Blending reform of tort liability and health insurance: a necessary mix

The thesis of this Article is that making more health insurance benefits available to more people, far from lessening injury victims' proclivity to sue in tort (as conventional wisdom argues), will increase such suits. Thus, it is necessary to accompany any increases in health care coverage with the type of tort reform proposed herein. This reform would allow parties to opt out of the cumbersome and expensive tort claim process with its compensation of noneconomic losses by substituting quicker and surer compensation of any unmet economic losses.     

Ethos,ideology, and partisanship: Exploring the paradox of conservative democrats

Despite the increasingly liberal cast of the national Democratic Party, self-identified conservatives continue to represent a significant segment of the party. At least 25 percent of Democratic identifiers considered themselves to be conservatives during the 1972–1988 period. This paper explores the puzzle of why significant numbers of political conservatives continue to identify with the Democratic Party. We argue that conservative Democrats relate to their party not because of political ideology, as do Republicans and to a lesser extent, liberal/moderate Democrats, but because of the symbolic values associated with the main groups in the party—what we refer to as party ethos. This proposition is examined by analyzing a new set of open-ended questions included in the 1988 American National Election Study probing citizens' images and assessments of the Republican and Democratic parties.The data utilized in this paper were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data forAmerican National Election Study 1988: Pre- and Post-Election Survey were originally collected by Warren E. Miller and the National Election Studies. Neither the collector of the original data nor the Consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.