Paul J Quirk
Biographic Data
| ID | 706184 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul J Quirk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul J |
| FAMILY NAME | Quirk |
| SIGNATURE | QUIRK P J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-3483-5057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1191 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Having Their Say
As studies using macrolevel evidence have shown, citizens are more satisfied with democracy when they feel that their instrumental preferences are represented in government, and this feeling is more likely in nonmajoritarian institutional contexts. Scholars have given less attention to whether such institutions also increase satisfaction by providing more inclusive political discourse. Citizens may value having their voice represented in politics…
Division at the Water’s Edge
Severe party conflict, not a high-minded suspension of politics, now prevails “at the water’s edge.” Democrats and Republicans fight pitched battles over foreign affairs. But are the two parties polarized in their substantive preferences on foreign policy, or mainly jockeying for partisan advantage? Are they polarized on foreign policy less sharply than on domestic policy? What are the sources of party polarization over foreign policy? Using a ne…
Deliberating Surveillance Policy
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Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Making it up on Volume
Hélène Landemore's Democratic Reason offers a new justification for democracy and for broad-based citizen participation, appealing to the “emergent” intelligence of large, diverse groups. She argues that ordinary citizens should rule as directly as possible because they will make better informed, more intelligent decisions than, for example, appointed officials, councils of experts, or even elected representatives. The foundation of this conclusi…
Lessons and Issues
A House Dividing
Polarized Populism
Scholars offer differing accounts of the roles played by political elites, on the one hand, and ordinary citizens, on the other, in the highly polarized partisan conflict of contemporary American politics. Some take polarized elite conflict to indicate, in itself, that elected policymakers have escaped the constraints of democratic control and act essentially independently. In sharp contrast to this view, I outline a case for the importance of wh…
The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences, Jason Kaufman, Cambridge MA
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Rhetoric and Reality
Political science has recently devoted some attention to the study of legislative deliberation. But it has reached no consensus about the basic concepts and approaches for investigating such deliberation. We identify four distinct normative perspectives in the legislative deliberation literature, and give particular attention to two of them—one that focuses on a debate's compliance with expectations of discourse ethics, and one that focuses on th…
Politicians Do Pander
The capabilities of the American state sometimes depend on the ability of policy-makers to act autonomously, on the basis of their own preferences and beliefs, in ways that serve broad societal and state interests but lack support from powerful constituencies. In a highly acclaimed book on the politics of health care reform in the Clinton administration, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000) argue that "politicians don't pander." Rather, they do indeed act o…
The Trouble With Experts
In his justly celebrated Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock evaluates the judgment of economic and political experts by rigorously testing their ability to make accurate predictions. He finds that ability profoundly limited, implying that expert judgment is virtually useless, if not worse. He concludes by proposing a project that would seek to improve experts' performance by holding them publicly accountable for their claims. But Tetloc…
Roundtable 2
Putting Experts in Their Place
Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter turns, in two contrasting ways, on the role of experts. On the one hand, Caplan uses the opinions of economists as a benchmark for identifying error in public opinion, finding such error systematic and pervasive. On the other hand, in considering remedies, he largely discounts the ability of policymakers to use expert advice and their own expertise to resist misguided public pressure. Although Caplan’…
The Contemporary Presidency
The George W. Bush administration has aggressively advanced claims of presidential supremacy in American government. We use data from surveys to explore the reactions to these claims on the part of three groups of governmental elites and the general public. Responses are shaped by partisanship and ideology, which overwhelm institutional loyalties. Democrats are generally unified in opposing practices that expand presidential power beyond establis…
Same Facts, Different Interpretations
Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world condition…
When the President Speaks, How Do the People Respond
Tulis’s critique of popular presidential leadership raises several questions about public opinion: Do modern, rhetorically inclined presidents influence the public? What types of presidential rhetoric might, in principle, mislead or manipulate the public? And is the net result that the people are led into error and distortion in their policy opinions? The public‐opinion literature, which has assiduously documented the public’s ignorance about pol…
Lester G. Seligman
Lester G. Seligman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, died November 2, 2004, in Urbana, Illinois. He had a distinguished academic career, making major contributions to the study of political leadership and especially the U.S. presidency, and played a leadership role in the profession as well. He was widely admired, not only for the excellence of his teaching and research, but also for his i…
The Logic of the Survey Experiment Reexamined
Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experiments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identify problems of inference associated with typical uses of survey experime…
Conceptual Foundations of Citizen Competence
The Political Environment and Citizen Competence
care reform, we find that performance depends heavily on environmental conditions. A combination of general information with increased motivation to act responsibly improves aggregate performance. An extremely favorable environment not only enhances performance, but it even eliminates the effects of individual differences in education and political sophistication. The analysis points toward reforming structures that shape the political environmen…
Reconsidering the Rational Public
There has been a marked change in the way political scientists think about the American citizenry. Beginning with the advent of survey research in the 1940s, students of public opinion took a dim view of citizens' political capabilities. Consistently finding a public profoundly lacking in political knowledge and sophistication, they became skeptical of the individual citizen's ability to make intelligent political decisions or to participate effe…
Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, wide-spread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are fa…
The Rising Hegemony of Mass Opinion
The Founding Fathers warned about the dangers of an “excess of democracy” and designed the Constitution in large part with a view toward preventing it. Judging from most commentary on American politics, with respect to most of the intervening two hundred years, they need't have worried: The mass public has only occasionally been a dominant force in national policy making. Elites, although often responding to broad public concerns, have usually de…
Just the Facts, Ma'am”
An important dimension of the future of fact is the status of political facts in research on public opinion. Analyzing the public's factual knowledge about public policy is central to addressing citizen competence yet more problematic than scholars have acknowledged. To show this, the authors first summarize a study of theirs that uses typical measures of citizens' information. In a survey of Illinois citizens, they measured factual perceptions a…
Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, wide-spread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are fa…
Same Facts, Different Interpretations
Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world condition…
The Logic of the Survey Experiment Reexamined
Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experiments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identify problems of inference associated with typical uses of survey experime…
The Political Environment and Citizen Competence
care reform, we find that performance depends heavily on environmental conditions. A combination of general information with increased motivation to act responsibly improves aggregate performance. An extremely favorable environment not only enhances performance, but it even eliminates the effects of individual differences in education and political sophistication. The analysis points toward reforming structures that shape the political environmen…
Conceptual Foundations of Citizen Competence
Just the Facts, Ma'am”
An important dimension of the future of fact is the status of political facts in research on public opinion. Analyzing the public's factual knowledge about public policy is central to addressing citizen competence yet more problematic than scholars have acknowledged. To show this, the authors first summarize a study of theirs that uses typical measures of citizens' information. In a survey of Illinois citizens, they measured factual perceptions a…
Having Their Say
As studies using macrolevel evidence have shown, citizens are more satisfied with democracy when they feel that their instrumental preferences are represented in government, and this feeling is more likely in nonmajoritarian institutional contexts. Scholars have given less attention to whether such institutions also increase satisfaction by providing more inclusive political discourse. Citizens may value having their voice represented in politics…
In Defense of the Politics of Ideas
Economic change played a major role in certain cases of pro-competitive deregulation. Nevertheless, the evidence of the cases tends to refute the economic theory of regulation. An adequate account of deregulation--or theory of policy-making--must incorporate the politics of ideas
The Cooperative Resolution of Policy Conflict
I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several…
Making it up on Volume
Hélène Landemore's Democratic Reason offers a new justification for democracy and for broad-based citizen participation, appealing to the “emergent” intelligence of large, diverse groups. She argues that ordinary citizens should rule as directly as possible because they will make better informed, more intelligent decisions than, for example, appointed officials, councils of experts, or even elected representatives. The foundation of this conclusi…
Division at the Water’s Edge
Severe party conflict, not a high-minded suspension of politics, now prevails “at the water’s edge.” Democrats and Republicans fight pitched battles over foreign affairs. But are the two parties polarized in their substantive preferences on foreign policy, or mainly jockeying for partisan advantage? Are they polarized on foreign policy less sharply than on domestic policy? What are the sources of party polarization over foreign policy? Using a ne…
The Trouble With Experts
In his justly celebrated Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock evaluates the judgment of economic and political experts by rigorously testing their ability to make accurate predictions. He finds that ability profoundly limited, implying that expert judgment is virtually useless, if not worse. He concludes by proposing a project that would seek to improve experts' performance by holding them publicly accountable for their claims. But Tetloc…
The Contemporary Presidency
The George W. Bush administration has aggressively advanced claims of presidential supremacy in American government. We use data from surveys to explore the reactions to these claims on the part of three groups of governmental elites and the general public. Responses are shaped by partisanship and ideology, which overwhelm institutional loyalties. Democrats are generally unified in opposing practices that expand presidential power beyond establis…
The Rising Hegemony of Mass Opinion
The Founding Fathers warned about the dangers of an “excess of democracy” and designed the Constitution in large part with a view toward preventing it. Judging from most commentary on American politics, with respect to most of the intervening two hundred years, they need't have worried: The mass public has only occasionally been a dominant force in national policy making. Elites, although often responding to broad public concerns, have usually de…
Putting Experts in Their Place
Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter turns, in two contrasting ways, on the role of experts. On the one hand, Caplan uses the opinions of economists as a benchmark for identifying error in public opinion, finding such error systematic and pervasive. On the other hand, in considering remedies, he largely discounts the ability of policymakers to use expert advice and their own expertise to resist misguided public pressure. Although Caplan’…
What must a president know
A House Dividing
When the President Speaks, How Do the People Respond
Tulis’s critique of popular presidential leadership raises several questions about public opinion: Do modern, rhetorically inclined presidents influence the public? What types of presidential rhetoric might, in principle, mislead or manipulate the public? And is the net result that the people are led into error and distortion in their policy opinions? The public‐opinion literature, which has assiduously documented the public’s ignorance about pol…
Deregulation and the State in Comparative Perspective
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Politicians Do Pander
The capabilities of the American state sometimes depend on the ability of policy-makers to act autonomously, on the basis of their own preferences and beliefs, in ways that serve broad societal and state interests but lack support from powerful constituencies. In a highly acclaimed book on the politics of health care reform in the Clinton administration, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000) argue that "politicians don't pander." Rather, they do indeed act o…
Roundtable 2
Evaluating Congressional Reform
An evaluation of the changes in Congress's structure that occurred in the 1970s requires attention to three dimensions of its performance as a policymaking institution: representation of interests, deliberation, and conflict resolution. Considered this way, the changes seem to have enhanced some aspects of congressional capacity (especially the representation of broadly-based interests) but to have diminished others (especially deliberation and c…
Bureaucratic Discretion
What must a president know
The Dynamics of Deregulation
Political Innovation in America
Bureaucratic Discretion
In Defense of the Politics of Ideas
Economic change played a major role in certain cases of pro-competitive deregulation. Nevertheless, the evidence of the cases tends to refute the economic theory of regulation. An adequate account of deregulation--or theory of policy-making--must incorporate the politics of ideas
Deregulation and the State in Comparative Perspective
The Cooperative Resolution of Policy Conflict
I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several…
Democratic Politics and Policy Analysis
Democratic politics and policy analysis: harmony or tension? Part One: The policy analysis paradigm. The threats of policy analysis. Part Two: Analysis in practice - contexts and roles. Adversarial analysis of U.S. Oil export policy. Analysis as a component of the policy process. Part Three: Policy analysis and democratic politics. Bibliography
Evaluating Congressional Reform
An evaluation of the changes in Congress's structure that occurred in the 1970s requires attention to three dimensions of its performance as a policymaking institution: representation of interests, deliberation, and conflict resolution. Considered this way, the changes seem to have enhanced some aspects of congressional capacity (especially the representation of broadly-based interests) but to have diminished others (especially deliberation and c…
Do Institutions Matter? Government Capabilities in the United States and Abroad. R. Kent Weaver , Bert A. Rockman
The Rising Hegemony of Mass Opinion
The Founding Fathers warned about the dangers of an “excess of democracy” and designed the Constitution in large part with a view toward preventing it. Judging from most commentary on American politics, with respect to most of the intervening two hundred years, they need't have worried: The mass public has only occasionally been a dominant force in national policy making. Elites, although often responding to broad public concerns, have usually de…
Just the Facts, Ma'am”
An important dimension of the future of fact is the status of political facts in research on public opinion. Analyzing the public's factual knowledge about public policy is central to addressing citizen competence yet more problematic than scholars have acknowledged. To show this, the authors first summarize a study of theirs that uses typical measures of citizens' information. In a survey of Illinois citizens, they measured factual perceptions a…
Reconsidering the Rational Public
There has been a marked change in the way political scientists think about the American citizenry. Beginning with the advent of survey research in the 1940s, students of public opinion took a dim view of citizens' political capabilities. Consistently finding a public profoundly lacking in political knowledge and sophistication, they became skeptical of the individual citizen's ability to make intelligent political decisions or to participate effe…
Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, wide-spread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are fa…
Conceptual Foundations of Citizen Competence
The Political Environment and Citizen Competence
care reform, we find that performance depends heavily on environmental conditions. A combination of general information with increased motivation to act responsibly improves aggregate performance. An extremely favorable environment not only enhances performance, but it even eliminates the effects of individual differences in education and political sophistication. The analysis points toward reforming structures that shape the political environmen…
Lester G. Seligman
Lester G. Seligman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, died November 2, 2004, in Urbana, Illinois. He had a distinguished academic career, making major contributions to the study of political leadership and especially the U.S. presidency, and played a leadership role in the profession as well. He was widely admired, not only for the excellence of his teaching and research, but also for his i…
The Logic of the Survey Experiment Reexamined
Scholars of political behavior increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of questionnaire items. Such experiments have major advantages: they are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of making inferences from conventional survey data. But survey experiments are no panacea. We identify problems of inference associated with typical uses of survey experime…
The Contemporary Presidency
The George W. Bush administration has aggressively advanced claims of presidential supremacy in American government. We use data from surveys to explore the reactions to these claims on the part of three groups of governmental elites and the general public. Responses are shaped by partisanship and ideology, which overwhelm institutional loyalties. Democrats are generally unified in opposing practices that expand presidential power beyond establis…
Same Facts, Different Interpretations
Scholars assume that citizens perform better when they know pertinent facts. Factual beliefs, however, become relevant for political judgments only when people interpret them. Interpretations provide opportunities for partisans to rationalize their existing opinions. Using panel studies, we examine whether and how partisans updated factual beliefs, interpretations of beliefs, and opinions about the handling of the Iraq war as real-world condition…
When the President Speaks, How Do the People Respond
Tulis’s critique of popular presidential leadership raises several questions about public opinion: Do modern, rhetorically inclined presidents influence the public? What types of presidential rhetoric might, in principle, mislead or manipulate the public? And is the net result that the people are led into error and distortion in their policy opinions? The public‐opinion literature, which has assiduously documented the public’s ignorance about pol…
Roundtable 2
Putting Experts in Their Place
Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter turns, in two contrasting ways, on the role of experts. On the one hand, Caplan uses the opinions of economists as a benchmark for identifying error in public opinion, finding such error systematic and pervasive. On the other hand, in considering remedies, he largely discounts the ability of policymakers to use expert advice and their own expertise to resist misguided public pressure. Although Caplan’…
Rhetoric and Reality
Political science has recently devoted some attention to the study of legislative deliberation. But it has reached no consensus about the basic concepts and approaches for investigating such deliberation. We identify four distinct normative perspectives in the legislative deliberation literature, and give particular attention to two of them—one that focuses on a debate's compliance with expectations of discourse ethics, and one that focuses on th…
Politicians Do Pander
The capabilities of the American state sometimes depend on the ability of policy-makers to act autonomously, on the basis of their own preferences and beliefs, in ways that serve broad societal and state interests but lack support from powerful constituencies. In a highly acclaimed book on the politics of health care reform in the Clinton administration, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000) argue that "politicians don't pander." Rather, they do indeed act o…
Political science (32 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Democracy (9 works) · Law and economics (9 works)