Political Marketplace Research Articles

Democrats, Republicans, and the politics of women's place

Democrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women's Place is impressive in its scope, powerful in its argument, and compelling in its analysis. . . . Using data sources ranging from public opinion surveys to elite interviews to party platforms to presidential speeches, Sanbonmatsu provides a provocative account of how and why the parties' electoral strategies have varied across gender issues. Scholars will be reading and citing this book for years to come.-Susan J. Carroll, Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers UniversityKira Sanbonmatsu's study contributes to our knowledge of the complexity of the response of the Democratic and Republican parties to the gender issues that emerged on the political scene as a result of the women's movement. She expertly shows how the perspectives of both party activists and the general public need to be taken into account across a range of gender issues for an understanding of the impact of women as a political force in contemporary politics.-Barbara Burrell, Northern Illinois University and author of A Woman's Place Is in the House: Campaigning for Congress in the Feminist EraDemocrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women's Place is an unusual double-treat-an original study of party politics and a review of how issues created by women's changing roles in society have never quite made it to the top of the political agenda. Readers who care about the obstacles faced by social issues in the political marketplace should not miss this book. They will be richly rewarded.-Doris A. Graber, University of Illinois at Chicago, Political Science Quarterly[Sanbonmatsu] has done important work in raising the question of the separation between abortion and other gender issues, and has moved us some distance in the direction of understanding this phonomenon. . . . [T]his book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the place of gender in American electoral and party politics in the last three decades.-Gretchen Ritter, University of Texas, Austin, Perspectives on Politics

Are Campaign Contributions Investment in the Political Marketplace or Individual Consumption? Or 'Why Is There So Little Money in Politics?'

In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years - if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators' votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question.

Impartial Spectator in the Marketplace of Ideas: The Principles of Adam Smith as an Ethical Basis for Regulation of Corporate Speech

The corporate voice is arguably the loudest in mass communication today and has been the subject of a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions since 1978. This integrative essay offers an ethical basis for justifying regulation of corporate speech, based on the neglected moral and political theories of Adam Smith. His essential tenets on free markets are applied to the First Amendment marketplace of ideas concept that has been prominent in developing corporate free-speech rights. This essay argues that regulation of corporate speech on this basis can actually enable more ideas to flourish in the political marketplace—advancing utilitarian ideals of the common good.

Testing a Predictive Model of Voter Behavior on the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Utilizing a predictive model of voter behavior, this study identified the motivations behind a sample of voters who cast a ballot for George W. Bush and AI Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. The motivations of the voters were differentiated on the basis of the “value” they sought in a president. In other words, just as companies in the “commercial marketplace” have to create value to attract customers, so does a candidate in the “political marketplace” who is seeking to carve out a niche for himself that separates him from his competition. Pairwise discriminant analysis is used to identify the motivations behind the choice behavior of voters at both the candidate and party level. The results reveal the complimentary roles that the political party and each candidate's campaign organization played in their respective marketing strategies.

Political market place USA

Political market place USA

A Field Guide for Science Writers

This is the official text for the National Association of Science Writers. In the eight years since the publication of the first edition of A Field Guide for Science Writing, much about the world has changed. Some of the leading issues in today's political marketplace - embryonic stem cell research, global warming, health care reform, space exploration, genetic privacy, germ warfare - are informed by scientific ideas. Never has it been more crucial for the lay public to be scientifically literate. That's where science writers come in. And that's why it's time for an update to the Field Guide, already a staple of science writing graduate programs across the country. The academic community has recently recognized how important it is for writers to become more sophisticated, knowledgeable, and skeptical about what the write. More than 50 institutions now offer training in science writing. In addition mid-career fellowships for science writers are growing, giving journalists the chance to return to major developments, and hope to be part of them with this new edition of the Field Guide. In A Field Guide for Science Writers, 2nd Edition, the editors have assembled contributions from a collections of experienced journalists who are every bit as stellar as the group that contributed to the first edition. In the end, what we have are essays written by the very best in the science writing profession. These wonderful writers have written not only about style, but about content, too. These leaders in the profession describe how they work their way through the information glut to find the gems worth writing about. We also have chapters that provide the tools every good science writer needs: how to use statistics, how to weigh the merits of conflicting studies in scientific literature, how to report about risk. And, untimately, how to write.

The third way in health care reform: does the emperor have any clothes?

The Labour government elected in the UK in May 1997 has described its approach to the National Health Service (NHS) as a third way in health care reform. This article seeks to analyse the defining features of the third way. It argues that the government has adopted an approach which combines central direction and local autonomy, sanctions and incentives, and planning and competition. The third way therefore entails a cocktail of different approaches and is both electic and pragmatic. In pursuing this policy, the government is seeking to deal with dilemmas that are as old as the NHS itself and is seeking a synthesis between approaches that in the past have been seen as exclusive. It can be argued that the search for a synthesis is unlikely to succeed and the government will have to decide whether it is really committed to a centralised health service in which the main emphasis is on planning and sanctions or whether it is willing genuinely to devolve power to a local level with reliance on incentives and elements of competition. The alternative interpretation is that by making use of a variety of instruments the government is increasing its chances of delivering its objectives. From this perspective, to insist on absolute consistency is to fail to recognise the complexity of the steering mechanisms required in modern public services. In the international context, the third way may find favour as a rhetorical device among politicians seeking to carve out a distinctive niche in the political market place, but its specific characteristics are likely to vary between systems.

Why? Versus Why Not?: Potentialities of Aging in Shaw's Back to Methuselah

Bernard Shaw's critique of society's “sacred cows,” as well as his participation in the social, cultural and political marketplace in which he lived, resemble the new historical/cultural materialism of contemporary theory. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw examines the notions of aging and illuminates the degree to which our chronological standards of “old age” are sociological not biological constructs. This tour de force on aging both dramatizes age as a function of societal and/or individual choice, not as a biological given, and juxtaposes opinions toward aging in such a way that flexible attitudes toward the subject emerge.

Richmond Award acceptance speech.

Richmond Award acceptance speech.

A Public Choice Perspective on the Subsidization of Private Industry: A Case Study of Three Cities and Three Stadiums

ABSTRACT:This article employs the public choice perspective to explain and evaluate the outcomes of publicly subsidized economic development projects. Despite the questionable impacts of economic development projects that have been assisted with the use of public subsidies (including tax remission, tax credits, and nontax incentives), such subsidies have increasingly become the tools with which states compete for various industries and, more recently, for stadiums. Invoking the public choice framework provides some insights into the interrelationship of the various actors involved in these projects — the investors, the public officials, and the taxpayers. A behavioral model is developed based on assumptions derived from basic economic principles and applied to the political marketplace. The model is then tested using case studies of public subsidization that involved three football stadiums.

Taxing choice: the predatory politics of fiscal discrimination

behavior deemed incorrect has long been convenient way for politicians to fund programs benefiting special interest groups, to the public's disadvantage. Government policy toward various goods--drugs, tobacco and alcohol, for example--has been locked into regulatory cycle of tax and taboo. Support for legalizing other substances is buttressed by the revenue-generating power of so-called sin taxesi And the products subjected to excise taxation have varied from soft drinks, fishing gear and margarine to airline tickets, telephone calls and gasoline. Taxing Choice thoroughly addresses the costs and benefits of these predatory public policies. Shughart notes that the record of such punitive selective taxation has been anything but successful, hindering economic progress and failing to deliver the promised social benefits. In addition, the costs of selective taxes fall disproportionately on lower-income people, while more politically powerful interest groups benefit. At the same time, such policies are poor way to raise funding for public services, and foster political corruption and self-serving bureaucracies accountable to no one. Indeed, policies discriminating against certain products may represent ominous trends easily extended into virtually every facet of people's lives. One can envision policies proscribing foods, sun bathing, obesity, and even books, films, and political and religious beliefs deemed dangerous. Part I is devoted to the political economy of selective taxation. Contributors trace the history and politics of selective excise taxes in the United States, discussing the range of products that have been subject to such taxation from the founding period to the present. Part II explains how these taxes emerge in political marketplace with opposing pressure groups scrambling for wealth transfers in their own favor. Part III looks at taxes on specific products as well as such banning policies as Prohibition and the war on drugs. Constitutional, economic, and civil liberty issues, including civil asset forfeiture and product liability, are discussed in Part IV. With the accelerating national debate over tax reform and the downsizing of government, Taxing Choice is a timely and far-reaching contribution to debate of great interest to economists, policymakers, historians, sociologists, and taxpayers in general.

Will China Democratize? Sources of Resistance

Will China Democratize?Sources of Resistance Thomas A. Metzger (bio) China today is in a process of economic, intellectual, and political transformation, 1 which includes what Alex Inkeles has called a tendency toward “convergence” between societies committed to modernization. 2 While Inkeles has robustly documented striking similarities between industrial societies in terms of modes of production, organizational traits, education, stratification, and personality traits, he hesitated in his earlier writings to predict that capitalism would replace socialism and that democracy would replace authoritarianism. Yet at least in China, one can see a major tendency in the direction of “the three marketplaces” (intellectual, economic, and political), a concept that can be derived from the famous work of Karl R. Popper and Friedrich A. Hayek on the nature of the free and prosperous society. 3 Thus China today seems largely to have accepted Hayek’s correlation of economic efficiency with the free economic marketplace. Although China is still far from being an “open society” or even enjoying the “intellectual marketplace” realized in Taiwan during the authoritarian era, its development will increasingly corroborate Karl W. Deutsch’s point that competitiveness in the international arena requires openness to the global flow of information. Even in the case of the political marketplace, the Chinese leadership is growing aware that the efficiency of the state requires the use of elections and the courts to check state abuses. Moreover, although few Chinese affirm the idea of democracy as [End Page 18] defined by U.S. political scientists, many are inspired by a certain vision of “rule by the people.” To a large extent, twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals have seen history as dominated by a “global trend” (shih-chieh-te ch’ao-liu); have identified the West as presently leading the global parade forming this trend; and today identify “rule by the people” (or min-chu, the Chinese word for “democracy”) as integral to Western success. Very different from the Arab-Muslim world’s much weaker interest in democracy, this widespread Chinese enthusiasm for the democratic ideal is rooted not only in the widely revered May Fourth Movement, which arose by 1919, but also in the Confucian way of defining proper governance. As I have argued, Confucianism is a this-worldly way of thought according to which realization of ultimate values is contingent on fully moral action by the political center; the standard of political morality transcends the current ruler; and the content of political morality is action in accord with “what people regard as beneficial to them.” 4 With this viewpoint, many Confucians since the late nineteenth century have logically, almost instantly, and quite naively perceived Western democratic procedures as infallible means with which to realize their traditional goal of perfect political morality. This tradition-rooted enthusiasm for democracy has remained central to Chinese political discourse, and fuels contemporary Chinese demands for democracy. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that China will adopt the Western liberal model of democracy any time soon. First, it is important, I think, to look at the problem by using something like Alex Inkeles’s idea of “convergence” and “divergence,” which is based on Weberian empiricism, rather than returning, as Francis Fukuyama has suggested, to the classical belief that global history has a unilinear direction based on universal human impulses that philosophers such as Hegel have identified. Weberian empiricism, in turn, breaks down into at least two approaches, both of which are important—the emphasis on Verstehen, what people have said and meant (including their patterns of public discourse pertaining to the construction of the sovereign political center, not just their informal opinions about how rotten the political situation is); and the emphasis on quantifiable data. Second, it is obvious that many millions of Chinese have a vested interest in the status quo, and that the political elites favoring the status quo have powerful coercive tools at their disposal. Third, there is the elusive problem of how to describe the current structure of the Chinese government. I believe there has been a strong tendency to underestimate both its stability and the degree of legitimacy it enjoys. Most misleading has been the common assertion that Maoism and Marxism have become a “joke,” and that the only...

The evolution of the large firm as a political actor in the European Union

The establishment of the European single market, the Maastricht accords and the development of a pan-European firm have all contributed to the creation of a European political marketplace with a myriad of access points. Why the large firm has changed its locus of political activity towards the European Union (EU), and what form this new political action has taken are the focus of this article. Based on a study of ninety-four of Europe's largest firms, this article outlines how firms, as individual actors, have come to play such a prominent role in the EU policy process, and assesses their current lobbying preferences for political channels to the EU. In recognizing the political sophistication of firms, the article concludes that firms are now able to recognize and construct strategic alliances with rival firms and countervailing interests to create European identities and facilitate access to new European policy forums.

Regulatory Competition and the Politics of Financial Market Reform in Britain and Japan

This article examines the impact that the internationalization of jnance has had on the regulation of domestic securities markets in Japan and Britain. In particular, it seeks to explain the apparent incompatibility of two distinct trends: deregulation (and state retreat) on the one hand, and increased regulation and state involvement in markets on the other.Much of the literature about the efects of internationalization on domestic policymaking has drfjculty explaining these two distinct regulatory frends. First, there has been no uniform “competition in regulatory laxity.” Second, the United States does not appear to have exerted hegemonic influence over outcomes. Finally, domestic‐level explanations which deny the importance of systemic‐level influences on domestic policy choices are unable to explain the similarity of policy choices undertaken by governments with very different regulatory traditions.I argue instead that regulatory reforms have been undertaken primarily for the benefit of a particular set of private economic actors—mobile consumers of financial services, including both holders of liquid investment capital and large multinational borrowers. Internationalization has systematically strengthened their influence over the policymaking process by making “exit” from one political marketplace to another a more realistic and more potent bargaining strategy than the alternative of exercising “voice.”

International Business and Training: Preparing for the Global Economy

globe is no longer divided by artificial and arbitrary geographic boundaries; it is becoming one economic and political marketplace. As nations' economies become more interdependent and as electronic communication media become more and more available; this process will continue to accelerate. In order for companies to attain and maintain a proper stance in this international marketplace and to function effectively in diverse and multiple cultures simultaneously, business leaders must incorporate training in intercultural communication as a foundation for and prior to their business dealings in international marketplace. Harris and Moran (1991) declare: Too many corporate and government leaders are operating upon 'old pictures' of cosmos and human nature, including nature of work, worker, and management process itself. Executives in transnational enterprises should join common struggle for a world cultural rebirth, and assist in conjuring up new visions that will energize or motivate human family. (p. 5) Culture and Communication Victor (1992) continues call for improved intercultural communication when he suggests, The nuances of international business - defined as any business conducted across national borders - are different from those of solely domestic business. fundamental principles of domestic business apply abroad but with added complexities (p. 245). Carbaugh (1990) points out, Two problems that are basic to cultural practice and theory of communication [are] . . . shared identity [and] . . . common meaning and meanings (p. xv). Chick (1990), in writing about intercultural communication reminds us, the competencies that ensure effective intercultural communication are so complex, covert, and context bound that they cannot be taught as a body of knowledge in any straightforward way . . . however, effective intercultural communication can be learned (p. 255). These ideas highlight importance of successful intercultural communication transactions to corporate leaders as they prepare their employees and business strategies to compete in global economy (Naisbitt & Aburdene, 1990; Frederick, 1993). Perceptions of conversations between people speaking a language - whether in person or in media - are common experiences for all of us. We react positively, negatively, or neutrally as we reflect on these situations. Our positive reaction might include statements such as, That's impressive or wish I knew what they were saying. A more negative reaction to same situation might be: should be speaking English, they're in America now or That's rude. A neutral reaction includes people who don't care one way or other. They might believe that America is a melting pot of many cultures and it's not unusual to hear people speaking a different language. For some Americans, neutral reaction seems fair; for others, especially those who are ethnocentric, negative reaction is more common. No one, regardless of culture, likes to feel like an outsider to a conversation. Yet, it is not uncommon to feel like an outsider in our own country when conversations are not in English or when they are in English but are filled with jargon or technical language. In these situations, lack of understanding language, and/or culture, can foster a foreign feeling. When we enter a country, we may not only have to learn a language, we are also entering a different culture. To communicate competently and fit in it is equally important for us to understand characteristics of culture as well as language. Victor (1992), in assessing importance of intercultural communication and potential for growth of American business in international marketplace, states: Increase in international trade far exceeds either gross domestic product [in United States] or industrial production in any single major industrialized country. …

Economics and Politics: The Case of Sugar Tariff Reform

We study Congressional voting on sugar tariff reform in 1912 to investigate theories of constituent influence on trade policy. In this setting, consumer interests enjoyed substantial political efficacy. Moreover, since a variety of producer interests competed in the political marketplace, we can evaluate which producer interests were most effective. We explore these issues by integrating two techniques drawn from economics and political science, overcoming some common problems encountered in political economy research. We first conduct an event study to ascertain the relative incidence and importance of legislative events. We then conduct a roll call regression on congressional votes to determine legislator responsiveness to different interest groups. We find that wealthy and concentrated groups, especially shareholders, were not influential. Large, unconcentrated groups, in particular beet sugar laborers and sugar beet and sugarcane farmers, were the most influential producer groups. Strikingly, these latter groups were created by prior protective tariffs.

Japan's Political Marketplace.

Japan's Political Marketplace.

The choices of identity

Abstract Identity is used in today's media very frequently to explain the conditions in which political competitions unfold, in particular when they develop into violent conflict. However, the explanatory power of descriptions in terms of ‘identity’ appears to be extremely limited. A comparative study based on field research done in different parts of the world tends to show that narratives of identity are produced in order to create and mobilize certain groups towards the attainment of particular political goals. Based on ‘liberating amnesia’ and selection of cultural traits, narratives of identity produce change and cannot be understood as expressions of social homogeneity or representations of immutable realities. This implies that there are always several identity narratives in competition on the same political marketplace and that citizens can choose among them. However, stressing the limits and exposing the dangers of politics dominated by identity narratives does not amount to denying the importanc...

Japan's Political Marketplace.

Japan's Political Marketplace.

Japan's Political Marketplace, by J. Mark Ramseyer, Frances McCall Rosenbluth

Japan's Political Marketplace, <i>by J. Mark Ramseyer, Frances McCall Rosenbluth</i>