Leader Influence and Reputation Formation in World Politics

The study of reputation is one of the foundational topics of modern international relations. However, fundamental questions remain, including the question of to whom reputations adhere: states, leaders, or both? We offer a theory of influence‐specific reputations (ISR) that unifies competing accounts of reputation formation. We theorize that reputations will adhere more to actors who are more influential in the relevant decision‐making process. We employ two survey experiments, one abstract and one richly detailed involving a U.S.‐Iran conflict, to evaluate ISR. We find evidence of large country‐specific reputations and moderately sized leader‐specific reputations. Consistent with the theory of influence‐specific reputations, leader‐specific reputations are more important when leaders are more influential.     

Canadian prime ministers in the house of commons: Patterns of intervention

This paper explores the parliamentary activity of six Canadian prime ministers from St Laurent to Mulroney. Employing Hansard, each parliamentary utterance by a prime minister from 1949 to 1993 has been coded into one of four categories: answers to questions, speeches delivered, statements made and other interventions. Voting records have also been coded. Employing this database, the analysis compares and contrasts the prime ministers in terms of their political personalities and explores the overall scope and character of prime‐ministerial activism in the House throughout the past 40 years. Canadian profiles are compared with already existing British data in order to test generalisations concerning the diminishing presence of prime ministers in parliaments in Canada and Britain.     

Mt. Laurel: A Major Transition in American Planning Law

American land use law in the late 1960's and early 1970's has been in a period of major and fundamental transition. It has seen a change in the basic policy of the law on one of its most important points as concerns exclusionary zoning, i.e., the attitude towards the three principal parties in interest in land use litigation-developer, neighbor, and excluded party. This entire change has been initiated not by the legislatures, but by the courts. The net result of this transition has been to strengthen the government's ability to impose (under the police power) certain types of regulations, primarily environmental in nature—while at the same time drastically reducing the power to impose regulations deemed exclusionary.