What's Hot at APSA

...His findings: Both blacks and Hispanics still serve significantly longer sentences than do whites...

...Under Reagan, federal grants to cities fell significantly for the first time: Federal money that once flowed directly to cities was redirected to states...

...In less technical terms, this means the average PAC donations to the most poorly funded 25 percent of senators is about $1 million, while the average PAC donations to the most wellfunded 25 percent of the Senate is $1.7 million...

...When the appropriate controls are added for offense level and criminal history, black offenders typically receive a sentence six months longer than their white counterparts, while Hispanics’ sentences are typically 1.4 months longer than whites...

...The informants were then asked about the odds of their potential candidates running-and possibly winning-in an election...

...Roughly half are concentrated in one of eight urban areas: Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Anaheim, Chicago, Washington D.C., Houston, and San Francisco...

...William Clay of Missouri, some of whose constituents were polled...

...congressional seat representing Utah‘s 2nd congressional district...

...But even more disturbing was informants’ perception that, as the personal qualities of a potential challenger increase, the likelihood of his or her seeking office decreased...

...These numbers were then used to calculate an ambivalency score for each respondent...

...There they’ll compare research, schmooze in the cool, incipient New England fall breezes, and engage in some hard-core academic ruminating...

...If you’re black, for instance, your chance of serving time rises sharply: An estimated 28 percent of blacks will spend time in a federal or state prison...

...But this time around, Greene had a new husband, Joe Waldholtz, whom she happened to name her campaign treasurer...

...Between individuals with equivalent scores, judges are prohibited from issuing sentences that vary by the greater of 25 percent or six months...

...Ronald Reagan changed all that, devolving the power to allocate aid to the states in the belief that such decentralization would enable regional concerns to be more efficiently addressed...

...h the months leading up to the ’94 election, Joe stole several million dollars from his new father-inlaw-$ 1.8 million of which he funneled into Enid’s campaign...

...More than half of the informants rated the potential challengers as stronger candidates than the incumbents...

...McGrath joined the Committee in 1985 and by 1988 his PAC receipts totaled over $300,000...

...But thanks to the baser elements of human nature, Mdyo was provided an episode which, in several aspects, resembles that of a controlled natural-science experiment...

...What’s Hot at APSA What the latest research reveals about race, crime, money, politics, and American values BY WILL VAN SANT THIS MONTH, LEGIONS OF DEEP thinkers will converge on Boston for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association...

...Consumer-donors give because they support the cause or causes that the politician or party represent, while investors-donors-which include corporations, unions, and political action committees-are seeking a return on their investment in the form of access to, or services and favors from, politicians...

...And while the gathering most likely won’t generate a media frenzy near the magnitude of, say, Monica Lewinsky’s getting her hair done, attention paid to the work presented there can serve to inform debate on a host of pressing issues...

...Moreover, an appellate court may review the judge’s rationale for departing from USSC guidelines...

...While admitting that a candidate with a dramatic monetary edge can use the cash to pad his vote share, Milyo says his research shows that small differences in spending between individuals has no discernible effect...

...According to Milyo, the Waldholtz case is indicative of broader findings in his research...

...Candidate Emergence Where are the quality candidates for elected office...

...In the second phase of the study the potential candidates identified by the informants were contacted and asked to explain their attitudes toward running for office...

...Though this decrease in funding was only temporary, the changes in the way funds are allocated, which have continued under Bush and Clinton, emphasizing state authority over cities, have had more permanent effects...

...The two faced each other again in 1994, with Shepard as the incumbent and Greene the challenger...

...These 1,400 informants were asked to identify potentially strong candidates for the House from their respective regions...

...Not according to Jeffrey Milyo of Tufts University...

...And in at least one instance, which we’ll get to in a minute, he’s found that this trend holds true even in elections with major spending disparities...

...has almost doubled, climbing from 4.8 percent to around 10 percent today...

...Floridians were asked a series of six questions that present different circumstances under which a woman may be compelled to seek an abortion...

...In an attempt to rectify these disparities, in 1984 Congress passed the Sentencing Guidelines and Policy Statement of the Sentencing Reform Act...

...Ignoring other possible factors in Waldholtz’ successsuch as the strong anti-incumbent bias that defined the 1994 elections-and attributing the entirety of the 14 percent decrease in Shepard’s vote share between ’92 and ’94 to the influence of her opponent’s ill-gotten campaign funds, Waldholtz still gained less than one percentage point of the vote for each $100,000 of the $1.8 million in illegal funds she spent...

...Ansolabehere began his analysis by separating donors into two groups: consumers and investors...

...This already volatile situation was profoundly exacerbated, according to Jones -Correa, by the intergovernmental and economic restructurings of the Reagan administration...

...These same six questions have been used by the General Social Survey since 1972...

...Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) then went onto the floor of the House and demanded a $174,000 cut in the NSF budget as a reprimand for its funding the CES...

...If your approach is more skeptical, then what you find is much less conclusive...

...For example, while campaign spending among senators varies widely, the differences in aggregate PAC contributions to the Senate do not-ranging from around $1 million at the lowest quartile to $1.7 million at the highest...

...This is the question that a team of researchers, led by L. Sandy Maisel of Colby College and Walter J. Stone of the University of Colorado, is investigating...

...Now Michael Jones-Correa of Harvard University is filling that gap, focusing his research on the urban context of inter-ethnic strife...

...Clay and a handful of colleagues, outraged that the study had been funded by the National Science Foundation, instigated a General Accounting Office inquiry into the work...

...Now researchers Stephen Craig and Jim Kane at the University of Florida are completing a study indicating that, in fact, when it comes to the morally charged and divisive issue of abortion, there exists greater ambivalence and less polarization in Americans’ attitudes than many would suppose...

...Most intriguing is the fact that there was no statistical difference in the level of ambivalence expressed by those who identified themselves as pro-life and those who identified themselves as pro-choice...

...Moreover, blacks, when convicted, typically serve longer sentences than their white counterparts, as do Hispanics...

...In turn, the states, trying to contend with their own budget shortfalls, chose to keep money from metropolitan areas...

...Income and education are also shown by Mustard to play a role in sentencing...

...All told 64 percent of those questioned expressed some level of ambivalence to the six statements...

...From this survey it is clear that the informants feel the best candidates are often not running for the House...

...When contacted for this article, Rep...

...One would think that these riots, in which dozens were killed and billions of dollars in property damaged, would have provoked a host of rigorous policy evaluations...

...Aided by a late media blitz, presumably funded by the illegal contributions of her husband, Enid Greene Waldholtz won the ’94 election by 10 percentage points...

...The cut was eventually approved...

...WILLV ANS ANT is nn intem at The Washington Monthly...

...More than 93 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States live in cities...

...In the largest study ever of its kind, Mustard examined 77,756 federal offenders sentenced under the SRA...

...According to Jones -Correa, however, “We haven’t learned anything since then.,’ Journalists are among those Jones-Correa holds responsible for the lack of a constructive response to these disturbances...

...A close look at the money spent and margin of victory, however, raises questions about the actual role the additional funds played in Waldholtz’ victory...

...Congress...

...The GAO demanded that the list of House districts used in the research be revealed, while Clay and his colleagues went even further, asking for the names of the 1,400 informants...

...One of the results of this has been an increase in urban ethnic crises...

...By presenting them as ideologically driven, in essence dissents over social injustice, journalists obscured the real issues of interethnic conflict at the heart of the riots...

...That’s right, the greater a potential candidate’s perceived level of integrity, ability to solve problems, and grasp of the issues, the less he or she is thought likely to run...

...By contrast, on the Senate side, where political power is more equitably distributed, investor donations too are more evenly spread out...

...Researching this issue does indeed present a methodological challenge...

...They were encouraged to choose individuals they thought truly worthy of elected office, regardless of whether the person was in a party other than theirs, had ever been mentioned in the press, or had even ever considered running for office...

...Sentencing Disparities According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, if recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, 5 percent of Americans will serve time at some point in their lives...

...Asked to explain the response of Clay and his cohorts to his research, Maisel is unequivocal: “They don’t want the system that supports them to be changed...

...When the surveys used for the first stage of this research were mailed last year, they apparently did not sit well with Democratic Rep...

...Though at the time of this writing the data collected is still being evaluated, some common objections made by the potential candidates have emerged: The effect on family, loss of privacy, negative campaigning, and the sense that they can accomplish more in another role, perhaps in state legislatures, were common reasons given for an individual not seeking election to the US...

...If you have no highschool diploma, expect close to a month of additional time...

...One group that seems to benefit from sentencing bias, however, is women...

...Consequently, cities had fewer resources, and thus less flexibility, in dealing with demographic changes than they once did...

...Ray McGrath‘s (R-NY) total PAC receipts stood at just over $100,000...

...Insufficient controls for other factors that contribute to campaign victories, he asserts, have resulted in misleading conclusions...

...Consequently, Enid Greene Waldholtz was the beneficiary of a windfall campaign contribution received independently of other variables that may have assisted in her victory...

...Both the Sentencing Reform Act and the rules of the USSC make it explicitly clear that this lund of inequity is a no-no...

...Consumer donations behave like charity donations, fluctuating based on factors such as a donor’s income level and are, says Ansolabehere, “a matter of taste...

...And indeed, when Joe’s imaginative fund-raising style was revealed in late 1995, many people in Utah accused Waldholtz of having bought the electionwith stolen cash no less...

...Campaign Cash Despite the high visibility many politicians and outraged public-interest groups have given to the issue of campaign finance reform, does anyone really know to what extent money spent campaigning affects electoral outcomes...

...If a case presents highly atypical features, a judge may sentence outside of the specified range, but must provide compelling and specific reasons for doing so...

...These immigrants often settle in poor neighborhoods where they must compete for resources and jobs that support native-born minority populations...

...It appears as if, on both sides of the abortion debate, there is a notable situational component that informs attitudes that are often perceived as stemming wholly from an extremist position...

...As for the race-based discrepancies, Mustard found that 57 percent of the black-white disparity in sentencing stems from judges departing from the USSC guidelines...

...Though the benefits to politicians of massive campaign spending is less clear than many people believe, research being conducted by Stephen Ansolabehere and Jim Snyder of MIT indicates that the benefits to those making the donations are somewhat clearer...

...Even this may well be an exaggeration of the money’s effect, since an independent candidateMerril Cook-siphoned 18 percent of the vote away from Waldholtz and Shepard...

...On the whole, women across the racial spectrum serve sentences six months (13 percent) shorter than men do...

...It is an ironic effect of paternalism, and one likely to bring smiles to the faces of wayward girls everywhere, that chivalry is still alive and .well in the American court system...

...If you approach this issue with the belief that money influences vote share, then you can find confirmatory evidence,” says Milyo...

...Similarly, informants saw a 91 percent chance that the incumbent would win in his party’s primary, and an 85 percent chance for victory in the general election...

...Potential challengers, on the other hand, faced much tougher odds: Their perceived chance at winning the primary was just a bit better than SO-SO and in the general election a bit worse...

...A decade later, however, blacks and other minority groups are still not being treated equally under the law, according to work done by David Mustard at the University of Georgia...

...Investordonors recognize this, and their donations-unlike consumer-donors’-closely follow the hierarchy in the House...

...Am b ival ence In the March ’98 Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris reviewed a book by Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe that describes the latent moderate sympathies of the American public...

...In fact, the perceived chance that a potential challenger would both run and win was less than 15 percent...

...About 1,200 responded...

...Clearly, our current political system is perceived to heavily favor incumbents...

...Using Ansolabehere’s investor theory, one would expect to find the price of a vote to run about three times more in the Senate than in the House-there being around three times as many House members as there are Senate members, making an individual senator’s vote considerably more influential than one representative’s...

...The most conflicted responses came when respondents were asked whether abortion is justified when a mother is “too poor” to raise the child, while respondents were much more definite that rape justifies an abortion...

...Numerous studies have been done concerning immigrants’ effects on the American economy, culture, etc., but surprisingly little attention has been paid to way these groups interact after they arrive...

...Milyo dismisses past research that has stressed the positive, vote-gaining effects of campaign spending as methodologically flawed...

...In order to promote uniformity in sentencing and ensure implementation of the SRA, the United States Sentencing Commission in 1987 developed a detailed set of rules outlining how long a person should serve for a particular crime...

...In 1992 Enid Greene and Karen Shepard vied for an open U.S...

...As this would suggest, you’re more likely to be sentenced to zero time, should this be among the judge’s options, if you’re white than if you’re black or Hispanic...

...As the incumbent, Shepard would seemingly have had the edge...

...During the postwar years, and particularly under Johnson, the federal government developed a variety of grants programs for cities that, in essence, bypassed state authority...

...The SRA, which went into effect in 1987, states that race, gender, ethnicity, and income should not affect the length of sentences given to criminals...

...Perhaps judges should spend some time familiarizing themselves with the rules they themselves are supposed to follow in order to fulfill their obligation to mete out equal justice under the law...

...Investor donations, on the other hand, are extremely invariant...

...It seems that despite all the partisan rhetoric, people, when given a chance to offer more than a simple yes/no poll response on controversial issues such as welfare, crime, and even abortion, aren’t as narrowly liberal or conservative as they present themselves...

...The distribution of power in the House is stratified, with party and committee leaders clearly sitting atop the food chain...

...How can a candidate’s campaign wallet be isolated for study from other, less quantifiable attributes, such as likeability, integrity, and performance record-all of which not only make a politician a better fund-raiser, but of themselves contribute to electoral success...

...Despite the disparity in expected electoral outcomes, however, informants saw little difference in candidate quality between incumbents and potential challengers...

...From 1990 to 1994 alone, 4.5 million immigrants arrived in this country, and since 1965 the number has approached, maybe surpassed, the number of those who immigrated here between 1880 and 1920...

...If you have an income of $5,000 a year or less, expect to serve 6.8 months longer than criminals who bring in between $25,000 and $35,000 a year...

...Sure enough, from 1978 to 1996, PAC contributions to the Senate and the House have adhered closely to a 2.7-to-1 ratio...

...The six questions were then reformulated as statements and the respondents were asked to rate on a scale of one to four both their positive and negative feelings about each, one being the total absence of any positive or negative feeling and four being an extreme emotional response...

...The degree of difference is particularly pronounced in sentencing for drug-related offenses: More than 70 percent of the black-white disparity and 82 percent of the Hispanic-white disparity in drug trafficking sentences is the result of judges’ departing from sentencing guidelines...

...Evidently, even as dollar amounts have risen, the market price for access to a politician has remained proportionally constant between the House and Senate over the past two decades...

...Further insight into the PAC-politician connection is afforded when we look at the distribution of contributions in relation to the power structure of each house of Congress...

...The Florida respondents were first asked whether they agreed that a given circumstance justified obtaining an abortion...

...In jurists’ defense, Mustard notes that sentencing disparities may stem from the judges’ superior knowledge of the particulars of the individual cases...

...These guidelines determine a criminal’s appropriate sentence by calculating two factors: an offense-level score based on the type of crime involved, and a criminal history score...

...House districts...

...Clay’s office refused to comment...

...Furthermore, blacks and Hispanics are much less likely to receive downward departures-sentences less than what the USSC guidelines indicate-than whites...

...Though generally more conservative than the GSS respondents nationwide in ’94, the Floridians ranked the six differing circumstances in the same order as did respondents to the national survey...

...Considering the widespread pattern of disparity, however, a more likely explanation is that the sentencing differences are either the result of education and income discrimination on the part of judges or the fact that wealthier and better educated defendants can take advantage of legal resources the less-fortunate cannot-or, what is most likely, a little of both...

...There is simply not enough to go around, thus making these melting pot microcosms flash points for ethnic conflicts...

...Up to this point the evidence seems to suggest that campaign spending does, in fact, equal votes...

...Jones-Correa points to the riots which erupted throughout the 1980s and early ’90s in Miami, Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles as evidence...

...The media, he says, erroneously compared the riots of the 1980s and early ’90s to those of the ’60s...

...Clay and Rep...

...Despite politicians’ assurances that political contributions have no influence on their votea claim already considered specious by those of us concerned about the influence of special interest money in politics-Ansolabehere’s work shows that the giving patterns of big-money donors do, in fact, suggest that political influence is being treated as a commodity...

...For what is called the Candidate Emergence Study, these scholars sought out 1,400 “activist-informants,” evenly distributed across the political spectrum, from a random sample of U.S...

...Immigration Considering the changing face of America, it’s little wonder that immigration policy is always a hot topic: Since 1970 the percentage of first-generation immigrants in the United States...

...Ironically, the move had exactly the opposite effect at the municipal level...

...If you’re college educated, you’ll get a break of 1.2 months...

...Here in the greatest democracy on earth, however, it has long been recognized that, when it comes to prison sentences, all men are not created equal...

...Shepard defeated Greene by four percentage points...

...Asked to rate the overall strength of candidates on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being the strongest, incumbents averaged a 5.9 and potential challengers a 5.4...

...Indeed, this question highlights one of the persistent problems of the social sciences in general: Replicable and controlled environments in which to test hypotheses are few and far between...

...In preparation for the conference, the Monthly took an informal survey of some of the nation’s top political and social scientists to find out some of the more talked-about work that is to be presented...

...Not surprisingly, while potential candidates who already held office were assigned a 90 percent likelihood of running for reelection, the odds that a nonincumbent would run were placed much lower at 35 percent...

...For instance, Ansolabehere notes that before joining the Ways and Means Committee in 1984, Rep...