Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the future in accordance with Bayes Rule. New voters, however, have no experience of their own. In Bayesian terms, they need prior beliefs. It turns out that under certain specified conditions, these young voters should rationally choose to employ parental experience to help orient themselves to politics. The resulting model predicts several well–known features of political socialization, including the strong correlation between parents' and children's partisanship, the greater partisan independence of young voters, and the tendency of partisan alignments to decay.     

The Professional Researcher as Change Agent in the Government–Performance Movement

Although academic and professional publications give the impression that performance measurement is a growing government practice, in actuality the use of this technology is not as deep or as widespread as it may appear. Even when performance measures are used, governments rarely integrate them into planning, budget, personnel, and other management processes. Most professional researchers located primarily in academic institutions, but also in research and government organizations, approach performance measurement as though governmental officials, elected or otherwise, are already sold on its usefulness. Instead, they need to function as "change agents," using a variety of strategies to gain acceptance and understanding of the strengths and limitations of performance measurement. This article draws on the authors' experiences with the Community Benchmarks Program of the Maxwell School in Onondaga County and a review of the current literature. It suggests guidelines for professional researchers who want to increase the use of performance measures by governments at all levels.     

A Strategy to Prevent Losses in Local Government Investment Pools

In the first half of the 1990s, some local government investment pools (LGIPs) suffered losses from derivatives investments. Although the losses came from derivatives, the actual cause of the losses was the violation of public-fund prudent investment practices. This article provides a strategy to prevent future losses for LGIPs' participants by looking at the pattern of return on investment of the pools. Our proposal is that rates of return on state pools that co-move with market rates are generally an indication of adherence to prudent investment practices. We demonstrate the viability of this proposal by using co-integration methodology. The implication is that if rates of return on a state pool do not co-move with market rates, they may indicate the violation of prudent investment practices.     

Shareholder wealth effects of legislative events: The case of airline deregulation

This paper presents empirical evidence about the impact on shareholder wealth of legislative events leading to the enactment of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. In contrast to prior regulatory event studies, this paper examines not only the final legislative enactment but also the Congressional hearings that preceded it. No significant effect on shareholder wealth is indicated when averaged across all airline firms and all legislative events. Impact of deregulation, however, was expected to be different for trunk airlines than for local airlines. Moreover, market expectations likely changed with the change in the political climate during the course of deregulation deliberations, from an industry financial health emphasis under a Republican (Ford) administration to a consumer welfare emphasis under a Democratic (Carter) administration. We find that trunk airlines experienced significant positive abnormal returns during the Ford administration, but negative abnormal returns during the Carter administration. In contrast, local airlines exhibited significant negative abnormal returns during both the Ford and Carter eras. Systematic risk of both trunk and local airlines also increased with the change in the political climate.     

A multinominal logit analysis of the influence of policy variables and board experience on FOMC voting behavior

Previous studies have used probit or logit models to analyze two states of monetary policy (tighter or looser). In this paper we employ multinominal logit to permit Federal Reserve monetary policy to assume one of three alternative states (tighter, looser, or no change) as a function of three independent economic variables (unemployment, real growth, and inflation) and the amount of experience of the Board of Governors. The results indicate that the Federal Reserve reacted differently under Burns, Miller and Volcker and between Volcker's two operating procedures in the formulation of monetary policy.     

Conversations in Context: The (Mis)Measurement of Value Change in Advanced Industrial Societies

One aspect of the multifaceted controversy on value change in advanced industrial societies concerns the measurement of values. Analyses of 1976–86 Euro-Barometer data have indicated that responses to the four-item “materialist-postmaterialist” values index are very sensitive to current economic conditions, especially inflation and unemployment rates and, hence, much of the recorded increase in postmaterialism in eight Western European countries since the mid-1970s is artifactual. Although it has been claimed these findings disappear if more recent data are considered, time series analyses reveal that responses to the values measure are strongly affected by prevailing economic conditions throughout the entire 1976–92 period. These aggregate-level findings are buttressed by individual-level analyses of 1989 Euro-Barometer data.     

Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in 1996: The End of an Era

On 30 September 1996 the U.S. Advisory Commission on IntergovernmentalRelations (ACIR) closed its doors, ending thirty-seven yearsof advocacy for federalism and intergovernmental relations.A majority of members in the Congress felt that A CIR had becomeirrelevant to the issues facing them and agreed that littlewould be lost by terminating the commission. The Clinton administration,although supportive until near the end, withdrew its'supportout of displeasure with the commission's handling of the unfundedfederal mandates issue. The national associations representingstate and local governments were ambivalent. ACIR was no longerlooked to for solutions to the nation's intergovernmental relationsproblems. With the exit of ACIR, the federal government's lastresource for addressing broad intergovernmental issues—beyondthe confines of individual programs—is gone.     

Back to the Future? Senior Federal Executives in the United States

Based on findings from the 1970s, research literature on senior government executives emphasized a growing integration of politics and administration. This integration was reflected in what we called the "Image IV" bureaucrat wherein political role traits combined with those of traditional bureaucratic ones. Although this was by no means a dominant trend, we were led to speculate that traditional divisions between political and bureaucratic roles were eroding. Data gathered from the 1980s and 1990s, however, lead us to infer that divisions between political and bureaucratic roles have reasserted themselves and that integration between them is being diminished rather than strengthened. We conclude that this may be because in an era of governmental austerity the demand for executive policy entrepreneurs has slackened while the political needs have shifted to those of managerial control over an inertial or even contracting state.