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Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Learning From Failure: A Review Of Peter Schuck’S Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Book Review), David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart Jan 2015

Learning From Failure: A Review Of Peter Schuck’S Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Book Review), David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf ’s theory of nonmarket failures in which “internalities” replace the heavily-studied market failure from externalities (Wolf 1979). Internalities are evidence of a discord between the public goals by which a program is defended and the private goals of its administrators. What might economists contribute? We suggest that economists have neglected internalities because they take group goals as exogenously determined and we defend an alternative tradition in …

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Changing The People, Not Simply The President: The Limitations And Possibilities Of The Obama Presidency, In Tocquevillian Perspective, Thad Williamson Jan 2011

Changing The People, Not Simply The President: The Limitations And Possibilities Of The Obama Presidency, In Tocquevillian Perspective, Thad Williamson

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Attempting to elucidate what precisely Alexis de Tocqueville would have made of either Barack Obama the politician or the astonishing political phenomenon that swept the nation's first African-American president into office in 2008 is a fruitless endeavor. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville devotes relatively little attention to the presidency as an institution, and still less to the merits and accomplishments of particular presidents. In his account, what made American democracy unique and functional was neither its federalist institutional arrangements nor the virtues of its national leaders, but its culture of political participation in local democratic institutions. Tocqueville recognized the power …

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Debating: Performance Ambiguity And Social Influence, Matthew B. Kugler, George R. Goethals Jan 2008

The Unbearable Lightness Of Debating: Performance Ambiguity And Social Influence, Matthew B. Kugler, George R. Goethals

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This chapter considers three sets of studies on how social influence affects perceptions of candidates' performances in presidential debates. The first set shows that perceptions are influenced markedly by the reactions of peers watching the debate at the same time or by televised audiences shown on broadcast debates. The second set shows that expectations created by news accounts prior to debates also have significant impact and that different kinds of news accounts affect different viewers in distinct ways. Individuals with a high need for cognition respond well to more complicated messages that advance some reason as to why an apparently …

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The Reagan Standard, Gary L. Mcdowell Sep 2007

The Reagan Standard, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

After much hemming and hawing, former U.S. Sen. Fred Dalton Thompson has made it official: He will seek the Republican nomination for the presidency. His official announcement, it has long been rumored, will cause a collective sigh of relief from a great many conservatives in the party. He is, after all, in their view, one of them. The question is, what does that mean?

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Judicial Nominees: Defining The Terms Of Senate Debates, Gary L. Mcdowell Dec 2004

Judicial Nominees: Defining The Terms Of Senate Debates, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Since roughly the beginning of the Reagan administration the left wing of the Democratic senatorial cohort has enjoyed remarkable success in disparaging Republican nominees to the federal judiciary as mere "conservatives". Its argument has been that those nominees would decide cases on everything from abortion to economic regulation on the basis of their "conservative" policy preferences. Sadly, as a general rule, the conservatives have allowed the Democrats to get away with this distortion.

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The True Constitutionalist, Raoul Berger, 1901-2000: His Life And His Contribution To American Law And Politics, Gary L. Mcdowell May 2001

The True Constitutionalist, Raoul Berger, 1901-2000: His Life And His Contribution To American Law And Politics, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

When Raoul Berger turned ninety a little over a decade ago, he was presented with a book of letters from friends and admisrers. Those sending their good wishes were among America's most distinguished jurists, public officials and scholars, including Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and Professor Philip B. Kurland. The collection was introduced by a letter from former President Ronald Reagan.

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The Limits Of Natural Law: Thomas Rutherforth And The American Legal Tradition, Gary L. Mcdowell Jan 1992

The Limits Of Natural Law: Thomas Rutherforth And The American Legal Tradition, Gary L. Mcdowell

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The history of American constitutional jurisprudence has been marked by a persistent fascination with the idea of natural law. This springs first and foremost from the fact that we understand as our constitutional foundation those “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” to which Thomas Jefferson made such eloquent appeal in the Declaration of Independence. Further, American politics since the founding of the republic has been characterized by a commitment, with more or less success, to the simple truth James Madison posited in The Federalist. “Justice,” Madison declared, “is the end of government. It is the end of civil …

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