Culture Wars,Secular Realignment,and the Gender Gap in Party Identification

Changes in the U.S. partisan balance over the past decade are often attributed to the enhanced political salience of cultural issues. Yet as white men have continued to become more Republican in recent years, white women increasingly identify with the Democrats. To the extent that cultural issues are influencing this partisan change, men and women must be responding differently to this cultural agenda. Using a pooled ANES data set from 1988 through 2000, I explore the extent to which cultural values are responsible for this gender realignment. Findings suggest that salient cultural issues influence the partisan choices of both men and women, however in somewhat different ways. For women, the issues themselves—reproductive rights, female equality, and legal protection for homosexuals—have become increasingly important determinants of party identification. For men, the influence of cultural conflict on partisanship is argued to be equally pervasive, albeit less direct.     

What to Do When Stakeholders Matter: The Case of Problem Formulation for the African American Men Project of Hennepin County, Minnesota

We propose a series of stakeholder analyses designed to help organizations—especially governments—think and act strategically during the process of problem formulation in order to advance the common good. Specifically, we argue that at least five sets of analyses are necessary, including the creation of (1) a power versus interest grid; (2) a stakeholder influence diagram; (3) bases of power–directions of interest diagrams; (4) a map for finding the common good and structuring a winning argument; and (5) diagrams indicating how to tap individual stakeholder interests to pursue the common good. What the analyses do is help to transform a seemingly "wicked problem"—for example, how to produce better outcomes for African American men aged 18–30—into something more tractable, and therefore amenable to collective action. In other words, stakeholder analysis can be used to link political rationality with technical rationality so that support can be mobilized for substantive progress.     

The Danes and Europe: From EC 1972 to Euro 2000 – Elections, Referendums and Attitudes

Within Europe, the Danish electorate is the one that has most often expressed its opinion about the European Union in elections and in national referendums. Votes and attitudes are analysed for the five elections to the European Parliament between 1979 and 1999 and in the six referendums – from the first on membership of the EC in 1972 to the September 2000 referendum on acceptance of the euro, the European single currency. The article gives an overview of the development of Danish public opinion in relation to the European Union from 1960 to 2000, the turnouts at referendums, and the elections and results for the European Parliament. It is shown that since Denmark joined the EU, public opinion has fluctuated greatly, although the balance among Danish European Parliament members has remained stable. The reasons for the frequent use of referendums in Denmark and a thematic outline of the six referendums are put forward. The article concludes with a comprehensive analysis of public attitudes towards the referendum on the euro in 2000. It is shown that regional electoral patterns have vanished, but underlying attitudes are manifested in the public.     

Die drei Welten der sozialen Ungleichheit: Belohnungen,Prestige und Citizenship

Talcott Parsons’s contribution to an analysis of social inequality seems to have had a strange destiny: it was either neglected as if Parsons had not contributed to the problem at all; or it was rejected as an allegedly useless kind of functional analysis of social stratification of modern societies. However, I argue, there is no single theory of functional stratification. Rather, there are at least three versions that have to be seen as separate approaches: First, the theory of rewards as it was developed by Parsons and, more important, by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore; second, the theory of moral respect, that Parsons presented in two different versions; third, the theory of a balance of equality and inequality in modern societies that Parsons developed following T.H. Marshall’s theory of citizenship. The article presents a historic and systematic analysis of these three strands of Parsons’s contribution to the debate on social inequality. While the theory of functional stratification failed as a whole, I show that Parsons nevertheless anticipated crucial aspects of recent sociological debates, like the importance of the vagueness and fluidity of social stratification, or the crucial significance of education being the most important resource for a realization of individual life chances in modern societies.