Why Do Experienced Challengers Do Better than Amateurs?

Politically experienced challengers are more successful in seeking political office than amateurs. The relationship is found so regularly that political experience has become the standard ex ante indicator of challenger quality in studies of American elections. Despite this, little work has investigated why experienced challengers are so successful. Many scholars attribute the relationship to inherent differences between experienced challengers and amateurs: experienced challengers have stronger electoral skills and greater access to material resources. I argue that these differences play a role, but an indirect one. Rather, experienced challengers are lead by both their resource advantage and the high amount of risk they are exposed to in seeking office to run in races in which their party has a good chance of winning. Thus, the direct cause of the experienced challengers’ success is self-selection into winnable races. Empirical analysis supports the self-selection model over a model in which resources directly lead to success.

Globalization forces and social policy choices: Glass half‐full or half‐empty?

Globalization, Europeanization and the End of Scandinavian Social Democracy?Edited by robert geyer, christine ingebritsen and jonathon w. moses. London: Macmillan. 2000. Changing Politics of Canadian Social Policy. By james j. rice and michael j. prince. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2000. Four Strong Winds: Understanding the Growing Challenges to Health Care. By michael b. decter Toronto: Stoddard. 2000. Now resident on Vancouver Island, the author was until recently a faculty member in the Department of political science at the University of Windsor.     

‘Letting the Beasts Out of the Cage’: Parole in the Post-Stalin Gulag, 1953–1973

After a lapse of 15 years under Stalin, parole was reintroduced into the Soviet Gulag in 1954. For justice officials anxious to expunge Stalin's repressive legacy, the resurrection of parole signalled a return to correctionalism, societal oversight over the Gulag, and a vastly reduced rate of incarceration. In practice, though, parole exposed significant continuities with the Stalinist Gulag, including endemic corruption, overwhelming concern with production, suspicion of outside interference in penal affairs, and constant upward pressure on the inmate population. In the broader view, the experience of parole in the post-war USSR aligned closely with that of the Western world.     

Trajectories of Perceived Parental Psychological Control across Adolescence and Implications for the Development of Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Theory and research indicate considerable changes in parental control across adolescence (e.g., declining behavioral control), but the developmental course and...     

Policy dynamics and the evolution of state charter school laws

Baumgartner and Jones (1993) showed how radically new policies emerge on government agendas as a consequence of exogenous shocks to policy subsystems displacing privileged interests. But how do these policies evolve post-punctuation? In this paper, we present three different models of policy change. Policies may revert to the old status quo if displaced interests re-assert themselves, or they may be “locked-in” by new interests now reaping the benefits. Alternatively, they may incrementally change as lawmakers “learn” how to better meet target population needs, particularly by witnessing how other jurisdictions address similar problems. We test these models with data on change in state charter schools laws over time. We find that whether old status quos are overthrow, and the fate of charter policies when they are enacted, is influenced more by competing political interests, especially interest groups, than elite and public perceptions of broad systemic crises. Yet, we also find that changing demands on the state and learning from the successes and failures of neighboring states also play significant roles.