Political Research Quarterly

This article explores intergovernmental policy interactions between cen tral city, county, and suburban city governments in 186 metropolitan ar eas. Two hypotheses are developed to test the existence and shape of intergovernmental policy interactions between these governments. A com petition hypothesis, based on Tiebout's 1956 concept of interjurisdictional competition, posits that counties and cities compete in the developmen tal policy area by matching what other cities and counties do. A coopera tion hypothesis, based on the notion of the functional arrangements between local governments, posits that counties and cities cooperate in the public safety and education policy areas by supplementing others' policies or by substituting their policies with others' policies. The results of an analysis of local government expenditures indicate that local gov ernments compete as well as cooperate at the intergovernmental level and that intergovernmental policy competition is weaker than interjuris dictional policy competition. The article ends with a series of discussions on possible changes in the current local government system to mitigate the competition between cities and their counties.

Maoz and Russett (1993) reported that democratic states after World War II were unlikely to engage in militarized disputes with one another, but their continuous measure of joint democracy is problematic. It can decrease if one of a pair of states becomes more democratic, even if the political regime of the other does not change. Thus, results using this index are difficult to interpret. In this study we estimate the likelihood of dyadic conflict using more straightforward indices of joint democracy As in Oneal, Oneal, Maoz, and Russett (1996), we control for economic in terdependence and several other theoretically interesting, potentially con founding influences. Our analyses indicate that the more democratic a pair of states, the less likely they are to become involved in a militarized dispute; but a high level of democracy in one state can not compensate for less democracy in a strategic partner. The political distance separating states along the democracy-autocracy continuum is an important indica tor of the likelihood of dyadic conflict: democracies are unlikely to fight other democracies, but democracies and autocracies are conflict-prone. These results indicate that, ceteris paribus, democratic states are more peaceful than autocracies at the national level of analysis.

This study uses data from a national and a local opinion survey that were underway when highly publicized police beatings of African Ameri can citizens occurred in two American cities-the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the killing of Malice Green in Detroit-to probe the impact of these dramatic events on public perceptions of racial discrimi nation. The incidents appear to have had their greatest effect on specific perceptions of the way local police treat blacks, and markedly less effect on broader perceptions of the extent of discrimination against them.

Legislative incumbents at both the congressional level and the state legislative level have an advantage in electoral races (Jewell and Breaux 1988, 1991; Garand 1991; King and Gelman 1991). By using the per quisites of office many scholars believe that incumbents have brought about their own reelection success. However, many scholars argue that the quality of a challenger is one of the most important variables that affects the likelihood of incumbent success (Jacobson 1987, 1989, 1990). To this point, the research on challenger quality has been conducted almost exclusively at the congressional level. This article examines chal lenger quality and success at the state level by examining races for the state legislature across 10 states from 1988-1992. Using previous elected experience as a measure of challenger quality, I find that quality chal lengers are willing to challenge state legislative incumbents and are strategic in deciding when to challenge. Furthermore, this article demon strates that when quality challengers run they are more likely to be successful.

In this study, we examine the extent to which legislators receive elec toral benefits from altering the geographic distribution of federal outlays. Although there are both theoretical and anecdotal reasons to believe in the existence of such benefits, previous empirical work has largely failed to verify the connection between pork barreling and reelection. We ex amine House incumbents during the 1980s, when budget deficits were allegedly forcing legislators to end the acquisition of distributive benefits, and we discover that legislators did in fact reap electoral benefits from pork barreling in the 1980s. We further discover that there is a sharp partisan difference in the marginal effects of federal outlays: additional federal monies strongly affect Democratic reelection margins but barely impact the electoral fortunes of Republicans. This conclusion has impor tant implications for current debates about Congress, divided govern ment, and the recent Republican takeover of Congress.

This article builds on our previous work, which showed that presiden tial popularity in Costa Rica is responsive to economic conditions. Here the analysis covers, in addition to Costa Rica, four sister republics which only recently have undergone democratization. We find that, as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America rises and falls with the state of the economy Also as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America is cyclical, higher early and late in the presi dential term. As new and tenuous as democracy is in most of the region, when it comes to rating presidents, Central Americans appear to use the same criteria as voters in the United States.

Specialized courts are historically thought to serve only policy-neutral objectives. In the research presented here, I reexamine this widespread belief. The article analyzes the interaction between the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a specialized circuit court, and bureaucratic agen cies to attempt to determine the Court's impact on U.S. trade policy out comes. Using dumping and foreign government subsidization cases brought to court in the 1980s, I develop and test an attribute model of judicial protectionism, encapsulating economic, political, and contextual legal circumstances surrounding international trade cases. The most no table findings are that the Federal Circuit shows a significant proclivity toward protecting U.S. industries against unfair trade practices of foreign competitors, suggesting that, contrary to previous thinking, specialized courts have far more than policy-neutral effects. Also, the International Trade Commission performs remarkably better in court than does the Department of Commerce due to the Commission's courtlike decisional strategy and independent political status. Finally, my model offers strong support for both political and case-related explanations of regulatory ac tivity, showing, e.g., that industry political power and organizational ability condition trade judges' decisions to dispense regulatory protection.

We examine the weekly print media's coverage of the women's move ment and ascertain the presence of five unique frames from the 1950s through the 1990s: a sex roles frame, a feminism frame, political rights frame, economic rights frame, and an anti-feminism frame. After describ ing the frames we discuss an experimental test of four of the media pack ages on voters' political attitudes using a non-random sample of adults. Experimental results indicate that the economic rights and anti-feminism frames had a strong, negative impact on subject attitudes toward gender equality, support for women's rights, support for non-traditional gender roles and the frequency with which subjects mentioned "women's issues" as among the most important issues facing the U.S. In addition, the femi nism frame also exerted negative effects; while, conversely, the political rights frame had a positive influence on similar gender attitudes. Results were moderated by respondent gender with men demonstrating greater susceptibility to issue framing than women.

A number of different theories have been advanced to explain support for policies which may benefit minority groups. This paper utilizes eco nomic-self interest, traditional racism, and conservative values to explore attitudes of German citizens toward granting political asylum and resi dency to immigrants. The linear structural relations (LISREL) analysis on a 1991 sample of German citizens suggests that the structure of attitudes is different depending upon which section of Germany (the West or the former German Democratic Republic [GDR]) is considered. East Germans tend to "fuse" traditional racism with conservative values to express a racism argued by "symbolic" theorists while the West Germans tend to separate the concepts, possibly because of the more mature democratic development of West German parties and institutions. In explaining im migration policy, traditional racism tends to dominate the West German model, while economic self-interest partially explains policy attitudes in the former GDR. Still, even in the East, ethnocentrism is a very strong factor in understanding support for restrictive immigration policies. We discuss the implications of the analysis in terms of the literature on Ameri can racism and policy reasoning.

Perhaps the central difficulty in the thought of Michel Foucault con cerns the shifts, breaks and changing stances across his various works. Two broad ways of interpreting Foucault are laid out. On the first view, Foucault is a liberal democrat whose thought is largely compatible with much of the modem project. On the second, Foucault is fully Nietzschean, opposing modernity in the name of an indeterminate and rhetorically affirmed "other," and arguing that all truth is deeply implicated in power. Many criticisms of this postmodern Foucault have already been made, but most of Foucault's defenders find them to beg the question. In order to avoid this stalemate, I examine how an engaged postmodern Foucaultian would deliberate about her moral and practical stance. I argue that this postmodern Foucaultian cannot consciously maintain her position while actually engaged, and for reasons that help to clarify which aspects of Foucault's thought need to be abandoned and which are useful.

The basic attitudinal structure underlying the American public's for eign policy preferences is assessed by using both exploratory and confir matory factor analyses on two major post-cold war surveys containing many similarly worded questions-by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CC, 10/94) and the Times Mirror Center (TM, 9/93). Although previous studies had stressed only two or three primary attitudinal fac tors and usually ignored factor intercorrelations, our exploratory analy ses of these data sets consistently yielded at least four distinct and readily interpretable factors, including two correlated "outward-focused" factors (Global Altruism and U.S. Global Interest), a U.S. Domestic issues factor bearing on foreign policy (e.g., jobs protection), and a Military Security factor. Building upon these results, confirmatory factor analyses using LISREL found that a four-factor model provided probabilistically close fits to both the CC and TM data sets and that accuracy of fits declined with various simpler models.