Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: If, as Benedict Anderson suggests, modern print media shape our collective imagination as a political community, then feminist press organs may be understood as contributing to a--politically potent--"imaginary sisterhood" (Anderson 1983; Werbner 1999). This conference paper examines how the feminist press made reproductive freedom a mobilizing issue for the feminist movement in postwar France. Particularly, it elucidates how its political contestation over "body politics"--the regulation of bodies for social purposes--has become so crucial for modern theories of citizenship rights.
In the French case, women sought recognition of their civil status throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they did not receive full citizenship rights until after World War II. Crucially, for French women, the winning of formal political rights, i.e. full active citizenship, was a precondition for claiming and obtaining equality in civil rights, including the control over one's body (Batiot 1986; Duchen 1986, 1994; McBride Stetson 1987; Vogel 1988; Mossuz-Lavau 1991; Picq 1993). This study examines the political struggle over abortion exerted by the feminist press, which developed during the height of the women's liberation movement (M.L.F.) in the 1970s.
As press organs of a larger social movement, these journals negotiated a social space for women between traditional feminine expectations and the promise of consumer culture. A close reading of these journals reveals women's specific need for information and expression on the controversial issue of reproductive rights, on the one hand, and their contestatory position in the political struggle over abortion on the other. This paper suggests that, like their commercial counterparts, these journals harbor an explicit ideological dimension. As the cornerstone of an autonomous democratic movement, the editors and authors of the feminist reviews created and "imagined sisterhood" as they wanted to represent and to speak for all "women."

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The singular act of a Member of Congress placing a roll call vote in the US House, either yea or nay, occurred over five and a half million times from the 80th to 100th Congress. Using a dataset that links a large variety of exogenous factors to each of those acts of voting, this paper seeks to identify the development of “inter-party partisanship” (how opposed are the Democrats and Republicans to one another?) and “intra-party” partisanship, (how cohesively do members of the same party vote together?).

The first section of this paper examines the scope of roll call voting in the post war US House, detailing the number, distribution, and variety of roll call votes held in that period. Following that, the second section examines methods that can be used to identify inter-party partisanship, including updated uses of Lowell and Rice measures. In addition, party and vote are correlated for each roll call vote to create another measure of inter-party partisanship – one that is explored by Clausen roll call topics.

The paper goes on to examine intra-party partisanship by looking at predictors of partisan defection. Using a variety of methods culminating in a comprehensive Logit model, we are able to parse out many of the causal predictors of defection – roll call characteristics, member characteristics, constituency characteristics, and electoral marginality. We find that while no magic bullet exists that can overwhelmingly account for variance in the probability of a member defecting, several patterns emerge that indicate the large role roll call characteristics and member characteristics have in predicting defection.

Please email me (after 15 October) at danielsinger@comcast.net for full paper

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper, we study members of the Italian parliament who were subject to investigation by the judiciary for suspected malfeasance over the eleven postwar legislatures spanning the years from 1948 to 1994. We find that charges of corruption reduce the probability that a deputy will be reelected by reducing the number of preference votes an incumbent receives. Nonetheless, most deputies are reelected during the postwar era, and there is no difference in reelection rates between those charged with corruption and those not charged.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Although spatial theory posits that political parties adjust their policies in response to rival parties’ policy strategies, there is little comparative research that evaluates this hypothesis. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project data, we analyze the relationship between parties’ policy programmes and the policies of their opponents in twenty-five postwar democracies. We conclude that parties tended to shift their policy positions in the same direction that their opponents had shifted their policies at the previous election; furthermore, parties were particularly responsive to policy shifts by other members of their “ideological families,” i.e. leftist parties responded to other leftist parties while right-wing parties responded to right-wing parties. Our findings have important implications for spatial models of elections, for the dynamics of party systems, and for political representation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Modern architecture was pioneered in the 1920s by architects in Central Europe, but it did not
become prominent in the United States until the 1950s. This late adoption is explained by the
social and spatial transformations of American society. Modern architecture was the ideological
expression of the quest of the professional-managerial class for power, symbolizing the rationality
and technology that this class believed should rule society in the place of capital. This style was
not prominent early in the U.S. because by the 1920s the professional-managerial class had
already become integrated into capitalist corporations and hence needed no independent
ideological expression of its ambitions. The emerging mass market in America forced architects
working for corporations to cater to the demand of working Americans for entertainment in urban
buildings to cover over the rationality and technology of their standardized work. After World
War II, however, the social and spatial arrangements of classes in America changed. The
managerial revolution displaced capitalists and entrepreneurs and gave the professional-
managerial class control of corporations. It thus sought to express its governing rationality in
sober, modernist headquarters. This architectural style was now accepted in urban centers by
working Americans because most had moved to the suburbs, where they used their market power
to demand a landscape of consumer diversion that countered and compensated for the symbols of
technocratic work downtown.