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Publius's Political Science
In: NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 16-03
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Response to Daniel Carpenter's review of A Republic of Statutes: The New American Constitution
In: Perspectives on politics, Volume 10, Issue 3, p. 796-797
ISSN: 1541-0986
We appreciate Dan Carpenter's thoughtful assessment of our book and are eager to respond to his reflections about the political theory of the republic of statutes. He is right that we did not discuss some highly entrenched statutory schemes that might well deserve small-c constitutional status as superstatutes. Although we do treat the Defense of Marriage Act as a superstatute in our chapter on the antihomosexual constitution and its disentrenchment, we might have included a chapter on the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 (along with the many subsequent amendments that helped shape the drug enforcement regime we have today) if we had as many original things to say about the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) administrative constitutionalism as Carpenter did in his book. It would have been a big chapter, too.
The politics of European federalism
In: International review of law and economics, Volume 16, Issue 3, p. 279-294
ISSN: 0144-8188
The Elastic Commerce Clause: A Political Theory of American Federalism
Federalism is sometimes said to be an unstable halfway house between unified national government and an alliance among separate the state, according to which sovereignty must ultimately be indivisible: either national institutions retain the authority to make decisions or they do not. Genuine federal arrangements are unstable under this perspective. The notion of indivisible sovereignty has a powerful hold on our view of politics, but we think it is limited, most importantly by its conflation of the question of where ultimate authority resides with the question of where state power is actually exerted. While the answer to the first question is obviously significant, economic and sociological conceptions of politics suggest that the answer to the second may tell much more about the nature of a polity. Perhaps the main attraction of federalism in a country riven by internal differences is that it permits foundational issues like the location of sovereignty to be finessed, so that internal divisions can be accommodated in ad hoc, practical ways. It permits people who may differ greatly in their conception of a good public life to develop and maintain their own separate communities within the context of a larger and more powerful political economy, without requiring them to surrender their separate identities.' Echoing Rawls, we view federalism as a political rather than a metaphysical solution to the formation and maintenance of a state.
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Super-Statutes: The New American Constitutionalism
In: The Least Examined Branch, p. 320-354
Constitutional culture and democratic rule
In: Murphy Institute studies in political economy
This volume investigates the nature of constitutional democratic government in the United States and elsewhere. The editors introduce a basic conceptual framework which the contributors clarify and develop in eleven essays organized into three separate sections. The first section deals with constitutional founding and the founders' use of cultural symbols and traditions to facilitate acceptance of a new regime. The second discusses alternative constitutional structures and their effects on political outcomes. The third focuses on processes of constitutional change and on why founders might choose to make formal amendments relatively difficult or easy to achieve. The book is distinctive because it provides comprehensive tools for analyzing and comparing different forms of constitutional democracy. These tools are discussed in ways that will be of interest to students and readers in political science, law, history and political philosophy
Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions
In: American politics research, Volume 50, Issue 1, p. 3-16
ISSN: 1552-3373
Research suggests that American partisans are increasingly distinct in their beliefs. These strengthened partisan feelings extend to economic perceptions—as numerous scholars have shown, there is a substantial gap between the proportion of Democrats and the proportion of Republicans that believe the economy is improving. Here, we examine the extent to which these perceptions have polarized over the past two decades and the degree to which they still respond to objective economic indicators. Exploiting a Gallup time-series, we show that the gap in economic perceptions approximately doubled between 1999 and 2020, and that partisan economic perceptions no longer seem to converge during economic crises. We further demonstrate that the economic perceptions of Democrats and Republicans have polarized relative to Independents and that this polarization is not asymmetric in magnitude. Collectively, these results document the extraordinary rise of perceptual polarization and illustrate that neither Democrats nor Republicans are immune to its effects.
'Are we losing touch?' Mainstream parties' failure to represent their voters on immigration and its electoral consequences
In: Italian Political Science Review: IPSR = Rivista italiana di scienza politica : RISP, Volume 50, Issue 3, p. 398-421
ISSN: 2057-4908
AbstractIn many advanced democracies, mainstream political parties have been disrupted either by the rise of new (populist) parties or by hostile takeovers. In this article we argue that immigration attitudes have had a powerful impact on the strategic environment of political parties and leaders. We show, based on evidence from a comparative study conducted by YouGov in spring of 2015, that immigration attitudes had, by that time, driven a wedge between mainstream parties – those that regularly play a role in government – and their partisans. This 'immigration gap' opened up enormous space for new political movements to form, either inside existing parties or outside. Furthermore, we show that the representation gap on immigration issues is a relevant predictor of vote choice, so that parties are particularly likely to lose votes when they are more distant from their supporters on immigration.
BOOK REVIEWS - The New Federalism: Can the States be Trusted?
In: Political science quarterly: PSQ ; the journal public and international affairs, Volume 113, Issue 3, p. 529
ISSN: 0032-3195
Sophisticated Voting and Agenda Independence in the Distributive Politics Setting
In: American journal of political science, Volume 31, Issue 1, p. 169
ISSN: 1540-5907
Sophisticated Voting and Agenda Independence in the Distributive Politics Setting
In: American journal of political science: AJPS, Volume 31, Issue 1, p. 169
ISSN: 0092-5853
A Republic of Statutes: The New American Constitution. By William N. Eskridge, Jr. and John Ferejohn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 592p. $85.00
In: Perspectives on politics: a political science public sphere, Volume 10, Issue 3, p. 793-797
ISSN: 1537-5927
Congress and Civil Rights Policy: An Examination of Endogenous Preferences
This examination of preference change in the U.S. Congress illuminates some of the possible causes of preference shifting. Rational choice models that are committed to fix preferences as explanatory objects exclude strategic endogeneity. To update the study of beliefs, a continuum of preference change is used. Examination of legislative behavior during the civil rights movement era indicates endogenous preference shifts accounted for some preference change during that period, but does not explain all the broad patterns. A true description of civil rights policy & politics requires some kind of pure preference change beyond replacement or other conversion mechanisms. Consideration of the endogenous preferences links the fact that Americans occasionally change the American creed to the many channels that legislatures use to update understanding of their constituencies. Tables, References. J. Harwell