Suzanne L. Parker

Increasing Distrust of the USA in South Korea

The purpose of this article is two-pronged. First, it seeks to identify the factors that seem to lower trust in the USA among South Koreans. These factors weaken the traditionally solid Korea-USA alliance and have led a US expert to call South Korea a “runaway ally.” Second, this article empirically tests various explanations of trust using a nationwide survey of South Koreans conducted in 2005. This article employs multiple regression analysis to test the hypothesized relationships. The results indicate that the following factors have a statistically significant impact on trust in the USA: ideological anti-Americanism, short- and long-term factors related to the activities of Americans or the USA, national self-esteem, and American pop culture.

Factions in Committees: The U.S. House of Representatives*

This study undertakes a major reanalysis of the decision-making processes in eight committees of the U.S. House of Representatives-Agriculture, Education and Labor, Interior and Insular Affairs, International Relations, Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Post Office and Civil Service, Public Works and Ways and Means. While past studies have relied mainly on interviews, this study uses a data base composed of recorded committee roll-call votes. The analysis consists of a Q-component analysis to determine voting blocs or factions; an R-component analysis to discover issue dimensions; and step-wise regression and correlation utilizing demographic, political and electoral characteristics to define the nature of the voting blocs. The results are then compared with previous analyses of the same eight committees to determine what changes, if any, have occurred since the committees were last analyzed. The findings suggest that partisanship and ideology have become stronger influences on committee decision making than previously noted.

The Labor Market for Politicians Why Ex-Legislators Gravitate to Lobbying

The so-called revolving door between employment in government and industry is especially relevant to the U.S. Congress because ex-legislators are notorious for taking jobs as lobbyists. There are two prominent explanations for why they do so: Lobbying either matches the talents of former legislators due to their specialized congressional training or it represents customary ex-post payments for ex-ante legislative assistance to special interests. This article explores the former dynamic, focusing on how specialized training impacts occupational outcomes of legislators and finds strong evidence to support the notion that former legislators become lobbyists due to unique human capital. This finding somewhat qualifies the notion that possible ex-post payments are a main driver for the postelective employment choices of ex-legislators.

The Economic Organization of Legislatures and How It Affects Congressional Voting

Congress confronts two major organizational problems that affect the behavior of legislators, party leaders, and groups doing business with congressional committees: The costly nature of monitoring and the absence of explicit mechanisms for upholding agreements. The problem of monitoring implies that party leaders will have a difficult time influencing decisions made in decision-making arenas where the actions of legislators are less visible, as in congressional committees. While legislators can evade leadership monitoring of their actions within committees, once an issue leaves a committee, the costs of monitoring decline, and leadership influence increases. The absence of mechanisms for assuring that legislators keep their bargains means that groups will place an emphasis on dealing with reliable legislators — those who can be counted upon to uphold their end of a bargain. Thus, party leaders are more effective in influencing floor voting because of their better ability to monitor legislator behavior; however, obligations to important interest groups will be more immune to leadership influence because of the incentives for committee members to adhere to their bargains.

The Question of Committee Bias Revisited

This study revisits the question of whether committees are biased in their policy outputs—pursuing policies at odds with noncommittee members. We find evidence that committees in the House are biased: Most committees are either more divided than the larger membership in the House, or there is a greater consensus within the committee than among noncommittee members. These patterns extend across all types of committees.

Consistency in policy thinking

This study examines consistency in opinion on a variety of important state and national policy questions. The data come from a two-wave panel study of adult Floridians conducted in 1981 and 1982. Wide variations in consistency of opinion over the 1-year period are found. Salience has an important impact on consistency, with respondents who find an issue salient almost always exhibiting more consistent opinions, but salience cannot explain the variations in consistency across issues. The level of government on which the issue is focused (national or state) has no bearing on consistency. Most important, the particular nature of the issue itself, especially how central it is to the individual and how long it has occupied the political agenda (maturity), affects consistency of opinion. Centrality and maturity both contribute to issue attitude consistency and even can compensate for one another. Both highly central new issues and remote old issues can produce consistent attitudes, but deficiences in centrality seem to override issue maturity. These findings illustrate the value of looking beyond opinion distributions to the meaning of the survey response. With information on consistency and its sources, the public opinion analyst can interpret polling results intelligently, and the study of public opinion can become more objective and scientific.

Rethinking the Meaning and Measurement of Political Trust

300439 1 Eder, Christina, Ingvill C. Mochmann, and Markus Quandt (eds). 2015. Political Trust and Disenchantment with Politics: International Perspectives. Leiden/Boston: Brill. 2 The anes trust questions are: (1) How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right—just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time? (2) Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people? (3) Do you think that people in government waste a lot of money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don’t waste very much of it? (4) Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are a little crooked, not very many are, or do you think hardly any of them are crooked at all? (5) Do you feel that almost all of the people running the government are smart people who usually know what they are doing, or do you think that quite a few of them don’t seem to know what they are doing? chapter 3