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Introduction: going public in theory and practice -- How Washington has changed -- How the politicians entering Washington have changed: outsiders and divided government -- The President and the press -- The growth of going public -- President Reagan and his first three budgets: a classic case of going public in action -- Opinion leadership and foreign affairs -- Present and future prospects for going public

While much has been written about economic competition between the United States and Japan, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that their relationship is founded essentially on each sides' domestic political concerns. Many critics have concluded that to gain a new equilibrium in relations, the two counties must develop a sophisticated appreciation of each other's political dynamics. Because budgets, taxes and macroeconomic policy are so central to activities of both governments, this book, by Japanese and American experts, focuses on the role of political institutions in formulating economic policy. Despite the differences in the two counties political systems--one-party/parliamentary versus two-party/presidential--there are striking similarities in the way politics is transacted in Japan and the United States. In particular, politicians in both countries are motivated primarily by the desire to serve local constituencies, which leads to overly parochial public policies. Combining case studies and discussions, the contributors provide an overview of the Japanese and American political systems, particularly those aspects that are most relevant to economic policymaking. In addition, they offer a comparative analysis of the politics of budgeting, tax reform, and structural policies.

During roughly the half-century straddling the turn of the twentieth century, America's national government underwent a dramatic transformation. It proceeded on two fronts, politics and administration. At the beginning of the era, politicians were deeply enmeshed in a system of patronage and graft reflecting their indebtedness to the local and state political parties without whose support their careers would have languished. Local party organizations recruited and sponsored candidates, ran election campaigns, and directed subsequent career moves among its cadre of politicians. In return, these politicians used their offices to stoke the party machine with a steady supply of patronage appointments and government contracts. By the end of the era, a variety of state and national reforms had effectively dismantled the patronage system.

Explores two accounts of the development of rural free delivery (RFD) as examples of different models of politics used to explain the transformations that occurred in the US at the turn of the 20th century. The "state development" model focuses on an executive-centered coalition of presidents, bureaucrats, reformers, & business leaders who favor regulatory agencies & the efficient provision of government services. The mix of actors & roles varies depending on the policy being considered. The "institutional politics" model places Congress in the central role regarding policy changes. The actors, who occupy constitutional offices with different constituencies/responsibilities, behave in different but predictable ways. Daniel P. Carpenter's (2001) case study of the RFD is compared to a 1999 article by Samuel Kernell & Michael P. McDonald. It is argued that Carpenter's account is informed by the state development model, while Kernell & McDonald's study conforms to the institutional politics model that allows for a broader explanation of the actions of both the executive branch & members of Congress. 2 Tables, 50 References. J. Lindroth

Candidates covet votes. They exert extraordinary effort and expend vast resources seeking to win as many votes as possible. Yet, the costly pursuit of votes occurs under great uncertainty concerning both the strategic correctness of their positions on issues and the efficiency of their campaigns. Of course, prudent candidates dedicate some resources to learning how voters are responding to their appeals, generally by commissioning polls of public opinion.Candidates' early adoption of scientific survey technology (Converse 1987) and the important role polls play in modern campaigns invite the question of how candidates ever got on without them. Before polls, did public opinion reside on a vast terra incognita on which candidates staked out issue positions oblivious to the whereabouts of the median voter? If so, campaigns must have been riddled with mistakes and inefficiency. John G. Greer (1991) made just this argument in claiming that the absence of accurate information about shifts in the electorate's preferences allowed political parties to be blindsided by what became realigning elections.The historical record offers few clues as to the extent to which nineteenth-century candidates labored under strategic ignorance. Yet, accounts of politicos and pundits alike tallying newspaper endorsements and carefully gauging attendance at campaign rallies do survive. However questionable these indicators' validity, even to contemporaries, they represented some of the few quantifiable barometers of voter sentiment available to that era's politicians. Some candidates kept "their ear to the ground" (a nineteenth-century dictum) by engaging in more active forms of voter research.

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found Washington occupying a lowly position in the political life of the country. In a footnote, Democracy in America informs the European reader, "America has no great capital city where direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the country." Throughout the book, he expands on the effects of this decentralization. And we may fairly suspect that as much as any other, this observation led de Tocqueville to concentrate his inquiry on the performance of democracy in communities across the country.

Within the last ten years a new conventional wisdom has surfaced in political science which tells us that presidents inexorably become less popular over time. Not much else matters. Neither the economy, nor the Vietnam War, not even Watergate seems to have had much independent effect on presidential popularity once time is taken into account. Before embracing these conclusions we need to reconsider the method that produced them. I argue that previous research too willingly accepted time as an explanatory variable, enshrouding it with theoretical meaning. To preserve its explanatory power alternative, substantive variables were shortchanged in their operational definitions and measurement. In this article I reverse the emphasis. Here, time is rejected as an explanatory variable and is employed only as a diagnostic indicator of the adequacy of the equations. A variety of alternative representations of real-world forces such as the economy and war are tested and some considerably improve the time-series correlation between the environment and presidential popularity. With these substantive variables I propose a simpler, if less glamorous, theory of presidential popularity consisting of two hypotheses: first, popularity is related to real events and conditions, and second, that it responds slowly to environmental change. Popularity is then both experiential and incremental. The findings for Presidents Truman through Nixon support this common-sense view. The Korean War (measured by U.S. casualties), the Vietnam War (measured by the number of bombing missions over North Vietnam and the U.S. war dead), the economy (especially six-month changes in consumer prices), Watergate, international "rally" events, and early term surges of approval all contribute independently to short-term fluctuations in presidential popularity. Moreover, as predicted, popularity appears to be autoregressive even when represented by an instrumental variables surrogate measure to minimize serial correlation. When the equations are specified in this way, time proves to be unnecessary in order to explain trends in presidential popularity.