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| 1 |
ID:
099780
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| Summary/Abstract |
US progressivism is half espoused, half rejected, by an ambivalent if talented President. The Republican image of the President as 'socialist' is one which the social democratic Democrats wish were true. The President's readiness to compromise has not tempered the extreme hostility of the Republicans. It has been exploited by the political agents of business and finance. It has used by the permanent war party: the campaign against 'terror' enables it to retain mastery of foreign and military policy. The New Deal's heirs, seeking more social democracy and less militarism, are bereft of new forms of political action. US democracy is threatened by an eruption of cultural and religious fundamentalism, racism, and xenophobia, as well as a compulsive refusal of social solidarity. Withal, the situation is open as well as complex, and the President in the long run may be much more successful than his angry detractors and disappointed supporters allow.
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| 2 |
ID:
124720
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
American spent much of this summer arguing over migration reform, and south Africans spent much of it contemplating Nelson Mandela's legacy. But the link between the two went unnoticed one of Mandela's biggest legacies was to show that immigration reform on a scale hugely more ambitious than any thing proposed in the hall of the US Congress can benefit everyone, in real economic terms.
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| 3 |
ID:
099104
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Do members of Congress put human rights concerns on the agenda in response to their constituents' demands for trade protection? Humanitarian concern may be an important motive, but the normative weight of these issues also makes them a potentially powerful tool for politicians with less elevated agendas. They may criticize the behavior of countries with whom their constituents must compete economically, while overlooking the actions of countries with which their constituents have more harmonious economic relations. This paper tests several hypotheses about the salience of human rights concerns in the politics of US foreign policy using data on congressional speeches during the late 1990s gathered from the Congressional Record. We find evidence that, while humanitarian interests remain an important motive for raising human rights issues, the economic interests of their constituents influence which members of Congress speak out on these questions, and the countries on which they focus their concern.
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| 4 |
ID:
129134
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2014.
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Striking a compromise on a controversial issue, Congress in January passed legislation to provide $537 million, the full amount the Obama administration had requested, for the program to rebuild the B61 nuclear gravity bomb and require the administration to submit detailed reports on alternatives to this plan. Congress also mandated the eventual retirement of a different gravity bomb, the B83, once the B61 is ready for service. These items were part of an omnibus appropriations bill signed by President Barack Obama on Jan. 17. The new law is a $1.1 trillion conglomeration of 12 appropriations bills that had to be passed to keep the government open for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The legislation includes $7.8 billion for nuclear weapons activities conducted by the Energy Department's semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). One of the key nuclear policy questions left unresolved last year was how much money the NNSA would be allowed to spend to extend the service life of about 400 B61 gravity bombs. About half of the B61s are stored in European NATO countries for use on tactical, or short-range, aircraft; the rest are stored in the United States for use on strategic, or long-range, bombers.
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| 5 |
ID:
144469
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is a battle over military expenditure at the International Monetary Fund, with consistent pressure from its most powerful member for the Fund to get tough on military expenditure being pitted against lowerorder states' invocation of the organization's sovereignty-protecting rules and practices. While the formal victory of the lower-order states has been codified in the Fund's relatively weak Guidelines on Military Expenditure, on a case-by-case basis policy shifts continue to be imposed on borrowers through the application of informal influence by the US Executive Director in the IMF boardroom. By integrating insights from literature exploring the tension between formal rules and informal practices in international organizations, this case study extends the understanding offered in the international relations literature of the foundations of sovereign inequality in international politics.
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| 6 |
ID:
160941
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| Summary/Abstract |
Both Australia and New Zealand, in addition to engaging with the US executive branch, also protect and advance their bilateral relationship by engaging with the US Congress. Since 1987, Australia has pursued congressional outreach, or diplomatic lobbying, to protect and advance its security and trade interests. As a result, Australia has won both security and trade benefits. New Zealand's congressional outreach, on the other hand, has had a more challenging task of improving bilateral relations due, in part, to US objections to New Zealand's anti-nuclear policy. This article extends existing research on Australian and New Zealand congressional outreach, develops a framework for examining embassy-based congressional outreach and, through comparative analysis of Australian and New Zealand congressional outreach, gives greater insight into the nature and character of their efforts on Capitol Hill.
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| 7 |
ID:
189175
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| Summary/Abstract |
AN INFLUENTIAL group of supporters has formed around expensive military projects, including missile defense projects. This group actively promotes the interests of both individual manufacturers and the program as a whole. The fact that information on US military policy is openly accessible to legislative and executive authorities, research centers, and the media reduces the power of unilateral lobbying in the interests of the military-industrial complex and individual state agencies.
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| 8 |
ID:
105199
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Limitation riders, which allow the U.S. Congress to forbid agencies from spending money for specific uses, enable congressional majorities to exert greater influence over bureaucratic policy decisions than is appreciated by research on policy making in the United States. I develop a theory of limitation riders, explaining why they lead to policy outcomes that are preferable to a majority of legislators compared to outcomes that would occur if this tool did not exist. I assess this perspective empirically by analyzing the volume of limitation riders reported in bills from 1993 to 2002 and all limitation riders forbidding regulatory actions from 1989 to 2009. In addition to supporting the conclusion that Congress possesses more leverage over agencies' decisions than is currently appreciated, the findings have implications for advancing theories of delegation.
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| 9 |
ID:
129133
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Obama administration in January announced a new policy on conventional arms transfers that emphasizes the need for restraint in considering transfers that might endanger regional security or human rights. President Barack Obama declared in a Jan. 15 directive that the new policy "supports transfers that meet legitimate security requirements of our allies and partners in support of our national security and foreign policy interests" and "promotes restraint" in those "that may be destabilizing or dangerous to international peace and security." The policy, which replaces a 1995 directive issued by President Bill Clinton, follows the administration's announcement last October that it was loosening rules on the sale of U.S.-made weapons overseas. The reforms announced last fall are part of an effort that the administration says will tighten controls on the sale of the most dangerous arms while enhancing commerce in defense material and services that are not threatening.
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| 10 |
ID:
163360
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MEMBERS OF CONGRESS HAVE MANY WAYS TO ACHIEVE their multiple goals of being reelected, making policy, and gaining power and prestige within their institution. Of these, roll call voting is the most visible and, many scholars argue, the most important signal that legislators send to their constituents, colleagues, and interest groups about their positions and achievements.
Yet since 1790, and permanently since 1794, the U.S. Congress has included delegates who cannot vote on the House floor—those from the United States’ territories. Congress currently includes five delegates from the U.S. island territories (Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas) as well as a delegate from Washington, DC. None of them is able to participate in roll call votes on the House floor, yet these delegates represent 4.52 million total residents which, according to 2015 Census Bureau estimates, would amount to the 26th most populous state between Louisiana (4.7 million) and Kentucky (4.4 million) in size.
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| 11 |
ID:
110534
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2011.
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We present a theory of parties-in-legislatures that can generate partisan policy outcomes despite the absence of any party-imposed voting discipline. Legislators choose all procedures and policies through majority-rule bargaining and cannot commit to vote against their preferences on either. Yet, off-median policy bias occurs in equilibrium because a majority of legislators with correlated preferences has policy-driven incentives to adopt partisan agenda-setting rules-as a consequence, bills reach the floor disproportionately from one side of the ideological spectrum. The model recovers, as special cases, the claims of both partisan and nonpartisan theories in the ongoing debate over the nature of party influence in the U.S. Congress. We show that (1) party influence increases in polarization, and (2) the legislative median controls policy making only when there are no bargaining frictions and no polarization. We discuss the implications of our findings for the theoretical and empirical study of legislatures.
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| 12 |
ID:
086967
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
For much of the last decade it was clear that the commercial operations of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were creating an increasing systemic financial risk. That risk was compounded by the fact that the Japanese and Chinese central banks were acting as cheap creditors. The Bush administration and some Republicans in Congress made efforts from 2001 to create a tougher regulatory framework for Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie were able to defeat these attempts to constrain their operations by a four-fold political strategy involving campaign contributions to members of Congress, a vast lobbying apparatus, the cultivation of a political language around affordable housing for minorities, and abusing and smearing their regulator. Since Japan and China understood that the US government would have to assume Fannie and Freddie's liabilities in a crisis they had no incentive to expose the political fiction that it would not.
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| 13 |
ID:
137781
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| Summary/Abstract |
Conventional wisdom is that trade policy is often guided by geopolitical security considerations. A growing body of research addresses the security–trade linkage as a plausible cause for executive negotiations over the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) in 2007. Yet, the approval of a trade deal with the Asian ally by America's legislature in 2011 features not only ‘security ties’ but also ‘electoral connections’. This paper seeks to examine the question of whether alliance relationships would inevitably translate into domestic commitments. Bringing domestic politics into consideration, this article also fills the gap in the literature on Congress-focused research of the KORUS FTA and sheds light on how lawmakers strike a balance between the principle of US foreign policy and the reality of conflicting domestic interests.
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| 14 |
ID:
185017
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| Summary/Abstract |
We study how officeholder gender affects issue accountability and examine whether constituents evaluate women and men legislators differently on the basis of their policy records. Data from 2008 through 2018 show that constituents’ approval ratings and vote choices in US House elections are more responsive to the policy records of women legislators than of men legislators. These patterns are concentrated among politically aware constituents, but we find no evidence that the results are driven disproportionately by either women or men constituents or by issues that are gendered in stereotypical ways. Additional analyses suggest that while constituents penalize women and men legislators at similar rates for policy incongruence, women legislators are rewarded more than men as they are increasingly aligned with their constituents. Our results show that accountability standards are applied differently across legislator gender and suggest a link between the quality of policy representation and the gender composition of American legislatures.
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| 15 |
ID:
156586
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| Summary/Abstract |
The 1988 revision of the US–Japan Nuclear Cooperation Agreement offers a major precedent both for current US nuclear cooperation policy and for the role played by Congress. Drawing on the Congressional Record and other primary sources, this article examines how US legislators criticized the agreement, forcing the Ronald Reagan administration to alter the subsequent arrangement and abandon the original idea of transporting plutonium by air. Congressional opponents could not prevent the adoption of the agreement outright, partly because of Japan's strong nonproliferation credentials, which helped to allay proliferation concerns. Instead, they focused their concerns on Japan's use of plutonium. By exploiting a split in the administration and stirring environmental concerns over air transportation of plutonium from Europe to Japan, opponents succeeded in affecting the outcome of the agreement. With the agreement up for automatic renewal in July 2018, current congressional concerns over Japan's excess plutonium stocks may play a similar influential role.
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| 16 |
ID:
086886
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Repeated efforts to achieve a new binational approach to immigration between the United States and Mexico have all ended in failure. So have recurring attempts to enact comprehensive US immigration reform that would include new temporary worker programs and legalization of unauthorized migrants, along with enhanced enforcement of immigration laws and border security.
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| 17 |
ID:
120377
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