Political Research Quarterly

Although our understanding of voting in Senate elections has increased considerably over the past decade, the exclusive reliance on survey data has limited the range of questions we have explored. Using a less traditional design, the present study expands our understanding of vote choice in Senate elections. This study combines two methods-a content analysis and an experiment-to examine the impact that news coverage and candidate status have on voters views of Senate candidates. The results of this study suggest that both campaign coverage and the candidate's status favor incumbents. First, current patterns of campaign coverage encourage people to develop more favorable impressions of incumbents. Second, people use incumbency as a cue to draw distinctions between identical incumbents and challengers, and these distinctions always favor incumbents.

This paper examines the union effect on vote choice and turnout in presidential elections from 1960 to 1988. It shows that union household status had a significant effect on vote choice in the last four presidential elections, including the widely reported debacle of 1984. Declining membership and other political-economic factors may explain organized labor's apparent political weakness, but these explanations have very different implications for our thinking about labor politics than the argument that leaders have diminishing impact on members' voting decisions. Surprisingly, union status does not have a significant impact on tumout; Verba, Nie, and Kim's "group-based political mobilization" hypothesis does not hold up well in the American context.

The Persian Gulf war boosted President George Bush's popularity in the classic rally-around-the-flag pattern. This paper explores whether such a rally has additional effects by influencing partisan attachments. We find that small shifts in party indentification and slightly larger changes in party affect can be explained by people's reactions to the Gulf war. Thus foreign policy rallies can be added to the growing list of variables which explain fluctuations in party identification.

We investigate the distinctiveness of state attitudes and their impact on attitudes toward legal abortion. We find modest differences in the level of support for legal abortion and for additional restrictions on abortion, but these differences are not significant after controls for the demographic characteristics, religion, and ideology of each state's citizens. Our results suggest that the abortion debate is a national debate, and that state differences in abortion attitudes can be explained by differences in the charateristics and other attitudes of the states' citizenry.

We examined Ronald Reagan's 1980 election campaign to judge the effects of his Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy on his image as portrayed in the print and televised news media. The IOD strategy attempts to shape the content and tone of coverage by limiting press access to Reagan, formalizing the relationship, and conveying a single message over extended periods of time. Our analysis shows Reagan had success shaping the content of the press's coverage, but not its tone. We also found that the IOD strategy had greater effects on televised news programs than on the print media.

Cohort analysis allows systematic analysis of change in civil rights voting in terms of age, period, and cohort effects. Cohort analysis requires measurements of longitudinal, corss-sectional, and time-lag differences among members of Congress. While offering support for the generational replacement hypothesis, this research suggests that period effects, events in the congressional environment, are important to our understanding of change in civil rights over time.

What are the implications of increasing a public agency's ability to generate its own revenue for political control of the bureaucracy? This article uses historical cases of public land user fees to argue that, under certain conditions, such a change, rather than increasing agency autonomy, actually facilitates congressional intervention and control. Specifically, if the revenue increase carries no guarantees of increased appropriations and maintained levels of discretion, then old funds are supplanted by new funds with new strings attached. I illustrate the argument by examining the impacts of increased entrance fees on the National Park Service in recent years.

With the growth of the suburbs and the strengthening relationship between income and household location, large differences have emerged in the values of the local property tax bases that fund public schools. Since the 1970s, court rulings have led states to attempt to equalize school funding by increasing state support. But large funding differences remain. While these differences and the impact of equalization efforts have been analyzed at length, the question of why equalization has failed has largely been ignored. This paper addresses that gap. By considering the incentives of legislators, taxpayers, and parents of school students, I explore the political economy of school funding, using evidence from New Jersey. My analysis suggests that equalization efforts will generally be opposed or undermined by various local-level actors. It also suggests that advocates of other funding reforms may face significant challenges from those preferring the status quo.

This article investigates whether elections provide bureaucrats with a means for accommodating political pressure from Congress and the White House. Specifically the article tests: (1) whether bureaucrats shorten the time they take to process applications from districts important to the agency and the White House in election years, and (2) whether such preferences are reflected in the resulting geographical distribution of assistance. An analysis of the administration and distribution of federal mass transportation discretionary capital assistance grants from 1966 through 1984 finds that agency officials adapted to White House but not subcommittee pressures in this way. The article concludes that the marginal influence of the presidency in the bureaucratic allocation of federal assistance needs further theoretical consideration.

Constitutional regimes may be divided into three types, the Single Lawgiver Model, the Immemorial Customs and Usages Model, and the Constitutional Convention Model. Each type provides for change differently. The first type of constitution, common in ancient regimes, is typically founded by a single individual, justified by divine authority, and difficult to change. The second model, with less discrete beginnings, claims to be the product of the distilled wisdom of time and experience. While in some such systems, the legislature is technically sovereign and the constitution is therefore quite "flexible," typically change proceeds quite slowly, and major changes may prove difficult to accommodate. In the third model, a constitutional convention writes a constitution superior to ordinary legislation and provides for formal changes in discrete increments. This model, formulated in America, has not been instituted in pure form, and shares characteristics of the other two. The overlap among these models continues to explain and influence modem debates about constitutional change.

This paper investigates the impact of holding a party leadership position or being a committee chair on votes for incumbents in state legislative elections in 1986. The results of the analysis indicate that majority party members who hold these positions of authority enjoy a greater electoral advantage than expected in their states. Leadership positions do not offer the same advantage to minority party legislators, however.

Little research has focused on the changes made in individual legislative committees through time. In this study we do a committee-by-committee analysis to determine the extent to which various committees were added, dropped, or had jurisdictional change in each chamber of eighteen states over a twenty-year period (1971-91).

Using propositions adopted from organizational theory, we predict that committees are altered to help the legislature respond to both exter nal pressures and internal tensions. Two types of data are used to test our hypotheses: a longitudinal analysis of committee listings for each of the eighteen study states and individual level committee request data from four states.

We find that professionalized legislatures make more committee changes and exhibit more commonality in the types of changes made than nonprofessional legislatures. The committees dropped in legislatures are requested less than the committees added.

These findings reinforce the conclusions of others that committees have political as well as policy-making functions. While the stability of professional legislatures has been emphasized, our findings point to the adaptive function of organizational change.

This paper draws on both the bureaucratic and congressional literature to develop and test a model linking bureaucratic dissatisfaction with citizen- initiated contact with members of Congress. It has been argued by Fiorina and others that bureaucratic malfunctioning creates opportunities for congressional intervention which aids constituents and reaps electoral benefits for elected representatives. While this view has been widely accepted by scholars, empirical research has scarcely addressed the question, and evidence to support this conjecture has been scant. Using data gathered in a particular congressional district (both data on actual member-constituent contact and survey data), results confirm Fiorina's contention that those who are unhappy with bureaucracy are more likely to contact members of Congress.