PS: Political Science & Politics articles from September 1996

PS: Political Science & Politics archives from September 1996

Vote For Me: politics in America. (includes related article on new television series)(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... Editor's Note: This issue's symposium, "Vote for Me: Politics in America," is presented in collaboration with the Public Broadcasting System's election-year programming. The PS essays complement the four hour series, Vote for Me, produced by...

The struggle for American culture.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... Is there an American political culture? Do Americans share a set of attitudes and assumptions powerful enough to shape their politics?(1) A generation ago, most social scientists thought so. Important books bore titles like The American Mind...

Who runs for Congress?(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... The United States has more elections than any other democracy. Voters not only fill positions that are typically appointive in other countries, such as judges, but they also select officials for many more layers of government, from the town or...

An effective Congress and effective members: what does it take?(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... What are the skills needed to serve effectively in Congress and how do politicians acquire them? Learning to be a member of Congress is unlike learning to be a plumber or a brain surgeon; there is no prescribed course of study and no...

Accentuate the negative: contemporary Congressional campaigns.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... Campaigning in the final days before Oregon's special Senate election in January 1996, Democratic nominee Rep. Ron Wyden was introduced at each event with a song written in 1944 and recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters:...

Urban political machines: taking stock.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... Big city political machines hold an important place in the nation's political lore. They gave us interesting characters with colorful names - John "Bathhouse" Coughlin, "Red Mike" Hylan, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, "Slippery Dick" Connolly, "Old...

The South and the 1996 elections.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... The most remarkable change in American politics in recent generations has been the emergence of partisan competition that has transformed the once solidly Democratic South. After almost a century of unswerving Democratic loyalty, the South gave...

Black power in 1996 and the demonization of African Americans.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... The cry of "Black Power" shook American society three decades ago. "Black Power" was a slogan that energized a generation of young African Americans, troubled their elders such as Dr. King (who agreed with many of the goals, but saw the slogan...

The evolving politics of the Christian Right.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... A recent essay by Ralph Reed (1996), Executive Director of the Christian Coalition, proves that religious conservatives are still divided over the propriety of political activism, nearly two decades after the rise of the Christian Right. Reed's...

Su voto es su voz: Latino political empowerment and the immigration challenge.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the "mordida," the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? . . . 'Gobernar es poblar' . . . Can "homo contraceptivus' compete with 'homo pro-genetiva' if borders aren't...

The political power of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.(Vote For Me: Politics in America)
September 1, 1996... In the United States, as in most of the world, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals(2) are outnumbered and despised. Unlike most other potentially political groups, gay people are further disempowered by virtue of being born as if into a diaspora -...

Does television erode social capital? A reply to Putnam. (response to Robert A. Putnam, PS: Politics and Political Science, vol. 27, December 1995)
September 1, 1996... During the past thirty-five years many commentators have expressed concern about declining support for the American political system, noting familiar evidence of the steady erosion in electoral turnout (Stanley and Niemi 1995, 78; Teixeira 1992),...

Voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections: an historical view and some speculation.
September 1, 1996... An examination of presidential voting patterns between 1828 and 1992 for all counties and most large cities in the continental U.S. (approximately 135,000 cases altogether) confirms that there has been a decline in turnout rates(1) since 1960, as...

The myth of the "electoral lock."
September 1, 1996... For at least two decades, it has been conventional wisdom among political gurus that our system of choosing presidents through electoral votes, accumulated state by state, offers Republicans a substantial edge. Representative is a comment by a...

The scholarly recount: a useful addition to the methods of voting research ... with an example.
September 1, 1996... "Elections are the ultimate mode of reducing each of us to a bean and counting us" (Verba 1993, 684). Things are not really that bad. On election day the voter, marking the typical American long ballot, makes a pronouncement more complex and...

Searching presidential documents on-line: advantages and limitations.
September 1, 1996... Along with the need for heightened skills in managing huge amounts of information, the use of new electronic resources requires its own caution: researchers should not allow the ease of information gathering to tempt them to rely exclusively on...

Kennedy and Achilles: a classical approach to political science.
September 1, 1996... Has any president been harder for historians and political scientists to get a handle on than John F. Kennedy? As Fred Greenstein (1992) has noted, "In spite of the voluminous literature on Kennedy himself, the events of his presidency, his...

Alfred Hitchcock and the art of research.
September 1, 1996... At least twice a year, I am confronted by groups of students asking fundamental questions about how to conduct research in international relations. Once is when I take my turn as a "show and tell" presenter in the government department seminar...

Teaching women in the news: exposing the "invisible majority."
September 1, 1996... Suppose your local newspaper, or the New York Times, or the college daily, became an exclusively female domain - that every expert source, byline, photograph, quotation, and evaluation were female. Most readers might wonder why women deserve 100%...

Creating a critical thinking learning environment: teaching statistics to social science undergraduates.
September 1, 1996... Analytic thinking skills are highly prized in academia, and yet there is speculation and some evidence that such skills are in decline among contemporary students. The putative decline has been attributed to, among other things, too much...

Where does policy analysis belong in the undergraduate public administration major?
September 1, 1996... The practice of public policy analysis draws upon multiple disciplines and perspectives: analyses may rest on the methods and tools of economics, political science, operations research, history, sociology, and/or psychology, dealing with...

Mission impossible? Making a political science final exam that's fun to grade.
September 1, 1996... About ten years ago, before he died, a colleague of mine from the philosophy department made a curious statement about final exams. (Wait made many curious statements, but this one I especially remember.) He said that he enjoyed correcting his...

Political science departments report declines in enrollments and majors in recent years.
September 1, 1996... Trends in undergraduate student enrollments and degrees in political science over the last 15 years is a good news/bad news story. The bad news that provides the current headline is generating lively exchanges among political science faculty on...

The challenge of campaign watching: seven lessons of participant-observation research.
September 1, 1996... When the term "participant-observation" comes up, many political scientists immediately think of Richard Fenno. Indeed, Fenno's description of his work as "soaking and poking" has become synonymous with this style of research. When I sought to do...

Teaching democratic principles in a traditional Russian university: fomenting a quiet revolution.
September 1, 1996... American scholars and average citizens alike are bombarded daily with images of Russia's experiment with democracy - conflicts between President Yeltsin and the Duma, the nationalistic tirades of Zhirinovsky, the brutal killings by the new Mafia,...