Party Pressure in the U.S. State Legislatures

We extend Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart's (2001) method of measuring party influence over roll‐call voting to the comparative state legislative context. Examining 27 state lower chambers, we find that overall parties exert detectable influence on 44% of all roll calls and 69% of close votes, but that the incidence of party influence varies strongly across chambers. Taking advantage of the comparative leverage the state context brings, we find that party influence responds significantly to measures of legislative careerism and state socioeconomic diversity, with majority size playing some role. The effect of preference polarization is complicated and conditioned by challenges facing the legislature, and we find results both challenging and conditionally supporting the conditional party government account.     

QE3 No Quick Fix For U.S.

<正>Another round of quantitative easing could lead to rising inflation and slow growth Although Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did not announce another round of quantitative easing (QE) during his speech at the annual Jackson Hole,     

MANAGING CITIZENS' EXPECTATIONS OF PUBLIC SERVICE PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE FROM OBSERVATION AND EXPERIMENTATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Citizens' expectations of public service performance influence their attitudes and behaviour towards services, including satisfaction, choice of service and political voice about them. However, there has been little research on what sets expectations. This paper assesses the effects of prior service performance and information about prior performance on two forms of citizen expectations, positive expectations of what performance will be and normative expectations of what performance should be. In an observational study, prior performance is positively related to expectations of what performance will be. Prior performance is positively related to high normative expectations but is unrelated to low normative expectations. The resilience of normative expectations suggests that poor performance will trigger dissatisfaction and citizen response rather than lowering expectations creating passive acceptance. In a field experiment, performance information effects are found for positive but not normative expectations. Providing information about excellent performance raises positive expectations and providing information about poor performance lowers positive expectations; negativity bias is evident with information about poor performance having a larger effect. Performance information that is credible to citizens can be used to manage citizens' positive expectations but their normative expectations are less amenable to influence by this route.     

Tendential Autonomy and Conflict Containment in Nonstate Governance Mechanisms

Environmental certification programs have emerged and matured in many resource industries. Program autonomy is a central strategic problem in assessing program effectiveness and legitimacy. The article treats the problem of autonomy by drawing on Teubner's heuristic, strategic reconceptualization of Luhmann's conception of autopoiesis. Emergent autonomy can be inferred in different ways at different stages of program development. It is concretely expressed both in a distinct circularity in internal referral, deferral, and appeals procedures, and in institutional capacities to develop such procedures. Procedural circularity is often taken as evidence of program failure, but it may instead be an indicator of early strength. Periods of acute crisis are privileged circumstances for observing such capacities.     

Political generations in Northern Ireland

Since the late 1980s, Northern Ireland has seen a radical electoral shift away from the historically dominant parties in the Catholic and Protestant blocs – the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), respectively – towards the traditionally more ‘extreme’ parties – Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This change in aggregate support has been accompanied by increasing differences between generations as older cohorts of UUP and SDLP supporters have been replaced by newer cohorts of DUP and Sinn Fein partisans. This is not a result of increased polarisation in values and attitudes (whether overtly political or simply communal intolerance) among younger cohorts who are, if anything, slightly more moderate than their forbears. Rather, this results from the changing political context in which new generations have been socialised – in particular the expanded choice sets facing voters as they have reached voting age. This in turn has positive implications for the consolidation of devolved democratic governance.     

RACIAL–ETHNIC THREAT,OUT‐GROUP INTOLERANCE,AND SUPPORT FOR PUNISHING CRIMINALS: A CROSS‐NATIONAL STUDY*

Scholars often have used the group threat thesis to explain why punitiveness varies across places. This research regularly has found that punitiveness is harsher in places with a larger minority population. Yet researchers only have had a rudimentary grasp of why this is the case. Moreover, most prior research has focused only on the United States, giving us little knowledge of whether the group threat thesis is a viable explanation of cross‐national differences in punitiveness. In the current study, we postulate that the relative size of the out‐group population affects punitiveness indirectly, via its impact on individual intolerance toward ethnic out‐groups. We test this thesis cross‐nationally with data from individuals residing in 27 European countries. Our findings are consistent with the argument that greater racial/ethnic diversity at the country level affects individuals’ attitudes toward minority out‐groups, which in turn increases their support for severely punishing criminal offenders.