Symposia

The Politics of Canada: Antoine Bilodeau, Ken Carty, Harold Clarke, Munroe Eagles, Mebs Kanjo, Al Kornberg, David Leal, Dan Lipinski, Tom Scotto, and Donley Studlar

Political Corruption: Michael Johnston, James A. McCann, David Redlawsk, Mark Warren, and Others

Features

National Conditions, Strategic Politicians, and U.S. Congressional Elections: Using the Generic Vote to Forecast the 2006 House and Senate Elections: Alan I. Abramowitz

Political Consulting: Growth of an Industry: Costas Panagopoulos

Ralph Nader's 2000 and 2004 Presidential Campaign Strategies: Barry C. Burden

The Profession

Reforming the Conference Presentation, or What We Can Learn from Hollywood: Charles King

Facing Failure: The Use (and Abuse) of Rejection in Political Science: Greg Weeks

Uncle Wuffle's Advice About Job Talks: A Wuffle

Diary of a Political Scientist I, Spring 2006: Baseball, Blackjack, and Bill Clinton: Michael Nelson

The Teacher

Agendas, Arguments, and Political Theory: John Harman and Deborah Vanderbilt

An Argument for Deliberative Civic Education in the Political Science Classroom: J. Cherie Strachan

Women of Color Teaching Political Science: Examining the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Course Material in the Classroom: Anna Sampaio

Department of Education Announces Guidelines for New Student Grant Program

The U.S. Department of Education has laid out guidelines for fall grant eligibility through a federal program designed to help academically talented students from low-income families pay for college. Starting this fall, freshmen and sophomores who have completed “a rigorous secondary-school program of study” and that maintain a 3.0 grade point average are eligible for additional grants. The guidelines will only be in effect for the next two years while more concrete criteria is established.

Archives Declassification Audit

The National Archives and Records Administration recently announced the results of an audit on the withdrawal of records from public access. Last summer, an independent historian brought to light a little-known program dating back to the Clinton Administration when he was denied access to formerly available documents. The CIA, and other agencies, had recalled documents from National Archives facilities, including presidential libraries. These agencies believed certain documents were inappropriately declassified by a 1995 executive order requiring the declassification of records at least 25 years old. When the current archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, learned of this arrangement he placed a moratorium on the withdrawal of documents and called for an audit of the removed material in order to determine whether the materials were improperly removed. The report found that 24% of the material was removed inappropriately and 12% was questionable, while 64% of the removed documents met the standards for continued classification. NARA plans to create a National Declassification Initiative to address this issue.

Endowments Get Budget Boost in the House

On May 17^th, the U.S. House of Representatives agreed to an amendment that added $5 million to the budget recently approved by the House Appropriations Committee for both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Under the terms of a spending bill that the House passed, the NEH will receive $146 million and the arts endowment a lesser amount of $129 million in FY 2007.

Senate Chair Suggests SBE Sciences' Removal from NSF

Using the time-honored tradition of singling out specific, merit-reviewed grants deemed unworthy of funding by members of Congress, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) noted it may be time to reassess the mission of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and move the social, behavioral, and economic sciences (SBE) to another department so that NSF can concentrate on the hard sciences. NSF Director Arden Bement, National Science Board Chairman Warren Washington, and AAAS Executive Director Alan Leshner defended SBE's important research contributions. They all argued for NSF support across all the sciences and the convergence and interdependence of the physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. Washington declared that NSF should have a diverse, balanced portfolio. Bement noted that the SBE sciences are broad, very difficult, yet deliver high economic returns.

New Division Director for SES Division at NSF

Richard Lempert, who has led the SES division for the past four years, has stepped down at the end of his term at NSF. Edward J. Hackett, currently a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, has been named his replacement. Hackett also holds an appointment in ASU's School of Life Sciences and the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes. His research focuses on the social organization of science, research collaboration, peer review, academic organizations, and careers. Hackett earned a B.A. in social relations from Colgate and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell. In other NSF news, Frank Scioli, who for many years served as Program Officer for the Political Science program, is now the senior adviser to the SES Division. Scioli spent much of the last year as SBE's representative to NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. Brian Humes and Paul Walhbeck are now admnistering the NSF Political Science program.

Washington Insider Sources

Sources for this column include the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History's NCC Washington Update, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Coalition for History's Washington Update Newsletter, and the Consortium of Social Science Associations' Washington Update.

Phillip J. Harold, Robert Morris University

“Prophetic Politics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethics of Suffering”

I hope to offer a nuanced interpretation of an important philosopher whose works are not well understood in the English-speaking world. The early work of Levinas critiques the rationalistic, instrumental interpretation of politics. In his later work, however, he tries to capture the meaning of human suffering and describe the ethical reversal this effects on our thought; here, it is only by giving up my claim to exercise power, and thereby exposing myself to suffering, that I can fulfill my ethical and political demands. True authority is found in the individual prophetic witness that exceeds all institutional recognition. A correct appreciation of these insights is important for understanding the tradition of thought to which Levinas belongs, and will also make a vital contribution to contemporary political thought.

Lilian A. Barria and Steven D. Roper, Eastern Illinois University

“The Completion Strategy for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Judicial Capacity-Building in Bosnia and Herzegovina”

This project investigates the Completion Strategy for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the development of national courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as appropriate venues for transferred cases as well as originating cases involving war crimes and other human rights violations. This research will be based on interviews conducted in BiH and is focused around several questions. First, the project seeks to examine whether the BiH judiciary has received sufficient training in order to meet the demands imposed not only by the substantial number of cases that will be tried but also the complexity of the cases. Second, this research seeks to examine whether national trials have increased the transparency of the judicial process and dispelled notions of bias in the prosecution of cases. Finally, this research seeks to examine whether the strengthening of national judiciaries in the region should be linked to the Completion Strategy of the ICTY.

David A. Backer, College of William & Mary

“Just Compensation? A Longitudinal Study of Victims' Attitudes Towards Reparations in South Africa”

More than 20 of the ‘third wave’ democracies have implemented reparations programs that compensate victims of past human rights abuses. Despite the prevalence of these measures, they remain controversial: analysts question the propriety and impact of such remuneration. While the relevant literature examines notable historical cases, few efforts have been made to gauge the responses of victims. My previous research in South Africa, including a survey of 228 victims of apartheid-era abuses that I conducted in the Cape Town area during 2002–2003, found that the government's failure to deliver on promises of reparations was a key reason why they perceived the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process to be unjust. I plan to conduct a second wave of the survey in order to undertake a longitudinal analysis of the impact on victims' attitudes of the financial compensation disbursed by the government between late 2003 and early 2005.

Jessica Allina-Pisano, Colgate University

“The Last Barbed Wire Fence in Europe: The Local Politics of Surveillance in a Divided Village of Transcarpathia in 1945–2005”

Kisszelmenc, an ethnically Hungarian settlement at the edge of southwestern Ukraine, consists of a single street that ends with a barbed wire fence. Just beyond that barrier, across the Ukraine-Slovakia border, is its sister village of Nagyszelmenc and the European Union. The proposed project will analyze the local politics of surveillance and control by four pairs of regimes in the post-war period in Kisszelmenc and Nagyszelmenc. The research will investigate the range of mechanisms by which states and empires engage local political actors to establish and maintain control over people and territory. Work on this region up to this point has addressed primarily questions of explicit collaboration, relationships between law and identity, party politics, and institutional change at the national level; this project will specify how different types of regimes negotiate with, direct, and are shaped by the infrapolitics of subordinate groups.

Bonnie N. Field, Bentley College

“Establishing Political Party Discipline: The Case of Democratic Spain, 1977–1989”

This project investigates the establishment of political party discipline in Spain between the 1977 founding democratic elections and 1989. Despite a common discipline-encouraging institutional environment, descriptive accounts indicate that the pace and timing of the establishment of party discipline varied by political party. This suggests that important non-institutional variables are at work, and/or that unidentified institutional variables are significant. As the descriptive accounts are ad hoc, this project will develop the first quantitative dataset of individual legislator votes in the Congress of Deputies, determine the empirical patterns of party discipline for each party, explain through statistical analyses the empirical patterns, and assess the implications for the development of stable parties, specifically, and of stable democracy, generally. Spain is a model case of a successful transition to and consolidation of democracy. The lessons learned from this study therefore have broad implications for understanding the challenges of democratic stability in new democracies.

John A. Scherpereel, James Madison University

“European Integration and the Changing Patterns of Territorial Authority in Central and Eastern Europe”

This project examines the relationships linking European integration and territorial authority in the EU's new member states. Preliminary research suggests that EU membership has empowered sub-national actors in some new member states while reinforcing central state authority in others. The project seeks to explain this variation, to generate predictions about the future of state authority in Central and Eastern Europe, and to contribute insights to contemporary debates about the fate of the nation-state in a globalizing world. I will use the SRG to fund summer research in Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

Christopher P. Muste, University of Montana

“Attitude Change and the Information Environment: A Multi-level Study of Public Opinion on Immigration”

The project explores changing attitude toward immigration, a prominent national issue in the 1990s, and evaluates the extent to which immigration attitudes respond to news media content and individual media exposure, as well as to changes in other attitudes related to immigration. The research design combines contextual measures of the volume and content of local news media coverage with NES panel data from 1992–1994, consisting of individual-level measures of attitudes, media use, and political awareness.

Patrick J. Sellers, Davidson College

“Constructing the News: Strategic Communication in Congress”

How do members of Congress work to shape news coverage outside the institution, and how effective are these efforts? My project addresses these questions by combining quantitative and qualitative evidence analyzed through the lens of theory. The evidence includes hundreds of thousands of public statements and news stories, as well as interviews with congressional press secretaries and personal experiences from an APSA Congressional Fellowship. Using this evidence, I consider two distinct but related stages of legislator's media campaigns. The first is the promotion of a message, which requires coordination of politicians' promotional efforts. The second stage involves coverage of the message, which can vary from a great deal to none at all. The interaction among the two stages creates a collective action problem for legislators. Solutions to this problem illustrate the power and importance of agenda setting by politicians and the news media.

Gregory Koger, University of Montana

“Going To The Mattresses: Filibustering in the U.S. Congress, 1789–2004”

My central claim is that filibustering varies with the tactical balance of power between legislative factions opposing and supporting a bill. This is why the Senate has become the crucible of American politics: over the last 50 years, Senate filibustering has become both easier and less visible. I utilize a blend of formal modeling, measurement, regression analysis, and historical case studies to significantly advance our understanding of legislative obstruction.

Andrew Konitzer, Austin College

“Accounting for the Success of the Serbian Radical Party in Municipal Elections: Seven Hypotheses”

This project is a study designed to gather data about local election outcomes in the Republic of Serbia, create an electoral database including political, economic, and social variables for each of Serbia's 160 municipalities from the years 1996–2004, and test seven hypotheses regarding the variation of Serbian Radical Party electoral success in the Republic's local elections.

Sean E. Richey, Pace University

“Manufacturing Trust: Japanese Community Currencies and the Creation of Social Capital”

Center Space Available for Spring 2007!

The Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs is quickly becoming an invaluable resource to political and social scientist. Since its opening in September 2003, the Center has housed more than 60 scholars. The Center, housed in the APSA headquarters near Dupont Circle, provides a great base of operations for scholars researching in the D.C. metro area. The Center offers Visiting Scholars furnished work space, telephone, fax, computers, Internet access, conference space, a reference library, and access to George Washington University's Gelman Library.

Visiting Scholar stays range from a few days to 12 months. Space is limited to APSA members and is available for faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students from the U.S. and abroad. Scholars are expected to cover their own expenses and a modest facilities fee for the use of the Center.

Prospective visiting scholars may apply at any time. Positions are awarded on the space-available basis. Full details on the Center and the Visiting Scholars Program, including application form, can be found online at www.apsanet.org/section_224.cfm. You may also contact the APSA office at: 202-483-2512; center@apsanet.org.

Research Funding Available

The APSA sponsors a number of funds to help finance research. Many of these funds can support your stay at the Centennial Center or elsewhere.

In The News

The APSA Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs co-sponsored an event with the Southern Political Science Association honoring long time APSA and SPSA member and friend, Walter Beach. Walter was the recipient of the 2005 Diane Blair Award given by the SPSA. This award recognizes outstanding achievement in politics and government.

The Centennial Center is also hosting a Summer Brown Bag series. Throughout the summer visiting scholars at the Center, along with outside scholars from local universities, will be presenting their research in brown bag sessions. For a full schedule, please visit our web site www.apsanet.org/content_3464.cfm.

In Profile

Nina Therese Kasniunas is a Ph.D. candidate at Loyola University in Chicago. Her research is examining the impact of interest group testimony on lawmaking in Congress. Political scientists, decision-makers within government, and political commentators assume that interest groups are established in order to influence government policy. And testifying before Congress is a preferred lobbying activity of organized interests. But there is scant empirical evidence about the impact of interest groups on lawmaking. Her research addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing (1) which interest groups are invited to give testimony to congressional committees and (2) what effect their testimony has in shaping the content of the legislation reported by the congressional committees.

Nina is looking at seven committees and their subcommittees during the 103^rd, 106^th, and 108^th sessions of Congress. This research will test eight hypotheses using two statistical models. The first model will explain which interest groups are given access to congressional committees. The second model analyzes whether interest group testimony has influence on the committee markup of legislation. Both models will test for characteristics of the interest groups as well as institutional characteristics of the committees.

In order to test whether the testimony influences the markup, Nina will be conducting a content analysis of the testimony given by interest groups to identify the recommendations made; the recommendation is the unit of analysis for this second model. Once the recommendations are identified, they will be compared to the markup of that particular bill to determine whether the advice was heeded.

It is the pursuit of elusive markup reports that brings Nina to the Centennial Center. She will be busy visiting with the various committees and their archivists to examine the markups. Nina believes her research will help clarify the role of interest groups in policymaking as well as shed some light on the important role committees play in our governmental system.