"This is a thematically unified survey of current and significant issues affecting interest group politics and scholarship in the USA. Petracca has drawn together interest group scholars and practitioners to write 16 original essays dedicated to making the best and newest research accessable to students at all levels. The mix of perspectives and approaches aims to offer a stimulating analysis of contemporary American interest group activity."--Provided by publisher.
Do states have the authority to limit the legislative terms of their members of Congress? Up until very recently this question was merely hypothetical, pondered by those with the luxury to ask and develop answers to an assortment of constitutional "what if's." However, the success of the term limitation movement across the nation has moved this hypothetical question to the center stage of relevant constitutional debate.Voters in fifteen states, including California, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington, have now approved initiatives to limit the number of terms served by their members of Congress. In nine other states term limit advocates are actively gathering signatures to place similar initiatives on the ballot in 1994, some for the second time. By 1995, as many as 24 states could have adopted initiatives to limit congressional terms. In the remaining states activists continue to lobby for legislation to limit the terms of state and federal legislators.Since a state's authority to impose term limits on members of Congress is of questionable constitutionality, it is likely many of these initiatives will end up in litigation (see Barnicle 1992; Corwin 1991; Greenberger 1991; and Kovacevich 1992). Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state-imposed term limits on members of Congress have already been filed and dismissed in Missouri and Florida. Legal action is pending in Nebraska and in the state of Washington where House Speaker Tom Foley has teamed up with the League of Women Voters to challenge the constitutionality of that state's term limitation initiative. The legal strategy against term limits has succeeded in overturning one initiative.
In just three decades rational choice theory has emerged as one of the most active, influential, and ambitious subfields in the discipline of political science. Rational choice theory contends that political behavior is best explained through the application of its supposedly "value-neutral" assumptions which posit man as a self-interested, purposeful, maximizing being. Through the logic of methodological individualism, assumptions about human nature are treated as empirical discoveries. My central argument is that by assuming that self-interest is an empirically established component of human nature, rational choice theory supports and perpetuates a political life which is antithetical to important tenets of normative democratic theory. Rational choice theory offers an incoherent account of democratic citizenship and produces a political system which shows a constant biased against political change and pursuit of the public interest. This article concludes by discussing the merits of democratic deliberation for achieving these transformative ends.
