Issue Accountability and the Mass Public

Under what conditions, if any, does the mass electorate hold congressional members accountable for their records on specific issues? We examine this question on the issue of crime, for which salience has varied substantially and opinion has favored Republicans, and the environment, for which salience has not varied much and voters have favored Democrats. Because different parametric specifications produce divergent findings, we utilize matching analysis in addition to ordinary least squares. The tests suggest that issue accountability exists even controlling for a member's overall record. However, such accountability depends crucially on issue salience and a member's partisan affiliation.     

State Traditions and Comprehensive Business Associations: A Comparative Structural Analysis

Recent studies calling for a more disaggregated approach to the study of the state risk rejecting those conceptual tools such as policy style and state tradition that have been developed for studying macropolitical institutions. Taking as a point of departure Dyson's attempt to relate state traditions and modes of interest-group politics, it is demonstrated that a certain symmetry exists between different types of states and the structures of systems of comprehensive business associations. Specifically, France is shown to have a dualistic system corresponding to its dualist polity, West Germany a system specialized by policy area corresponding to its accommodative polity, and Britain, Canada and the US to have competitive, pluralist systems consistent with their adversarial polities. Such correspondence supports trying to treat as a variable the relationship between macropolitical traditions or policy styles and sectoral policy communities.     

EEG AS A PREDICTOR OF ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Slowing of alpha brain activity has been reported among antisocial individuals. One popular hypothesis to explain this slowing assumes a developmental lag, that is, brain immaturity. Studies to date have not established whether the brain wave activity precedes the development of antisocial behavior. The present longitudinal study attempts to answer this question by looking at EEG brain activity measures taken before the beginning of delinquent activity. Slower alpha patterns proved to be characteristic of later delinquents. The findings, however, do not support the developmental immaturity hypothesis.     

THE DYNAMICS OF POLICY CHANGE: WBBYING AND WATER PRIVATIZATION

The privatization of the water industry was one of the most controversial and turbulent privatizations of the 1980s. The government undertook the project somewhat reluctantly, then the first plans had to be withdrawn, but eventually, the privatization of the industry was successfully completed in 1989. In this article, we first set out to provide a thorough account of the process of privatizing water, based on primary sources and exhaustive interviews. In doing so, we identity some major problems of established theories of British policy making: the process of water privatization clearly does not conform to any single model of policy making. Instead, individual 'episodes' of the policy process conform to different models. Arguing that existing theories of British policy making may have focused too narrowly on routine decision-making processes, we propose that a theory of the transformation of policy communities is required to understand the dynamics of radical policy change in Britain.