“Therefore,Get Wisdom”: What Should the President Know,and How Can He Know It?

The literature on the U.S. presidency offers analysis of how the presidential advice and information support function has been performed. Some studies go further to suggest certain principles for designing the advice- and information-giving process involved in presidential decision making, along with organizational features to implement such principles. A well-established principle, based on comparative case studies, is that presidents should institutionalize distrust. Implementation of this principle usually involves channeling competing options, along with supporting information, to the Oval Office before a president becomes committed to a course of action or policy choice. In designing how the presidential support function is to operate, the advantages and disadvantages of the institutionalized distrust principle should be carefully examined, taking into account circumstantial conditions. This article examines this practical issue from the perspective of a historically oriented presidency scholar, writing during the transition to the Barack Obama administration.     

Size,Power, and Electoral Systems: Exogenous Determinants of Legislative Procedural Choice

I tested hypotheses about the relationship between exogenous institutions and legislative procedural choice using a unique cross‐sectional approach and a dataset gleaned from 55 legislative bodies from around the world. I focused on three entrenched characteristics of legislative bodies that we have theoretical reason to think will shape procedures: size, the relative power of the chamber, and the method by which its members are selected. Relatively small and powerful bodies generally have decentralized procedures. To a lesser extent, we can say the same of chambers that have electoral systems that incentivize the personal vote.     

PERSUASION AS GOVERNANCE: A STATE‐CENTRIC RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Debates about governance and the relationship between governance and government have focused upon markets, hierarchies and networks as principal modes of governance. In this paper we argue that persuasion constitutes a further and distinctive mode of governance, albeit one which interpenetrates other modes of governance. In order to assess the nature, limitations and scope of persuasion and the complex relationships between markets, hierarchies, networks on the one hand and persuasion on the other, we interpret persuasion through the prism of two theoretical perspectives on governance. We argue that the society‐centred perspective usefully draws our attention to the role played by non‐state actors in the exercise of governance through persuasion but that a state‐centric relational account can help us to better understand important facets of persuasion as a mode of governance.     

Reeling in Disengaged Students: An Assessment of a Countywide Juvenile Court Attendance Program

On any given day, thousands of youths are absent from school; many are absent without a legitimate excuse and thus deemed truant. Truancy has been linked to various problem behaviors including academic failure, delinquency, and school dropout. Thus, the prevention of truancy is assumed to have beneficial effects far into the future. This study provides an overview of an innovative truancy abatement program operating in southwestern Idaho known as the Ada County Attendance Court. Qualitative and quantitative data are presented to show how the program operates, its effects, and how it differs from other truancy prevention programs nationwide.     

Will Your Job Disappear?

The double whammy of job‐displacing technological advance and wage‐deflating globalization has demoted the American middle class, even as the rich get richer from access to global markets and from their slice of profits from managing massive global financial flows. The specter of growing inequality is haunting free‐market capitalism as never before since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. What is happening? What is to be done? Top economists take a hard look at a hard reality.