Suchergebnisse

Previous work in law and political development has emphasized the role that a "support structure" in civil society plays in translating electoral success into legal outcomes. In this paper, I claim that legal change can also work in the other direction—political appointees in government can use their power to assist their allies in civil society. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival materials, I show how—especially under Attorney General Meese—the Reagan Department of Justice invested in the ideas (through its support of originalism), organizations (especially the Federalist Society), and personnel of the conservative legal movement and reorganized itself to give these longer-term objectives more importance in the department. These investments add up to a case of "transformative bureaucracy": the use of bureaucratic power to transform the conditions of future political conflict.

Political scientists generally pay great attention to the creation of policies, but relatively little to the absence of policies. This article examines the reasons why Great Britain has not developed affirmative action policies, and in doing so, tries to shed some light on why the United States has. The author finds that both institutional and cultural factors explain the absence of preferential treatment in Great Britain, in particular the salience of the immigration issue, the absence of a leading oppressed group, the structure of the Labour Party and the electoral system, and the centralization of the British political system. The author argues that Great Britain seems to be moving along a different trajectory from that of the United States and that although their antidiscrimination policies are less developed than those in the United States, they may be more effective in the long term. As a result, the British experience may hold lessons for the United States.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Political Competition, Legal Change, and the New American State -- 2. The Rise of the Liberal Legal Network -- 3. Conservative Public Interest Law I: Mistakes Made -- 4. Law and Economics I: Out of the Wilderness -- 5. The Federalist Society: Counter-Networking -- 6. Law and Economics II: Institutionalization -- 7. Conservative Public Interest Law II: Lessons Learned -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Interviews -- Notes -- Index

Over the last decade, in a major switch in position, conservatives have embraced the cause of reducing prison populations in the states and, increasingly, at the national level. The long-term crime decline and the increasing antistatism of the Republican Party contributed to this change, but it also has an important cognitive component: Policy makers have become more open to evidence of the damaging effects of mass incarceration. In contrast to previous studies, our case shows that such policy "feedback" only functions politically when a signal about a policy consequence is assigned valence and intensity by policy makers, whose calculations are heavily structured by the demands of party coalitions. On issues in which no core coalition member has a major stake, feedback can be tipped from reinforcing to undermining and vice versa, but this process depends on the efforts of entrepreneurs to change the way information is processed. In a highly polarized environment, opening policy makers to previously ignored evidence requires the cultivation of a reform cadre composed of ideological standard-bearers who can vouch for the orthodoxy of the new position.

The dominant implication of the carceral state literature is that path-breaking change is impossible through ordinary politics, reducing the options to either acquiescence or a level of mass mobilization not seen in decades. Over the last decade, however, activists have generated a surge of agitation for carceral reform, especially at the state level. In a twist the scholarly literature did not anticipate, much of that energy is coming from the Right. The theoretical flaw underlying the scholarly pessimism is a focus on the way policies entrench themselves through positive feedback, without commensurate attention to negative feedback. We argue the balance of feedback is shifting to the negative side in the case of mass incarceration. To seriously shrink the prison population, however, conservatives will have to accept the construction of alternative government structures; liberals will have to accept that these will remain more paternalistic than they might like. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

The dominant implication of the carceral state literature is that path-breaking change is impossible through ordinary politics, reducing the options to either acquiescence or a level of mass mobilization not seen in decades. Over the last decade, however, activists have generated a surge of agitation for carceral reform, especially at the state level. In a twist the scholarly literature did not anticipate, much of that energy is coming from the Right. The theoretical flaw underlying the scholarly pessimism is a focus on the way policies entrench themselves through positive feedback, without commensurate attention to negative feedback. We argue the balance of feedback is shifting to the negative side in the case of mass incarceration. To seriously shrink the prison population, however, conservatives will have to accept the construction of alternative government structures; liberals will have to accept that these will remain more paternalistic than they might like.

Considers the problem of a democratic deficit in the EU, arguing that the optimum way to fortify the polity's democratic legitimacy is by employing already existing policy instruments & subsidies to bolster democracy at the popular level. The EU can help revive local government -- the real bedrock of democracy -- & thus give citizens the political competencies & autonomy needed to flourish in an immense multi-tiered confederal system. Democratic legitimacy, for the EU, ought to be an outgrowth of its capacity to safeguard the potential for democratic government in Member States rather than originating from the mostly futile exercise of democratizing itself. 8 References. K. Coddon