In Retreat from Excellence: The Single Six-Year Presidential Term

Analysis of the effects of the single, six-year term proposal by assessing its probable impact on presidential tenure in the past reveals that it would have reduced the tenure of highly regarded presidents who were relatively successful in dealing with Congress and increased the tenure of presidents with lackluster reputations and limited success in congressional relations. Thus, by inference, the adoption of this widely-touted institutional reform might undermine rather than strengthen presidential leadership in American politics.     

Nationalist Religious Broadcasting: The Case of the 2004 US Presidential Nominating Conventions

Abstract

In televised broadcasts from the 2004 US Presidential nominating conventions, religion played a somewhat surprising role at gatherings of ostensibly secular political parties. Across Democratic and Republican conventions, three streams of religious discourse and practice were evident, in varying emphases and shadings: revivalist Protestantism, civil religion, and a cultural religion of "innocent domination." These three aspects of religious discourse and practice sought to associate "America" with an innocent, pure and persuasive form of transcendent authority. Republicans marshaled assertions of both innocence and domination to the service of their candidate, President George W. Bush, more effectively than Democrats did for their candidate, Senator John W. Kerry, thereby lending Bush a convention "bounce" in polls that Kerry lacked. A close reading of the role of religion in these conventions suggests, in short, that something more complex and pervasive than a theocratic conspiracy by "the religious right" was at work.     

Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project

Most conventional oral history takes a bottom-up approach tothe past, focusing on settings where there is little in theway of a functional written record. This essay discusses thevalue of oral history in the opposite case of the American presidency.The written archive and journalistic record on each presidentis immense. Yet oral history is a valuable resource in thiselite environment, too. There are routine silences in even thebest of presidential papers, which oral history interviews canhelp fill. Moreover, the White House has become a workplacewhere recorded details can be hazardous to one's political health.Accordingly, few presidential aides today keep diaries or notesof key meetings—impoverishing the archive future historianswill use to study the presidency of our times. Oral historythus fortifies a weakening documentary record. This essay exploresthese broad issues and how they are being dealt with in theconduct of the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project.     

Presidential Coequality: The Evolution of a Concept

The assertion that the presidency is coequal in power to the other branches in the American system of government is often heard, has been suggested by all recent presidents, and has even made its way into political science. But tracing the history of the concept demonstrates that this assertion is an invention of quite recent vintage. Those who wrote and favored the Constitution did not make such claims, nor did early presidents. Even Andrew Jackson's famous and, to his generation, shocking assertion of coequality coincident with his censure was not really a claim of equal power between branches. According to our systematic analysis of presidential rhetoric it was Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who initiated and popularized the idea of interbranch coequality. They did so to defend themselves in two episodes of substantial presidential vulnerability: Watergate and the ensuing midterm elections. Subsequent presidents have elevated something that would have seemed wrong and absurd to any founder into a blithe truism. This belief harms governance by creating both artificially high expectations for the president and a presumption of institutional stasis. The “second constitution” based on popular beliefs about interbranch relations continues to evolve, as much a product of happenstance as of rational design.     

Theorizing the Submerged State: The Politics of Private Schools in the United States

In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states and an original database of court challenges between 1912 and 2015, I employ probit regression with sample selection to evaluate the effect of submergence on successful court challenge. I find that more submerged policies are less likely to be successfully challenged than less submerged policies. Submerged policy design enables supporters to avoid legal as well as political challenge.     

The Robustness of Aboriginal Land Tenure Systems: Underlying and Proximate Customary Titles

While Aboriginal 1 1 I do not deal with Torres Strait Islander land relationships in this paper, although the arguments may well apply in that case. I have restricted myself to systems with which I am more familiar
land use patterns may have been fragile in the face of colonisation, and severe limits were consequently placed on Aboriginal people's capacity to physically enact local traditional entitlements on many lands, the basis and key content of traditional title to such lands is not fragile but has generally been maintained with considerable robustness. In this paper I suggest that this robustness arises in a critical sense from the pre-existing and widely continuing dual structure of traditional land tenure, which may be understood as consisting of an underlying title held within the relevant regional jural and cultural system, which underpins proximate entitlements enjoyed by small groups of individuals. There is scope within Australia's Native Title Act (1993) for the recognition of this system of customary law under the western legal concept of native title.     

Shades of Orange: The Electoral Geography of Ukraine's 2004 Presidential Elections

Two American geographers and noted specialists on the electoral geography of post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine describe and analyze the three rounds of Ukraine's pivotal and highly contested presidential elections in late 2004. In an effort to shed light on the underlying demographic and socio-economic correlates of the vote (e.g., age, income, urban/rural residence, language/ethnicity), the authors pay special attention to changes among the rounds, providing background to widespread allegations of electoral fraud in round two (first runoff). Finally, they summarize results of bivariate and multivariate regression analyses that reveal which among the various correlates contribute most to explaining differences in the vote. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O18, R10. 6 figures, 5 tables, 26 references.     

集权政治与专家治市:近代中国市政独立的艰难旅程——1930年代汉口个案剖析

20世纪20年代末30年代初,旨在推动城市现代化的市政改革运动在汉口兴起.作为市政改革的一项重要内容,专家治市在推动近代中国城市政治民主化、法制化和城市管理科学化方面具有积极作用.专家治市的成功与否,既受制于民国整体的政治环境和城市现代化的总体进程,亦与专家治市中的主体--近代知识分子的身份转变和文化转型有很大关系.由于市政体制受制于国民党一党专制的集权体制,加之近代中国没有建立起西方式的公务员体制,而且中国城市早期现代化还处于起步阶段,以及近代知识分子对权力的人格依附,近代中国没有也不可能建立真正的专家治市的良好市政,市政独立也不可能真正实现.