Suchergebnisse

P. Converse's The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964) (no further publication information provided) launched the debate on the absence or presence of ideology in mass US politics. Insufficiently elucidated is the question of the role of ideology within American political elites. Until the mid 1960s, opinion was sharply divided. One school of thought, headed by McClosky et al (1960 -- no further publication information provided), claimed that greater ideological differences exist among political elites than among the general public. A second school of thought took the position that despite such differences, there is overall agreement between political elites (Mills, 1956; & Bell, 1960 -- no further publication information provided). The principal weakness of both viewpoints is that they neglect to define "ideology" or fail to recognize its components. Here, "ideology" is defined as a "system of beliefs centered upon a small number of central principles." To determine the absence or presence of elite ideology, an examination was made of interrelationships between belief elements. Of particular importance was the concept of "constraint," since it indicated the presence of a subjacent, "meaningful" structure. Through factor analysis of attitude scales rather than individual items, it was concluded that Converse's argument was correct: elite attitudes exhibit more constrainment than mass attitudes. In addition, when attention was focused on behavior rather than words, & when the behavior was the result of specific conflicts & well-defined interests, evidence of structuring became clearly recognizable. It is recommended that students of American political behavior be less eager to reject an ideological perspective in their examination of political elites. 6 Tables, Appendix. Modified AA.

This paper describes a technique for the rigorous analysis of probabilistic measures of association derived from contingency tables. The technique uses the approach to contingency table analysis first described by Grizzle, Starmer, and Koch and extended by Forthofer and Koch. This approach permits the user to obtain estimates of gamma, Yule's Q, Kendall's taub and tauc, Somer's D, and Goodman and Kruskal's taus, plus estimates of the variances and covariances of those measures of association. With the variance-covariance estimates, the user can examine a wide range of hypotheses for statistical significance.

We discuss various approaches to nonviolent conflict resolution and specifically the views of Gene Sharp and Erik Erikson as developed in their recent books on the subject. Both authors have in common a concern with the sources of obedience and the processes by which people come to question authority and the use of force. We explore the insights and limits of each approach and suggest aspects that need further clarification in the discussion of nonviolence. Sharp's encyclopedic effort draws together much material and is a valuable source. Erikson develops a set of poetic and telling conclusions from Gandhi's career that provide a deeper sense of how nonviolent campaigns can be waged and what they are all about.

Lax and Rader critique our use of the Chow test in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes on the grounds that individual justices votes are not statistically independent, which constitutes a violation of assumptions underlying the Chow test. In this response we point out that the Chow tests constituted only one part of our analysis; we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to look at the strength of the Chow tests compared to other sequential splits. Most importantly, we required that the observed statistical patterns of change be theoretically consistent with the legal changes made by the regime changing decisions; we note two areas where we did preliminary analyses that produced statistically significant results, but where those results did not make sense in light of the jurisprudence. We repeat both our Chow tests and individual interaction tests taking into account the clustering of observations. Our reanalysis provides support for some, but not all, of our original results. Adapted from the source document.

In this research note/replication, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article to the jurisprudential area of search and seizure. Given the centrality of this area of Supreme Court decision making in the core studies supporting the attitudinal model, replicating our analysis of the jurisprudential regime construct in this area provides an important test of the concept. Our results produce strong support for the proposition that post-Mapp decision making can be separated into distinct regimes, with a set of important cases decided in 1983-1984 demarcating the regimes. The predictors of decisions in the two periods are consistent with the types of changes one would expect the regime shift to produce. Our findings challenge the attitudinalists'proposition that there is at best negligible statistical evidence that law influences Supreme Court decision making.