The Economic Sources of Congressional Approval

Abstract Models of congressional approval have, in both theory and specification, often imitated models of presidential approval. Through their modeling decisions, researchers have implicitly assumed that the economic determinants of presidential and congressional approval are identical. Such assumptions have discouraged other researchers from testing competing hypotheses about the economic determinants of congressional approval. Using aggregate‐level time‐series analysis, this study investigates the question of whether or not the economic determinants of approval vary by the target of political judgment. I find that presidential approval is driven largely by sociotropic prospections, a result consistent with previous research. In contrast, I find the public relies most heavily upon egocentric retrospections when judging the U.S. Congress.     

The President as Institution Builder: The Reagan Case

Every president bestows upon his successors a "legacy" that will have an impact on both policy issues and institutional operations. Although attention is commonly focused on the president's role as a policymaker, he serves as an institution builder, as well, leaving a legacy that is manifested in long-term developments, in technical details of managing the job, and in patterns of interaction with other actors in the political environment. Reagan's institutional legacy has been the subject of intense debate and is addressed here in relation to five vantage points as they were employed during his eight years in office: personnel, structure, standard operating procedures, modes of exercising influence, and norms. These dimensions are examined in relation to the presidency, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the judiciary.
Reagan's departures in the selection and management of executive and judicial branch personnel were the most distinctive features of his legacy. Important changes were also made in the regulatory review and budgetary processes. Politicization and centralization, two long-term developments in the presidential office, gained renewed vigor, and Reagan elaborated a judicial strategy for achieving policy goals while refining the administrative strategy pioneered earlier by Nixon. Serious damage may well have been done to the norms of public service and justice under the rule of law. The framework introduced here promises to help scholars deal more systematically with the institutional impacts of both past and future presidents.     

GEEKING UP AND THROWING DOWN: HEROIN STREET LIFE IN DETROIT

This paper reports the results of a field study of 15 street-level heroin dealers in Detroit, Michigan. The techniques used by these heroin dealers are different from those described in most previous literature. The Detroit dealers do not conform to the traditional "hustling" model. They operate within a bureaucracy, do not generally sell heroin to fund their own habit, are relatively young, and largely lack an approval ideology for their activities.     

THE PRAGMATIC AMERICAN: EMPIRICAL REALITY OR METHODOLOGICAL ARTIFACT?

Scholars widely agree that the public is pragmatic about criminal justice. The empirical basis for this conclusion is the failure in several previous studies to find a sizable negative relationship between dispositional and situational crime attributions, or between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. We suggest, however, that public pragmatism may be an artifact of the use of unidirectional question batteries in prior research to measure attribution styles and policy support. When such questions are used, acquiescent responding can introduce systematic error that is positively correlated across items and scales. Drawing on data from an experiment with a national sample (N = 826) of Internet panelists, we examine how this methodological approach impacts the bivariate correlations and multivariate relationships between attribution styles and between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. The findings reveal that using unidirectional sets of questions to measure these concepts likely results in 1) inflated alpha reliability coefficients, 2) an underestimation of the magnitude of the negative relationships between attribution styles and between punitiveness and support for rehabilitation, and 3) an underestimation of the extent to which punitiveness and support for rehabilitation are driven by the same factors, working in opposite directions.     

Jihadi Strategic Studies: The Alleged Al Qaida Policy Study Preceding the Madrid Bombings

This article analyzes an Al Qaida strategy document about Iraq that received considerable attention after the Madrid bombings because of its references to the Spanish elections. The current article discusses the origin, content, and significance of the document and argues that it represents a hitherto unidentified genre in radical Islamist literature, namely "jihadi strategic studies." The text, which is secular in style, analytical in its approach, and pragmatic in its conclusions, displays a level of political awareness that breaks with most preconceptions about religious fundamentalist thought. Moreover, it dispels the myth of a unified and coherent "Al Qaida ideology."‐