Political Research Quarterly

Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy, and the process by which it is made. Only occasionally, however, has concern about nuclear weapons spread beyond these relatively marginal groups, generated substantial public support, and reached mainstream political institutions. In this paper, I use histories of peace protest and analyses of the inside of these social movements and theoretical work on protest cycles to explain cycles of movement engagement and quiescence in terms of their relation to external political context, or the "structure of political opportunity." I begin with a brief review of the relevant literature on the origins of movements, noting parallels in the study of interest groups. Building on recent literature on political opportunity structure, I suggest a theoretical framework for understanding the lifecycle of a social movement that emphasizes the interaction between activist choices and political context, proposing a six-stage process through which challenging movements develop. Using this theoretical framework I examine the four cases of relatively broad antinuclear weapons mobilization in postwar America. I conclude with a discussion of movement cycles and their relation to political alignment, public policy, and institutional politics.

In order to see whether men and women emphasize different messages in their campaigns, I examine the televised political advertisements of 38 candidates for the U.S. Senate between 1984 and 1986. In addition, I look at patterns of campaign coverage to determine whether the press distinguish between male and female candidates. Since a candidate's message will be most persuasive if that message is echoed by the press, gender differences in press treatment can have electoral consequences. The results of this study show that male and female senatorial candidates adopt campaign strategies that are similar on certain dimensions and strikingly different on others. Male and female candidates both prefer to focus on policy matters in their candidate-oriented appeals, although they rarely take specific stands on issues. Yet there are important gender differences in the advertisements of male and female candidates and these differences correspond to the candidates' stereotypical strengths. Men tend to concentrate on economic issues, while women are much more likely to discuss social issues such as education and health policy. These differences (and others), although evident in their own campaign communications, are not represented in media coverage of the candidates' campaigns.

Despite the recent electoral success of female candiates in local, state, and national elections, we find that voters' gender stereotypes have potentially negative implications for women candidates, especially when running for national office. We test the political impact of stereotypes by examining the relative importance of typical "male" and "female" personality traits and areas of issue competence for "good" politicians and a hypothetical candidate at different types and levels of office. Overall, we find a preference for "male" characteristics at higher levels of office. We attempt to reconcile the existence of gender stereotypes, which portray women candidates as insufficiently aggressive or less competent in their dealings with the military with the recent electoral success of women in national and statewide elections.

The candidate evaluation literature has emphasized the contribution of both candidate characteristics and voter characteristics (e.g., party identification) to candidate appraisals. But the literature on attribution and sex role stereotypes suggests that women candidates may be evaluated differently than their male counterparts. This paper presents the results of a survey of 98 voters in which we explored the relationships among gender role attitudes, voters' attribution of leadership traits, and support for male and female candidates. The surveys were conducted in Syracuse, New York, during the 1990 campaigns, which included three male-female races. Our results substantiate the hypothesis that when candidate information is sparse, gender role attitudes are consequential in the initial evaluation of lesser known women candidates. Gender attitudes are important factors in candidate favorability when the candidates are women challengers. Secondly, we found that voters had a tendency to attribute particular leadership qualities and issue skills based on sex to hypothetical candidates, if no other information was available. In addition, we found that the more egalitarian the voters' gender role attitudes, the more likely they were to evaluate favorably actual women candidates. Finally, it was the case that all incumbents, male and female, were rated more positively on both "masculine" and "feminine" traits than were challengers.

An explosion in the literature on women and politics has been stimulated by the contemporary women's movement. This paper argues that an early diversity in theoretical orientation and methodology has been replaced by a narrow orthodoxy characterized by the use of polling and the survey method, and the theoretical voting behavior model employed by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. Left out of this approach is the study of political parties as organizations-a variable presented here as essential to the study of women in politics. The image of parties in women and politics scholarship is surveyed, as are the theoretical implications of ignoring women's gains in political parties in such studies.

Both liberals and communitarians grant normative weight to equality. To adjudicate their on-going debate, we need to clarify the meanings they attribute to that ambiguous concept. This paper analyzes a communitar ian conception of equality, and criticizes its practical implications. At the bottom of this account, we find a virtue-centered ethical theory that assumes citizens are equally interested in true human "flourishing." Communitarians define that flourishing as living virtuously within a community committed to participatory democracy and a substantive conception of the common good. This conception of equality shapes their account of legitimate politics, including the denial of a strong right of privacy. Thus, the communitarians' occasionally troubling policy stands are not simply specific and eliminable errors. They are, instead, deeply rooted in the structure of their theory, and, absent serious modifications, a reconsideration of liberal alternatives is in order.

The aim of this paper is to bring into the comtemporary discussion of crises of authority an ignored pre-Marxist approach best manifested in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and in the related ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville. Both stressed the importance of a nation's "collective unconscious" or value orientations in maintaining political legitimacy. If these erode, a "crisis in incubation" ensues, when authority is passively accepted until a major problem triggers a full-fledged crisis. The conjectural importance of this approach is indicated by brief comments on the possibility of a new type of crisis in the post-modem, post-industrial society.

Neo-functionalist and intergovemmentalist theories of regional integration have been reasserted in recent analyses of European Community (EC) politics. This essay examines the ability of hypotheses drawn from these theories to clarify the politics leading to the 1989 Social Charter in the EC. It is found that a linkage politics model, based in part upon neo- functionalism and intergovernmentalism but which also emphasizes the impact of interest group organization on regional bargaining, best explains this case. The essay concludes with suggestions for reformulations of regional integration theory.

Despite the interest of political scientists in social regulatory policy implementation, only recently has the policy design movement begun classifying and assessing the comparative advantage of various policy "tools" or implements. This study seeks to advance understanding of social regulatory policy tools by assessing their potential as a vehicle for developing midrange theories of policy design. Analysis of Michigan traffic safety data indicates that those pursuing policy design research should anticipate that: (1) enforcement effects vary across regulatory tools; (2) attributes such as "birth order" and "precision of targeting" can condition the impact of various types of social regulatory tools differently; (3) success is conditioned not only by implement attributes, but also by implementation styles, contexts, and target populations; and (4) the comparative advantage of any tool can be assessed accurately only by considering its interaction with other implements across these disparate styles, contexts, and target populations.

Using a production function model, this paper examines Olson's thesis that political organization contributes to economic decline. The findings confirm that political organizations have a slight negative influence on state income growth rates. However, other variables account for almost 80 percent of the variation across states. This analysis points to the importance of capital markets and business and occupational interests and the utility of the production function approach for explaining growth.

News coverage of human rights is important for education, the protection of rights, and the development of foreign policy. The relationship between the media and human rights makes it essential to know how human rights are reported by the media. Previous studies on news coverage of human rights have examined only the amount of coverage, not its content. This study analyzes human rights coverage in the New York Times, Time magazine, and the CBS Evening News for a ten-year period, 1978-1987. An examination of the different indexes determined what rights and which countries received media attention. I found that the three news outlets present a similar view of human rights, focusing on civil and political rights; there is very little attention given to economic, social, and cultural rights. Geographical coverage focuses on a small number of countries primarily in two regions, Eastern Europe and Latin America.