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The signs are abundant that many of the institutions and processes of American politics are becoming increasingly direct. As communication technologies erode the mediating roles played by secondary leadership, citizens and public officials interact directly with each other more intensively and more frequently.As this gale has moved through our political system, different scholars have noted their own particular "straw in the wind." By far the most attention has been given to the declining capacity of party as a mechanism mediating between voters and office holders (Polsby, 1983; Kirkpatrick, 1978). A different viewpoint comes from Samuel Kernell, who has revised Richard Neustadt's work on the presidency by arguing that presidential power is increasingly secured and exercised through public opinion influence (Kernell, 1986). Those who have studied the activities of incumbent Congressmen and Senators note that they have also extended their direct contact with constituents: not only have the flows of mail into and out of congressional offices increased markedly over the past two decades, but the establishment of C-Span has brought congressional business into literally millions of homes (Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988). Moreover, in a constant search for new ways of contacting citizens, congressmen are in the forefront of experimentation with cable television, satellites, VCRs and computer communications (Arterton, 1987).

Most concepts of ethnicity are unsuitable for political analysis because they ignore either subjective or objective aspects, and because they ignore the fluid and situational nature of ethnicity. The approach flowing from the concept proposed here permits the observer to examine empirical variations that tend to be treated as rigid assumptions by modernization analysts on the one hand and class analysts on the other. The concept is applied to a study of the Nubians of Uganda because of the intermixture of class and ethnic features involved in their fall from status at the beginning of the colonial period and their subsequent sudden rise following the 1071 coup d'état of Idi Amin. The fairly recent creation of the Nubians as an ethnic category and the relative ease with which others can become members illustrate other features of the proposed concept of ethnicity. Finally, this concept is used to examine and criticize overly restrictive notions of ethnicity found in theories based upon both cultural pluralism and consociationalism.

There has been a scarcity of work examining the political consequences of discrete emotions. This article examines the political effects of several emotions-anger, sadness, fear, and enthusiasm. Emotional ads should influence whether voters become politically active. To test this, two experiments were administered. The first examines emotional responses to campaign messages; the second tests whether emotions influence political participation. The results indicate anger is mobilizing, by increasing participatory intentions and factors related to participate. This result is then replicated using ad-tracking data. The findings indicate that emotions are an important factor in studying campaign effects. Adapted from the source document.

How does the racial environment influence mass political participation? The power--threat hypothesis predicts that a larger out-group population in the surrounding environment increases citizen participation, whereas the relational goods hypothesis predicts that it decreases participation. I attempt to reconcile these conflicting arguments into a single hypothesis positing that citizens' decisions to participate in politics are simultaneously shaped by the power--threat and relational goods effects. I conclude that the racial environment plays a significant role as a determinant of mass participation but in ways more complicated than what simple models of contextual effects suggest. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]