Uncertainty in American Politics

by Edited by Barry C. Burden

• ISBN13: 9780521812733
• ISBN10: 0521812739
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-07-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book represents an exciting intellectual meeting of researchers from diverse subfields to analyze how and why uncertainty affects American politics. It seeks to reconnect research traditions that have seldom spoken to one another. Though used by formal theorists, empiricists, and historians in a parallel fashion for a number of years, the notion of uncertainty has often been introduced only to explain away anomalies, provide backing for a larger argument, or justify a particular methodology. Uncertainty has rarely been considered in its own right or as a concept that might connect researchers from different subfields. The authors demonstrate some of the many substantive effects that uncertainty has on the bureaucracy, voters, and elected officials. They also reveal the origins and consequences of uncertainty to remind researchers across the discipline how central the idea should be to any serious study of US politics.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	vii
Introduction: Everything but Death and Taxes: Uncertainty and American Politics	1	(26)
Barry C. Burden
PART 1: ELITE AND INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS
Bargaining, Uncertainty, and the Growth of the White House Staff, 1940--2000	27	(21)
Matthew J. Dickinson
Political Uncertainty and Administrative Procedures	48	(27)
Richard G. Vanden Bergh
Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Jr.
Uncertainty and Legislative Capacity for Controlling the Bureaucracy	75	(23)
George A. Krause
Bureaucracy and Uncertainty	98	(20)
Laurence O'Toole, Jr.
Kenneth J. Meier
Uncertainty and Political Debate: How the Dimensionality of Political Issues Gets Reduced in the Legislative Process	118	(21)
Bryan D. Jones
Jeffrey Talbert
Matthew Potoski
PART 2: CITIZEN AND ELECTORAL POLITICS
Declining Uncertainty: Presidents, Public Opinion, and Polls	139	(22)
John G. Geer
Prateek Goorha
Uncertainty and American Public Opinion	161	(25)
R. Michael Alvarez
John Brehm
Catherine Wilson
Risk and Uncertainty as Sources of Incumbent Insecurity	186	(27)
Cherie D. Maestas
Uncertainty, Experience with Black Representation, and the White Vote	213	(32)
Zoltan L. Hajnal
Index	245