Collaboration and Leadership for Effective Emergency Management

Collaboration is a necessary foundation for dealing with both natural and technological hazards and disasters and the consequences of terrorism. This analysis describes the structure of the American emergency management system, the charts development of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and identifies conflicts arising from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the attempt to impose a command and control system on a very collaborative organizational culture in a very collaborative sociopolitical and legal context. The importance of collaboration is stressed, and recommendations are offered on how to improve the amount and value of collaborative activities. New leadership strategies are recommended that derive their power from effective strategies and the transformational power of a compelling vision, rather than from hierarchy, rank, or standard operating procedures.     

Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate

Scholars have long debated the individual-level relationship between partisanship and policy preferences. We argue that partisanship and issue attitudes cause changes in each other, but the pattern of influence varies systematically. Issue-based change in party identification should occur among individuals who are aware of party differences on an issue and find that issue to be salient. Individuals who are aware of party differences, but do not attach importance to the issue, should evidence party-based issue change. Those lacking awareness of party differences on an issue should show neither effect. We test our account by examining individuals' party identifications and their attitudes on abortion, government spending and provision of services, and government help for African Americans using the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel study, finding strong support for our argument. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the microlevel study of party identification and the macrolevel analysis of partisan change.     

Voter satisfaction and electoral systems: Does preferential voting in candidate-centred systems make a difference?

Abstract.  Over the years, many scholars have examined the relationship between electoral systems and measures of voter satisfaction with democracy. The tendency in these studies has been to explore the traditional Proportional Representation/non-Proportional-Representation dichotomy, assessing whether more proportional systems produce higher levels of satisfaction. This article examines another dimension of electoral system variation – namely the degree to which the ballot structure incorporates ordinal, or preferential features. Given that proponents of such systems extol their virtues as offering voters 'greater choice', it is interesting to explore how this actually plays with the voters. The article makes use of cross-national data from the comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project to examine the relationship between preferential voting and levels of satisfaction with democracy.     

Lobbying and compromise

The compromise enhancing effect of lobbying on public policy has been established in two typical settings. In the first, lobbies are assumed to act as “principals” and the setters of the policy (the candidates in a Downsian electoral competition or the elected policy maker in a citizen-candidate model of electoral competition) are conceived as “agents”. In the second setting, the proposed policies are solely determined by the lobbies who are assumed to take the dual role of “principals” in one stage of the public-policy game and ‘agents’ in its second stage. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that in the latter setting, the compromising effect of lobbying need not exist. Our reduced-form, two-stage public-policy contest, where two interest groups compete on the approval or rejection of the policy set by a politician, is sufficient to show that the proposed and possibly implemented policy can be more extreme and less efficient than the preferred policies of the interest groups. In such situations then more than the calf (interest groups) wish to suck the cow (politician) desires to suckle thereby threatening the public well being more than the lobbying interest groups. The main result specifies the conditions that give rise to such a situation under both the perfectly and imperfectly discriminating contests.     

Politics of Environmental Law: Political Ideology, Elitism or Urban-Rural Interests?

This paper examines a number of demographic aspects in congressional districts and states that played important roles in a series of Congressional votes on environmental issues in 2000. These characteristics include urbanization or population density, education, income, race, and employment. Our findings are mixed. While we find some evidence (at least in Senate votes) that population density is a positive predictor of “pro-environment” votes, we also find that things commensurate with the Environmental Kuznets Curve such as income, education, and lifestyle also play an important role in environmental voting.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

An analytical history of terrorism, 1945–2000

This paper traces the history of modern terrorism from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It divides that history into three stylized waves: terrorism in the service of national liberation and ethnic separatism, left-wing terrorism, and Islamist terrorism. Adopting a constitutional political economy perspective, the paper argues that terrorism is rooted in the artificial nation-states created during the interwar period and suggests solutions grounded in liberal federalist constitutions and, perhaps, new political maps for the Middle East, Central Asia and other contemporary terrorist homelands.     

The Political Frame for Negotiated Capitalism: Electoral Reform and the Politics of Crisis in Japan and Sweden

This article examines the impact of political institutions on the strength of executive governments as well as the consequences of that strength for policymaking. It argues that both political changes and electoral reforms in Japan and Sweden have weakened the political frame for “negotiated” or “coordinated” decision making in these nations. In Sweden, however, the complete demolition of the old political frame has opened up opportunities and incentives for new modes of governance. In Japan, by contrast, reforms have buttressed rather than dismantled the old frame, impeding the transition to a new approach.