Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: As 33rd President of the United States, Harry Truman sought to extend the reach of Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal Programs with his own domestic priorities, which he labed the Fair Deal. However, challenges
of being a succession president, the period in which he served as chief executive, and the nature
of the party system combined to block implementation of his objectives. President Truman's answer was
extensive application of the veto power. This study examines all facets of Truman's veto use, including
his approach to Congress; veto strategy; employment of regular public bill vetoes, private bill vetoes,
and pocket vetoes of public bills; and legislative reaction to his vetoes. The study taps original documents
from the Truman Presidential Library and quantitative methods to examine the topic. The findings
clearly substantiate the importance of the veto to President Truman's legislative success.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The conflict between the Georgian government and the breakaway region of Abkhazia has been frozen since 1994, when a ceasefire agreement was signed and Abkhazia achieved de facto (although internationally unrecognized) independence. While ceasefire violations are rare and a return to violent conflict seems unlikely, the economic costs of the ensuing stalemate have been high. The Pareto inefficiency of the stalemate suggests a bargaining range in which a negotiated settlement could make both sides better off, but neither side can credibly commit to compensate the other for concession on the critical issue of status. In the absence of a credible and neutral third party guarantor, the most plausible negotiated settlement to the conflict is one in which one side is willing to concede the issue of status unilaterally.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Through a combination of legislative history and roll call analysis, the paper explores how the southern wing of the Democratic party, the pivotal voter in the quasi-three party system during the New Deal/Fair Deal period, exercised a decisive role in shaping the institutional conditions--both favorable and unfavorable--under which the labor movement developed. When southern representatives approved policies in tandem with their nonsouthern Democratic colleagues, these became law, though
crucially bearing two concessions to the South: (1) the exclusion of persons employed in agricultural and domestic labor, the sectors in which African-American workers were most densely concentrated in the South, and (2) with limitations placed on the building of a national administrative apparatus to implement and enforce laws regulating national labor markets. When southerners dissented from labor policy favorable to union and worker rights, they exercised a veto on the modal Democratic party position. During the 1930s and 1940s, the South shifted from supporting to opposing the Democratic party's relatively pro-labor stance. We trace this trajectory, placing causal weight on the way tight labor markets during the Second World War facilitated the penetration of unions, some of which were racially integrated, within the South.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Few public decisions stir more controversy than siting nuclear power plants and other “local public bads.” How democratic governments overcome citizen opposition reveals the flexibility demonstrated by states under pressure along with the evolutionary nature of democracy in industrialized nations. Employing a historical-institutional approach to facility siting in Japan, this paper finds that bureaucracies with clearly defined goals facing sustained public opposition are more likely to engage in adaptive, flexible responses. Under these conditions, agencies depart from the use of “core” tools such as policing and coercion which have more guaranteed outcomes but short term impacts and move toward “peripheral” ones which seek to alter citizen preferences about these facilities. States innovate in confrontation with social movements and do not require large crises or shocks to initiate radical policy change. Furthermore, states are not swayed by public opinion to the degree imagined by democratic theorists, but often play a significant role in shaping it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper I confront a burgeoning conventional wisdom among foreign policy scholars which holds that the US should tend to succeed in efforts to engage autocratic rogue states, such as North Korea, Iran, and Syria. Rather, I argue that domestic political pressures in the US and domestic political opportunities in the autocratic taget state will impel US administrations to oversell and overcommit to engagement, and impel the target state to reciprocate US engagement with merely cosmeticor tactical behavioral concessions. I proceed to test this theory in the "hard case" of the US engagement of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Owing to the highly asymmetric bilateral balances of power and interests that grossly favored the US during this engagement attempt, domestic political pressures mitigated the Reagan Administration's inclination to conditionally engage the embattled Baathist regime in Baghdad so as to reform troublesome Iraqi behavior in such issue-areas as Iraq's continued support for terrorism.