Is national policy more responsive to the preferences of white Americans than to those of people of color? To answer this fundamental question, we examine how well federal lawmaking reflects the preferences of 520,000 Black, Latino, Asian Amer [...]
This volume is a collection of case studies by University of Northern Iowa's Master of Public Policy (MPP) graduate students, as well as undergraduate students studying leadership and management in public service. It is our hope that these cas [...]
By Dr. Jayme Renfro, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Northern Iowa Welcome to the exciting and impactful world of grant writing! Whether you are a student embarking on a career in nonprofit management, a budding resea [...]
Scholars have studied international organizations (IOs) in many disciplines, thus generating important theoretical developments. Yet a proper assessment and a broad discussion of the methods used to research these organizations are lacking. Wh [...]
Description The Congress in Action Workbook, written with the support of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Zero Textbook Cost Program and Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Education Resources Initiative [...]
Nils B. Weidmann, Universität Konstanz, Germany The 'data revolution' offers many new opportunities for research in the social sciences. Increasingly, social and political interactions can be recorded digitally, leading to vast amounts of new [...]
Abstract Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cas [...]
Public Administration: The Essentials provides students with the conceptual foundation they need for an introduction to the field of public administration. This OER textbook covers the most critical issues in the field through the use of class [...]
What does Journal Article Analysis Consist of? Journal Article Analysis consists of reading journal articles and analyzing them. You are responsible for identifying twelve parts of a journal article: title, main point, question, puzzle, debate [...]
In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dic [...]
Democratic accountability relies on voters to punish their representatives for policies they dislike. Yet, a separation-of-powers system can make it hard to know who is to blame, and partisan biases further distort voters’ evaluations. During [...]
How representative are conference delegations in state legislative chambers? I argue that differing conference rules across state legislative chambers influence majority party control over conference delegations. With an original data set enco [...]
The scholarly exchange over approaches to measuring public preferences in the American states dates back several years. This introduction to the debate attempts to provide broad perspective on how scholars have conceptualized and measured poli [...]
To fully understand state policy outcomes or elections in the US, we need valid over-time measures of state-level public opinion. We contribute to the research on measuring state public opinion in two ways. First, we respond to Berry, Fording, [...]
During the most recent round of redistricting, many states have enacted a number of reforms to their mapmaking practices. One reform that has received increased attention in recent years is a ban on prison gerrymandering—the practice of counti [...]
State governments are tasked with making important policy decisions in the United States. How do state legislators use their public communications—particularly social media—to engage with policy debates? Due to previous data limitations, we la [...]
Executives are important elites, and ideology is important to elite behavior, but measurement challenges and a focus on the presidency have kept scholars from fully exploring executive ideology. This article advocates studying US governors to [...]
Do attempts to level the financial playing field lead more candidates to run for office? In theory, public financing should increase competition, presumably because additional funding from taxpayers motivates more challengers to run for office [...]
The examination of the interaction between the institutions in American state politics has long suffered from a dearth of data. This is the case despite the importance of understanding the separation of powers in the states and the specific ef [...]
The power of conference committees is well documented and studied by scholars of the US Congress. But little is known about politics of bicameral agreement within state legislatures. Leveraging variation across states, I explore the conditions [...]
As racial tensions flare amidst a global pandemic and national social justice upheaval, the centrality of structural racism has renewed old questions and raised new ones about where Asian Americans fit in U.S. politics. This paper provides an [...]
How well do we understand the political moment in which we find ourselves in the wake of the Trump presidency? The United States has long failed to keep up with its democratic peers on a wide range of social outcomes but the struggle to keep a [...]
This paper examines the context-dependent role of race as a predictor of non-electoral political participation. Prior country-level studies have documented group-level differences in a variety of forms of participation in South Africa and the [...]
This study explores how American Indians use interest group strategies to block federal legislation. Unlike other disadvantaged groups, who have influenced public policymaking through descriptive representation, American Indians have turned to [...]