Political Action Committee Spending and Senate roll call voting

This paper addresses how PAC spending affects the roll call voting behavior of U.S. Senators. Using a theoretical framework which draws broadly on the voting literature, we develop models that explain Senatorial voting behavior in a pre-PAC and post-PAC world. Testing both models we find weak support for a Downs-Black view of voting participation in the first model. The second model supports the alteration of voting incentives resulting from PAC spending. We find that PACs have a positive effect on voting participation. The conjecture remains whether PACs change voting outcomes, but it is clear that they buy voting participation.     

MPs and web technologies: an untapped opportunity?

MPs have not previously been assigned a major role in electoral campaigning, being considered only one element of a political party's ‘marketing’ tools for winning votes. Evidence now suggests that the relationship between MPs and their constituents is changing. The concept of ‘constituency service’ implies that individual MPs can have a much greater influence on local voters and so possibly buck national trends. At the same time the concept of the ‘permanent campaign’ is transforming political campaigning whereby the political elite needs ever‐greater control of the tools used to provide messages to voters. The internet is a potential battleground between MPs who want greater control of their own local campaigning and the party elite who want to ensure a consistent, coherent and controlled message. The Internet is a new addition to the campaigning armoury, yet the focus so far has been on e‐government, e‐democracy and election campaigns. By concentrating on how and why MPs use their websites this paper considers whether MPs have fully understood and utilised this new medium. Key questions include whether their websites are ‘sticky’, interactive and a means of creating a targeted message. The findings of this detailed study of MPs' websites show that apart from a few pioneers, MPs have not progressed beyond using the Internet as ‘shovelware’ — the vast majority view their website as an electronic brochure and not a new form of two‐way communication. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Toward a psychological ecology of affirmative action

Research-based knowledge of the effects of affirmative action has been little help to policy makers. That is the case because there has been no means through which to organize into a policy-relevant whole the findings that have come from a variety of disciplinary sources. A heuristic schematic of the psychological ecology of affirmative action is proposed as a step toward developing a conceptual framework that can reduce this problem. A psychological ecology of affirmative action consists of the mutual relations between policy interest groups and the procedures used to implement these policies. A critical point that the ecological framework leads to is that the nature of affirmative action procedures has a major influence on the material and subjective links between interest groups. Given that claim, the schematic is used to categorize, review, and critique the multidisciplinary research on affirmative action. From that overview, a set of general guidelines for the design of effective affirmative action programs is proposed. Finally, a call is made for a shift in the unit of policy analysis from a focus on group justice to relational justice.     

Affirmative action in American politics: Strength or weakness?

When Geraldine Ferraro was selected to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate, questions were raised about why she was chosen. Was her selection an outcome of affirmative action in the political arena? The research reported in this paper investigates whether the effect of Ferraro's candidacy on voting inclinations and behavior among college students was mediated by conceptions of the procedure of affirmative action. As predicted, conceptions of affirmative action (the difference between actual and threshold ratios) influenced changes in inclination to vote Democratic in response to the Ferraro candidacy. In turn, those inclinations affected voting behavior in the 1984 presidential election. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical importance of perceived procedural fairness in the political arena.