.95 hardback. ISBN: 1 85396 209 0

Tourism and Politics: Policy, Power and Place. Colin Michael Hall, 1994 (reprinted. March 1996). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. 239 pp.; £14.99 paperback. ISBN: 0 471 9647 2

European Union Spatial Policy and Planning. R. WILLIAMS, 1996. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 304 pp. £16.95 paperback. ISBN: 1 8539 6 305 4

Disability and the City: International Perspectives. Rob Imrie, 1996. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. 200 pp.; £15.95 paperback. ISBN: 185396 273 2 (paperback)     

Taking the Measure of Congress: Reply to Chiou and Rothenberg

e-mail: binder{at}gwu.edu Chiou and Rothenberg raise important questions about how tomeasure key concepts in the study of legislative stalemate inthe U.S. Congress. In challenging my choice of measures to capturebicameral differences, Chiou and Rothenberg argue that my findingsare the artifact of measurement error. In this reply, I reviewthe hurdles involved in measuring policy views over time andacross institutions and suggest that the preferred measure ofChiou and Rothenberg falls short for measuring bicameral differences.Second, I assess the extent to which measurement choices affectthe robustness of my findings about the determinants of gridlock.Drawing on new measures and model specifications, I show thatmy results are robust to alternative specifications. I concludewith an assessment of the broader challenges posed by how wemeasure critical concepts in the study of congressional performance.     

Decision process models and the needs of policy-makers: Thoughts on the foreign policy interface

Many political scientists are not at all convinced that empirically verifiable generalizations about political behavior can ever be produced. There are thus many who believe that political scientists can never exert a significant impact upon the public policy-making process. Perhaps one way of narrowing the gap between the researcher and the policy-maker is to examine the public (foreign) policy decision-making process, pinpoint the leverage points within the process where social and political scientists (who engage in foreign policy analysis) might help, and then list the kinds and methods of analysis that would contribute the most to the process. The work of Harold D. Lasswell, James E. Anderson, E. S. Quade, William D. Coplin, and Charles F. Hermann can help us define the (foreign) policy-making process and locate the points at which scientific analysis can help the (foreign) policy-maker. The matching of these leverage points with types and instances of relevant analyses, as well as the methodologies necessary to carry out the analyses results in a matrix of decision tasks and research tasks which may be viewed as an agenda for the conduct of policy relevant research.The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or any other agency of the U.S. Government.     

Taming chance: Risk and the quantification of uncertainty

The quantification of uncertainty through probability is central to definitions of risk used in environmental policy analysis. This essay explores the translation of unquantified uncertainty into probability and the expression of allied philosophical problems in the practice of environmental risk and decision analysis. First we look at means used in science for handling uncertainty associated with some major risks and which are not well represented through probability. Saving the science without quantified probability is addressed through the role of probabilistic events in risk analysis, suggesting the need to expand the scope of risk analysis to include some types of unquantified reasoning about adverse events. Next we look at uses of subjective probability and decision analysis to overcome problems of unquantified uncertainty in science, where we argue that a constructive conception of probability judgments, based in the foundations of decision analysis, provides the most useful approach for such methods. A theme throughout is the role of intellectual control implicit in our efforts to tame change through the representation of uncertainty through probability.     

Collaborative Decision Making in Urban Regeneration: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

In this paper we examine the processes and participants in urban regeneration with a view to identifying the nature of collaborative decision making in a particular policy arena. Recognizing that the environment in which public managers operate is a complex nexus of agency, structure, environment, and feedback processes, we apply a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework comprised of agents, rules, outcomes, decision factors, and processes within the public policy arena—in this case urban regeneration in Ireland—in order to explore collaborative decision making in the public domain. The CAS framework draws particular attention to self-organizing features of the system under study and to the emergence of agents, order (“rules”), and outcomes. Using this framework, we found that three of the six urban regeneration projects (“systems”) in our study featured the emergence of project specific agents as important facilitators of collaborative decision making and as key contributors to the expansion of system scope.     

Twenty-First-Century Challenges for Environmental Management

Books reviewed:
Richard N.L. Andrews, Managing the Environment—Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy
Rosemary O'Leary, Robert F. Durant, Daniel J. Fiorino, and Paul Weiland, Managing for the Environment: Understanding Legal, Organizational, and Policy Changes