The closely contested presidential election of 2000, which many analysts felt was decided by voters for the Green Party, cast a spotlight on a structural contradiction of American politics. Critics charged that Green Party voters inadvertently contributed to the election of a conservative Republican president because they chose to "vote their conscience" rather than "choose between two evils." But why this choice of two? Is the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans an immutable and indispensable aspect of our democracy? Lisa Disch maintains that it is not. There is no constitutional...

Does the public alter American foreign policy choices, or does the government change public opinion to supports its policies? In this detailed study, Douglas Foyle demonstrates that the differing influence of public opinion is mediated in large part through each president's beliefs about the value and significance of public opinion.Using archival collections and public sources, Foyle examines the beliefs of all the post-World War II presidents in addition to the foreign policy decisions of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton. He finds that...

It is often noted that the public is frustrated with the news media. But what do American voters really think about how the media present political information? While studies have examined how the news shapes opinions as well as what people respond to and remember, this is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of how voters use and evaluate the news media in political elections and the impact these trends have on their use of the news.

Kenneth Dautrich and Thomas H. Hartley performed a four-wave national panel survey of voters during the 1996 presidential campaign. They found...

Why has child care legislation developed along its present course? How did the political players influence lawmakers? What do the politics of child care legislation over the past thirty years indicate for the future? Based on more than one hundred interviews with legislators and executive branch officials, archival research, and secondary sources, this book looks at the politics behind child care legislation, rather than analyzing child care as a work and family issue.

Identifying key junctures at which major child care bills were introduced and debated (1971, 1990, and 1996), Sally Cohen...

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, only three Democrats have captured the White House--all of them natives of southern states. The ascendancy and reelection of Bill Clinton to the presidency is a prime example of this phenomenon, and although books have been published on the "native son" psychological variable in electoral contests, no work to date has investigated this aspect of Clinton's political career.

Covering all of Clinton's twenty-one elections to state and national offices, Hanes Walton Jr. explores one of the political success stories of our century, showing...

From "Don't ask, don't tell" to the Defense of Marriage Act, from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to the continued battle against AIDS, gays and lesbians have been in the spotlight during the Clinton administration. They now form a political interest group as well as a social community, and political scientists, legal scholars, and the media have started speculating on the impact of this newfound prominence.

Gays and Lesbians in the Democratic Process puts theory to the test by compiling the current research of political scientists working in an empirical tradition. The...

Individual donors play a critical role in financing congressional elections, accounting for more than half of all money raised in House campaigns. But significant donors (defined here as those contributing more than $200) are the least understood participants in the system. Defenders assert that contributing money to campaigns is part of a broader pattern of civic involvement and is free speech that gives a voice to various interests. Detractors argue that these contributions are undemocratic, enabling wealthy citizens to overwhelm the voices of the many and to promote narrow business and...

Few would argue that presidential policies and performance would have been the same whether John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon became president in 1960, or if Jimmy Carter instead of Ronald Reagan had won the White House in 1980. Indeed, in recent elections, the character, prior policy experience, or personalities of candidates have played an increasing role in our assessments of their "fit" for the Oval Office. Further, these same characteristics are often used to explain an administration's success or failure in policy making. Obviously, who the president is--and what he is like--matters....

Intervention is as American as apple pie, writes Robert Jervis in the introduction to this book. Illustrating this proposition, twelve authorities draw a general portrait of American military intervention since the end of the cold war by examining specific interventions: Bosnia, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, the Gulf War, and South Korea. In the process, this book focuses on the great complexity involved when deciding to enter a conflict; the almost universal circumvention of congressional authority; the ineffectualness of "pinprick" air strikes; and the essentially ad hoc...

How did the Christian Right come to predominate in the Republican Party? Why, on the other hand, do secular and religiously liberal beliefs largely prevail in the Democratic Party? Our understanding of the rift between the Democratic and Republican parties--a rift in many ways fueled by religious beliefs--requires an analysis of the entire spectrum of religious and nonreligious players in the American political process and how their influence has evolved over a long period of time.

Employing a sizeable collection of data on party members, activists, and elites, Geoffrey Layman examines...