Electoral Messages from the District: Explaining Presidential Support in the U.S. House of Representatives

Legislators are highly sensitive to those parts of their reelection constituencies whose support is least solid. Therefore, out-party members of Congress should be more supportive of the opposing party's president when that president enjoys greater electoral support among the legislators' reelection constituencies. This hypothesis is tested in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1980s and 1990s. The hypothesis is supported, even with controls for the ideology of the member and the political orientation of the district. The findings suggest legislators have a sophisticated view of their districts and perceive electoral messages from the voting patterns of their constituents. The results also imply that presidential success is conditioned by the forces that operate in the congressional election context.     

Plant Cultivation on the Northwest Coast: A Reconsideration

Conventional wisdom suggests that the peoples of the Northwest Coast did not cultivate plants prior to European contact. Considerable evidence suggests the contrary, however, particularly the well-documented practice of estuarine root gardening among the Kwakwaka'wakw and other indigenous peoples of the region. These gardens were maintained through transplanting, weeding, selective harvesting, soil modifications, and the production of mounds or low terrace-like structures within individually demarcated root plots. The scholarly oversight of these practices can be attributed to a number of biases rooted in the colonial and academic agendas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn, scholarly legitimation of the region's “nonagricultural” label has served to undermine indigenous land claims on estuarine sites into the present day.     

Car park charging in the Cairngorms National Park

Charges for parking in the countryside pose a particular dilemma in Scotland as they are seen by many outdoor groups as a backdoor approach to restricting the public's newly acquired right of responsible access to the countryside. The issue is particularly sensitive in the case of the Cairngorms National Park (CNP) where charging has spread to a number of key car parks across the area. Based on the results of a survey of over 300 visitors this paper investigates visitors’ attitudes and perceptions towards car park charging in the CNP, and explores the conditions under which they would find charging legitimate; in particular, the notion of hypothecation (i.e. the practice of declaring where and how monies contributed will be spent). We find that the vast majority of visitors surveyed are supportive of charging but that support is conditional on: the nature of the charging system, the type of location in question, and the landowners’ commitment to hypothecating user fees for reinvestment in visitor facilities and preservation of the environment. We conclude by proposing a CNP‐wide charging policy, fundamentally based on the principle of hypothecation.     

Dr John H. Kenneth

A technique for the detailed assessment of terrain capability is described. The method is used to evaluate the terrain capability of 81 sample farms in North East Scotland. The relevance of the technique is assessed by an analysis to determine the influence of terrain capability on type of farming. Results are also presented to indicate that farmers’ perception of their land type may be different to its actual capability. The need for a flexible approach to terrain capability evaluation is stressed.     

Production Skill and Paleoindian Workgroup Organization in the Medicine Creek Drainage,Southwestern Nebraska

Extremely skillful stoneworking is widely cited as an important characteristic of the Paleoindian period in North America. This paper considers differences in finished and unfinished projectile points and bifaces from two Paleoindian sites in the Medicine Creek drainage of southwestern Nebraska with this in mind, arguing that these differences reflect significant differences in the overall level of skill of the stoneworkers who used these sites. Recognizing variability in Paleoindian flintknapping skill has implications for the organization of landuse in the Medicine Creek region and for our understanding of the archaeology of the Paleoindian period in general.