Political Research Quarterly

This paper analyzes the coalitional perceptions of African-Americans after incorporation in their city's dominant political condition. Our research ad dresses two main questions. First, how do African-Americans view their coalition prospects with other major racial and ethnic minority groups? Here we focus on the perceptions of African-Americans in one city, Los Angeles, toward Latinos and Asian-Americans, and compare their attitudes with those of blacks in other cities. Second, how do these coalitional perceptions fit into a fuller model of political attitudes? This analysis provides us with evidence of generational differences in coalitional perceptions and supports the hypothesis of coalitional entropy.

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. Se cond, 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 univer salized 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 enhanc ing their reelection prospects.

For nearly five decades, scholars have explored interest group involve ment in courts, with their insights providing substantive and, eventually, theoretical breakthroughs. While the early pluralists noted instances of groups litigation in both federal and state courts, virtually all modern-day scholars have focused their attention on federal arenas. This emphasis is hardly surprising: we do not know whether or not interest groups participate in state court litigation in numbers sufficient to warrant investigation. In an effort to fill this gap, I address two interrelated questions about litigation in state courts: has interest group use of state judicial systems increased over the past four decades and has the scope of litigation activity expanded to incorporate a wider range of interests? An examination of litigation activity in sixteen state supreme courts generally answers these questions affirmatively. It indicates a heightened presence of organized interests; it also shows that a wider range of groups now participate. Even so, growth occurred unevenly; some states evinced precisely the kind of patterns I anticipated, while others were far more erratic.

This research examines what factors are likely to cause the Congress to attempt to reverse Supreme Court decisions that hold federal laws unconstitutional during the Warren, Burger, and early years of the Rehnquist courts. First, we outline a general theory of congressional motivation to reverse Supreme Court decisions that looks to both electoral considerations and the need to safeguard congressional power as the primary motivating factors. Using a data set consisting of 65 Court decisions that reversed all or part of some federal statute(s), we test our hypotheses using a probit model to predict when the Congress will take counteraction. We find that the electoral considerations of public opinion and interest group pressure are likely to lead to a congressional response, while the institutional considerations of court unanimity and the age of the legislation struck down are also important. The congress, however, is most likely not to take any decision reversal action.

Burden sharing has been a contentious topic from the early years of the North Atlantic alliance. Since 1966, it has also been a recurring test of the theory of collective action. Here we report the results of new tests of Mancur Olson's theory and its extension, the joint-product model, proposed by Todd Sandler et al. Our analyses of pooled cross-sectional and time-series data for fifteen NATO allies, 1950-86, offers the first full, independent test of the joint-product model. While our analyses demonstrate the theoretical value of Sandler's model, they also indicate that Olson's original emphasis on the public nature of the good supplied by the alliance remains valid. Some evidence regarding the role of the United States suggests that NATO has been a uniquely privileged group.

The bulk of the literature rejects the argument that Democratic failure in presidential elections between 1968 and 1988 had an ideological basis. Analysis of the interplay of respondents' own issue positions with their perceptions of the parties/candidates suggests a different and rather complex picture. Between 1968 and 1980, the partisan/ideological cores of the two parties-liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans- behave quite differently: only moderately different defection rates between the most liberal Democrats and most conservative Republicans increase considerably as one moves from the relevant ideological extreme to the center. Placement of parties/candidates in issue space explains this asymmetry during this initial period of Democratic decline: the Democratic party/candidate is perceived as far to the left, with Demo cratic identifiers positioned midway between the electoral alternatives; Republicans identifiers, in contrast, are to the right of both parties/candid ates, but very close to their own. Beginning in 1980, the Reagan candidacy/administration push popular images of the Republicans to the right, eliminating their ideological advantage and forcing us to look elsewhere for the basis of continued Democratic losses.

Although social choice theorists have long recognized the theoretical possibility of cyclical majorities in democratic settings, it has been difficult to find a clear example of cyclical voting in a real-world setting. This is at least partly due to the fact that legislative rules suppress their appearance. This paper identifies and examines a definitive and significant example of cyclical voting. The cycle occurred in a series of votes in the U.S. Senate during one week in January 1925 on the issue of what the federal government should do with the Muscle Shoals works, initiated during World War I and still a significant political issue in the 1920s.

An extensive body of work has tried to assess changes in the relative power of Congress and the president in passing new laws. Most of this work has used the lenses provided by modernization theory and political time theory to explain shifts in the political balance of power. In this paper I provide evidence to show that the long neglected constitutional approach is at least as important as the others if we wish to understand the relative legislative power of the two branches of government over time.

Despite its popularity and controversial character, few studies of political talk radio have been conducted. Little evidence for the hypothesis that political talk radio leads to alienation, social and political isolation, cynicism, and political withdrawal was found among a population-based sample of 525 adults in San Diego, California. Respondents reported widespread exposure to talk radio, although they often did not discriminate accurately among political, nonpolitical, and other program ming. Exposure was associated with traditional forms of political participation, beliefs in self-efficacy linked to specific political behaviors, and psychological involvement in politics. Increased penetration of the public may have altered the nature of the political talk radio audience so that exposure to talk radio is more closely associated with customary forms of political involvement than with social and political alienation.

By exploring the consequences of imperfect information, R. Douglas Arnold and John Mark Hansen (both intellectual descendants of David Mayhew) make significant contributions to the rational-choice theory of legislator decision-making. Indeed, their books can be usefully understood as the latest stage in the evolution of that theory. Ultimately, however, their contributions to the theory are incomplete. While Arnold and Hansen both highlight an insufficiently emphasized issue, their particular arguments concerning the implications of imperfect information leave unanswered several important questions.