Measuring the “personal vote” of members of Congress

This paper uses a pooled time series/cross sectional research design to measure the “personal vote” of three groups of members of Congress. The personal vote is defined here as that part of a candidate's vote share that is unique to him or her. It is measured using a legislator-specific intercept for each legislator in an equation predicting vote share. The other variables in the equation account for the effects of the election year environment and the tenure of the representative. Three cohorts of representatives are analyzed: 1) those whose careers ended before 1966, 2) those whose careers began after 1965, and 3) those whose careers began before 1966 but ended after. The mean legislator-specific intercept is nearly twice as large for the first group as for the second; it is 29 percentage points larger for the first than the third. A second stage regression explains these intercepts using legislator characteristics, party affiliation, region of origin, and number of terms served. The term effects increase at an increasing rate as tenure increases for all those whose careers end after 1966. Personal vote accumulates nearly twice as fast for those first elected after 1965 as for those first elected before 1966.     

The Advantages of Pure Forms of Parliamentary Democracy over Mixed Forms

It is often said that parliament shouldrepresent the opinions found in thepopulation and that government should beheld accountable for its political program.It is shown that these two goals rely ontwo different basic models of democracywhich are not fully compatible with eachother: the model of a pure representativedemocracy and the model of a pure two partycompetition. Unaccountable governments,voter alienation, strategic voting, andgovernmental instability are shown to beconsequences of this institutional mix.These problems may be avoided with reformsin the direction of one or the other basicmodel.     

THE HUMAN EQUATION IN EARTHQUAKE PREDICTION AND WARNINGS

For natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornados, prediction systems and public warning programs have been operational for many years. Earthquake prediction, however, is only an emerging technology. Given the potential for catastrophe in a large earthquake and the great difficulty in specifying time, location and magnitude of impact, certain substantial policy problems emerge; hence, the maximum benefit of scientific earthquake predictions is realized. Policy planners must concentrate on public education and the creation of organizational linkages which would comprise the public warning information system (i.e., how and what is said, and monitoring public response to any warning). Most important is that the issue of prediction-warning be addressed now since planning can produce benefits even if no predictions are issued.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: America's Choice 2000: Entering a New Millenium edited by William Crotty. The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Presidential Election by James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch.