Micheal W. Giles

Racial Threat and Partisan Identification.

Power theory views relationships between groups as a function of their competitive positions in political, economic, and social arenas. In contexts where the threat posed by a minority group is high, the dominant groups response is predicted to be more hostile than in contexts where that threat is low. A pooled time series analysis of voter registration data for Louisiana parishes for 1975-90 provides support for the operation of the threat mechanism. Higher black concentrations are associated with declines in the percentage of white registered voters who are Democrats and an increase in the percentage who are Republicans. Consistent with the expectations of power theory, this relationship is conditioned by the social status of the parish. T he past three decades have witnessed two dramatic trends in southern politics. First, beginning with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there has been an extraordinary increase in political participation among southern blacks. This mobilization has been directed almost entirely to the Democratic party. Second, commencing at about the same time, a steep decline has occurred in the identification of southern whites with the Democratic party. This decline has been accompanied by a limited growth in Republican identification in the region and a large increase in the number of southern whites who identify as Independents. The end product of these trends has been twofold. On the one hand, the once solidly Democratic South no longer can be said to have a majority party (Black and Black 1987, 232). On the other hand, the Democratic party that once championed racial segregation in the region has come increasingly to depend upon black voters for its

Picking Federal Judges: A Note on Policy and Partisan Selection Agendas:

The importance of lower federal courts in the policymaking process has stimulated extensive research programs focused on the process of selecting the judges of these courts and the factors influencing their decisions. The present study employs judicial decisionmaking in the U.S. Courts of Appeals as a window through which to reexamine the politics of selection to the lower courts. It differs from previous studies of selection in three ways. First, it takes advantage of recent innovations in measurement to go beyond reliance on political party as a measure of the preferences of actors in the selection process. Second, employing these new measures it examines the relative effects of the operation of policy and partisan agendas in the selection process. Third, a more complex model of selection is assessed than in most previous studies-one that expressly examines the role of senators and senatorial preferences in the selection process. The results clearly suggest that the politics of selection differ dramatically depending upon whether or not senatorial courtesy is in operation. The voting behavior of Courts of Appeals judges selected without senatorial courtesy is consistent with the operation of a presidential policy agenda. Among judges selected when senatorial courtesy is in play, the linkage between presidential preferences and judicial outcomes disappears.

Political Participation and Neighborhood Social Context Revisited

This research note reports the results of an extension of Huckfeldts study of the effects of neighborhood status on political participation. Using survey responses from the 1972 American Election Study, Huckfeldts distinction between individually and socially based participation (1979), and composite measures of respondent and neighborhood social status, we find: (1) that neighborhood social status is related to socially based participation; but (2) that it is unrelated to individually based participatory acts; and (3) that the effect of neighborhood social status on participation is not consistent for respondents of different levels of social status.

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.

Setting a Judicial Agenda: The Decision to Grant En Banc Review in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Agenda setting has received only modest attention in studies of the judiciary. This reflects the limited control most courts exercise over the cases they hear. We analyze the influence of ideological and legal factors on the grant of en banc rehearing in the U.S. Courts of Appeals—one of the few instances of agenda control in the lower federal courts. Unlike previous research, we examine multiple decision points in the agenda-setting process. Our results indicate that the influence of attitudinal and legal factors varies across decision points revealing a complexity obscured in previous work. Our research underscores the importance of treating agenda setting as a process rather than as a single decision.

Policy Support Within a Target Group: The Case of School Desegregation

This study empirically tests three theoretical approaches to explaining specific support for a policy output among members of its target group. The utilitarian model posits support as a function of objective costs and benefits to the individual stemming directly from the policy. The attitudinal model relates specific support to diffuse predispositions rooted in socialization. The perceptual model holds that specific support derives from beliefs about the character of the political decision process by which the policy was formulated. Tests of these three approaches are based on survey data on specific support for school district desegregation plans among a large sample of black and white parents of public school children in Florida. In both subsamples, the utilitarian approach explained very little of the variance in support, but the attitudinal and perceptual models were corroborated. Implications of these findings are drawn for desegregation policy making and for public policy theory.

Political Science Journals in Comparative Perspective: Evaluating Scholarly Journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Inthisarticlewereporttheresultsfromanewsurveyofpoliticalscientistsregard-ingtheirevaluationsofjournalsinthepoliticalsciencediscipline.UnlikepreviousresearchthathasfocusedondatafromtheUnitedStates,weconductedanInternetsurveyofpolit-icalscientistsintheUnitedStates,Canada,andtheUnitedKingdom.Wepresentdataonjournalevaluations,journalfamiliarity,andjournalimpact,bothforourentiresample( N =1,695)andseparatelyforrespondentsfromeachofthethreecountries.Wedocumenttheoverallhierarchyofscholarlyjournalsamongpoliticalscientists,thoughwefindimpor-tantsimilaritiesanddifferencesinhowpoliticalscientistsfromthesethreecountrieseval-uatethescholarlyjournalsinthediscipline.Ourresultssuggestthatthereisastrongbasisforcross-nationalintegrationinscholarlyjournalcommunication,thoughmethodologi-caldifferencesamongthethreecountriesmaybeanimpediment. P oliticalscientistscommunicatethroughawidevari-etyofscholarlymedia,includingbooks,journalarti-cles, convention papers, and electronic papers.Amongthese,booksandjournalarticlesholdapre-eminentplaceinscholarlycommunicationnetworks,butitisalsothecasethatnotallbookpublishersandscholarlyjournals are created equal. Rather, there is a well-documentedhierarchy among both book publishers (Goodson, Dillman,andHira1999)andscholarlyjournals(GilesandWright1975;Giles, Mizell, and Patterson 1989; Garand 1990, 2005; Garand

Time constraints and the opportunity costs of oversight

In a principal–agent relationship, how should principals budget time for oversight when oversight activity is not instantaneous? We develop a formal model of resource allocation by a principal monitoring multiple agents, where the principal faces a dynamic budgeting problem. Our model reveals a tension between the value of holding resources in reserve to maintain the threat of an audit and the direct policy gains of monitoring activity. We show that as the frequency of principal–agent conflict increases, there are some conditions under which the most effective strategy for a principal is to allocate less and less of their total time to monitoring. The model has important implications for the empirical analysis of a monitoring setting where a principal oversees multiple agents.

Authors' Response to Reviews

with A. Blais, J. C. Garand, and M. Giles, ‘Authors’ Response to Reviews’, Political Studies Review 7, 2009, 88-92