Article Abstracts

Steve Valocchi. "The Racial Basis of Capitalism and the State, and the Impact of the New Deal on African Americans." Social Problems, August 1994.

This paper describes the ways in which African Americans were written out of or subordinated within the social policies of the New Deal period. To explain this feature of the New Deal, I argue that the existing social science perspectives on social policy need to be built on a greater appreciation of the role of racial subjugation in the construction of class interests, party processes, and the state. The recovery of this racial basis helps us understand why our liberal welfare state resists efforts to move in a more social democratic direction.

John Zipp. "Government Employment and Black-White Earnings Inequality, 1980-1990." Social Problems, August 1994.

Through both its direct employment and its policies, the public sector historically has provided an important avenue for the upward mobility of blacks. However, the conservative Reagan-Bush agenda of the 1980s greatly redefined the role of government in promoting racial equality, and this paper tests to see if the advantages that blacks have obtained from government employment changed across the decade. Utilizing the 1980 and 1990 CPS microdata, I find that racial inequality increased in the federal government and that, concomitantly, the benefits for blacks working for the federal government decreased between 1980 and 1990. I conclude with the implications of these results for both research and policy.

Katherine Beckett. "Setting the Public Agenda: 'Street Crime' and Drug use in American Culture." Social Problems , August 1994.

Social control issues such as "street crime" and drug use have received an extraordinary degree of political attention in the United States since 1964. In this article, I use OLS and other methods to identify which factors are associated with subsequent shifts in levels of public concern about crime and drugs. The results indicate that state claimsmaking activities, and to some extent, media initiative on these issues, are associated with public concern about "street crime" and drug use. This study provides support for "constructionist" accounts of the politicization of crime and drugs by demonstrating that it is the definitional activities of the state and the media, rather than the reported incidence of crime or drug use, that has shaped public opinion concern regarding those issues.

Earl Wysong, Richard Aniskiewicz, and David Wright. "Truth and DARE: Tracking Drug Education to Graduation and As Symbolic Politics." Social Problems, August 1994.

This article utilizes a multi-dimensional impact and process evaluation framework to explore the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program in terms of long-term effects, political potency, and implementation issues. The impact dimension compares questionnaire data from 288 high school seniors exposed to DARE as seventh graders with 335 non-exposed seniors. No significant differences in drug use behaviors or attitudes were found between the two groups. Micro-level process findings from a focus group interview reinforced the quantitative results. At the macro-level, DARE is shown to be a form of symbolic politics, supported by direct and indirect stakeholders, and embedded in a complex and potent organizational support structure. To minimize conflicts with DARE stakeholders and enhance program understanding, we consider how factors associated with the implementation process may have influenced the results. These include contextual factors, disjunctions between program ideals and implementation realities, and program design limitations. This multi-dimensional evaluation approach provides both context and meaning for understanding the DARE program and for interpreting the results. It also underscores the need for a more multi-faceted discourse on drug prevention programs in order to consider the relative merits of both psychosocial and structural approaches to the issue of drug use.

Robert S. Broadhead and Douglas D. Heckathorn. "AIDS Prevention Outreach Among Injection Drug Users: Agency Problems and New Approaches." Social Problems, August 1994.

Drawing on original fieldwork and agency theory, we examine the operations and internal workings of community-based outreach projects to combat AIDS among out-of-treatment injection drug users (IDUs). We show that even though these projects suffered from a host of organizational problems, the response from IDUs was positive and vigorous. Based on these findings and recent developments in the theoretic understanding of collective action, we describe new approaches to AIDS prevention that build on traditional outreach prevention efforts but rely more heavily on an active collaboration between IDUs and service providers. These approaches fulfill the call by many AIDS researchers for the development of future prevention projects that capitalize on the unexpected responsiveness IDUs exhibited to traditional outreach efforts. Finally, we consider other public health areas in which such interventions might be effectively applied.

Philipp Genschel and Raymund Werle. "From National Hierarchies to International Standardization: Modal Changes in the Governance of Telecommunications." Journal of Public Policy, Vol.13, No.3.

The emergence of large technical systems like railroads, telecommunications networks or power grids was closely associated with hierarchical governance. Despite the success of hierarchical structures in promoting the development of these systems they have recently come under strain. They are suspected of being too slow, too cumbersome, and too unimaginative to deal with the complexity and turbulence of modern technology. Practical people as well as academics look for functional alternatives. One of the alternatives is the decentralisation of technical control via standards. The paper investigates this alternative by analysing the role that standards have achieved in telecommunications after the hierarchical order was eroded by globalisation and deregulation. It discusses how the demise of hierarchy has boosted the "demand" for standards and how the institutional infrastructure for standardisation was adapted to meet this demand.

Elim Papadakis and Clive Bean. "Popular Support for the Welfare State: A Comparison Between Institutional Regimes." Journal of Public Policy, Vol.13, No.3.

Apart from the preoccupation with raising revenue for the welfare state, the question of popular support is central to its future. Arguments about the prospects for the welfare state, about its social and political bases of support and about classifying different types of regime provide the context of our investigation. Our approach is to examine empirical evidence of the connection between support for the welfare state and (a) different types of regime and (b) social and political factors. The analysis of these relationships has important implications for policy-makers who are concerned about consent to their programmes and about the experiences of comparable regimes.

Mark Mason. "Europe and the Japanese Banking Challenge." Journal of Public Policy, Vol.13, No.3.

The dramatic overseas expansion of Japanese banks during the 1980s provoked major policy debates within the European Community. Fears that Japanese firms in the banking industry might replicate earlier successes in other industries, together with charges that Japan did not grant reciprocal access to European banks, raised important questions for EC member states committed to the implementation of common banking policies. Adoption of the crucially important Second Banking Coordination Directive and other public measures enabled the Community flexibly to impose strong controls on Japanese banks in the region. The nature of these public measures toward Japanese firms in the Community's banking industry, together with related EC policies toward local Japanese competition in other industries, suggested the emergence of a more general EC policy model for confronting the vaunted "Japanese challenge."

Anna Pollert. "The Single European Market, Multinationals and Concentration: The Case of Food Manufacturing." Journal of Public Policy Vol.13, No.3.

This paper examines the logic and implications of the Single European Market for the food manufacturing sector. It points to the role of multinationals in this sector and the process of concentration through merger and acquisition as a central growth strategy. It suggests that rather than encourage further concentration, European policy should concern itself with the benefits as well as the problems of regional differentiation and the complementarity rather than the conflict of different scales of production and distribution.

Robert M. Stein and Kenneth N. Bickers. "Universalism and the Electoral Connection: A Test and Some Doubts." Political Research Quarterly, June 1994.

A recurring theme in the academic literature on distributive policy is the tendency for legislators to form oversized coalitions to bestow benefits on virtually every district represented in the legislature. In this paper we offer two tests of the universalism hypothesis. First, we examine the distributional expectation of the universalism thesis under the assumption that separate logrolls occur over the distribution of benefits for individual programs. Second, we test the thesis under the assumption that logrolls occur over bundles of programs organized by policy subsystems. Our findings show that the evidence on the extent to which benefits from distributive programs are universalized is weak. We suggest a number of reasons why these weak results might be expected. We argue that the incentive to universalize benefits is only one goal of legislators and may not always be the most fruitful strategy for enhancing their reelection prospects.

Colleen M. Grogan. "Political-Economic Factors Influencing State Medicaid Policy." Political Research Quarterly , September 1994.

A political-economic theory is developed to explain the formation of public policy in the American states: here, I focus specifically on states' Medicaid policy decisions. I analyze three dimensions of Medicaid policy - financial eligibility, categorical eligibility, and benefit coverage - and argue that each dimension represents a different political process. My theory assumes that state politicians maximize their political utility by attempting to satisfy the preferences of voters, interest groups, and their own ideology, while at the same time they minimize their political disutility by attempting to keep the political costs of their actions as low as possible. However, I postulate further that the political process varies according to the degree to which constituents are interested in the policy, the strength of interest groups, and politicians' political ideology. To test this theory, I use a heteroskedastic, timewise autoregressive model for panel data. My theory is fairly well supported by the empirical results: the Medicaid policy dimensions do represent different political processes, and politicians must trade off the utility gained from increasing spending with the utility lost from increasing public expenditures. However, contrary to my theory: politicians' political ideology plays a significant role in all the Medicaid policy decisions.

Jeffery J. Mondak. "Policy Legitimacy and the Supreme Court: The Sources and Contexts of Legitimation." Political Research Quarterly, September 1994.

Conflicting evidence regarding the ability of the Supreme Court to confer policy legitimacy suggests that the process of legitimation is both subtle and multifaceted. Two aspects of this process are examined here. First, the relationship between policy legitimacy and policy agreement is explored. Experimental tests demonstrate that policy legitimacy emerges from a direct process of symbolic legitimation, and through an indirect process of persuasive legitimation. Second, the mediated character of Supreme Court rulings is examined as it relates to the Court's ability to enhance policy legitimacy. Experimental tests reveal that the Court's power of legitimation remains consistent regardless of variance in specific content of news coverage. Collectively, findings highlight the intricacy of policy legitimation while providing evidence that the institutional legitimacy maintained by the Supreme Court can produce significant shifts in policy evaluations.

Lawrence Baum. "Specialization and Authority Acceptance: The Supreme Court and Lower Federal Courts." Political Research Quarterly, September 1994.

Research on organizational behavior suggests that the authority of higher officials for their subordinates is relatively low for subordinates whose work is highly specialized. If this proposition is valid, the Supreme Court should have more limited authority for specialized federal courts than for their generalist counterparts. To test this expectation, citations to the Court's decisions in patent law were analyzed. It was posited that the former Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA), a specialized court, cited the Supreme Court in patent cases less often than did the generalist federal courts of appeals. This hypothesis was strongly supported according to several measures of citation frequency. The results emphasize the potential impact of specialization on hierarchical authority in organizations and underline the consequences of specialization for judicial behavior.

Lucig H. Danielian and Benjamin I. Page. "The Heavenly Chorus: Interest Group Voices On TV News." American Journal of Political Science, Vol.38, No.4, November 1994.

The work of E.E. Schattschneider and others suggests that there may be systematic biases or unrepresentativeness in the voices that interest groups contribute to public deliberation about policy. Evidence for hundreds of TV news stories concerning 80 diverse policy issues from the 1969-1982 period indicates that corporations and business groups predominated (especially on economic issues), with 36.5% of all interest group mentions, contrasted with only 13.2% for labor. Professional and agricultural interests were rarely heard from. Citizen action groups had 32% of all interest group stories, but these often concerned unpopular protest activity. Such imbalances, apparently resulting from differential command of money and other resources, seem to violate norms of equal access, representativeness, balance, and diversity in the marketplace of ideas.

Kenneth R. Mlandenka and Brinck Kerr. "Does Politics Matter? A Time Series Analysis of Minority Employment Patterns." American Journal of Political Science, Vol.38, No.4, November 1994.

Public sector jobs represent a major source of political and economic progress for racial minorities. However, wide variation exists across United States cities with respect to how effectively minorities have been able to lay claim to an equitable share of these jobs. Past research suggests that the election of a minority mayor plays a major role in successful employment strategies. Previous studies, however, have been limited by reliance on cross-sectional research designs. Employing a pooled time series design in a large number of cities, we find that black mayors have very little impact on black job success. We also find the Hispanic mayors have no effect on Hispanic job success. Instead, favorable minority employment outcomes are determined by an interaction among minority representatives on city council and minority administrators in key decision making positions. This political-bureaucratic explanation suggests that a major reassessment of the determinants of minority employment progress is in order.

Diana Evans. "Policy and Pork: The Use of Pork Barrel Projects to Build Policy Coalitions in the House of Representatives." American Journal of Political Science, Vol.38, No.4, November 1994.

The literature on distributive politics in legislatures concentrates on the formation of logrolling coalitions to pass the district projects of the coalition's members at the expense of the general public. This article argues that district projects are also used for another purpose: to help committee leaders to construct supporting coalitions for legislative packages that satisfy the leaders' own goals, including general benefit legislation. This study explicates such a strategy and tests its efficacy by estimating the impact on House members' roll call votes of the inclusion of highway "demonstration" projects in the 1987 highway and urban mass transit reauthorization by the leadership of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee. The analysis shows that distributive benefits conferred by the leaders did indeed influence members' support for the leaders' legislative goals on that bill.

Kristen Renwick Monroe. "A Fat Lady in a Corset: Altruism and Social Theory." American Journal of Political Science, Vol.38, No.4, November 1994.

This manuscript reviews the literature on altruism as it has been discussed traditionally in economics and rational choice theory, evolutionary biology, and psychology. All of these fields assume self-interest is the norm for human behavior; all, therefore, experience great difficulty explaining action that risks sacrificing one's own welfare in order to benefit another. The literature on altruism is reviewed here not just to understand and explain the phenomenon itself, but also to use our understanding of altruism as an analytical tool that can yield insight on the validity, universality and limitations of the intellectual theories about human behavior that organize so much of our daily lives and public policies.

George Hoberg and Kathryn Harrison. "It's Not Easy Being Green: The Politics of Canada's Green Plan." Canadian Public Policy, Vol.XX, No.2, June 1994.

In December 1990, the Canadian federal government introduced the Green Plan, a $3 billion comprehensive environmental action plan intended to guide federal environmental policy over the ensuing five years. This article examines the policy instruments contained in the Green Plan. We develop a classification of instruments in the plan, and then offer an explanation for the observed pattern. We argue that the Green Plan contains a surprising paucity of measures to directly protect the environment, whether regulations to restrict or prevent pollution, taxes to penalize polluting behaviour, or spending for clean up. Rather, the overwhelming balance of initiatives is concerned with generating and disseminating information about the environment. We have analysed the interaction of rational actors within an institutional and ideological context, and argued that the contents of the Green Plan are best explained by a combination of the electoral incentives of the Conservative government, the budgetary incentives of Department of Environment bureaucrats, the institutional constraints posed by cabinet government and federalism, and a particular social construction of the idea of sustainable development.

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