American Politics Commons^™

Policymaking Under Pressure: The Perils Of Incremental Responses To Climate Change, Cary Coglianese, Jocelyn D’Ambrosio

All Faculty Scholarship

Federal policymakers’ reluctance to enact a comprehensive climate change policy during the past decade has coincided with increased awareness of the inevitability and severity of the problems from global climate change. Thus, it is no surprise that piecemeal, sub-federal policies have garnered considerable support. Bolstered by the political science literature on the promise of incrementalism and democratic experimentalism, many proponents of climate change action favor incremental steps in the hope that they will improve the environment or at least serve as a basis for more comprehensive policies. Against this hopeful view, we explain why ad hoc responses to climate change …

Conflicts Between The Commander In Chief And Congress: Concurrent Power Over The Conduct Of War, Jules Lobel

Articles

The Bush Administration argues that the Commander in Chief has exclusive power to decide what military tactics to use to defeat a wartime enemy. The Administration's constitutional position that Congress may not permissibly interfere with these Executive Commander in Chief powers has been heavily criticized, particularly with respect to the Executive power to interrogate prisoners or engage in warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and its argument that Congress cannot limit the Iraq war. Yet, many critics concur in the Administration's starting point - that the President has exclusive authority over battlefield operations.

This article challenges that assumption. It argues that …

The Effects Of Australian Ballot Rules On Constituent Spending And Committee Assignments In The U.S. House, 1885-1901, Jill Wittrock, Stephen Nemeth, Howard Sanborn, Brian Disarro, Peverill Squire

Stephen Nemeth

Katz and Sala linked the development of committee property rights in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives to the introduction of theAustralian ballot. If, as they posited, members sought personal reputations to carry them to reelection in the new electoral environment, the current article argues that behaviors with more imme diate political payoffs also should have changed inways their theory would predict. The article examines whether committee assignments, floor voting behavior, and the distribution of pork barrel projects changed in predicted ways and finds supportive outcomes, but usually only when the office bloc ballot, and not the party bloc ballot, …

Developing A Young Professionals Network For The Arts, Thomas Bryer, Kristin Stewart

Thomas A Bryer

The Young Professionals Network for the Arts simulation is an exercise that allows students to think through the process of creating a network from the ground up. The structure of the class session that includes the simulation consists of a lecture on the readings and an 8-Step network building process, followed by the simulation.

Immigration, José Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

No abstract provided.

Issue Evasion, José Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

No abstract provided.

Women And Leadership, Caroline Heldman

Caroline Heldman

No abstract provided.

Out-Of-Body Image, Caroline Heldman

Caroline Heldman

On a typical day, you might see ads featuring a naked woman's body tempting viewers to buy an electronic organizer, partially exposed women's breasts being used to sell fishing line, or a woman's rear-wearing only a thong-being used to pitch a new running shoe. [...] Dove beauty products launched a much-lauded advertising campaign that used "real women" (i.e., not super-skinny ones) instead of models, but then Dove's parent company, Unilever, put out hypersexual ads for Axe men's body spray that showed the fragrance driving scantily clad women into orgiastic states.

Is Federalism The Reason For Policy Failure In Hurricane Katrina?, Thomas Birkland, Sarah Waterman

Thomas A Birkland

Governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina are generally cited as policy failures. Media and popular analyses focus on the federal government’s policy failures in hazard preparedness, response, and recovery. Meanwhile, disaster experts realize that disaster response is a shared intergovernmental responsibility.We examine the federal nature of natural disaster policy in the US to consider whether federalism, or other factors, had the greatest influence on the failures in Katrina.We find that some policy failures are related to policy design considerations based in federalism, but that the national focus on ‘‘homeland security’’ and the concomitant reduction in attention to natural hazards and disasters, …

Rebranding America : The Occidental Strategy, Derek Shearer

Derek Shearer

No abstract provided.

Global Governance Organizations: Legitimacy And Authority In Conflict, Jonathan Koppell

Jonathan GS Koppell

Global governance organizations (GGOs) are frequently maligned as both illegitimate and ineffective. With the growing prominence of entities that promulgate global rules governing trade, communications, finance, and transport, these shortcomings take on greater importance. This essay presents a theoretical framework to understand the challenge of legitimacy for GGOs. It argues that GGOs tend to face trade-offs between legitimacy and authority, but that widespread usages of these important terms conflate or confuse them and thus obscure critical issues in GGO politics. Once these terms are more clearly defined, we see more easily that GGOs must sometimes violate democratic norms, sacrificing equality …

Effort, Intensity And Position Taking: Reconsidering Obstruction In The Pre-Cloture Senate, Kathleen Bawn, Gregory Koger

Gregory Koger

Effort is a crucial element of the legislative process — writing bills, forming coalitions, crafting strategies, and debating. We develop a model in which legislative decisions are the product of competitive effort by two teams, one trying to pass new legislation, and the other to block it. Teams choose effort levels based on preferences over the policy outcome, political rewards for effort, and opportunity costs, and the team that produces more effort wins. We apply this model to four cases of major legislation from the pre-cloture Senate: passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Ship Purchase Act of …

Filibustering And Majority Rule In The Senate: The Contest Over Judicial Nominations, 2003-2005, Gregory Koger

Gregory Koger

This chapter proves a simple point: the Senate could be a much more majoritarian chamber than it is. Presumably, as in the House, the majority party would benefit from restrictions on filibustering. Howevver, senators have been reluctant to make major reforms, even when they are members of the majority party and their party’s agenda is being thwarted by Senate minorities. The”nuclear option” contest over judicial nominations from 2003 to 2005 illustrates one source of this stability: the minority party may refrain from obstruction in the face of a threat to curtail the right to filibuster.

Twenty-Sixth Amendment, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

No abstract provided.

Excerpt From Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy And Power In American Culture (Revised And Updated Edition), Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

This is the introduction to the revised and updated edition of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2008). The book challenges the dominant academic and popular approach to conspiracy theories, which views them as a paranoid, extremist expression of marginal groups and individuals that pathologically challenges the basic assumptions of American history and the pluralistic political system of the United States. The book is premised on the contrary proposition that the prevalence of conspiracy theories is neither necessarily pernicious nor external to American politics and culture but instead an integral aspect of …

Trying To Vote In Good Conscience, Elizabeth F. Brown

Elizabeth F Brown

This Article analyses the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States, and how it addresses the economic and environmental issues raised during the 2008 Presidential election.

Presidential Election Of 1980, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

No abstract provided.

Much Ado About Pluralities: Pride And Precedent Amidst The Cacophy Of Concurrences, And Re-Percolation After Rapanos, Donald J. Kochan, Melissa M. Berry, Matthew J. Parlow

Donald J. Kochan

Conflicts created by concurrences and pluralities in court decisions create confusion in law and lower court interpretation. Rule of law values require that individuals be able to identify controlling legal principles. That task is complicated when pluralities and concurrences contribute to the vagueness or uncertainty that leaves us wondering what the controlling rule is or attempting to predict what it will evolve to become. The rule of law is at least handicapped when continuity or confidence or confusion infuse our understanding of the applicable rules. This Article uses the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Rapanos v. United States to …

The Soft Power And Persuasion Of Translations In The War On Terror: Words And Wisdom In The Transformation Of Legal Systems, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

The power of words is the power of persuasion. The exportation of the foundational legal principles that helped form the American republic can serve as instrumental "soft power" tools in the war on terror. Efforts promoting projects like the Arabic Book Program are important vehicles to cross-cultural and cross-lingual international relations. This Article argues that an arsenal of words can be as, or more, powerful than an arsenal of artillery. The West has much to offer, but the rest of the world needs to be able to read it without getting lost in translation. Providing linguistic access to the documents …

The Developer’S Decision Calculus: An Agent-Based Model Of Commercial Development, Mirya R. Holman, Travis Coan

Mirya R Holman

While considerable research has been devoted to understanding the impact local regulatory environments on housing development, few studies have examined the implications of land-use regulations for commercial development. The paucity of studies is unfortunate given that commercial development often provides municipalities with considerable economic benefits (e.g., employment) and a crucial source of tax revenue. This study presents a formal model of the commercial development process that explicitly incorporates the dynamic interaction of commercial developers and local cities. Specifically, we construct an agent-based model (ABM) of the commercial development process that represents some key features of the development process. We form …