The President as Institution Builder: The Reagan Case

Every president bestows upon his successors a "legacy" that will have an impact on both policy issues and institutional operations. Although attention is commonly focused on the president's role as a policymaker, he serves as an institution builder, as well, leaving a legacy that is manifested in long-term developments, in technical details of managing the job, and in patterns of interaction with other actors in the political environment. Reagan's institutional legacy has been the subject of intense debate and is addressed here in relation to five vantage points as they were employed during his eight years in office: personnel, structure, standard operating procedures, modes of exercising influence, and norms. These dimensions are examined in relation to the presidency, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the judiciary.
Reagan's departures in the selection and management of executive and judicial branch personnel were the most distinctive features of his legacy. Important changes were also made in the regulatory review and budgetary processes. Politicization and centralization, two long-term developments in the presidential office, gained renewed vigor, and Reagan elaborated a judicial strategy for achieving policy goals while refining the administrative strategy pioneered earlier by Nixon. Serious damage may well have been done to the norms of public service and justice under the rule of law. The framework introduced here promises to help scholars deal more systematically with the institutional impacts of both past and future presidents.     

GEEKING UP AND THROWING DOWN: HEROIN STREET LIFE IN DETROIT

This paper reports the results of a field study of 15 street-level heroin dealers in Detroit, Michigan. The techniques used by these heroin dealers are different from those described in most previous literature. The Detroit dealers do not conform to the traditional "hustling" model. They operate within a bureaucracy, do not generally sell heroin to fund their own habit, are relatively young, and largely lack an approval ideology for their activities.     

THE PRAGMATIC AMERICAN: EMPIRICAL REALITY OR METHODOLOGICAL ARTIFACT?

Scholars widely agree that the public is pragmatic about criminal justice. The empirical basis for this conclusion is the failure in several previous studies to find a sizable negative relationship between dispositional and situational crime attributions, or between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. We suggest, however, that public pragmatism may be an artifact of the use of unidirectional question batteries in prior research to measure attribution styles and policy support. When such questions are used, acquiescent responding can introduce systematic error that is positively correlated across items and scales. Drawing on data from an experiment with a national sample (N = 826) of Internet panelists, we examine how this methodological approach impacts the bivariate correlations and multivariate relationships between attribution styles and between support for punitive and rehabilitative crime policies. The findings reveal that using unidirectional sets of questions to measure these concepts likely results in 1) inflated alpha reliability coefficients, 2) an underestimation of the magnitude of the negative relationships between attribution styles and between punitiveness and support for rehabilitation, and 3) an underestimation of the extent to which punitiveness and support for rehabilitation are driven by the same factors, working in opposite directions.     

Jihadi Strategic Studies: The Alleged Al Qaida Policy Study Preceding the Madrid Bombings

This article analyzes an Al Qaida strategy document about Iraq that received considerable attention after the Madrid bombings because of its references to the Spanish elections. The current article discusses the origin, content, and significance of the document and argues that it represents a hitherto unidentified genre in radical Islamist literature, namely "jihadi strategic studies." The text, which is secular in style, analytical in its approach, and pragmatic in its conclusions, displays a level of political awareness that breaks with most preconceptions about religious fundamentalist thought. Moreover, it dispels the myth of a unified and coherent "Al Qaida ideology."‐     

Die Lassersche Wahlrechtsreform. Der Kampf um die Einführung der Volkswahl des cisleithanischen Abgeordnetenhauses 1871–1873

SUMMARY

After the creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary in 1867, the 17 kingdoms and provinces with a population of over 20 million gathered in the (Cisleithanian) Austrian half comprised a multitude of nationalities. Since 1861 they had been represented in the imperial council (Reichsrat) consisting of an aristocratic upper house and a lower house of representatives from the 17 local diets. The local diets were a modified form of Estates, with a first house of large landlords, a second house elected by those entitled to vote in urban elections, in some cases a third house for trade and craft bodies, and another house for rural communities. Many of these elections were also indirect and based on a property qualification, and bishops and others sat by right in the local diets. Deputies from the local diets to the imperial council were chosen in a variety of ways. Despite previous demands for direct elections, this remained only to a limited extent a constitutional monarchy. The non-German nationalities had an overall majority in the population but were severely underrepresented in the House of Deputies (Abgeordnetenhaus) and divided among themselves. The self-imposed absence of several of them from its sessions gave force to the demands for electoral reform and put pressure on the Emperor to grant concessions. Complex negotiations with the parties and changes of government led to the ministry in 1871 of Adolph Fürst Auersperg, who appointed Joseph Freiherr Lasser von Zollheim as Interior Minister with the task of completing the electoral reform. Thomas Olechowski proposes in this article that the measures eventually introduced in 1873, hitherto ‘nameless’, be named the Lasser Electoral Reform, on the analogy of later reforms named in the literature after their progenitors. Lasser resisted pressure for a more open constitution from the liberals who held an effective majority in the newly elected House of Deputies, but not the required two-thirds for constitutional change. It also proved difficult to satisfy the national elements in the Empire, especially Czechs and Poles, and hard-fought local elections accompanied the stages in introducing reform. Among many detailed plans publicly aired was one by Eduard Herbst which would have reduced the electoral advantage of the richest elements, but Lasser was able to recruit Herbst to help formulate his own more conservative proposals. Lasser's concern was to take the election of deputies away from the local diets, not to broaden the franchise nor alter the existing balance of power between countries and classes, and the Emperor too wanted minimal reform. Where popular unrest broke out, military force soon suppressed it. The withdrawal of a large Galician contingent from the debate in the House of Deputies failed to stop the legislation. The end result was only a small change in the balance between the provinces and a modest reduction in the representation of large landlords. Only 6 per cent of the population received the vote, with that of a large landlord counting 140 times that of a member of a rural community. Even so, the now directly elected imperial council proved less compliant than its predecessor, and new electoral reforms were to broaden the franchise in 1882, 1895 and 1907.