James C. Garand

EXPLAINING VOTER TURNOUT IN LATIN AMERICA, 1980 TO 2000

Previous cross-national research on voter turnout has focused attention primarily on Western industrial democracies, with relatively little attention paid to turnout in developing countries. In this article, the authors extend the research program on comparative voter turnout to presidential and legislative elections held in Latin American countries from 1980 to 2000. Building on previous research, the authors estimate a series of models that represent the effects of institutional, socioeconomic, and political variables in shaping turnout. The findings suggest that turnout in Latin American countries is influenced primarily by institutional variables (such as unicameralism, compulsoryvoting, and concurrent legislative and executive elections) and political variables (i.e., founding elections and political freedoms). Surprisingly, the authors find that socioeconomic variables, which are found to have strong effects on turnout in Western democracies, are unrelated to turnout in Latin American countries.

Horizontal Diffusion, Vertical Diffusion, and Internal Pressure in State Environmental Policymaking, 1989-1998

Throughout the 1980s, states developed policies to address the growing problem of abandoned and uncontrolled hazardouswaste sites. Not surprisingly, some states have adopted stringent policies that are similar to the federal Superfund program, whereas others have developed different approaches. In this article, we develop and test empirically a model of the strength of state hazardouswaste programs, which we depict as a function of both internal determinants and external diffusion. For internal determinant explanations we consider the effects of problem severity, internal political factors, interest group pressure, and socioeconomic and demographic variables. We also include variables representing regional and top-down (national) diffusion. Our results indicate the importance of both internal determinants and external diffusion. Strong state hazardous waste programs are a function of state wealth and the severity of internal hazardous waste problems, as well as external determinants, with regional diffusion as a particularly influential factor.

Balancing Work and Family: The Role of Employer-Supported Child Care Benefits

The stress of balancing work and family demands has increased as more wives and mothers have entered the workforce. One way to alleviate that stress is through employer-supported, family-related benefits and policies. The purpose of this research is to determine what family-oriented benefits and policy options are being offered by businesses in one state, as well as the circumstances or conditions under which such benefits are offered. The human resources directors of a stratified random sample of businesses were mailed a questionnaire and asked to report the types of benefits they offered. Demographic data on the companies and employees also were collected. Generally, companies offered few benefits, but the number of benefits offered is found to be related significantly to company size and the percentage of women in the company workforce. These findings are consistent with the rational-choice interpretation underlying the authors model.

Explaining Government Growth in the U.S. States

Despite the explosive increase in the research program on government growth in recent years, little work has been done on government growth disaggregated to the subnational level. I examine the empirical validity of five competing models of government growth for the fifty U.S. states from 1945 to 1984: Wagners Law, fiscal illusion, party control, bureau voting, and intergovernmental grant. Government size is defined in terms of state government spending as a proportion of total state economic output, with separate implicit price deflators being employed for the public and private sectors. Based on a longitudinal test of these competing models, the analysis uncovers strong empirical support for the bureau voting and intergovernmental grant models, moderately weak support for the Wagners Law model, and virtually no support for the fiscal illusion and party control explanations. These findings have important implications for the study of government growth in general and, more specifically, in the states.

Journals in the Discipline: A Report on a New Survey of American Political Scientists

A long with books, scholarly journals constitute the primary media through which political scientists communicate the results of their research to their discipline. However, not all journals are created equal. There is a hierarchy of scholarly journals in political science, with some journals being highly respected and others less so. Articles published in the most highly regarded journals presumably go through a rigorous process of peer review and a competition for scarce space that results in high rejection rates and a high likelihood of quality. Articles published in these journals pass a difficult test on the road to publication and are likely to be seen by broad audiences of interested readers. Other journals publish research findings that are of interest to political scientists, to be sure, but articles published in these journals either pass a less-rigorous test or are targeted to narrower audiences. The purpose of this paper is to report on new findings relating to how political scientists in the United States evaluate the quality and impact of scholarly journals in their discipline. Based on a survey of 565 political scientists who are on the faculties of both Ph.D.and non-Ph.D.-granting departments, we consider subjective evaluations of the scholarly quality of 115 journals of interest to political scientists, as well as the degree to which political scientists are familiar with journals and are hence likely to be exposed to the findings reported in articles published in those journals. Following the work of Garand (1990) and Crewe and Norris (1991), we also create a journal impact rating that combines information about subjective evaluations of journal quality with information about respondents familiarity with those journals. While some research on journal quality in political science has focused on the citation rates of scholarly journals (Christenson and Sigelman 1985), perhaps the most widely cited approach for evaluating journal quality and impact is one based on subjective evaluations of journals, as measured in surveys of political scientists (Giles and Wright 1975; Giles, Mizell, and Patterson 1989; Garand 1990; Crewe and Norris 1991). Giles and Wright (1975) pioneered this approach with their initial study, which examined political scientists subjective evaluations of 63 political science journals; Giles, Mizell, and Patterson (1989) followed up with a reassessment of the evaluations of 78 journals, including 56 journals included in the first survey. Garand (1990) notes that the rankings of journals reported by Giles et al. (1989) include some interesting anomalies. In particular, some journals with very narrow audiences and foci are ranked highly by Giles et al. based on the high evaluations received from their relatively narrow readerships. The result is that some journals are ranked highly, even though a large majority of political scientists are not familiar with them and not necessarily because they are highly visible and broadly recognized for the qualit of the scholarship contained w hin their pages (Garand 1990, 448).l Garands solution is to measure journal impact in a way that takes into account both the subjective evaluations given to particular journals and the number of political scientists who are familiar with these journals. This approach is adopted by Crewe and Norris (1991) in their study of the impact of British, European, and American political science journals. In this paper we follow the approach adopted by Giles and colleagues in collecting data on journal evaluations, as well as the approach adopted by Garand in creating a measure of journal impact. Our rationale is simple: we suggest that a journals impact is a function of both the quality of research published in its pages and the degree to which its findings are disseminated broadly to the political science profession. Two journals with equally strong evaluations will have different impacts on the profession, depending on how many political scientists are familiar with and exposed to their articles. We realize that an effort to rate the quality and impact of scholarly journals is controversial, particularly given recent debates about what constitutes a valued contribution in political science and the role of journals in reflecting the values of the discipline. Admittedly, the notion of combining evaluations and familiarity into an impact rating reflects a subjective value about journal publications, but we suggest that these underlying values are not unreasonable ones. Our intention is not to denigrate the contributions published in journals with relatively narrow foci and/or readerships. Rather, we merely point out that articles published in such journals, even if they are of high quality, will be seen by a smaller number of political science colleagues and are less likely to have as strong an impact on the political science discipline. We also suggest that there is some value in having research read by numerous scholars, especially when the broad readership crosses subfield boundaries. The potential for cross-fertilization that occurs when research findings are subjected to the scrutiny of numerous scholars and from different subfields is likely to enhance the quality of research. Arguably, the research of scholars in a given subfield is improved when it is read and evaluated by scholars from American politics, comparative politics, political theory, and international relations. This

Partisan Change and Shifting Expenditure Priorities in the American States, 1945-1978:

This article examines the impact of shifts in partisan control of the governorship and state legislatures on longitudinal patterns of expenditure priorities for 38 states from 1945 to 1978. I suggest that such partisan interventions should have an impact on patterns of spending priorities over time only under two circumstances: (1) when the political parties within governmental institutions differ systematically in policy-relevant ways, and (2) when the governmental institution undergoing partisan change has the institutional power relative to other policymaking bodies to translate spending priorities into outcomes. Using a multiple interrupted time series analysis of trends in spending priorities for education, highways, welfare, and health and hospitals, it is found that, in general, partisan interventions do have a nontrivial impact on patterns of spending priorities over time, both in terms of the level (intercept) and trend (slope) of the spending priorities time series. In sum, it would appear that there is more than modest support for the general partisan intervention model of change in spending priorities over time.

Changes in the Vote Margins for Congressional Candidates: A Specification of Historical Trends

Recent research on House elections has focused on the decline in congressional competition since the mid-1960s. However, this body of research suffers from three major problems: 1) an imprecise specification of the nature of change in the degree of congressional competition, 2) its exclusive reliance on a limited time frame, which calls into question the generalizability and adequacy of its explanations, and 3) its overemphasis on incumbency-oriented explanations. Using a Multiple Interrupted Time Series (MITS) analysis of trends in aggregate electoral data from 1824 to 1980, we find that current low levels of congressional competition are not historically unique, but instead constitute a continuation of a long-term trend established in the mid-1890s. In addition, and in contrast to the general thrust described in the literature, there appears to be a post-1965 trend toward greater competition, although the absolute level of competition is lower after the mid-1960s. Finally, a disaggregation of electoral results by incumbency status suggests a growth in the incumbency advantage since the mid-1890s, but that lower post-1965 levels of congressional competition are the result of a winners and not an incumbency, advantage. Such findings cast doubt on the adequacy of explanations that focus on post-1965, incumbency-oriented factors.

Homo Economus? Economic Information and Economic Voting:

Although retrospective economic voting does not require voters to have precise information about recent economic conditions, it is arguably the case that the quality of retrospective voting as a democratic accountability mechanism hinges on the degree to which citizens have reasonably accu rate perceptions of the state of the economy In this paper we test a model of the accuracy of individuals perceptions of national economic condi tions. Utilizing data collected in a survey of residents of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, during the 1992 presidential campaign, we depict perceptual accuracy as a function of four sets of independent variables: (1) personal characteristics likely to enhance citizens political and economic cognition; (2) perceptions of economic threat; (3) interest in politics and/or econom ics ; and (4) exposure to media sources. Our findings point to the impor tance of personal characteristics, such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, and age, as well as retrospective personal evaluations, political inter est, and media exposure in determining the accuracy of citizens economic perceptions. Moreover, we provide preliminary evidence that perceptual inaccuracy has an indirect effect on vote choice in 1992 through its effect on retrospective sociotropic economic evaluations.

An Alternative Interpretation of Recent Political Science Journal Evaluations

In their recent article in PS, Giles, Mizell, and Patterson (1989) provide a long-awaited update of an earlier article (Giles and Wright, 1975) on subjective evaluations by political scientists of a wide range of social science journals. In both articles, Giles and his collaborators sent questionnaires to a random sample of political scientists, asking them to rate each of the journals with which they were familiar on a scale from 0 to 10 with 0 = poor, 2 = fair, 4 = adequate, 6 = good, 8 = very good, and 10 = outstanding. Additional data were also collected on whether or not respondents were familiar with each journal. Based on the evaluation data, Giles et al. calculate the mean evaluation for each of the journals represented, as well as a ranking of the journals from most highly to least highly evaluated. The mean ratings and the rankings of these journals that were calculated by Giles et al. are presented in columns (1) and (5) of Table 1, respectively. The rankings have a fair degree of face validity. For the most part, the major comprehensive journals in political science are found to be ranked highly, based on mean evaluations among those claiming to be familiar with the journal; the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics are all ranked in the top six journals, along with World Politics, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology. Further, several broad-based subfield journals are also ranked highly (e.g., International Organization, Comparative Politics, Political Theory). However, an examination of these ratings yields some intriguing anomalies. What is surprising is that several journals with very narrow audiences and foci are also ranked very highly. For instance, the American Journal of International Law, Soviet Studies, Slavic Review, China Quarterly, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Journal of Political Economy are ranked among the top 22 journals, even though in none of these instances is more than one-quarter of respondents familiar with the journal. These relatively high ratings are obviously due to the high evaluations given these journals by their relatively narrow readerships, and not necessarily because they are highly visible and broadly recognized for the quality of the scholarship contained within their pages.

Ranking Political Science Journals: Reputational and Citational Approaches

Academic journals play a key role in the dissemination of scholarly knowledge in the social sciences. Hence, publication in journals is critical evidence of scholarly performance for both individuals and the departments that they populate. While in the best of worlds each scholars performance would be evaluated based on a close reading of his/her published journal articles, in the actual practices of hiring, tenure and promotion review, and departmental evaluations this ideal is often honored only in the breach. Instead, evaluators commonly base their judgments of the importance and quality of published articles, at least in part, on the journals in which they appear. The higher the status accorded a journal, the greater the weight attached to publications appearing in it.