What Moves Macropartisanship? A Response to Green, Palmquist, and Schickler

1998 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 901-912 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Erikson ◽  
Michael B. Mackuen ◽  
James A. Stimson

Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (1998), macropartisanship is largely shaped by presidential approval and consumer sentiment. It is not the case, however, that macropartisanship mirrors the ever-changing levels of current presidential popularity and prosperity. Rather, macropartisanship reflects the cumulation of political and economic news that shapes approval and consumer sentiment. Using ECM technology, we show that, far from being the weak force that Green et al. suggest, the cumulation of innovations in presidential approval and consumer sentiment largely account for the long-term trends in macropartisanship. For forecasting macropartisanship in the near future, it is better to predict from the fundamentals represented by the history of approval and consumer sentiment up to a given moment than from current values of macropartisanship itself.

2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Matthew Gardner Kelly

Background/Context Dealing mostly in aggregate statistics that mask important regional variations, scholars often assume that district property taxation and the resource disparities this approach to school funding creates are deeply rooted in the history of American education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article explores the history of district property taxation and school funding disparities in California during the 19th and 20th centuries. First, the article documents the limited use of district property taxation for school funding in California and several other Western states during the 19th century, showing that the development of school finance was more complicated than standard accounts suggest. Then, the article examines how a coalition of experts, activists, and politicians worked together during the early 20th century to promote district property taxation and institutionalize the idea that the wealth of local communities, rather than the wealth of the entire state, should determine the resources available for public schooling. Research Design This article draws on primary source documents from state and regional archives, including district-level funding data from nine Northern California counties, to complete a historical analysis. Conclusions/Recommendations The history of California's district property tax suggests the need for continued research on long-term trends in school finance and educational inequality. Popular accounts minimizing the historical role of state governments in school funding obscure how public policies, not just market forces shaping property values, create funding inequalities. In turn, these accounts communicate powerful messages about the supposed inevitability of funding disparities and the responsibility of state governments to correct them. Through increased attention to long-term trends in school funding, scholars can help popular commentators and policymakers avoid assumptions that naturalize inequality and narrow the possibilities for future funding reforms.


Author(s):  
Anand Menon ◽  
Luigi Scazzieri

This chapter examines the history of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European integration process. The chapter dissects the long-term trends in public opinion and the more contingent, short-term factors that led to the referendum vote to leave the European Union. The UK was a late joiner and therefore unable to shape the early institutional development of the EEC. British political parties and public opinion were always ambiguous about membership and increasingly Eurosceptic from the early 1990s. Yet the UK had a significant impact on the EU’s development, in the development of the single market programme and eastward enlargement. If Brexit goes through, Britain will nevertheless maintain relations with the EU in all policy areas from agriculture to energy and foreign policy. Europeanization will remain a useful theoretical tool to analyse EU–UK relations even if the UK leaves the Union.


1992 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 298-298
Author(s):  
Geerat J. Vermeij

Individual organisms compete for resources. Among competitive dominants, per-capita energy use has generally increased through time. This increase has had a ripple effect on all other species by increasing the number of competitive and predatory encounters among individuals. Species unable to cope with such biological rigors have become restricted to environments where resource supply is low and where encounters with enemies are few. Among species that hold their own in biologically rigorous habitats, construction materials that are cheap to produce and that enable individuals to grow and respond quickly have generally been favored over those that exact a high cost in energy and time. Extinction interrupts but does not reverse or fundamentally alter these long-term between-clade evolutionary trends. The availability of resources to organisms, as well as the opportunity for evolutionary change, depends on extrinsic events and factors as well as on the competitive abilities of organisms.Those who have raised methodological and theoretical objections against this economic interpretation of the history of life deny the overriding importance of organisms as agents of natural selection, emphasize the random nature of extinction, deny the existence of long-term trends, favor a larger role for mutualistic as opposed to antagonistic interactions, or accord a larger role to species-level attributes in evolution that are not reducible to the properties of individual organisms. These arguments are either unpersuasive or incorrect. The long-term economics of life may have important lessons for our own use of resources.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 422-431
Author(s):  
Martin Conway

The concept of fragility provides an alternative means of approaching the history of democracy, which has often been seen as the ineluctable consequence of Europe’s social and political modernisation. This is especially so in Scandinavia, as well as in Finland, where the emergence of a particular Nordic model of democracy from the early decades of the twentieth century onwards has often been explained with reference to embedded traditions of local self-government and long-term trends towards social egalitarianism. In contrast, this article emphasises the tensions present within the practices and understandings of democracy in the principal states of Scandinavia during the twentieth century. In doing so, it provides an introduction to the articles that compose this Special Issue, as well as contributing to the wider literature on the fragility of present-day structures of democracy.


Author(s):  
John Parr

This paper traces the history of local government in England (as opposed to the United Kingdom) since the early nineteenth century, and explores five long-term trends in its evolution. These are path dependence; the occurrence of major structural change; the phenomenon of policy reversal; the treatment of urban areas; and resistance to regional government. The author concludes that throughout the period under study, policy towards local government has exhibited a ‘pendulum effect’, with two opposing emphases operating in a sequential, rather than a simultaneous manner.


10 Be is produced in a similar way as 14 C by the interaction of cosmic radiation with the nuclei in the atmosphere. Assuming that the 10 Be and 14 C variation are proportional and considering the different behaviour in the Earth system, the 10 Be concentrations in ice cores can be compared with the 14 C variations in tree rings. A high correlation is found for the short-term variations ( 14 C-Suess-wiggles). They reflect with a high probability production rate variations. More problematic is the interpretation of the long-term trends of 14 C and 10 Be. Several explanations are discussed. The reconstructed CO 2 concentrations in ice cores indicate a rather constant value (280 ± 10 p.p.m. by volume) during the past few millenia. Measurements on the ice core from Byrd Station, Antarctica, during the period 9000 to 6000 years BP indicate a decrease that might be explained by the extraction of CO 2 from the atmosphere-ocean system to build the terrestrial biomass pool during the climatic optimum.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cooper ◽  
Paulina Lewinska ◽  
Julian Dowdeswell ◽  
Edwin Hancock ◽  
William Smith ◽  
...  

<p>Prior to the satellite era (pre-1970s) knowledge of long-term glacier change is sparse. Although some glacier-wide mass balance datasets are available, few records extend beyond twenty years in length, or indeed, start prior to the 1980s; as such, identifying long-term trends between glacier change and global temperatures is difficult. As a result, extending the record of glacier change will not only help to identify such trends, but may also facilitate more robust understanding of future glacier response under a perturbed and varying climate.</p><p>Since the ‘heroic age of Arctic (and Antarctic) exploration’, many photographs of polar environments have been captured and stored for historic interest. These photographs, depicting images of past glaciers and ice sheet margins, have, as of yet, untapped potential to provide important insights into past glacier extent, and long-term behaviour.</p><p>Using computer-vision methodologies, we present a unique record of georeferenced 3-D elevation models using declassified aerial imagery dating from the 1930s—1980s at quasi-regular time steps. This study focusses upon two sections (ca. 190 km total length) of the southeast margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet (in the vicinity of Kangerlussuaq Glacier), capturing the history of both land- and marine-terminating outlet glaciers, and local glaciers. We examine quantitative information extracted from these reconstructions, allowing us to ‘back extend’ the record of glacial change in this region, by measuring changes in glacial extent, surface profiles and height (elevation), and calculating volume estimates.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 541-543 ◽  

Robert A. Margo of Boston University and NBER reviews “The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700” by Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong. The EconLit abstract of the reviewed work begins: Presents an introduction to the field of anthropomorphic history and surveys the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet, and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. Discusses our changing bodies -- three hundred years of technophysio evolution; investigating the interaction of biological, demographic, and economic variables from fragmentary data; the analysis of long-term trends in nutritional status, mortality, and economic growth; technophysio evolution and human health in England and Wales since 1700; height, health, and mortality in continental Europe, 1700-2100; and the American experience of technophysio evolution. Floud is Provost of Gresham College, London. Fogel is a professor of economics and Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions in the Booth School of Business and Director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago. Harris is Professor of the History of Social Policy at the University of Southampton. Hong is Assistant Professor of Economics at Sogang University. Index.


2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pasi Ihalainen

This paper discusses the methodology of conceptual history, a branch of the study of the history of political thought which focuses on the changing meanings of political concepts over the course of time. It is suggested here that methodological disputes among historians of political thought frequently arise out of differing theories of language and meaning and that historians should be more open-minded to the idea of combining various research strategies in their work. Conceptual history, for instance, can be viewed as the combination of historical versions of semantics and pragmatics. While the study of the macro-level semantic changes in the language of politics can reveal interesting long-term trends and innovative uses of language, a contextual analysis of speech acts is also needed when the rhetorical aspects of conceptual change are traced. This interaction of semantic and pragmatic analysis in conceptual history is illustrated by examples originating from eighteenth-century political preaching.


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