American Politics Research

This article examines state efforts to regulate alcohol consumption and the effectiveness of that regulation on policy outcomes. The politics of alcohol is examined as a function of the political demands of the alcohol production industry, the alcohol consumption industry, reformist/ religious groups, and other state political forces. Efforts to regulate alcohol consumption are predicted well by this model. Efforts to explain drunk driving law changes are not. Restrictions on alcohol sales have a direct impact on alcohol consumption and an indirect impact on heavy drinking. Efforts to limit drunk dnving, with one exception, have no impact on the relative level of drunk driving. The lack of policy impact is attributed to the politics of policy adoption.

Scholars have devoted substantial effort to studying the conditions under which political party control affects public policy. One among several advantages for assessing party-policy impacts at the subnational level in the American federal system is the existence of a well-known and easily quantifiable decision by the 50 state governments on an important redistributive policy change, the amount of aid each state "guarantees" its "families with dependent children." Earlier efforts at establishing the effects of party on redistributive policy in the American states have been mixed. The authors suggest that the conditions for party impact can best be represented as the interaction of party, liberal/conservative party ideology, and the closeness or competitiveness of the parties. Given existing theoretical arguments in the literature, the authors model these interactions as characterizing either the party in control or the party system as a whole. The authors test for which of the models is superior in predicting changes in welfare policies and find, on balance, the systemic model is superior to the control model.

Though individual-level attributes typically dominate models of political participation, many studies have shown that the social context also influences individuals' likelihood of participation. This article considers two questions concerning the impact of the social context on participation. First, it examines whether specific features of individuals' discussion networks (size, politicization, and homogeneity) influence their likelihood of participation. Second, it considers whether social interaction influences only participation that is socially based, as suggested by studies of the effects of aggregate contextual characteristics on participation. The analysis uses data from the 1976 American National Election Study, which is merged with 1970 census data. Social interaction affects participation in both individually based and socially based participation, although not always in the expected direction. Aggregate contextual measures are then used to replicate previous studies that established the distinction between individually based and socially based participation. That similar results are not obtained suggests that this distinction is not valid and that the social context is likely to influence all types of participation.

The current unidimensional conceptualization of party identification contains many ambiguities. Most troubling, however, has been the debate over the dimensionality of this important concept. This article further examines the defects of the unidimensional conceptualization of party identification using the National Election Studies party thermometers. The results repeatedly demonstrate that the current conceptualization inadequately expresses individual affect toward the political parties and political independence. An alternative conceptualization is discussed that would eliminate the anomalies of the unidimensional concept.

Although a number of studies have reported gender differences on attitudes toward the use of force in foreign policy, several recent studies have reported that gender is a weak and non- significant predictor of foreign policy attitudes. The authors find that gender differences are significant even after a variety of demographic controls and that gender is among the most important demographic predictors of foreign policy attitudes. Gender differences have widened in scope over time and now include both foreign policy goals and tools. These differences are largest among the youngest cohorts. The determinants of women's and men's foreign policy attitudes, however, are essentially the same.

Although President Carter spoke forcefully about the importance of human rights in his foreign policy, President Reagan disavowed such a claim. A number of scholars have gone beyond the rhetoric and estimated the relationship between foreign aid allocations and human rights in the two administrations; few have found significant differences. This research differs from past work by using data from all but two of the recipient countries of U.S. aid and by employing an incremental model of decision making to explain the pattern of aid allocations. Contrary to the author's expectations, the author concludes that a concern for human rights was more prevalent in the foreign aid allocations of the Reagan administration than in the aid allocations of the Carter administration.

One of the objectives of the Refugee Act of 1980 was to eliminate a bias that existed in U.S. refugee admissions in favorof aliens from hostile countries of origin (countries with communist, socialist, and leftist forms of government). This analysis finds that the hostile country bias in refugee admissions was perpetuated (and even, in the case of the State Department, intensified) through policy implementation by agencies within the immigration bureaucracy since passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. Specifically, the INS and the State Department, in their post-1980 decision making on asylum and refugee applications, continue to favor aliens from hostile countries.