Political Research Quarterly

This study examines the extent and ways in which two ideologically dis parate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court rely upon the intent of the fram ers of the Constitution in their opinions on constitutional questions. A content analysis of the complete opinions written by Justices Brennan and Rehnquist over a ten-year period reveals that not only do they not differ in their relative use of intentionalism but they also very rarely use original intent as the controlling argument in their opinions. We examine as well the justices' historiography. Finally, a systematic examination of all opin ions shows that the two justices consistently use intentionalism in support of quite different ideological outcomes. We discuss the quantitative and interpretive findings in light of debates over constitutional interpretation and explanations of judicial decision making.

Policy advocates in many states may pursue their policy agendas either by traditional legislative politics or by direct legislation. I show that this choice matters: policy outcomes resulting from direct legislation often reflect dif ferent interests than policy outcomes resulting from the legislative process, even on similar issues. Using data from California statewide elections, I analyze policies that were considered in both the legislative process and the direct legislation process, and for which the two processes led to differ ent outcomes. I demonstrate that features of the legislature, especially party organization, can induce individual legislators to vote against their district majority preference. In the aggregate, these influences are shown to lead legislative and direct legislation outcomes to diverge.

This research examines the relationship between interest group activities and the public policy decisions of congressional committees. Unlike the conventional approach, which estimates the relationship between interest group resources and legislators' roll-call votes, the technique used here treats as the dependent variable interest group success at getting what they want from committees on their individual policy preferences. This approach has the unusual advantage of allowing systematic investigation of deci sions made behind the scenes which never come to a formal vote. It also facilitates estimation of the relationship between policy outcomes and lob bying directed at committee staff as well as members, and allows evalua tion of the effect of contextual variables, especially conflict. A model of interest group success on dozens of provisions of two complex bills was estimated. Although conflict among groups dampened interest group suc cess, lobbying committee staff was associated with group success. How ever, even under the decision-making condition expected to be most favorable to interest groups, virtually complete public invisibility, interest groups did not always get their way with congressional committees.

We suggest that the "simple political spillover" hypothesis—that participation in decision making at work increases the probability of participating in poli tics outside the workplace—ought to be respecified in such a way that it takes into account (1) the possible differential effects on political participation of direct and representational forms of decisional participation at work; (2) the possibility that the pathway between workplace and political participation is mediated by the former's impact on psychological outlooks; and (3) the pos sibility that participation in decision making in economically troubled enter prises may diminish political participation. Using a sample of 1,247 workers from producer cooperative, employee stock ownership, conventional union, and conventional non-union wood products mills, we show that this more complex spillover model gives us a better understanding of the linkages be tween workplace and political experiences.

This study reexamines influences on individual turnout. Assessing the effects of the short-term campaign environment on turnout behavior, previous schol arship has failed to account for the fact that voting in the United States is a two-stage process: the preliminary act of registration followed by the act of voting. The findings from this analysis suggest that this failure has tilted exist ing research away from discovering substantively impressive campaign influ ences. While citizen characteristics are the principal determinants of registration status, campaign factors emerge as quite important in explaining the turnout of those individuals who have surmounted the registration hurdle.

Although retrospective economic voting does not require voters to have precise information about recent economic conditions, it is arguably the case that the quality of retrospective voting as a democratic accountability mechanism hinges on the degree to which citizens have reasonably accu rate perceptions of the state of the economy In this paper we test a model of the accuracy of individuals' perceptions of national economic condi tions. Utilizing data collected in a survey of residents of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, during the 1992 presidential campaign, we depict perceptual accuracy as a function of four sets of independent variables: (1) personal characteristics likely to enhance citizens' political and economic cognition; (2) perceptions of economic threat; (3) interest in politics and/or econom ics ; and (4) exposure to media sources. Our findings point to the impor tance of personal characteristics, such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, and age, as well as retrospective personal evaluations, political inter est, and media exposure in determining the accuracy of citizens' economic perceptions. Moreover, we provide preliminary evidence that perceptual inaccuracy has an indirect effect on vote choice in 1992 through its effect on retrospective sociotropic economic evaluations.

The present article investigates contemporaneous and lagged effects of de mocracy, coercive capacity, and political conflict on repressive behavior. As designed, 51 countries from 1948 to 1982 are examined with an Almon distributed lag model on yearly data (N =1820). From the empirical inves tigation, both short- and long-term relationships are found to be signifi cantly related to the rate at which censorship and political restrictions are applied. Past values of democracy are found to affect repression negatively for five years and past values of dissident behavior are found to affect re pression positively for seven years. I conclude that a relatively complex memory structure, encompassing both short- and long-term explanations, must be employed when one attempts to understand why states use re pressive behavior.

In a revisionist effort Howard Gillman finds that Chief Justice Marshall despite his and the Founders' widely recognized concern for national in terests--was in fact responsible for the Knight states-rights disaster in 1895. In my view nothing Marshall said or did supports the revisionist view- indeed much of what he said and did repudiates it. I suggest that dual federalism, the doctrine on which Knight turns, was a concoction of the plantation South to thwart Marshall's and the Founders' well-known nation alism. I suggest further that this concoction was part of the "lost cause" until the 1890s when business lawyers adopted it for their own anti-federal-regulation purposes. The result was Knight.

Recent scholarship calls into question the traditional realist-behavioralist interpretation of the justices of the Fuller Court as motivated by a desire to promote their policy preferences for laissez-faire economics. This essay extends the assault on what might be referred to as the Holmesian para digm of the tum-of-the-century Court by exploring the jurisprudential origins of that Court's decision in the infamous Knight case, in which the justices ruled that Congress had no authority under the commerce clause to regulate production. By demonstrating that the Court's distinction be tween commerce and manufacturing was a commonplace of nineteenth- century constitutional law and not an "activist" innovation, I hope to underscore the advantages of situating Supreme Court decision making in the context of distinctive jurisprudential traditions. Revisiting this earlier commerce clause jurisprudence also sheds light on the contemporary Court's dramatic resurrection of this contentious pre-New Deal tradition in the recent case of U.S. v. Lopez (1995).

"Marshall indicated [in Gibbons] that in his view, congressional power to regulate 'commercial intercourse' extended to all activity having any in terstate impact-however indirect." Lawrence R Tribe

This essay reviews four texts that analyze women in political institutions in order to develop a more general theory of gendered institutions. Scholar ship on women in political institutions will be advanced by continuing to look beyond the confines of the traditional subfields of political science, drawing on interdisciplinary work in feminist theory, critical race theory, and the sociology of work. Gender should be theorized, not as a word that is interchangeable with sex, but as a continuous, variable, and tenacious process that, while usually leading to women's disadvantage, is challenged, negotiated, subverted, and resisted. Such scholarship should explore how masculinity, work, and politics are intertwined.