Changes in State Party Organization 1960–1980: A Preliminary Report and Request for Data

1980 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 428-432
Author(s):  
Cornelius P. Cotter ◽  
John F. Bibby ◽  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Robert J. Huckshorn

We are engaged in a study of the current and past condition of party organizations in the United States. The research examines parties within an institutional framework and seeks to measure the strength of party organizations at the national, state, and local levels. But in order to compare parties over time it is necessary to have longitudinal data. The purpose of this note is to ask interested researchers to share with us documented data on state party central committee staff and annual operating budgets or expenditures for the period 1960–1978. We would also appreciate suggestions for sources of such data for any of the state parties.Table 1 presents the state party central committee budget and staff data collected to date. The 21-year period 1960–1980 yields 2,100 possible data points for the 100 state party organizations. We have collected budget data for 964 (45.9 percent) and staff data for 1,000 (47.6 percent) of the data points. These data have come from a variety of sources:1. interviews with state party officials in 27 sample states (states selected for analysis in the cross-sectional portion of our research;2. questionnaires sent to 556 former state party chairmen;3. surveys by Roland H. Ebel, Cornelius P. Cotter, and Bernard C. Hennessy;4. data collected and generously made available by William J. Crotty;5. Jerome M. Mileur's 1977 survey of state party central committees;6. Robert J. Huckshorn's collection of state party data;7. surveys conducted by the Democratic National Committee in 1962, the Republican National Committee in 1968–69, and by the president of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen in 1974.

Commonwealth ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie Sweet-Cushman ◽  
Ashley Harden

For many families across Pennsylvania, child care is an ever-present concern. Since the 1970s, when Richard Nixon vetoed a national childcare program, child care has received little time in the policy spotlight. Instead, funding for child care in the United States now comes from a mixture of federal, state, and local programs that do not help all families. This article explores childcare options available to families in the state of Pennsylvania and highlights gaps in the current system. Specifically, we examine the state of child care available to families in the Commonwealth in terms of quality, accessibility, flexibility, and affordability. We also incorporate survey data from a nonrepresentative sample of registered Pennsylvania voters conducted by the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. As these results support the need for improvements in the current childcare system, we discuss recommendations for the future.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas D Shrubsole

The revitalization and renewal of traditional indigenous spiritual practices have produced new forms of indigenous religiosity rooted in experience, contact and combination. This paper examines the contemporary Sun Dance, a traditional healing ritual that seeks to address pain and sickness in indigenous communities through religious practice. For some Sun Dancers in both the United States and Canada who seek freedom for indigenous peoples through radical political activism, the Sun Dance has provided courage, validity and deeper meaning in their endeavours. However, when a highly politicized form of the ritual emerged in the non-traditional region of the British Columbia interior at Gustafsen Lake, it led the media, the state, and local elected First Nations leadership to dismiss the ritual as fraudulent. As demonstrated below, a failure to protect sacred sites and ceremonies and to understand the embodied spiritualities that accompany them can lead to violence between religious communities and the state.


2019 ◽  
pp. 458-466
Author(s):  
Yuri N. Timkin ◽  

The article draws on archival materials of the State Archive of the Kirov Region and those of the State Archive of Social and Political History of the Kirov Region to examine the development of uezd organizations of the ARCP (B) in the Vyatka gubernia in late 1918 and the first half of 1919. In late 1918 the Vyatka gubernia became the Civil War battleground. When Perm was taken, the White Guard began to threaten Vyatka. Meanwhile, the political situation in the gubernia was tense; peasants, townspeople, and workers had their grievances against the Bolshevik policies. The existing uezd organizations of the ARCP (B) were unprepared to work in the immediate battle area. Fearing for the fate of the Eastern front, the Central Committee of the party sent a commission to Vyatka headed by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. It was to carry out a wide range of measures to reorganize party and Soviet work. The power was taken by the Military Revolutionary Committee. The novelty of the study is in the fact that archival materials are used to assess the circumstances of the ARCP (B) organizations. These circumstances can be defined as those of a permanent crisis; the party organizations were ill-adapted to the extraordinary conditions of the Civil War. The narrowing of the party’s social base caused, first of all, by food policies forced the gubernia committee to cleanse party organizations and staff them up with well trusted personnel. The author has introduced into scientific use some previously unknown facts. The analysis of archival material allows to conclude that party work lapsed because party organizations seemed ineffective in the days of the anti-Soviet uprisings of summer and autumn of 1918 and while the Civil War raged. Conflicts, squabbles, intra-party struggles became an everyday occurrence. Party organizations constantly faced infiltration of persons with opposing views who sought to avoid mobilization or improve their financial situation.


Subject Reforms to the structure of the State Council and Communist Party. Significance President Xi Jinping has completed the restructuring of the State Council and Communist Party Central Committee launched earlier this year. These changes retrench long-standing Party rules and rigid structures that have constrained Xi's power. Impacts The changes will centralise power in the hands of Xi and his nominees. Some changes will streamline policymaking and delivery, especially in areas such as foreign aid, financial oversight and market regulation. The changes may marginalise Premier Li Keqiang, a proponent of fiscal prudence and structural economic reform.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-373
Author(s):  
David Popp

AbstractInnovation is an important part of energy policy, and encouraging clean energy innovation is often an explicit goal of policy makers. For local governments, promoting clean energy innovation is seen not only as a pathway to a cleaner economy but also as a tool for promoting the local economy. But is such optimism warranted? There is a substantial literature examining the relationships between innovation and environmental policy, but few studies focus explicitly on innovation at the state and local level. In this paper, I provide key lessons from research on clean energy innovation, focusing on lessons relevant for state and local governments. I then summarize the results of a recent working paper by Fu et al. (2018) that studied wind energy innovation across individual states in the United States. While state-level policies can promote clean energy innovation, it is overall market size that matters most. Thus, innovation need not occur in those states most actively promoting clean energy. I conclude with lessons for state and local governments drawn from both this work and the broader literature on energy innovation.


2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Hansson ◽  
Paul Mihailidis ◽  
Carl Holmberg

This study aims to comparatively explore the role of the state (federal policy) in distance-education initiatives in the higher education communities of Sweden and the United States. In a globalized context, education institutes now have the capabilities to provide education and educational resources more efficiently and to a wide-ranging and diverse audience. Within the education sector and distance education, the role of the state and federal policy becomes increasingly important, in terms of how distance-education platforms are developed and implemented in institutions of higher education. The first section of this article provides an overview of the United States and Sweden's current higher education and distance-education landscapes, focusing on the role of the state and federal policy with respect to the funding and overall aims of distance education. The development of distance education in Sweden is highly related to political goals and policies, the top down/domestic/‘inside’ approach. The governing body dictates the funding and policy for distance education, and implementation is left to the university body. In the United States, the landscape differs in that no one federal institution provides direct funding or unified guidelines for developing distance education, but universities are left to their own devices and capabilities for implementation. In Sweden, high ambitions and goals are set at the national level, but the educational organizations are changing only slowly. The pressures on the education organizations are high because of steadily decreasing funding and fewer and fewer staff in relation to students. In the United States, education functions primarily as a state and local responsibility. In conclusion, the article aims to exploit the differences between the two countries' role of the state (federal policy) in distance-education policy, and present a middle ground which would be most balanced for distance education, entailing some federal supervision with the allowance for a certain level of autonomy in regards to development, implementation, funding and longevity.


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