John T Woolley
Biographic Data
| ID | 333597 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John T Woolley |
| GIVEN NAMES | John T |
| FAMILY NAME | Woolley |
| SIGNATURE | WOOLLEY J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4403-7142 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 265 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
New Conflicts in the Briefing Room: Using Sentiment Analysis to Evaluate Administration-press Relations from Clinton through Trump
Journalists have argued that the high levels of hostility between President Trump and numerous media outlets have marked a critical juncture in presidential-press relations. This perceived conflict challenges a key expectation of literatures on political media and the presidency: that functional interdependence will encourage presidential administrations to tolerate more aggressive media questioning in an effort to control media messages. We exam…
The Contemporary Presidency: Do Presidential Memo Orders Substitute for Executive Orders? New Data
We describe and implement a text‐search strategy for reliably identifying, among published presidential documents, orders not titled “executive order” or “proclamation.” Given the inconsistent use of terms and titles in these documents, we refer to them with an umbrella term: “memo orders.” We identify over 1,600 memo orders in the archives of the American Presidency Project (APP) from 1977 to 2012. Drawing on the Federal Register for the same pe…
Measuring Deliberative Conditions: An Analysis of Participant Freedom and Equality in Federal Open Market Committee Deliberation
Drawing from the literature on deliberative conditions, we analyze thirty years of verbatim transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The transcripts provide a rare opportunity for the systematic empirical analysis of deliberative conditions. The importance of the FOMC, and its recent policy failures, makes the case particularly interesting. Deliberative scholars argue that deliberation should occur in a setting where participants …
The effect of “sunshine” on policy deliberation: The case of the Federal Open Market Committee
How does an increase in transparency affect policy deliberation? Increased government transparency is commonly advocated as beneficial to democracy. Others argue that transparency can undermine democratic deliberation by, for example, causing poorer reasoning. We analyze the effect of increased transparency in the case of a rare natural experiment involving the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In 1994 the FOMC began the delayed public releas…
After Dodd-Frank: Ideas and the Post-Enactment Politics of Financial Reform in the United States
The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical and scholarly attention. We find that recent reforms in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing concepts of regulatory capture or business power. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial services industry than existing …
The Presidency A to Z
Persistent Leadership: Presidents and the Evolution of U.S. Financial Reform, 1970‐2007
Between 1970 and 2007, presidents of both parties consistently and actively supported financial deregulation. Given the low visibility and relatively technical nature of the issues, presidents saw deregulation as the best way to respond to technical innovation in the industry and disruptions caused by inflation. This history suggests several lessons for students of the role of presidents in policy making. Presidents can be active in promoting pol…
Democracy and National Economic Performance: The Preference for Stability
appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages, another mechanism that might explain democratic stability. When growth and volatility are jointly examined, democracies reveal highly favorable economic results. oes democracy affect national economic performance and, if so, how? No question is more central to the study of political economics. Almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused …
Using Media-Based Data in Studies of Politics
Political scientists have made broad use of data that are drawn from media sources. These data tend to be of two kinds: measures of the volume of media attention to an issue, or counts of events reported in the media for which there is no other systematic data source. With increasing access to full-text data archives, there will be many more opportunities for scholars to create data. This paper reviews a number of issues having to do with potenti…
Les conséquences du fédéralisme sur l’élaboration de la politique de la Réserve fédérale
The Consequences of a Fedéral Structure on the Construction of the Policy of the Federal Reserve ; The Federal Reserve has a regional composition formed by twelve district banks and a central council, the council of govemors. Several institutional characteristics contribute to the independence of the Fédéral Reserve, however the four-year mandate of the president of the Reserve expires, quite by chance, at the beginning of the year of the preside…
The Politics of Watershed Policymaking
In 1996, we began a study of contrasting efforts to restore and enhance watershed health in three different river basins. While we were organizing our study, one of the watershed groups that we were examining “fell apart,” therebey providing us with an unusual opportunity of study the difference between organizational success and failure. Obviously there are many problems in brawing broad conciusions from the study of a few cases, and we are well…
Exorcising Inflation-Mindedness: The Transformation of Economic Management in the 1970s
In late August 1994, Alan Blinder was concluding his second month of service as vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. A former member of the CEA and a distinguished economist, Blinder had achieved a reputation as a“hard-headed liberal economist.”
Growing firms in declining fields: Unanticipated impacts of oil development
In a study of off‐shore oil development in the Santa Barbara Channel, we found that many local oil‐related firms adapted to declines in the oil industry by diversifying into other realms, thus forestalling their expected demise. We provide case instances of how such adaptation occurs. Firms’ success at self‐transformation alters the type of environmental impacts caused by the oil industry's coming to the region. This mitigates the boom‐bust cycle…
The Politics of Monetary Policy: A Critical Review
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is a pre-eminent banking institution, and an institution that has been subject to scrutiny from a wide variety of scholarly perspectives. The object of this article is to review prominent works dealing with the politics of the Federal Reserve, particularly its relations with other institutions and their effects on monetary policy. The review shows that the formal legal independence of a central bank s…
Conflict among Regulators and the Hypothesis of Congressional Dominance
A number of "new institutional" scholars have proposed, contrary to conventional analysis, that Congress has available to it all the means necessary to insure that agencies make policy in a fashion consistent with congressional preferences. This has come to be known as the congressional dominance hypothesis. This line of theorizing suggests that we should not expect to find evidence of substantial and persisting disagreements between regulators. …
Institutions, the Election Cycle, and the Presidential Veto
Despite the large number of analyses of vetoes in recent years, many puzzles persist. This paper treats vetoes as a form of institutional conflict. This conflict is analyzed as being jointly determined by congressional and presidential behavior. The role of elections, partisan conflict, institutional change, and variation in presidential resources are examined as determinants of the likelihood of institutional conflict. Veto conflicts are disaggr…
Of Rule and Revenue
The Adequacy of the Electoral Motive in Explaining Legislative Attention to Monetary Policy: A Comparative Study
In the contemporary literature on the behavior of elected politicians, significant progress has been made by developing the implications of two assumptions: first, that politicians are rational actors and, second, that their overriding objective is the protection of their prospects for reelection. Both assumptions, especially strong and limited statements of the second, have been controversial. Both have been elaborated in greatest detail with re…
Partisan Manipulation of the Economy: Another Look at Monetary Policy with Moving Regression
This research addresses a paradox: While there appears to be a significant partisan effect on economic outcomes, there is little or no persuasive evidence of partisan differences in the manipulation of policy instruments. This paradox appears to result from uncertainties about the specification of reaction functions for policy instruments. One implication of these uncertainties is that studies of policy instruments are biased against finding part…
Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy
Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy
This is the first book to describe and analyze the relationships between the Federal Reserve and the president, Congress, bankers, and economists. Far from being politically independent, the Federal Reserve is shown to be sensitive to a wide range of political influences.
Monetarists and the Politics of Monetary Policy
Monetarist economists appear to have achieved a high level of success in having their policy ideas put into practice. The monetarists are analyzed here as a political group. They are characterized as a loosely organized group offering distinct policy prescriptions, closely aligned with neoliberal political forces. The supply of monetarists is discussed in terms of their relative numbers and shared socialization experiences. The demand for monetar…
Reaction Functions, Optimization, and Politics: Modelling the Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policy
A central concern of policy research is to disentangle the consequences of discretionary acts of authorities from the constraints under which they operate. In economic policy research, reaction functions, a broad class of single-equation models, appear to offer insights into this problem. However, reaction functions share many of the pitfalls of the empirical use of optimizing models of policy, and particular difficulties attach to disentangling …
Monetary Policy Instrumentation and the Relationship of Central Banks and Governments
Despite the importance of monetary policy in economic management and the substantial stakes involved in monetary policy decisions, political scientists have almost entirely ignored important political questions involving both monetary policy and central banks. This article organizes in formation about central banks, the institutional focus of much of monetary policy, and central bankers. Two dimensions of monetary policy instrumentation, complexi…
Using Media-Based Data in Studies of Politics
Political scientists have made broad use of data that are drawn from media sources. These data tend to be of two kinds: measures of the volume of media attention to an issue, or counts of events reported in the media for which there is no other systematic data source. With increasing access to full-text data archives, there will be many more opportunities for scholars to create data. This paper reviews a number of issues having to do with potenti…
Democracy and National Economic Performance: The Preference for Stability
appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages, another mechanism that might explain democratic stability. When growth and volatility are jointly examined, democracies reveal highly favorable economic results. oes democracy affect national economic performance and, if so, how? No question is more central to the study of political economics. Almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused …
Conflict among Regulators and the Hypothesis of Congressional Dominance
A number of "new institutional" scholars have proposed, contrary to conventional analysis, that Congress has available to it all the means necessary to insure that agencies make policy in a fashion consistent with congressional preferences. This has come to be known as the congressional dominance hypothesis. This line of theorizing suggests that we should not expect to find evidence of substantial and persisting disagreements between regulators. …
Institutions, the Election Cycle, and the Presidential Veto
Despite the large number of analyses of vetoes in recent years, many puzzles persist. This paper treats vetoes as a form of institutional conflict. This conflict is analyzed as being jointly determined by congressional and presidential behavior. The role of elections, partisan conflict, institutional change, and variation in presidential resources are examined as determinants of the likelihood of institutional conflict. Veto conflicts are disaggr…
Partisan Manipulation of the Economy: Another Look at Monetary Policy with Moving Regression
This research addresses a paradox: While there appears to be a significant partisan effect on economic outcomes, there is little or no persuasive evidence of partisan differences in the manipulation of policy instruments. This paradox appears to result from uncertainties about the specification of reaction functions for policy instruments. One implication of these uncertainties is that studies of policy instruments are biased against finding part…
The Politics of Watershed Policymaking
In 1996, we began a study of contrasting efforts to restore and enhance watershed health in three different river basins. While we were organizing our study, one of the watershed groups that we were examining “fell apart,” therebey providing us with an unusual opportunity of study the difference between organizational success and failure. Obviously there are many problems in brawing broad conciusions from the study of a few cases, and we are well…
Reaction Functions, Optimization, and Politics: Modelling the Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policy
A central concern of policy research is to disentangle the consequences of discretionary acts of authorities from the constraints under which they operate. In economic policy research, reaction functions, a broad class of single-equation models, appear to offer insights into this problem. However, reaction functions share many of the pitfalls of the empirical use of optimizing models of policy, and particular difficulties attach to disentangling …
After Dodd-Frank: Ideas and the Post-Enactment Politics of Financial Reform in the United States
The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical and scholarly attention. We find that recent reforms in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing concepts of regulatory capture or business power. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial services industry than existing …
The Contemporary Presidency: Do Presidential Memo Orders Substitute for Executive Orders? New Data
We describe and implement a text‐search strategy for reliably identifying, among published presidential documents, orders not titled “executive order” or “proclamation.” Given the inconsistent use of terms and titles in these documents, we refer to them with an umbrella term: “memo orders.” We identify over 1,600 memo orders in the archives of the American Presidency Project (APP) from 1977 to 2012. Drawing on the Federal Register for the same pe…
Monetary Policy Instrumentation and the Relationship of Central Banks and Governments
Despite the importance of monetary policy in economic management and the substantial stakes involved in monetary policy decisions, political scientists have almost entirely ignored important political questions involving both monetary policy and central banks. This article organizes in formation about central banks, the institutional focus of much of monetary policy, and central bankers. Two dimensions of monetary policy instrumentation, complexi…
Monetarists and the Politics of Monetary Policy
Monetarist economists appear to have achieved a high level of success in having their policy ideas put into practice. The monetarists are analyzed here as a political group. They are characterized as a loosely organized group offering distinct policy prescriptions, closely aligned with neoliberal political forces. The supply of monetarists is discussed in terms of their relative numbers and shared socialization experiences. The demand for monetar…
Persistent Leadership: Presidents and the Evolution of U.S. Financial Reform, 1970‐2007
Between 1970 and 2007, presidents of both parties consistently and actively supported financial deregulation. Given the low visibility and relatively technical nature of the issues, presidents saw deregulation as the best way to respond to technical innovation in the industry and disruptions caused by inflation. This history suggests several lessons for students of the role of presidents in policy making. Presidents can be active in promoting pol…
New Conflicts in the Briefing Room: Using Sentiment Analysis to Evaluate Administration-press Relations from Clinton through Trump
Journalists have argued that the high levels of hostility between President Trump and numerous media outlets have marked a critical juncture in presidential-press relations. This perceived conflict challenges a key expectation of literatures on political media and the presidency: that functional interdependence will encourage presidential administrations to tolerate more aggressive media questioning in an effort to control media messages. We exam…
The effect of “sunshine” on policy deliberation: The case of the Federal Open Market Committee
How does an increase in transparency affect policy deliberation? Increased government transparency is commonly advocated as beneficial to democracy. Others argue that transparency can undermine democratic deliberation by, for example, causing poorer reasoning. We analyze the effect of increased transparency in the case of a rare natural experiment involving the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In 1994 the FOMC began the delayed public releas…
Growing firms in declining fields: Unanticipated impacts of oil development
In a study of off‐shore oil development in the Santa Barbara Channel, we found that many local oil‐related firms adapted to declines in the oil industry by diversifying into other realms, thus forestalling their expected demise. We provide case instances of how such adaptation occurs. Firms’ success at self‐transformation alters the type of environmental impacts caused by the oil industry's coming to the region. This mitigates the boom‐bust cycle…
The Adequacy of the Electoral Motive in Explaining Legislative Attention to Monetary Policy: A Comparative Study
In the contemporary literature on the behavior of elected politicians, significant progress has been made by developing the implications of two assumptions: first, that politicians are rational actors and, second, that their overriding objective is the protection of their prospects for reelection. Both assumptions, especially strong and limited statements of the second, have been controversial. Both have been elaborated in greatest detail with re…
Monetary Policy Instrumentation and the Relationship of Central Banks and Governments
Despite the importance of monetary policy in economic management and the substantial stakes involved in monetary policy decisions, political scientists have almost entirely ignored important political questions involving both monetary policy and central banks. This article organizes in formation about central banks, the institutional focus of much of monetary policy, and central bankers. Two dimensions of monetary policy instrumentation, complexi…
Monetarists and the Politics of Monetary Policy
Monetarist economists appear to have achieved a high level of success in having their policy ideas put into practice. The monetarists are analyzed here as a political group. They are characterized as a loosely organized group offering distinct policy prescriptions, closely aligned with neoliberal political forces. The supply of monetarists is discussed in terms of their relative numbers and shared socialization experiences. The demand for monetar…
Reaction Functions, Optimization, and Politics: Modelling the Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policy
A central concern of policy research is to disentangle the consequences of discretionary acts of authorities from the constraints under which they operate. In economic policy research, reaction functions, a broad class of single-equation models, appear to offer insights into this problem. However, reaction functions share many of the pitfalls of the empirical use of optimizing models of policy, and particular difficulties attach to disentangling …
Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy
This is the first book to describe and analyze the relationships between the Federal Reserve and the president, Congress, bankers, and economists. Far from being politically independent, the Federal Reserve is shown to be sensitive to a wide range of political influences.
Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy
Partisan Manipulation of the Economy: Another Look at Monetary Policy with Moving Regression
This research addresses a paradox: While there appears to be a significant partisan effect on economic outcomes, there is little or no persuasive evidence of partisan differences in the manipulation of policy instruments. This paradox appears to result from uncertainties about the specification of reaction functions for policy instruments. One implication of these uncertainties is that studies of policy instruments are biased against finding part…
Of Rule and Revenue
The Adequacy of the Electoral Motive in Explaining Legislative Attention to Monetary Policy: A Comparative Study
In the contemporary literature on the behavior of elected politicians, significant progress has been made by developing the implications of two assumptions: first, that politicians are rational actors and, second, that their overriding objective is the protection of their prospects for reelection. Both assumptions, especially strong and limited statements of the second, have been controversial. Both have been elaborated in greatest detail with re…
Institutions, the Election Cycle, and the Presidential Veto
Despite the large number of analyses of vetoes in recent years, many puzzles persist. This paper treats vetoes as a form of institutional conflict. This conflict is analyzed as being jointly determined by congressional and presidential behavior. The role of elections, partisan conflict, institutional change, and variation in presidential resources are examined as determinants of the likelihood of institutional conflict. Veto conflicts are disaggr…
Conflict among Regulators and the Hypothesis of Congressional Dominance
A number of "new institutional" scholars have proposed, contrary to conventional analysis, that Congress has available to it all the means necessary to insure that agencies make policy in a fashion consistent with congressional preferences. This has come to be known as the congressional dominance hypothesis. This line of theorizing suggests that we should not expect to find evidence of substantial and persisting disagreements between regulators. …
The Politics of Monetary Policy: A Critical Review
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is a pre-eminent banking institution, and an institution that has been subject to scrutiny from a wide variety of scholarly perspectives. The object of this article is to review prominent works dealing with the politics of the Federal Reserve, particularly its relations with other institutions and their effects on monetary policy. The review shows that the formal legal independence of a central bank s…
Exorcising Inflation-Mindedness: The Transformation of Economic Management in the 1970s
In late August 1994, Alan Blinder was concluding his second month of service as vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. A former member of the CEA and a distinguished economist, Blinder had achieved a reputation as a“hard-headed liberal economist.”
Growing firms in declining fields: Unanticipated impacts of oil development
In a study of off‐shore oil development in the Santa Barbara Channel, we found that many local oil‐related firms adapted to declines in the oil industry by diversifying into other realms, thus forestalling their expected demise. We provide case instances of how such adaptation occurs. Firms’ success at self‐transformation alters the type of environmental impacts caused by the oil industry's coming to the region. This mitigates the boom‐bust cycle…
Les conséquences du fédéralisme sur l’élaboration de la politique de la Réserve fédérale
The Consequences of a Fedéral Structure on the Construction of the Policy of the Federal Reserve ; The Federal Reserve has a regional composition formed by twelve district banks and a central council, the council of govemors. Several institutional characteristics contribute to the independence of the Fédéral Reserve, however the four-year mandate of the president of the Reserve expires, quite by chance, at the beginning of the year of the preside…
The Politics of Watershed Policymaking
In 1996, we began a study of contrasting efforts to restore and enhance watershed health in three different river basins. While we were organizing our study, one of the watershed groups that we were examining “fell apart,” therebey providing us with an unusual opportunity of study the difference between organizational success and failure. Obviously there are many problems in brawing broad conciusions from the study of a few cases, and we are well…
Using Media-Based Data in Studies of Politics
Political scientists have made broad use of data that are drawn from media sources. These data tend to be of two kinds: measures of the volume of media attention to an issue, or counts of events reported in the media for which there is no other systematic data source. With increasing access to full-text data archives, there will be many more opportunities for scholars to create data. This paper reviews a number of issues having to do with potenti…
Democracy and National Economic Performance: The Preference for Stability
appear to arise because democracies ameliorate the effects of social cleavages, another mechanism that might explain democratic stability. When growth and volatility are jointly examined, democracies reveal highly favorable economic results. oes democracy affect national economic performance and, if so, how? No question is more central to the study of political economics. Almost all previous work on democracy and economic performance has focused …
Persistent Leadership: Presidents and the Evolution of U.S. Financial Reform, 1970‐2007
Between 1970 and 2007, presidents of both parties consistently and actively supported financial deregulation. Given the low visibility and relatively technical nature of the issues, presidents saw deregulation as the best way to respond to technical innovation in the industry and disruptions caused by inflation. This history suggests several lessons for students of the role of presidents in policy making. Presidents can be active in promoting pol…
The Presidency A to Z
Measuring Deliberative Conditions: An Analysis of Participant Freedom and Equality in Federal Open Market Committee Deliberation
Drawing from the literature on deliberative conditions, we analyze thirty years of verbatim transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The transcripts provide a rare opportunity for the systematic empirical analysis of deliberative conditions. The importance of the FOMC, and its recent policy failures, makes the case particularly interesting. Deliberative scholars argue that deliberation should occur in a setting where participants …
The effect of “sunshine” on policy deliberation: The case of the Federal Open Market Committee
How does an increase in transparency affect policy deliberation? Increased government transparency is commonly advocated as beneficial to democracy. Others argue that transparency can undermine democratic deliberation by, for example, causing poorer reasoning. We analyze the effect of increased transparency in the case of a rare natural experiment involving the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). In 1994 the FOMC began the delayed public releas…
After Dodd-Frank: Ideas and the Post-Enactment Politics of Financial Reform in the United States
The financial crisis of 2008 raised the politics of regulation to a new level of practical and scholarly attention. We find that recent reforms in U.S. financial markets hinge on intellectual resources and new organizational actors that are missing from existing concepts of regulatory capture or business power. In particular, small advocacy groups have proven significantly more successful in opposing the financial services industry than existing …
The Contemporary Presidency: Do Presidential Memo Orders Substitute for Executive Orders? New Data
We describe and implement a text‐search strategy for reliably identifying, among published presidential documents, orders not titled “executive order” or “proclamation.” Given the inconsistent use of terms and titles in these documents, we refer to them with an umbrella term: “memo orders.” We identify over 1,600 memo orders in the archives of the American Presidency Project (APP) from 1977 to 2012. Drawing on the Federal Register for the same pe…
New Conflicts in the Briefing Room: Using Sentiment Analysis to Evaluate Administration-press Relations from Clinton through Trump
Journalists have argued that the high levels of hostility between President Trump and numerous media outlets have marked a critical juncture in presidential-press relations. This perceived conflict challenges a key expectation of literatures on political media and the presidency: that functional interdependence will encourage presidential administrations to tolerate more aggressive media questioning in an effort to control media messages. We exam…
Political science (20 works) · Economics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Business (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (6 works) · Monetary policy (6 works)