Party Voting in the U.S. Senate, 1877-1990: An Assessment of Long- and Short-Term Effects

Although party voting in the U.S. Senate has been affected by long-term and short-term factors, models in previous research have ignored this distinction. The author employs a relatively new tool, error correction modeling, to measure the long- and short-term effects of internal and external factors on party voting in the U.S. Senate. The results show that party voting for both major parties is a long-term equilibrium relationship with ratification of the 17th Amendment and that external factors are much more important than internal ones for explaining changes in levels of party voting.     

The Vice President in the U.S. Senate: Examining the Consequences of Institutional Design

The constitutional placement of the vice president as the president of the Senate gives procedural control of the Senate to an individual who is not elected by the chamber. We argue that because the vice president frequently acts against the wishes of Senate majorities, senators have been reluctant to allow chamber power to be centralized under their largely unaccountable presiding officer. This fear has had a major influence on Senate development, preventing the Senate from allowing its chair to reduce dilatory action, as the House has done. Accordingly, delay, via the filibuster, has become commonplace in the Senate. Such delay has reduced the Senate's efficiency, but has largely freed it from the potential influence of the executive branch.     

Drinking the Tea: The Tea Party Movement and Legislative Agendas in the U.S. Senate

This article empirically investigates the impact of the Tea Party movement in the U.S. Congress by examining senatorial legislative agendas, including bill and resolution introductions and cosponsorships. Specifically, we test how senators responded to the Tea Party movement by increasing their attention to specific Tea Party issues. Our analysis accounts for state-level and electoral factors, including the level of grassroots Tea Party activity in a senator’s home state and the presence of a Tea Party primary challenger. Our findings indicate that the Tea Party led Republican senators to focus more on economically conservative issues in their legislative agendas, and that this impacted the Republican Conference as a whole. Our study of the Tea Party movement in the Senate highlights how national forces can shape legislative activity in Congress.     

Tempus Fugit,Incumbency Stays: Measuring the Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. Senate

This article evaluates the incumbency advantage in the U.S. Senate. We argue that existing methods utilized to measure this advantage are suboptimal to gauge the concept in the Senate. After testing and highlighting the weaknesses of some of these methods, we present an alternative way to measure the incumbency advantage based on the number of electoral victories or terms spent in office. We test the impact of this new measure on candidates’ reelection prospects and their vote share by analyzing senatorial elections from 1948 to 2008. We find that the share of the vote obtained by incumbents increases linearly with time spend in office.     

Representing Structural Change in U.S. Migration Patterns

This paper focuses on the identification of three sets of relationships exhibited by a time series of age-specific national migration rates and multiregional transition probability matrices: the relationship across time for the same age group, as defined by period (temporal) transformation coefficients or matrices; the relationships across age at a particular moment in time, as defined by age transformation coefficients or matrices; and the relationships across time and age, as defined by cohort transformation coefficients or matrices. Given any two of these relationships one can solve for the third. This feature of age-period-cohort relationships has a practical application in the development of improved methods for representing structural change in migration patterns over time and for indirectly estimating migration patterns using inadequate data.     

The Impact of U.S. Airline Deregulation on Airport Traffic Patterns

This paper surveys changes in the U.S. National Airway System since the 1960s. The most appropriate measures for summarizing air traffic distributions at airports are investigated, with the Gini Index of Concentration being used extensively to analyze U.S. airport traffic patterns over a twenty-four-year period. The properties of the Gini index and other measures are compared and discussed in detail in the context of analyzing air traffic distributions. It is shown how concentration in the traffic patterns at the larger airports was at a high level prior to deregulation, but since 1978, the patterns have gradually become even more concentrated.     

Decision-Making on Roll Call Votes in the House of Representatives

This article explores notions of contextual decision-making in congressional floor voting, based on structured interviews with 80 House Members. The research documents that congressmen make up their minds in different ways on different kinds of votes. Decision-making was found to be variegated; the major distinction is between high and low profile votes. The article also offers an optimistic assessment of the potential for constituency/representative linkages in House voting.     

美国对以色列的政策及美以关系的发展（1948-1958）

以色列是在美国的支持下建立的。战后,美国通过插手巴勒斯坦事务,逐步从英国手中夺取处理该地区事务的主动权。在以色列建国伊始,美国给予这一新生国家巨大的帮助。但在战略上,美国并未将以色列视作特别重点考虑对象。在第二次中东战争结束以后,以色列开始受到特别关注,其在美中东战略中的地位和作用日渐突出。本文利用美国解密的档案材料及国内外学者的有关著述,对以建国初期(1948至1958年)美国对以色列的策略及美以关系的发展进行梳理与分析,希望有助于深刻理解美以特殊战略关系的形成及美以关系发展的现状。     

Inter-Court Dynamics and the Development of Legal Policy: Citation Patterns in the Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Lower federal appellate judges, like other government officials, identify problems, formulate and implement solutions, and subsequently evaluate them for their efficacy. Immediately following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, courts were confronted with cases that raised new policy issues in claims of employment discrimination. With no guidance from the Supreme Court for five years, circuit courts articulated solutions to these issues with written published opinions. By examining citations to precedents in those opinions, we evaluate the degree to which the court's reasoning draws on policies from other circuits. Although stare decisis does not compel appeals court judges to consider decisions from other circuits, 76 percent of the opinions include a reference to an out-of-circuit precedent. Outside citations were not uniform across circuits and cases with increased references to outside courts in circuits were characterized by conflict. Our examination of citation patterns suggests that the development of precedent proceeds on two tracks. On one level, circuit judges' opinions build on precedent from within their court. More broadly, citations reflect on an inter-court dialog to identify conflict and consensus in federal legal policy.     

美国城市旅游

美国城市旅游对我国发展都市旅游有借鉴意义。本介绍了美国在散客旅游方式、旅游交通、城市旅游资源开发、旅游宣传资料以及旅馆业经营方式方面的一些做法。