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.     

Small Parties and the Senate Revisited: The Consequences of the Enlargement of the Senate in 1984

An intriguing feature of electoral systems is that apparently insignificant modifications of their constituent rules can have important consequences. One such potentially important change, following the increase in the size of the Senate in 1984, was the shift from five to six places for each state to be filled at each half Senate election. Attention has been drawn, most notably by Sharman \[1986. 'The Senate, Small Parties and the Balance of Power.' Politics 21(2): 20-3], to the capacity of this change to reduce the representation of small parties, with adverse consequences for the role of the Senate in national government. A decline in Labor's share of the vote and growth in support for minor parties are identified as the primary reasons why the predicted outcomes have not eventuated. The paper speculates about the possible future relevance of Sharman's argument.     

Gender and Patterns of Roll Call Voting in the U.S. Senate

Previous studies of gender and representation at the state legislative level and in the U.S. House of Representatives have shown that women tend to be more liberal than their male colleagues and are more likely to support women's issues. Because of the limited presence of women in the body over the years, there is scant empirical evidence to confirm whether this pattern is present in the U.S. Senate. Sound theoretical basis indicates that the institutional rules of the Senate, the Senate's individualistic culture, the Senate's six-year election timetable, and the national profile of U.S. senators may create conditions that allow gender differences in roll call voting to be more easily detected than is possible in more rigidly structured institutions such as the U.S. House. This study employs a longitudinal design that pools roll call voting data from the 103rd Congress through the 110th Congress to determine whether female senators compile substantively different policy records than their male colleagues. The results indicate that gender does systematically influence roll call voting patterns in the Senate. However, it is largely a function of female Republicans voting in a less conservative fashion than male Republicans on the basic left-right policy space and on a smaller set of issues of importance to women.     

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.     

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.     

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。     

The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record

U.S. Department of State . Foreign Relations of the United States , 1952 – 1954 : Guatemala . Washington, DC : U.S. Government Printing Office , 2003 . 461 pp. $ (hardcover).     

Institutional and Policy Responses to Uncertainty in Environmental Policy: A Comparison of Dutch and U.S. Styles

Uncertainties regarding problem definition and policy response are an endemic pan of environmental decisionmaking. Some standard responses to uncertainty in decisionmaking are analyzed and then used to suggest the importance of learning-oriented policy processes in open, flexible, and adaptive institutional environments. The institutional and policy responses to both types of uncertainties are explored in two different institutional settings: the consensus-oriented setting of the Netherlands and the more adversarial and pluralistic context of the United States. The examination displays tensions accompanying learning-oriented environmental policymaking and the complex impact of institutional environments. Conclusions sketch implications for how to accommodate learning-oriented environmental policy processes.