Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Are political consultants agents of legislative parties? The conditional party government hypothesis proposes that if the members of a legislative party become more homogenous and polarized from the opposition party, they will be more likely to select strong party leaders to pursue collective goals. In this case, which describes the current state of affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives, the leadership of the two parties have a strong incentive to sustain homogenous legislative caucuses. Campaign finance scholars point to the pressure on incumbents with surplus funds to transfer part of their warchests to party committees, as well as party spending in close House races, largely via independent expenditures (IE), as means to bolster legislative party ties. Another means of building party unity may be influence over the market for campaign services that political consultants provide, particularly as many consultants contract with parties for IE. Data from Campaigns & Elections magazine of which consultants worked for parties and/or House incumbents will be used to test if incumbents hiring party-contracted consultants enhance their party unity scores compared to incumbents who did not party-agent consultants.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Electronic filing with the
Federal Election Commission has rendered federal election campaign
funding and spending data more readily available than ever. This paper
makes use of FEC data from U.S. House of Representatives election
campaign expenditure records for the 2002 election cycle, spanning all
major party candidates during the twenty-four months of 2001 and 2002,
and it is particularly concerned with the timing and amount of fees
paid to political consulting firms for services such as polling,
advertising, direct mail, etc. The argument presented here has the
premise that political consultants, like candidates for elected office,
make strategic decisions about which races to enter and about when to
enter them. Consequently, the timing of entry or participation in House
campaigns by consultants should tend to reflect reliable
indicators—incumbency, candidate experience, district partisanship,
etc.—of a candidate’s prospects for success. However, the relative
competitiveness or safeness of a seat (as perceived by political
elites, such as journalists for Congressional Quarterly, which
periodically publishes “risk rankings” of seats) may evolve during the
course of the election cycle. Consultant decisions may also reflect
these dynamic considerations, and as election day nears, there should
be a concentration of campaign expenditures for consultant services in
the handful of assuredly competitive races. Using event count
methodology, this hypothesis will be evaluated along with the competing
hypothesis that reputation-building political consultants may preempt
changes in perceptions of a race’s competitive, in which case the
timing of some candidates’ spending on consultant fees may precede
prognosticators that their race is competitive.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Recent media accounts have chronicled the growing presence of American political consultants in foreign elections. Conservative estimates alone indicate that over fifty different American consultants have advised over one hundred campaigns. These consultants are transforming how campaigns are waged and democracy is practiced around the world. Consequently, this development raises important issues for scholars of international relations, theorists of globalization, and students of democratization. The paper sets forth the contours of a larger project on the subject. Section I briefly discusses modern campaign techniques and how they have evolved in the United States. Section II provides an overview of the concept of diffusion and some of the mechanisms by which diffusion takes place. Section III identifies several critical issues to be tracked in this project on the diffusion of the American style of election campaigning, including the causes of this diffusion process, the importance of American consultants in the Americanization of campaigning, whether, in fact, the practices have diffused and transformed how elections are waged. We conclude by highlighting the topic's importance for understanding emergent properties of the meaning of practice of democracy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper deals with a dilemma for peace and conflict studies created, in part, by a recent call from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for conflict resolution-relevant institutions to form consortia in response to USAID's need to combine its development work worldwide with conflict resolution theory and practice. The dilemma is that:-- some members of academic institutions consider it immoral/unethical to assist -- and to be seen to be assisting -- the Bush administration's policies of pre-emptive war, invasions and occupations of two Muslim countries, undermining of the Geneva Convention, violations of civil liberties in the US and abroad and commission of various other violations of human security. On the other hand other academic researchers consider it immoral/unethical to stand by and do nothing to shape such reprehensible US Government foreign and domestic policies.The paper will analyze the dilemma and positions of the various parties to the debate, and suggest a morally/ethically and pragmatically defensible resolution of the corresponding conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: From the first systematic analysis of women’s voting by Ogburn and Goltra (1919) to Boneparth’s (1977) seminal work on women campaign volunteers, political scientists have tried to better understand women’s political participation, in all of its various forms. This includes studies focusing on political activity from women party activists in state parties (Costantini 1990; van Assendelft and O’Connor 1994; Paddock and Paddock 1997) and as national party workers (Glenney 1982; Burrell 1993; Baer 1993), to women candidates and lawmakers, at both the state (Thomas 1994; Dolan and Ford 1998; Rosenthal 1998; Ford and Dolan 1999) and the federal levels (Carroll 1994; Darcy, Welch and Clark 1994; Witt, Paget and Matthews 1994; Swers 2001).

In this paper, we begin to analyze another increasingly important, yet relatively understudied facet of women’s political participation—female political consultants and their participation in the burgeoning political consulting industry. While women have played promenant parts in each campaign during the last two presidential election cycles, this does not tell us much about the bigger picture of women’s role and participation in professional electioneering. Our goal here is to assess the role women play as advisors to congressional candidates. Specifically, we focus on how widely women participate as advisors in federal elections, and what factors help to determine whether or not women are hired by candidates and campaigns.