Suchergebnisse

The 2012 American elections were highly competitive, with the unusually close partisan balance making the elections an opportunity for each of the two major parties. This book assembles leading political scientists and political journalists to explain the 2012 election results and their implications for America's future. In addition to assessing election results, the book examines the consequences of the large ambitions of the Obama presidency and the political and policy risks entailed in the pursuit of those ambitions. It also explores Congressional elections and policymaking since 2008, and how they affected election results in 2012. The book promises a more coherent focus than that evident in similar edited works, achieved through a limited number of chapters and clear definition of chapter content.

Engaged pluralism entails active interaction, debate, and learning from each other. I argue that individuals need to undertake the challenges arising from engaged pluralism to ensure a healthy, vibrant disciplinary future, and for a democracy that thrives. I consciously extend the term "engagement" to apply not only to understanding across sub-disciplines and different grounds of knowledge, but also to addressing research to the needs of society. There are golden opportunities centered around the benefits of a more open, rigorous, and contentious science that can be maximized through focused engagement around methodologies and methods. In short, two primary themes encapsulate my views on where our discipline should be heading. First, the pursuit of engaged methodological pluralism in our scholarship is critical. Second, supporting democratic principles and civic engagement, which is at the core of the American Political Science Association and has continued, in ebbs and flows, throughout the discipline's life, is necessary.

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class is both a work of political science and a contribution to broad public discussion of distributive politics. Its topic could not be more relevant to a US polity wracked by bitter partisan disagreements about taxes, social spending, financial regulation, social insecurity, and inequality. The political power of "the rich" is a theme of widespread public attention. The headline on the cover of the January–February 2011 issue of The American Interest—"Inequality and Democracy: Are Plutocrats Drowning Our Republic?"—is indicative. Francis Fukuyama's lead essay, entitled "Left Out," clarifies that by "plutocracy," the journal means "not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others." Fukuyama makes clear that he believes that this state of affairs obtains in the United States today.Readers of Perspectives on Politics will know that the topic has garnered increasing attention from political scientists in general and in our journal in particular. In March 2009, we featured a symposium on Larry Bartels's Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. And in December 2009, our lead article, by Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, starkly posed the question "Oligarchy in the United States?" and answered it with an equally stark "yes." Winner-Take-All Politics thus engages a broader scholarly discussion within US political science, at the same time that it both draws upon and echoes many "classic themes" of US political science from the work of Charles Beard and E. E. Schattschneider to Ted Lowi and Charles Lindblom.In this symposium, we have brought together a group of important scholars and commentators who offer a range of perspectives on the book and on the broader themes it engages. While most of our discussants are specialists on "American politics," we have also sought out scholars beyond this subfield. Our charge to the discussants is to evaluate the book's central claims and evidence, with a focus on three related questions: 1) How compelling is its analysis of the "how" and "why" of recent US public policy and its "turn" in favor of "the rich" and against "the middle class"? 2) How compelling is its critique of the subfield of "American politics" for its focus on the voter–politician linkage and on "politics as spectacle" at the expense of an analysis of "politics as organized combat"? 3) And do you agree with its argument that recent changes in US politics necessitate a different, more comparative, and more political economy–centered approach to the study of US politics?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Whether the size of the campaign funds of incumbents and the timing of their accumulation influences entry decisions of high quality challengers; based on 397 House races in which an incumbent ran for reelection in 1990; US.

In recent years, political science has seen a boom in the use of sophisticated methodological tools for time series analysis. One such tool is the general error correction model (GECM), originally introduced to political scientists in the pages of this journal over 20 years ago (Durr 1992; Ostrom and Smith 1992) and re-introduced by De Boef and Keele (2008), who advocate its use for a wider set of time series data than previously considered appropriate. Their article has proven quite influential, with numerous papers justifying their methodological choices with reference to De Boef and Keele's contribution.Grant and Lebo (2016) take issue with the increasing use of the GECM in political science and argue that the methodology is widely misused and abused by practitioners. Given the recent surge of research conducted using error correction methods, there is every reason to take their suggestions seriously and provide a fuller discussion of the points they raise in their paper. The present symposium serves such a role. It consists of Grant and Lebo's critique, a detailed response by Keele, Linn, and Webb (2016b), and shorter comments by Esarey (2016), Freeman (2016), and Helgason (2016). Finally, Lebo and Grant (2016) and Keele, Linn, and Webb (2016a) reflect on the contributions made in the symposium, as well as discuss outstanding issues.