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.     

Presidential Leadership of Congressional Civil Rights Voting: The Cases of Eisenhower and Johnson

Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson presented dramatically contrasting styles of leadership in their relationships with Congress. Yet each was successful in securing passage of monumental civil rights legislation in very different political environments. Focusing on the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we show that both Eisenhower and Johnson attracted support from the opposition party's faction at the far end of the ideological spectrum while retaining support from his own party's dominant faction. The analysis suggests that it is not the president's leadership style alone that produces legislative results, but a proper mixture of leadership style and the political environment.     

Methodology, Statistics, and Voting Error: An Exploration of 2000 Presidential Election Data in Two States

In the wake of the voting controversy of Election 2000, along with passage of a congressional measure designed to fix what many believe is an ailing voting system, research into the impact of voting equipment on residual voting error has become a crucial question as the states prepare to replace existing voting equipment through the use of matching federal funds, to adjust existing equipment, or to face yet more lawsuits. Most existent studies into the link between voting equipment and residual voting error have concentrated on voting equipment across the states rather than within the individual states, generating results that are subject to a possible aggregation bias. Using a variety of statistical techniques, data on Election 2000 U.S. presidential and U.S. senatorial races are analyzed in an attempt to determine the impact of voting equipment on the voting error levels intrastate in those races. This study presents analysis of two sets of state data, Wyoming and Pennsylvania, and is used to argue that the infamous punch-card voting equipment may not be a significant contributor to an increase in voter error when analyzing intrastate, contrary to existing research that indicates it is significant when analyzed across multiple states. This research underscores the importance of researchers' ideological perspectives in application of statistical methodology to the American policy arena.     

Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Abstract

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.     

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.     

A Tale of Three Variables: Exploring the Impact of Alternative Measures of Presidential Approval On Congressional Voting

This study explores the impact of three distinct measures of public approval on congressional voting. Specifically, we test for the relative impact of a president's national approval, his partisan approval, and his district- (or state-) level approval on congressional support, measured at the level of individual members of Congress. Though we remain consistent with other arguments that hold presidential approval is likely to act as a background variable rather than a determinant of congressional voting, we maintain that theoretically more meaningful relationships between public opinion and congressional voting can be developed. Specifically, we argue that a more relevant test can be made which includes opinion measured closest to where that opinion is likely to matter to members, namely among electoral copartisans and district-level constituencies. We estimate various models (bivariate and integrated multivariate), and find strong support for our hypotheses that, to the extent members of Congress use public approval as a voting cue, they do in fact pay far more attention to partisan and constituency interests than they do to national opinion.     

Food Markets in the Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea: Actors, Power and Rural Development Geography

Discussions of rural development in the highlands of Papua New Guinea have often centred on coffee, and been couched either in narrowly economic terms or in class analysis terms. Fresh food marketing has received less attention, although it is an important activity for many highland people. An approach which takes into account the subjectivity of actors, and the contests of power which permeate markets, is explored in this paper. The history and present forms of fresh food marketing in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea are then outlined. The author concludes by arguing for a geography of rural development, which is based on close attention to social interaction at the local level, coupled with an awareness of global structures provided by non-universalist political economy.