Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Using the 1998 American State Administrator Project (ASAP) survey, we explore whether state agency budget requests are affected more by administrator’s aspirations or by the policy priorities of their political principals. Our analysis indicates that bureaucrats’ budget aspirations increase bureaucrats’ budget requests, thus confirming the underlying assumption behind budget-maximizing bureaucrats. Our findings also suggest, however, that bureaucratic budget power is a bit exaggerated. The policy priorities of political principals exert a strong curbing power over bureaucrats’ budget requests especially when the monitoring capacity of the principals is enhanced by legislative professionalization or macro-budgeting, the executive budget, and lobbyists’ activities. We additionally found that bureaucrats are overly blamed for budget growth. What might have been agency assertiveness is partly attributable to legislative assertiveness and interest group pressures. Bureaucratic budget moderation recently is further explained by the longitudinal decline in bureaucrats’ budget aspirations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is an initial investigation into “condolence sequences.” I start with observations about condolences in ordinary conversation—how they are offered and received. After examining condolences in ordinary conversation, I turn to their use in telephone requests for tissue donation. These are calls from a medical center to families of recently deceased patients. As a precedent to requesting the donation of tissue from the deceased, and as a kind of substitute “how are you” sequence (in that they presume a grieving call recipient), callers regularly offer condolences. Callers are more formalized in their offering of condolences than are participants in conversation. Call recipients display a range of responses, from silences that are clearly resistive, to neutral responses (“all right”) that acknowledge offering, to those that are affirmative (“well thank you”). In all cases, there is no accounting, or description of the primary figure’s condition at death, and this works to forward the talk towards the primary reason for the call, which is the request for tissue donation. Mostly, I examine the range of condolence offerings and of responses, but also touch on the relation between condolence sequences and the donation request sequence itself.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Various explanations have been offered for the success of the Door-In-The-Face (DITF) sequential request strategy. This document provides a synthesis of the DITF findings and argues that the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) provides a theoretical framework for explaining DITF findings. To explore that possibility, participants (N=492) were asked to respond to a questionnaire assessing TPB constructs regarding a variety of social organizations. Two weeks later, participants received a phone call from one of the organizations (a local homeless shelter) soliciting donations. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three DITF conditions of varying request sizes or a target request-only condition. Results indicated significant differences in verbal and actual compliance based on request size. Moreover, the results indicated the importance of perceived behavioral control in DITF contexts. Limitations and directions for future DITF study are discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The power to nominate and confirm federal judges is shared by the Congress and the President, yet our understanding of this practice is often obscured by a narrow focus on political factors in the president’s purview, on the confirmation or rejection stage (where Congress has negative power, not positive power) or on nominations the Supreme Court (where Congress has little say). However, few works explicitly address the role Congress plays in shaping the pre-selection pool for judicial nominees. In this article, we explore the pre-nomination process by examining judicial nomination requests from Members of Congress to the Eisenhower and Ford Administrations. We find that the characteristics of the nominee matter more than the characteristics of the nominator. Party affiliation of a nominee is the strongest predictive factor, along with nominations to lower courts and experience in the federal government, while senatorial courtesy and prior legislative and judicial experience has no effect. The results provide for a more comprehensive view of the nomination-confirmation process and suggest that characteristics of nominees, Congress and the president must be taken into account in describing judicial confirmation patterns.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: As a new democracy, with evolving norms about representation, Ukraine provides an ideal setting to investigate legislative activity. According to Ukraine's constitution, legislators have the right to file formal requests for information or action to other institutions. In the paper, we assess several hypotheses about deputy advocacy. Our data set covers deputies in three parliaments (2002, 2006, and 2007) and includes electoral, party, and personal data, as well as variables addressing requests. We evaluate if constituency-based deputies make more requests than their counterparts in party list seats, if deputies who served in multiple parliaments change their behavior as electoral incentives change, and whether deputies focus their requests on national- or local-level concerns. This paper contributes to our knowledge about representation by analyzing how electoral rules, party affiliation, and legislator characteristics affect elected officials' level of policy advocacy once they are in office.