Modern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal...
moreModern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal powers is a governor's popularity with the public. Efforts to explain variation in gubernatorial popularity have yielded mixed results, in part because of limited data on governors' approval ratings and underspecified models. We assess the determinants of gubernatorial popularity that fall along both a national-state dimension and an economic-political dimension using the new U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset. Our results suggest that the proper focus of gubernatorial popularity research should be to distinguish not between its national and state influences but between its economic and political influences, as both national and state unemployment rates are central to explaining public assessments of governors in our models.
A central question in the study of executive politics concerns whether presidents behave in an idiopathic, opportunistic fashion reflecting individual differences across administrations, or whether presidents behave as institutional...
moreA central question in the study of executive politics concerns whether presidents behave in an idiopathic, opportunistic fashion reflecting individual differences across administrations, or whether presidents behave as institutional actors who are constrained by external forces that occur across administrations. We argue that development of the institutional presidency is an important consideration in understanding presidential behavior. We maintain that presidents will behave consistent with the opportunistic model during the developmental phase of the institutional presidency, while they will act compatibly with the constraint model once the institution has fully matured. Using data on executive orders for the 1939-96 sample period, both event count regression techniques and model selection criteria are employed to test our theory. The statistical evidence supports our claim that each theory has empirical merit, depending upon the stage of the institutional presidency under investigation.
We discuss circumstances whereby presidents dispense distributive benefits to enhance their reelection chances and cultivate congressional support. Presidents do this by influencing bureaucratic decision making within those subsystems to...
moreWe discuss circumstances whereby presidents dispense distributive benefits to enhance their reelection chances and cultivate congressional support. Presidents do this by influencing bureaucratic decision making within those subsystems to strategically time federal project announcements to coincide with presidential and congressional elections. We test these conten tions and find support for them. We conclude that the traditional theory of distributive politics is not so much invalid as incomplete. Our findings show that presidents can play more strategic roles within the distributive policy arena than existing theory suggests.
Antisemitism has long been found on both the political far-right and farleft. The recent rise in antisemitism worldwide raises the question of whether current antisemitism is found more with the far-right or far-left, the former a...
moreAntisemitism has long been found on both the political far-right and farleft. The recent rise in antisemitism worldwide raises the question of whether current antisemitism is found more with the far-right or far-left, the former a function of right-wing populism and the latter with what has been termed the new antisemitism. This paper uses data from the 2014 round of the European Social Survey in 20 nations to test for the connection between ideological selfplacement and antisemitic attitudes in mass publics. Analysis finds greater levels of antisemitism with the extreme far-right compared to the far-left, but extreme leftists appear slightly more antisemitic than moderate leftist. Further, there is less antisemitism than anti-Muslim and anti-Roma (Gypsy) attitudes at all positions on the left-right continuum. The conclusion puts the findings into context and suggests directions for future research.
Considerable debate exists over whether the public holds the governor accountable for the state's economy. Part of the controversy stems from weak design and limitations in data, but part also from weakness in theory. We argue that...
moreConsiderable debate exists over whether the public holds the governor accountable for the state's economy. Part of the controversy stems from weak design and limitations in data, but part also from weakness in theory. We argue that voters recognize the limitations of state ...