Positions Of Leaders Research Articles

Congressional Leadership 1965–96: A New Look at the Extremism versus Centrality Debate

Abstract An examination of the differences between the ideological positions of leaders and other members in the U.S. House of Representatives (1965–96) demonstrates that Republican leaders tend to be significantly to the right of the median Republican member and Democratic leaders tend to be significantly to the left of the median Democratic member. Furthermore, leaders from both parties tend to be ideologically located near the mode of their party's ideological distribution. These empirical results have implications for issues such as party polarization, conditional party government, and the possibility of separating out party and ideology.

The Electoral Connection in the Chinese Countryside

A 1987 law established popularly elected village committees in the Chinese countryside. This article analyzes a unique set of survey data to describe and explain the connection between village leaders and those who choose them, in terms of orientation to the role of the state in the economy. It compares positions of village leaders with positions of respondents sampled from their selectorates of township-level leaders and electorates of ordinary villagers. Results of multivariate regression analyses indicate that: (1) village leaders are responsive to both old and newly emerging constituencies, as reflected in significant congruence between village leaders and their selectorates above and electorates below; (2) congruence between village leaders and their electorates is not exclusively the result of shared local environment, informal influence, or socialization but is significantly associated with the electoral process; and (3) the causal mechanism underlying the electoral connection in the Chinese countryside is the familiar one of voter choice.

Cowboys, cornucopians and long-run sustainability

In the 1970s there was a lively debate on the relationship between natural resource availability and long-run economic growth. One side has been characterized as “neo-Malthusian”. It emphasized the limited global “stockpile” of critical natural resources, from cobalt to petroleum, and the need to curb population and economic growth. The other side of the debate has been characterized as “cornucopian”. It emphasized the creative powers of technology and free markets to find substitutes for any and all scarce resources. This paper argues that the original dichotomy was false. It did not adequately represent either the real positions of most conservative business and political leaders today, nor did it reflect the currently emerging consensus among environmentalists. The former do not concern themselves with long-run issues at all, nor do they take a global view of the problems of mankind. Rather, they argue from the standpoint of short-run national (and corporate) interest. Environmentalists, on the other hand, do not fit the “neo-Malthusian” world view, which emphasizes the role of natural resources (and land) as factors of production, and points to the limited supply of renewable resources and the inevitable exhaustion of non-renewables. The most important scarcities, in the emergent environmentalist world view, are largely outside the market domain: soil fertility, clean fresh water, clean fresh air, unspoiled landscapes, climatic stability, biological diversity, biological nutrient recycling and environmental waste assimilative capacity. There are no plausible technological substitutes for these. The irreversible loss of species and ecosystems, and the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and of toxic metals and chemicals in the topsoil, groundwater and in the silt of lake-bottoms and estuaries, are not reversible by any plausible technology that could appear in the next few decades. Finally, the great nutrient cycles of the natural world — carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus — require that constant stocks in each environmental compartment and balanced inflows and outflows. These conditions have already been violated by large-scale and unsustainable human intervention.

The "Official English" Movement and the Symbolic Politics of Language in the United States

neous nations in the world, linguistically it is one of the most homogeneous (Thernstrom 1980). Nevertheless, in recent years policy has sparked political conflict in many states and localities as demands for bilingual government services have provoked concern about the continued primacy of This article explores elite and mass reactions to the ongoing confrontation between language rights and official English and reveals a significant gulf between the positions of opinion leaders and ordinary voters. As in the case of the tax revolt, the initiative process is the device that has allowed populist sentiment in favor of official English to prevail over elite opposition. Our main purposes are to identify the social and political conditions that have stimulated linguistic conflict and to determine the motivational bases for the mass appeal of official English. We argue that for most members of the majority group in the United States the tangible personal costs and benefits of bilingual government services or official English are neither clear nor substantial. On the other hand, challenges to the of one's typically engage deep-seated feelings about national identity and group worth (Horowitz 1985; Edwards 1985). With this in mind, we employ the familiar conceptual distinctions between economic and status politics (Gusfield 1963) and self-interest and symbolic politics (Sears, Tyler, Lau, and Allen 1980; Sears and Citrin 1985) to explore the sources of public opinion on issues.

Situational Pressures and Functional Role of the Ethnic Labor Leader

HIS paper grew out of a larger study of T ethnic minorities in the unions of Los Angeles County.1 It is an exploratory study, based upon a highly selected group of informantschiefly leaders of local unions high proportions of ethnic membership. The purpose of such a study is to call important problems to attention and to suggest leads for further inquiry. In this discussion the term role will be used in a somewhat vestigial sense; it should be made clear at the beginning that the concern here is less the internal psychological field of the actor than those gross regularities in the external situation wherein the actor must move. Such a framework places the burden of analysis, not upon the self concept of the individual leader, but rather upon the recurrent necessities of the organization-i.e., the conditions of a specifiable role. Two aspects of the unions are singled out as especially critical for other features of the organization. The first of these is the external function of the organization, and the second is the reflection of this function in the form of pressures upon the system of roles, and the system of control, within the local. The guiding question for determining external function, empirically, can be put as follows: What does a labor union have to do to stay in business? In gauging the position of a given officer, it can be stated thus: What does he have to do in order to keep his job? In answering such questions one may avoid an excessive emphasis on the formal blueprint of the organization. The necessary functions of a union can be summarized as follows: (1) to express and channel the protest behavior of workers and thus exert pressure on management; (2) to achieve accommodative relationships within the institutional environment, thus allowing for organizational stability and the means to deliver the goods. Arthur Ross has stated the reciprocals of these demands in four specific relationships.2 (1) The local must establish contractual relationships management; (2) the local must live with some International union; (3) the local must get along with other significant unions in the locale, and, (4) the local must control its members. The importance of a particular group will vary the sources of the union's organizational strength; no union will be free of such necessary relationships. (For example, certain locals are relatively independent of their Internationals but are highly dependent upon the consent of the membership; others exhibit an exactly reversed relationship these two groups.) The organized centers of power which the union must live with, or control, affect the necessary functions of the union personnel. This discussion will be concerned the most central figure in the union, the professional leader-and particularly the leader of Mexican or Negro identity. Certain propositions can be advanced for the positions of all labor leaders. The first thing to note is the relative instability of tenure. The * The research upon which this paper is based was supported by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and by the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of the University of California at Los Angeles. I Scott Greer, The Participation of Ethnic Minorities in the Labor Unions of Los Angeles County (unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles). 2 Trade Union Determinants of Indistrial Wage Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949).