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Begin New Search Publishing Institution Academy of Political Science Publication Year within 25 Years

121. Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics

Author:
William P. Marshall
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
The unilateral actions of President George W. Bush in seeking to combat the war on terror, followed by President Barack Obama's efforts in attempting to overcome Congressional inaction by pursuing major policy initiatives through executive order, have again brought into focus the question of whether presi¬dential power has expanded to the point where, in Arthur Schlesinger's famous coinage, the United States now has an Imperial Presidency. To hear some tell the story, Presidents Bush and Obama have taken presidential power to new heights, thereby endangering constitutional limits on separation of powers. To hear others, the actions of these presidents have been fully consonant with those of their predecessors and present no new threat to the constitutional system of checks and balances.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
America

122. Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

Author:
Michael Nelson
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Quick: how much older is Richard B. Cheney than George W. Bush? If your first instinct is to say anything greater than five years you will be wrong. The mistake would be forgivable. When Bush ran for president in 2000, his entire experience in government consisted of six years as governor of Texas. When he picked Cheney as his vice presidential running mate, he chose someone who had served as White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and minority whip in the House of Representatives. "Green" was a word often used to describe Bush. Cheney, on the other hand, was "seasoned."

123. The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688-2012

Author:
John Krinsky
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Valentin Volosinov (1973) posits that the generic conventions of reporting others' speech vary over time and place, and that these variations, if tracked, can reveal a great deal about changes in the ordering of social hierarchies. Sidney Tarrow's The Language of Contention, following Volosinov and his better‐known collaborator and mentor, Mikhail Bakhtin, argues that language-and in particular, keywords of social protest-are also indices of social change. Tarrow explicitly argues that "the symbols, mentalities, and narratives that actors employ can track real‐world changes in contentious politics" and "as new words for contention diffuse across social and territorial boundaries to new actors, such words can tell us how meanings change as the same words are used by different actors" (p. 5). Thus, Tarrow takes on Volosinov and Bakhtin's historical and "dialogical" view of language, seeing it as situated, multivocal, and changing, pulled variously by "centripetal" and "centrifugal" forces of structured social interaction.

124. American Umpire, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman

Author:
Meena Bose
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Studies of American foreign policy wrestle with identifying grand themes that illustrate patterns in choices and policymaking, while also recognizing differences that may be unique to an event or result from specific circumstances that often are not replicated. Cast very broadly, the contrast reveals an underlying difference in conceptual approach by political scientists versus historians. As Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman writes, historians “emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated … Few principles apply all the time” (p. 5). Her monumental work, American Umpire, does both: It argues persuasively that history shows the United States acting as an “umpire” rather than an “empire” in world affairs, and then applies this concept to American foreign policy from the eighteenth century to the present.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
America

125. The End of Exceptionalism in American Education: The Changing Politics of School Reform

Author:
Terry M. Moe Free
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Jeffrey Henig's new book is about the changing governance of the public schools and why it matters. Henig's central theme is that local, single‐purpose governance-a hallmark that has made education "exceptional" by comparison to other realms of public policy-has been giving way to general-purpose governance, sometimes through mayoral control, but mainly through a shift to state and national decision arenas. With this ongoing shift in governance, he argues, education is being plunged into the same governance mix with other public policies, and this change has consequences for power, politics, and reform.
Topic:
Politics and Reform
Political Geography:
America

126. The Adversary First Amendment: Free Expression and the Foundation of American Democracy

Author:
Mark A. Graber
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Grand theories of the First Amendment suffer from problems of exclusion and inclusion. The broad principles that justify excluding some human activity from constitutional protection inevitably bleed in ways that support excluding ac­tivity that virtually all people think is covered by the First Amendment. The broad principles that justify granting First Amendment protection to activities inevitably bleed in ways that support granting protection to human activities that hardly anyone thinks merit special constitutional protection. The Adversary First Amendment: Free Expression and the Foundations of American Democracy effectively highlights how many standard justifications for exclud­ing commercial advertising from constitutional protection threaten to under­mine constitutional protection for consensual core speech rights. Martin Redish less successfully demonstrates that his adversarial theory of democracy would not entail constitutional protection for a wide variety of activity that government may consensually regulate.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
America

127. Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice, Martin Johnson and Kevin Arceneaux

Author:
Robert Y. Shapiro
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
This is a study of "media effects" on American public opinion. It begins with a clear‐headed review of the debate about the "hypodermic model" of strong persuasive effects versus "minimal effects," of the shift of interest to agenda setting, priming, and framing effects. What it misses, however, is what we know from regular media reports of survey results and the history, for example, in Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro's The Rational Public (1992), that aggregate public opinion changes for understandable reasons, even in cases of short‐term fluctuations, in a manner related to new information typically found in the news media. John Zaller emphasizes in The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) that this news impact is most likely to occur when it reflects elite‐level agreement, in contrast to ideological or partisan disagreement that would lead the opinions of Democrats and Republicans in the mass public to diverge. Though originating from leaders, these are media effects that have changed in recent years in the sense that there has been increasing partisan divergence among the public across a full array of policy issues. This divergence has followed ideological polarization at the elite level since the 1970s, and it is the motivation for Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson's excellent book.

128. Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union: Leadership Style from Polk to Lincoln

Author:
Matthew J. Dickinson
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
In his study of the leadership style exhibited by six presidents, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln, Fred Greenstein applies the analytic scheme he first unveiled in The Presidential Difference to explain how the decisions that these men made in the critical period 1846–1861 led to the Civil War. Greenstein argues that their actions, beginning with Polk's ill-fated decision to provoke a war with Mexico, formed a funnel of causality that increasingly limited the options of their successors when dealing with the slavery issue, so that when Lincoln took office, it was impossible to keep the Union together short of military conflict. In addition to addressing a significant period in American history, Greenstein's choice of topic has the added virtue of shining a spotlight on a group of presidents who, with the exception of Lincoln, tend to be overlooked in the history books. To be sure, this is not a revisionist study; Greenstein's analysis is unlikely to change anyone's assessment of these six presidents in terms of their historical rankings (although I admit to coming away with a slightly greater appreciation for Millard Fillmore's presidency).
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
America

129. The Bankruptcy of Liberalism and Conservatism

Author:
Amitai Etzioni
Publication Date:
04-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
AMITAI ETZIONI examines the frequently employed distinction between the public and the private realms. He concludes that this dichotomy as well as the one between liberalism and conservatism is becoming obsolete because both realms are increasingly intertwined and tend to move in tandem. Such observations urge reexaminations of several key assumptions of public philosophy.

130. The Consequences of Forced State Failure in Iraq

Author:
Andrew Flibbert
Publication Date:
04-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
ANDREW FLIBBERT discusses the Iraq war and its aftermath. He argues that most of the pathologies in Iraqi political life since 2003, from sectarian mobilization to insurgent violence, are best understood as consequences of forced state failure. He contends that the war should not be viewed as badly conducted so much as badly conceived, claiming that the same ideas that led to the war also determined the shape of the peace in subsequent years.
Political Geography:
Iraq