The Dynamics and Interactions Between the President's and the Public's Civil Rights Agendas: A Study in Presidential Leadership and Representation

Past research views presidents as reactive and minor actors in the civilrights policy process. However, that research has focused solely on the latter stages of the policy process. This report views the president's role from an agendasetting perspective. A content analysis reveals that presidents lead public opinion on civil rights, but that the public has little impact on the president's civil rights agenda. The distinction between discretionary and required agenda items explains this asymmetry between the president and the public in civil rights policymaking. A fuller notion of policymaking that includes all stages of the process, from agendasetting to implementation and evaluation, is required to understand the role of the president in civil rights policymaking and leads us to revise the perception that presidents play reactive and minor roles in civil rights policy.     

A Transformed Triangle: Court, Congress, and Presidency in Civil Rights

The relative permeability of the three elements of a triangle-the Supreme Court, Congress, and the president-to civil rights interest groups has varied over time. For almost two decades after World War II, the Supreme Court was the groups' preferred arena because Congress was resistant and presidents could thus do little or were hesitant to act. For a brief time in the mid-1960s the president and Congress became supportive of civil rights groups' claims while the Court also remained accessible. Starting in the late 1960s executive and legislative support for civil rights moderated, with presidential support declining significantly in the 1980s. When the Supreme Court adopted that latter stance, Congress became the body through which to protect civil rights by reversing the Court's decisions. In this examination of the "transformed triangle" in civil rights policymaking, we look at this change over time and at "flip-flops" in litigation as one administration changes the position espoused by its predecessor, and we also give some attention to the Supreme Court's response to congressional reversal of its rulings.     

The Right Tool for the Job: The Canalization of Presidential Policy Attention by Policy Instrument

This article investigates how presidential policy attention is allocated across policy tools and whether there is a channeling of tool use by policy area. I also examine whether there is evidence of disproportionate information processing within presidential policy attention allocation and whether it is common across presidential policy tools. Presidential messages, hearings on administrations' legislative proposals, amicus briefs, and executive orders are employed to capture presidential policy tools. The allocation of attention via these four instruments is examined from 1957–2007 in the policy areas of defense and foreign affairs, macroeconomics, banking and commerce, civil rights, law and crime, and labor and immigration. I find that there is a canalization of presidential policy attention by instrument, and that the opportunity structure of policy tools shapes attention allocation. Additionally, I find evidence for punctuated equilibrium theory in the allocation of presidential policy attention via these four tools. When presidents do shift their attention to an issue area, they often attack the issue with some coordination of their policy instruments.     

Racial Stratification, Intellectual History, and Presidential Action in the Civil Rights Domain

Using an historical approach, this paper assesses the role of the American presidency in the pursuit of civil rights policy. The basic argument is that the drivingforces in the passage of civil rights policies since Reconstruction have been external pressures on the presidency. Rather than being protagonists in the progression of civil rights, presidents are portrayed as political actors primarily interested in maintaining social order and attracting African-American votes. Rarely have presidents pushed for civil rights progress outside of that context.     

保障公民的文化权益是维护社会公平的重要保证

公民文化权利与公民政治权利、经济权利一样,属于公民的基本权利。保障公民文化权益,不断满足人民群众日益增长的精神文化需求,对全面建设小康社会和构建和谐社会具有重大的意义。文化差距而产生的文化矛盾、公共文化服务资源短缺等是制约当前公民文化权益健康发展的主要因素。因此,我们必须从现阶段经济社会发展水平出发,以实现和保障公民基本文化权益、满足广大人民群众基本文化需求为目标,坚持公共服务普遍均等原则,兼顾城乡之间、地区之间的协调发展,最大限度地满足人民群众日益增长的精神文化需求。     

Disability Policy and the Media: A Stealth Civil Rights Movement Bypasses the Press and Defies Conventional Wisdom

The Americans with Disabilities Act was pushed through Congress with far less attention from the media than has accompanied other major civil rights bills. This was part of a deliberate and unconventional strategy by disability rights lobbyists who believed that media portrayals of disability were so cliched that journalists would impede, not further, the public's understanding of disability rights issues. Despite the success of the strategy, there is a price to pay for having been a 'stealth' civil rights movement: Now that the law is in place, disabled people face a backlash from Americans who neither understand the ADA nor the need for civil rights protection for disabled people.     

Taking perspective of the stories we tell about transgender rights: The narrative policy framework

Our project uses the narrative policy framework (NPF) to explore narrative effects on attitudes about transgender rights. The framework focuses on the stories that are told about public policy. As opposed to conceptualizing communications as informational, NPF suggests that getting lost in the story is primary for attitude change. We also incorporate a perspective taking exercise to examine its effects on individual attitudes. Using an experiment on 1784 American adults, we found that individuals who received the inclusive transgender policy narrative by either watching or reading the narrative held views more supportive of transgender rights, with the effect greater for watching than reading. Those who experienced greater narrative transportation, being more lost in the story, reported more supportive attitudes. We further find that those with traits that lead them to become more imaginatively involved in stories occasionally are more greatly affected by watching policy narratives than those who are less imaginatively involved. However, perspective taking did not influence attitudes and weakened the treatment effects of the narratives. Our findings suggest stories can affect policy attitudes and beliefs, which may be conceptually distinct from traditional framing-based accounts and implies distinctive causal mechanisms that result in attitude change.     

Presidential Speeches and the Stages of the Legislative Process

Presidents go public frequently to increase their success in Congress. Yet scholars know little about when presidents speak within the legislative process or why. If presidential speeches are indeed a source of power for presidents, then presidents are likely to use them throughout the legislative process, not speak only to affect final passage. We argue that presidents speak generally to meet broad electoral and political goals, but target speeches according to their goals at each stage of the legislative process: to frame the debate at the agenda-setting stage, to push bills out of committee, and to finalize support from legislators at the roll call stage. We analyze 116 bills between 1989 and 2004, supplemented by Bush Library archival data and a case study of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. The results illustrate that presidents speak mostly at the agenda-setting and roll call stages and presidential attention at each stage varies by informational cues provided by the larger political environment.     

Science,Technology and Constitutional Rights: An Interdisciplinary Forecast for the US Congress

Abstract

In honor of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution, a Congressional agency undertook an interdisciplinary analysis of the implications of new and emerging science-based technologies for constitutionally protected civil rights and liberties. Four areas of scientific research and development were identified as most likely to give rise to significantly new technological capabilities. Some of these could challenge established assumptions about individual responsibility, civil liberties, and the powers of government: information science, molecular biology, materials science, and social science, particularly as they find applications in communications and publishing, criminal justice, medicine, public health, and bioengineering. Constitutional precedents related to freedom of the press, open scientific communications, the rights of those accused or convicted of crime, due process, equal protection of laws, and individual privacy will have to be re-examined. Science is offering individuals new choices and forcing them to make new decisions, even as it brings into question some assumptions about free will and accountability.     

Passing Nonincremental Policy: Presidential Influence in Congress,Kennedy to Carter

This article represents an important step in understanding early, modern presidents’ strategic use of signing statements by taking a sharp focus on the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In contrast to recent presidents who have used the instrument increasingly to challenge legislative provisions, Eisenhower's use of signing statements was rather complex—from political credit-claiming, explaining the provisions of bills to the American public, and reinforcing his views on the federal-state balance of power—to maintaining bipartisan relations on foreign policy, shaping implementation of congressional bills, and selectively criticizing Congress for overspending. The theoretical framework devotes particular attention to the interplay of contexts—electoral, institutional, and economic—on Eisenhower's use of signing statements by policy area across his two terms.     

Elite Leadership,People of Mexican Origin,and Civil Rights: Dennis Chavez and the Politics of Fair Employment

People of Mexican origin lacked broad-based mobilization for civil rights during the mid-twentieth century and failed to gain attention with national leaders unaware of the unique conditions in the Southwest. In the absence of these factors, elite leadership and issue networks filled the gap. In this article I explore the case of New Mexico. I argue that the elite leadership of New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez helped to shape national debates regarding fair employment and other civil rights legislation. Chavez helped work for the passage of a strong state fair employment law in New Mexico in 1949 and increased awareness of the place of people of Mexican origin in civil rights policy and politics nationally and in New Mexico. Gaining support from African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and labor unions, Chavez helped to include people of Mexican origin in debates regarding civil rights policy. However, a lack of national legislation, policy implementation, and the rise of backlash politics prevented the creation of a strong policy and strong agency.     

Pet Sounds: Subsystems,Regimes, Policy Punctuations,and the Neglect of African American Farmers, 1935–2006

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) has reoriented the study of public policy and American politics in particular. In this study, we documented how a policy punctuation that appears to take hold at the macro level of the polity in the form of a policy regime has difficulty penetrating subsystem politics. We drew on subsystems theory, PET, and the latest work on policy regimes to document the resistance of the agriculture subsystem to efforts to add a civil rights dimension to agriculture policy between 1935 and 2006. We concluded that the issue evolution of agricultural support programs, and their insulation from civil rights policy, is a prime example of how subsystems use negative feedback to resist change.     

Building Alliances or Rallying the Base: Civil Religious Rhetoric and the Modern Presidency

Abstract

Civil religious rhetoric has been utilized throughout American history to legitimize political interests by drawing upon broadly shared beliefs regarding the nation’s identity, meaning, and purpose in the world. Although scholars have traditionally assumed this rhetoric was employed to unify the nation, others emphasize its potential to exacerbate conflict as policy debates morph into battles over the national identity. This research project analyzes presidential speeches from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama (1939–2012) and finds that the type of speech delivered, public approval of the president, and the partisan composition of Congress influence the prevalence of civil religious rhetoric. It concludes that modern presidents have more often relied upon civil religion to rally the partisan base than build alliances with the opposition.     

Public Outreach,Executive Orders,and the Unilateral Presidency

Scholars have traditionally and loosely defined executive orders as presidential directives that instruct bureaucrats about how to implement policy. In contrast, proclamations are thought to be used by presidents to address policy matters regarding the general public. This has been an assumption that scholars have accepted without empirical evidence. We have long known that presidents strategically pursue policy to build support among numerous groups, such as African Americans, religious organizations, women, educators, and labor unions. Presidency scholars also know that executive orders are an expedient tool that an administration utilizes to pursue its policy agenda. As a result, why should we assume that the exclusive target population of executive orders is members of the federal bureaucracy? This is the first study to explore whether and how presidents from 1936 through 2008 use executive orders to target specific populations with policy.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 2. April 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 2 Front Cover: School shootings Student lie‐in at the White House to protest gun laws, 19 February 2018. The demonstration was organized by Teens For Gun Reform, an organization created by students in the Washington, DC area in the wake of the 14 February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Earlier on the day of the shooting, the priest at the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe mused during the Ash Wednesday ritual whether valentine hearts and bouquets of red roses could coexist with ashes on foreheads and reminders of human mortality. Could love and death be partners? As the congregation exited the church, mobiles rang with news of yet another school shooting and the deaths of 14 high school students and three teachers trapped inside an elite high school in suburban Florida. The gunman was a high school reject and white supremacist. It was the 292nd school shooting in America since Sandy Hook, the tiny tot massacre of 2013. Yet America's presidents and political leaders across the political divide remain hostage to the National Rifle Association's mantra: more automatic rifles equals more security, now including in US schools. State laws prevail over executive orders. Currently 14 states in the US arm teachers and 16 states allow local school boards to decide whether to do so. But one thing has changed as the survivors of the school massacres and their young followers have taken the reins. Beginning on 14 March, thousands of students from elementary and high schools have begun to march out of their classrooms. A new and powerful civil rights movement is spreading across the nation. Meanwhile Trump and his education secretary are proposing to target poor, black and Latino students, to undo President Obama's policies that protected male minority students from disproportionately harsh ‘zero tolerance’ school policies. In this issue, Scheper‐Hughes considers school shooting antecedents, beginning with the misfired Clinton campaign against youth violence. Back Cover: ESTHER GOODY (1932–2018) Esther Goody during fieldwork in Ghana, 1957. Esther Goody was a member of one of the most famous husband‐and‐wife teams in anthropology. She devoted her working life to the study of northern Ghana's peoples and to synthesizing social anthropology and social psychology.     

Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–79

In Los Angeles, Hollywood in particular, straight‐themed pornography and gay male nightlife became more visible and, moral reformers believed, of grave public concern between the early 1960s and the early 1970s. As a result, defining the limits of sexual freedom became a problem for urban public officials, who resolved the dilemma by casting heterosexual sex entertainment as disruptive of neighbourhood quality of life, making it a question of property values and crime, and reframing gay nightlife as an issue of privacy and the right of public assembly. The article considers battles over commercial pornography and battles over gay male rights and culture. As the civil rights and black power movements commanded, then lost, the attention of liberals, sexual libertarians and a mobilised gay rights movement forced urban politicians to reconsider the place of sex and sexual identity in public life. A new generation of urban liberals faced a difficult challenge: to respond to their constituents' libertarian views of sex and sexuality while not appearing to endorse civic disorder and economic decline. They had to defend both privacy rights and property rights.     

Beyond Depoliticization? Caste,NGOs and Dalit Land Rights in Maharashtra,India

In India, Dalit mobilization for land rights and the cultivation of gaairan (grazing lands) in the last decade has attracted the attention of international civil society actors who participate in such mobilization through local non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). This article contextualizes the debate on the growth and role of NGOs by presenting the politics of formation and working of a funding‐driven network of NGOs on Dalit rights and livelihoods in India. It cautions against exaggerating the role of international civil society actors in local democratization processes, and also argues that the feared depoliticizing of public interests as a result of INGO involvement is misplaced in the case of Dalit politics.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.     

Is State Gambling Policy “Morality Policy”? Framing Debates Over State Lotteries

The politics of so‐called “morality policies” including same‐sex marriage, abortion, gun control, and gambling have captured the attention of both the public and political scientists in recent years. Many studies have argued that morality policy constitutes a category of public policy that has distinctive characteristics (such as technical simplicity and less amenability to compromise) compared with non‐morality policy. However, in a recent contribution Mucciaroni argues that morality “policy” should instead be viewed primarily as a strategy for framing issues. Drawing on examples from the debate over gay rights, Mucciaroni finds that opponents focus on rational‐instrumental or procedural frames more so than engaging in “morality talk.” In this study, I seek to extend Mucciaroni's analysis to the issue of lottery gambling in the United States. Drawing on data from legislative records in four states, I find that lottery critics mostly avoid private behavior‐based morality arguments. Instead, they criticize government's role in sanctioning lotteries and denounce the negative consequences of gambling. Supporters, meanwhile, emphasize the potential benefits of lottery creation and the importance of allowing the state public a voice on the issue. The results indicate that rational‐instrumental arguments coexist alongside morality talk in state lottery debates, and that private behavior morality frames are on the decline while governmental morality frames are on the rise.