Edie N. Goldenberg

The Media: Obstacle or Ally of Feminists?

Under certain circumstances, media treatment can serve as an obstacle to womens achievement of their political goals. In other circumstances, the news media can act as an additional resource. It is quite clear that the early media coverage of the womens movement did not help the movement to grow. In fact, the press coverage of the womens movement, when there was any at all, was unflattering, and the movement grew in spite of the media. Similarly, the media treat men and women candidates differently in their campaign coverage, and this differential treatment can hinder womens access to the political arena. On the other hand, the discovery of the gender gap and its prominent play in the press probably helped women in the political arena. The media, by emphasizing the significance of the so-called womens vote, made women appear to be a more potent force in the electorate.

Mass Media in U. S. Congressional Elections

Congressional candidates in the United States run campaigns that are largely independent of national parties and their leaders. The U.S. media are free of party control and decentralized geographically. Many legislative candidates buy time on local radio and television to air campaign ads, and they seek news coverage as well. Incumbents have inherent advantages in these activities, although these are greater in House than in Senate elections. As a result, congressional candidates tend to become relatively visible over the course of the campaign, depending upon the degree of overlap of their constituency boundaries and media markets as well as upon the competitiveness of their races. What U.S. voters learn about candidates for legislative office depends substantially on where the voters live.

The three faces of evaluation

Program evaluation can be used for three purposes: to learn about a programs operations and effects, to control the behavior of those responsible for program implementation, and to influence the responses of outsiders in the programs political environment. Most agencies fail to take full advantage of all three faces of evaluation. They begin their evaluation programs too late; they assign evaluation responsibilities to staffs which lack the requisite skills; or they yield to temptations to distort or suppress evaluation findings. The case of the evaluation of civil service reform demonstrates how these multiple purposes can be pursued together with constructive results. It also suggests several lessons of more general relevance.

Normal Vote Analysis of U. S. Congressional Elections

This study is a district-level analysis of the effects of campaigns on deviations from the normal, or expected, vote in 1978 elections for the U.S. House. The normal vote is derived from national election survey data on party identification in 86 districts, using techniques applied previously to presidential elections. Data on campaigns comes from interviews with campaign managers of the two parties in these districts. The findings show that incumbency has the greatest effect on candidate recognition. Candidate recognition and spending on media affect deviations from the normal vote, but the quantity of media coverage has little effect.

Firing the Unproductive Employee: Will Civil Service Reform Make a Difference?

Civil service reform included a set of changes intended to facilitate the firing of consistently un productive employees. This article describes the background and logic of these changes, reviews the status of their implementation, and offers preliminary evidence on their consequences for per sonnel management in the federal government.

Mass Media and Legislative Contests: Opportunities for Comparative Study

Recent research in democratic electoral systems suggests there are strong possibilities for using both electoral and mass media system characteristics to explain why some legislative candidates are more successful than others at the polls. These effects will vary with the strength of national forces in legislative elections, as well as with the extent of coverage of local races in the media. Prospects for the comparative analysis of the role of the mass media are presented, and a series of testable hypotheses are formulated to assess how media structure and content, the political and party systems, and partisanship affect candidate visibility and evaluation by the electorate.