Articles:

Presidential Capital and the Supreme Court Confirmation Process
Timothy R. Johnson, Jason M. Roberts [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials, PDF format]

Collective Action and the Mobilization of Institutions
David Lowery, Virginia Gray, Jennifer Anderson, Adam J. Newmark [Abstract]

Strategic Abandonment or Sincerely Second Best? The 1999 Israeli Prime Ministerial Election
Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, Matthew Diamond, Abraham Diskin, Renan Levine, Thomas J. Scotto [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials, PDF format]

Resisting the Lonely Superpower: Responses of States in the United Nations to U.S. Dominance
Erik Voeten [Abstract] [Supplemental Materials, PDF format]

The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda
Vanessa A. Baird [Abstract]

The Limits of Political Rationalism: Enlightenment and Religion in Oedipus the Tyrant
Peter J. Ahrensdorf [Abstract]

Inter-local Cooperation and the Distribution of Federal Grant Awards
Kenneth N. Bickers, Robert M. Stein [Abstract]

Vote-Seeking Incentives and Legislative Representation in Six Presidential Democracies
Brian F. Crisp, Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon, Bradford S. Jones, Mark P. Jones, Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson [Abstract]

Theoretical and Empirical Implications of Attitude Strength
Joanne M. Miller, David A. M. Peterson [Abstract]

The Mobilization Solution? Face-to-Face Contact and Voter Turnout in a Municipal Election
David Niven [Abstract]

Regulatory Convergence in Non-Governmental Regimes? Cross-National Adoption of ISO 14001 Certifications
Matthew Potoski, Aseem Prakash [Abstract]

Rational Behavior or the Norm of Cooperation?: Filibustering Among Retiring Senators
L. Marvin Overby, Lauren C. Bell [Abstract]

The Politics of Punishment: Evaluating Political Explanations of Incarceration Rates
Kevin B. Smith [Abstract]

Confidence in Institutions Before, During, and After "Indecision 2000"
Vincent Price, Anca Romantan [Abstract]

Abstracts:

Presidential Capital and the Supreme Court Confirmation Process
Timothy R. Johnson, University of Minnesota
Jason M. Roberts, University of Minnesota
The Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process has become one of the most contentious aspects of American politics in recent years, representing a seismic struggle between the president and the U.S. Senate over the ideological makeup of the nation's highest court. Existing research focuses on how the ideological compatibility of the president and the Senate affects the ideology of the president's nominees. However, little work addresses whether presidents can overcome an ideologically hostile Senate by spending political capital to support a nominee. As such, we examine the president's public expenditure of capital to obtain confirmation for Supreme Court nominees facing a Senate that is reticent to confirm. By content analyzing public statements made by presidents during confirmation battles we find strong support for the hypothesis that presidents strategically "go public." Further, this strategy has a marked influence on presidents' ability to win confirmation for their most important nominees.

Collective Action and the Mobilization of Institutions
David Lowery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Virginia Gray, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jennifer Anderson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Adam Newmark, Wake Forest University
Bias in the composition of interest communities is often explained by reference to variations in the collective action constraint facing voluntary and nonvoluntary organizations. But with the exception of literature on PAC formation, studies of direct institutional mobilization are rare. More often than not, their mobilization advantages vis-à-vis problems of collective action are simply assumed. This paper fills this gap by testing the collective action hypothesis on direct institutional mobilization. We argue that the PAC studies are flawed as tests of this hypothesis; they study the wrong mode of political activity and use selective samples and limited research designs. We develop a new test using state data on seven types of institutions to solve these problems. We also compare the collective action problem facing institutions to the related problems facing voluntary organizations. We find strong evidence of collective action problems in institutional mobilization, problems that make interest populations of nonvoluntary and voluntary organizations appear far more similar than commonly thought.

Strategic Abandonment or Sincerely Second Best? The 1999 Israeli Prime Ministerial Election
Paul R. Abramson, Michigan State University
John H. Aldrich, Duke University
Matthew Diamond, Duke University
Abraham Diskin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Renan Levine, University of Toronto
Thomas J. Scotto, Duke University
The Israeli election for Prime Minister in 1999 featured five candidates. Three, including a major, centrally located candidate, Yitzhak Mordechai, withdrew from competition during the two days before the voting. Mordechai withdrew in large measure in reaction to the strategic decisions of voters, that is, some voters who favored him deserted his candidacy as his poll standings declined. We use surveys conducted during the 1999 campaign to estimate models of strategic voting behavior based on the multi-candidate calculus of voting. We find that strategic voting in the Israeli, majority-with-runoff electoral system closely resembled the level and nature of strategic voting found in the more nearly pure plurality systems for which the statistical models were originally developed. The result is support for the reasoning Mordechai provided for his decision, illustrating the interlocking nature of strategic decisions between candidates and voters.

Resisting the Lonely Superpower: Responses of States in the United Nations to U.S. Dominance
Erik Voeten, The George Washington University
The United States finds itself increasingly isolated in multilateral organizations. To infer what this trend signifies, we need to disentangle changes in the agenda from changes in revealed preferences. This paper does so with a novel data set, important votes in the United Nations according to the State Department, and method, a multilevel item- response model estimated by MCMC methods. The results show that the agenda becomes more negative for the United States after 1996, whereas the almost universal widening of the preference gap occurs at a constant rate between 1991 and 2001. In addition, there is no evidence for an increasing clash of civilizations and some evidence that the gap with states that become more liberal has increased less.

The Effect of Politically Salient Decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court's Agenda
Vanessa A. Baird, University of Colorado- Boulder
It is widely recognized that the U.S. Supreme Court sets its agenda by choosing to hear certain cases and refusing to hear others. But what influence, if any, does the Court have on the types of cases that are appealed to it? The Court has no formal power to solicit cases, but I contend that potential litigants interpret politically salient Court decisions as signals of its willingness to hear additional cases in certain policy areas. When this happens, the Court receives additional well framed cases that allow it to make policy in those areas. The theoretical implications are twofold: 1) by signaling the litigant community to support litigation in certain policy areas, the Supreme Court can bring cases onto its agenda well before the certiorari process begins, and 2) the Supreme Court is dependent on extra-judicial actors and their resources to make comprehensive policy.

The Limits of Political Rationalism: Enlightenment and Religion in Oedipus the Tyrant
Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Davidson College
When Nietzsche launched the postmodern attack on the Western tradition of rationalism founded by Socrates, he invoked the purported anti-rationalism of Sophocles' Oedipus the Tyrant. Through his account of Oedipus, Sophocles does indicate why a pure political rationalism, that is, an attempt to govern political society in the light of reason alone, must ultimately fail and why tradition, convention, and piety are therefore necessary to political life. For convention makes what is by nature manifold seem simple and clear and what is by nature indifferent to human hopes seem supportive of them. But Sophocles' play does not celebrate convention, for it is Oedipus' unreasonable, conventional hopes that lead him to harm those dearest to him and himself so needlessly and cruelly. However mindful Sophocles may be of the limits of political rationalism, he clearly affirms the superior wisdom and humanity of the individual life guided by reason.

Inter-local Cooperation and the Distribution of Federal Grant Awards
Kenneth N. Bickers, University of Colorado
Robert M. Stein, Rice University
Much of the research on the distribution of federal assistance focuses on the activities of members of Congress. Yet it has been long understood that seeking and receiving federal aid programs by state and local governments is a costly activity. What is not understood nor carefully studied is how local jurisdictions attempt to "work" the federal aid system to obtain increased federal funding. To investigate this question, we draw upon theories of collective action among governmental jurisdictions within metropolitan areas to explain both the quantity and quality of participation in the federal aid system. We focus on four questions: (1) To what extent is governmental fragmentation and inter-jurisdictional collaboration among governmental jurisdictional within metropolitan areas positively related to the ability of local actors to secure new federal grant awards? (2) To what extent do congressional delegations that represent voters within metropolitan areas influence the flow of grant awards to those areas? (3) To what extent are the efforts of congressional delegations to secure new grants conditional on partisan factors, both nationally and at the local level? (4) Do the effects of cooperative grant seeking endeavors vary across different types of grant programs? The single most important finding is that inter-local cooperation and governmental structure within metropolitan areas matter significantly in the distribution of federal assistance.

Vote-Seeking Incentives and Legislative Representation in Six Presidential Democracies
Brian F. Crisp, Washington University, St. Louis
Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon, Texas A&M University
Bradford S. Jones, University if Arizona
Mark P. Jones, Rice University
Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson, Texas A&M University
Through the use of an original dataset of bill initiation activity in six presidential democracies, we advance scholarly understanding of how the institutional incentives faced by legislative candidates influence representation. We extend and adapt theory, derived primarily from the experience of the U.S. Congress, demonstrating its viability, once assumed constants from the U.S. case are explicitly modeled, in quite distinct institutional contexts. In particular, we find the focus of individual legislators on national versus parochial concerns responds to the incentives provided by the candidate selection process, general election rules, legislator career patterns, and interbranch relations.

Theoretical and Empirical Implications of Attitude Strength
Joanne M. Miller, University of Minnesota
David A. M. Peterson, Texas A&M University
Attitude strength is defined as the extent to which an attitude is stable, resistant to change, impacts information processing, and guides behavior. Several concepts, such as accessibility, ambivalence, and importance relate to the broader concept of strength. For many years, both social psychology and political science ignored the differences across these various concepts, though in different ways. Social psychologists treated them as interchangeable, as indicators of the same latent concept. Political scientists treated them in isolation, focusing on one type of strength and ignoring the other, possibly relevant types. Recent research in both fields, however, challenges these approaches. Indicators of attitude strength are distinct concepts, and these differences are important empirically and theoretically. In this essay, we review the developments in both disciplines and make suggestions for how scholars should use and operationalize these concepts.

The Mobilization Solution? Face-to-Face Contact and Voter Turnout in a Municipal Election
David Niven, Florida Atlanic University
In the ongoing quest to understand and potentially improve voter turnout, many analysts have focused their attention on political mobilization effects. Some scholars suggest that the failure to engage in widespread personal mobilization efforts has contributed to declining turnout, and that a recommitment to mobilization by parties, candidates, and others would reverse the trend. This research explores the effects of face-to-face mobilization efforts in select precincts in a 2001 Boynton Beach, Florida municipal election. Controlling for their past voting history, the face-to-face mobilization effort did increase turnout by about 5 points. The results suggest that face-to-face mobilization efforts increase turnout at a huge cost in hours worked – but do so mostly by encouraging intermittent voters to go to the polls.

Regulatory Convergence in Non-Governmental Regimes? Cross-National Adoption of ISO 14001 Certifications
Matthew Potoski, Iowa State University
Aseem Prakash, University of Washington
Recent globalization discussions have revived the issue of regulatory convergence. Convergence advocates point to the structural pressures of the global economy on countries, while the divergence school points to the embeddedness of domestic regulatory institutions. This paper examines cross-national divergence in adoption rates of ISO 14001, an important international non-governmental environmental regime developed with the cooperation of multinational firms. ISO 14001 offers a process-based system of voluntary regulation instead of an outcome-based system of public regulation that many firms find cumbersome. Our analysis of data from 59 countries suggests that ISO 14001 adoption rates are likely to be higher in countries whose trading partners have adopted this non-governmental regime, which are embedded in international networks of non- governmental organizations, whose governments flexibly enforce stringent environmental regulations with a less adversarial and litigious stance towards firms, and where consumers want mechanisms for identifying environmentally progressive firms.

Rational Behavior or the Norm of Cooperation?: Filibustering Among Retiring Senators
L. Marvin Overby, University of Missouri
Lauren C. Bell, Randolph-Macon College
This paper contributes to the growing empirical literature on filibusters by examining the factors that are associated with individual-level filibustering behavior. We focus particularly on the behavior of senators in the latter part of their careers, using impending retirement as analytical leverage to determine whether decisions to engage or not in dilatory parliamentary practices are driven more by narrowly drawn considerations of instrumental utility or by compliance with institutional norms of deference and cooperation. Using data from 1975 to 1993 and employing multivariate models that allow us to control for other relevant factors, we find only limited support for a narrowly rational model of Senate "followership." In the course of our enquiry, we clarify the notion of legislative norms, integrate our study with recent inter-disciplinary scholarship on the evolution of cooperative behavior, and consider how leadership can be exercised in environments largely bereft of formal leadership resources.

The Politics of Punishment: Evaluating Political Explanations of Incarceration Rates
Kevin B. Smith, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Why have incarceration rates dramatically increased even as crime rates have remained stable or even declined? This is a question of considerable policy and theoretical relevance that currently has no satisfactory answer. I attempt to address this question by examining the key political explanations of prison populations and the unit of analysis and data limitation obstacles that make it difficult to conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of these frameworks. I address these issues and undertake such an analysis using a pooled state-level analysis covering the years 1980-1995. Results suggest that the growth in prison populations has little to do with changes in crime rates or government response to citizen attitudes. Instead it is the most basic elements of the political environment (partisanship and elections) and the continuing legacy of racial social cleavages that explain why incarceration rates have increased.

Confidence in Institutions Before, During, and After "Indecision 2000"
Vincent Price, University of Pennsylvania
Anca Romantan, University of Pennsylvania
The disputed outcome of the 2000 presidential election provides an opportunity to examine changes in public confidence in various political institutions at a time when these were under unusual stress. The present research draws upon three-wave panel data. Measures of confidence were asked in August, December, and February. Particular institutions show distinct patterns, in line with their salient roles in the crisis. Confidence in the Supreme Court polarized considerably along partisan lines as a direct function of opinions about the Court's decision. Confidence in the Presidency, already polarized in August, shows weakening polarization and reverses direction upon Bush's inauguration. Confidence in Congress increased significantly, with no growth in polarization. Findings confirm that confidence in various institutions has dynamic components related to both "diffuse" and "specific" support.