Vested Interests

SUMMARY

Interest groups are key players in contemporary campaigns and elections. Along with candidates and political parties, interest groups invest heavily in attempting to influence the outcomes of electoral contests, including presidential races. While scholars have investigated the resource allocation strategies of presidential candidates, little is known about how interest groups distribute resources in presidential campaigns. This study examines spending on political advertising in the 2000 presidential election and compares interest groups' resource allocation decisions to those of the candidates' organizations and the national political parties. The findings reveal that, although interest groups are numerous, disconnected and geographically dispersed, these entities—in the aggregate—adopt allocation strategies similar to those of candidates and parties.     

Models of Voter Behavior in Traditional and Evolving Democracies

ABSTRACT

The data of Polish, Slovenian, and U.S. political elections have been analyzed according to Newman's model of voter's choice behavior (Newman & Sheth 1985; Newman 1999). The results of the research were interpreted with the methodology of structural equations, where cognitive domains, the media, and the emotional feelings toward the candidates were variables in mutual cause-and-effect relationships. The results of the analyses demonstrated the differences in the importance of the media for the election process. In established democracies like in the U.S. the media play an important role as independent means of delivering information, while in evolving democracies media are not independent and are oftentimes used by the competing political sides as an element in electoral battles. The article also presents proposals for studying voter behaviors within constructivist and realistic paradigms as well as some suggestions for marketing practice.     

US Presidential Elections: Two Centuries of Constitutional Continuity and Political Change—With an Analysis of the Political Geography of Barack Obama's Re‐election Campaign

The system for electing the President of the United States remains essentially as it was prescribed in the Federal Constitution drafted in 1787. The individual 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) are accorded a number of votes in the (so‐called) Electoral College; each state's Electoral College vote is then attributed to the candidate gaining a plurality (most) of the popular vote in that state; and the candidate with a majority (50% + 1) of these aggregated Electoral College votes is declared the incoming president. What has changed have been the methods of nominating the candidates, chief of which are the political parties from the nineteenth century with their stage‐managed quadrennial conventions and the primary/caucus campaigns from the twentieth century which precede and now determine the formal nomination. President Obama's 2012 re‐election campaign showed both the crucial importance of the much‐maligned Electoral College in winning the presidency and the demographic divisions hidden in the larger American political landscape.     

Mission Accomplished: The Wartime Election of 2004

The war in Iraq, so the widely accepted view, hurt the reelection of George W. Bush. We contend, to the contrary, that the war helped him get reelected. First, we show that his victory fits the dominant pattern of wartime elections in American history. Second, we find that Bush’s approval ratings benefited from a complex rally where the Iraq war prolonged rather than diminished the 9/11 effect; most Americans affirmed rather than disputed a link between the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Third, while Bush’s approval proves sensitive to U.S. casualties in the Iraq war, any damage to his standing prior to the election was mitigated by sufficient popular support for that war. And finally, on Election Day, Bush was able to garner the vote of two critical blocks with favorable feelings about the Iraq war, be it the decision to invade or the prospect of success.

Fear in the Voting Booth: The 2004 Presidential Election

Every presidential election offers interesting questions for analysis, but some elections are more puzzling than others. The election of 2004 involves two linked and countervailing puzzles. The first is: How did President George W. Bush manage to win at all, avoiding the fates of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter? The other is: Why didn’t he win by a more substantial margin than in his first election, as all reelected presidents since Eisenhower were able to do? On the one hand, in the wake of September 11, the president had approval ratings around 90% and the threat of terrorism remained a substantial concern through Election Day. This would seem to afford Bush an overwhelming advantage. On the other hand, the public’s views of the state of the economy and of the course of the war in Iraq were negative. We think that the juxtaposition of these questions will help to explain the outcome of the election and of the pattern of the results. Moreover, by unpacking our explanation of the vote into three policy-related issue components—economic retrospective evaluations, domestic policy views, and foreign policy views—we examine the way these preferences contributed to the electorate’s voting decisions.     

Electoral Democracy during Wartime: The 2004 U.S. Election

The U.S. election of 2004 affords an opportunity to investigate how wartime affects presidential voting. The conventional wisdom is that wartime presidents always get reelected, but previous studies have not examined how citizens' attitudes on the war affect their voting. The papers in this special issue investigate this process, looking at how attitudes on the Iraq War, the larger War on Terrorism, and the so-called cultural war affected attitudes toward the presidential candidates and voting. The studies use a wide variety of datasets and survey questions, showing that the different aspects of the war resonate with different voters and that some of the effects of wartime are indirect through increasing the salience of leadership in the election. Wartime presidents do not get reelected automatically; they have had success in reelection because of how they use the war to build an image that can get them reelected.

组合创新：否定与超越自我的思维范式

创新已经渗透到社会经济、政治、文化和人们生活、思想观念的方方面面。变革社会中对于创新的重要性人们都有深刻的感悟,对如何实现创新见仁见智。本文从敢于否定、超越自我、实现组合创新的角度,提出创新首先要敢于否定自我,即剔除过时的成绩、知识、能力、经验和观念等,但否定并不是丢弃全部,而必须留下合理内核。合理内核是那些带有规律性的、与新的发展战略有关的、带有个体特色的东西,然后将合理内核与新的发展要素进行组合实践。揭示出组合创新就是继承与发展的统一这样一种创新的基本理念和方法。     

关于创设“继任犯”理论的构想

基于封约三年内先後出现的三个类似疑案的研究，笔者首次发现了这类犯罪是除犯罪预备、犯罪未遂、犯罪中止之外的又一种“不完整一罪”犯罪形态，首次提出了“继任犯”理论，有效解决了“继任犯”定罪乱、处罚乱问题。     

美国宪政主义与20世纪非洲宪政的发展

非洲历来是美国全球战略锁链上不可缺少的一环 ,非洲的宪政发展很早就受到美国宪政思想和政治体制的影响。 2 0世纪 90年代后期 ,非洲许多国家的宪政随着美国在全球推行政治民主化运动而出现重大转型 ,美国的宪政对非洲国家的宪政影响突出地体现为四个方面 ,即人权观念 ,联邦制 ,总统制与政党制以及司法审查制度等方面。通过分析采纳美国模式的原因和后果 ,可以看出非洲的宪政发展依然任重道远。     

Preliminary Observations of Arthropods Associated with Buried Carrion on Oahu

Several studies in Hawaii have focused on arthropod succession and decomposition patterns of surface remains, but the current research presents the first study to focus on shallow burials in this context. Three domestic pig carcasses (Sus scrofa L.) were buried at the depths of 20–40 cm in silty clay loam soil on an exposed ridge on the leeward side of the volcanically formed Koolau Mountain Range. One carcass was exhumed after 3 weeks, another after 6 weeks, and the last carcass was exhumed after 9 weeks. An inventory of arthropod taxa present on the carrion and in the surrounding soil and observations pertaining to decomposition were recorded at each exhumation. The longer the carrion was buried, the greater the diversity of arthropod species that were recovered from the remains. Biomass loss was calculated to be 49% at the 3‐week interval, 56% at the 6‐week interval, and 59% at the 9‐week interval.