Paul Burstein

Changing Public Policy: The Impact of Public Opinion, Antiwar Demonstrations, and War Costs on Senate Voting on Vietnam War Motions'

A new approach to the study of legislative change enables us to deal directly and quantitatively with questions about how long-term changes in public policy come about. The approach is applied to the aggregate change of mind by the U.S. Senate as it moved from support of the Vietnam war to opposition from 1964 to 1973. Substantively, cumulative war costs, public opinion, and antiwar demonstrations all had significant effects on Senate roll call outcomes, but they were so highly intercorrelated that their separate effects could not be disentangled. In addition, demonstrations taking place in the months before a vote had a slight positive impact on the number of dovish votes received by motions. The 1970 invasion of Cambodia seems to have led to a significant turning point in the way the Senate dealt with the war. The general strengths and weaknesses of the new approach are assessed. It opens a new area to statistical inquiry and generates a number of novel questions that should lead to additional research.

Social Structure and Individual Political Participation in Five Countries.

Seven hypotheses constituting the core of a causal model of individual political participation generate a large number of predictions about strengths of relations among sets of variables related to political participation. The model is tested on data from national surveys of Americans, Britons, West Germans, Italians, and Mexicans, and the model predicts the relative magnitudes of coefficients in the system of regression equations with better than 90% accuracy. Variables locating an individual in social networks, such as involvement in organizations and media use, are the best predictors of participation, and are also the most consistent in their effects crossnationally. Socioeconomic status predicts less well, and demographic variables least well; both sets of variables are important largely as they affect location in social networks.

Ending the Vietnam War: Components of Change in Senate Voting on Vietnam War Bills

Very little quantitative academic work has dealt with the politics of American involvement in and withdrawal from Indochina. This article is a preliminary examination of how the U.S. Senate moved from a strong pro-involvement stance to a strong anti-involvement one. The main findings are: (1) the aggregate change in Senate voting came about disproportionately through replacement of supporters of the war by opponents, as opposed to changes of mind by incumbents; (2) nevertheless, dovish bills adopted toward the end of the conflict would have passed even without the support of replacements, because incumbents were converting fairly rapidly; (3) doves were disproportionately Democrats, relatively young, low in seniority, and from the northeast and north central states; (4) elections were important in the Senate change of mind, but often not in the way expected; rather than doves defeating hawks toward the end of the war, hawks tended disproportionately to die or retire and may have been replaced by doves because most candidates running by the end of the war were doves. Theoretical implications and research proposals are discussed.

Prohibiting Employment Discrimination: Ideas and Politics in the Congressional Debate over Equal Employment Opportunity Legislation

Past analyses of the politics of equal employment opportunity (EEO) legislation focus on the circumstances associated with its passage by Congress. This paper, in contrast, considers how Congress came to agree on the content of todays EEO law, how support for EEO legislation increased from the early 1940s to the early 1970s, and why action on EEO subsequently ceased. The data show that although American society changed a great deal during these years, the congressional debate on EEO was organized around ideas proposed in the 1940s. The growth of support for EEO legislation was steady and gradual over the entire period, and congressional action ceased after 1972 because the original agenda had been completed. The implications of the findings for the causal analysis of congressional action are considered.