M Stephen Weatherford
Biographic Data
| ID | 955394 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Stephen Weatherford |
| GIVEN NAMES | M Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Weatherford |
| SIGNATURE | WEATHERFORD M S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 730 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Binder, Sarah, and Mark Spindel. The Myth of Independence
Sarah Binder, the doyenne of scholarship on Congress, and Mark Spindel, an investment banker running a Washington, DC-based hedge fund, combine their different vantage points to map the “interdepen
Recognizing the Political in Implementation Research
The widely publicized opposition to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is in marked contrast to its relatively uncontroversial development and adoption—a contrast that points to the importance of understanding how the politics of enactment differs from the politics of implementation. In this article, we draw on the research literatures on enactment, implementation, and policy feedback to outline the reasons that the poli…
The Eisenhower Transition
Eisenhower is credited with steering a course between ideological extremes, his “presidency of consolidation” implying that his economic policy traced a smooth, unitary path. Instead, I argue that his is a twofold legacy. Eisenhower's most frequently cited actions, such as modifying Social Security and unemployment insurance, involved moderating the pace but maintaining the direction of past policy. But in relation to the New Deal labor policy re…
The President, the F ed, and the Financial Crisis
The active role of the F ederal R eserve ( F ed) in responding to the financial crisis has provoked questions not only about its policies' economic wisdom but also about the political significance of the F ed's exercise of expanded power. This article places the F ed's actions into perspective, framing three counterfactuals that yield different vantage points on the key question: Have the F ed's actions in the financial crisis and beyond amounted…
Evidence Use and the Common Core State Standards Movement
Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other types of evidence. By drawing on elite interviews, we find that CCSS promoters and developers used e…
Organized Interests and the Common Core
Among the notable aspects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the diverse array of interest groups supporting them. These organizations must now apply the strategies they used so effectively in advancing the Common Core to stem mounting opposition to it. This article draws on theories of political and policy learning and interviews with major participants to examine the role that CCSS supporters have played in developing and implementing…
The Wages of Competence
The financial crisis, the deep recession, and the Democrats' huge losses in the 2010 midterm election, have focused attention on President Barack Obama's economic policy leadership and the framing of the economy as a campaign issue. In this article, I evaluate three alternative explanations for the Democrats' showing on the economy: the severity of the financial meltdown and the resulting recession; the president's key economic initiatives, the s…
Advancing a Social Policy Agenda through Economic Policy
In using parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a down payment on an ambitious education reform agenda, Barack Obama has accomplished what few others presidents have. The strategy has given his administration three distinct advantages: a large discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on the president s agenda; and the ability…
The Age of Deficits
Crafting an Education Reform Agenda Through Economic Stimulus Policy
The economic stimulus enacted during President Obama's initial weeks included a down payment on his ambitious education reform agenda. By combining short-term policy with reform, the strategy gained his administration three advantages: a discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on his agenda; and the ability to shape the national reform disc…
Comparing Presidents' Economic Policy Leadership
Presidents are rightly held responsible for managing the national economy—they exercise substantial discretion over fiscal policy and have the potential for informally influencing monetary policy. At the same time, presidential accomplishments are circumscribed by market forces and institutions at home and overseas, and the complexities of fragmented authority and external constraints make judging performance difficult. I draw on the literature o…
Public Opinion and Foreign Policy
Do presidents incorporate the preferences of the public into their foreign policy decisions? Previous scholarship has begun to sketch out the sources of variation in the policy–public opinion linkage, but we still lack a clear understanding of the factors that increase or decrease presidential responsiveness. To better explore the relationship, we conceptualize presidential foreign policy making as a five-stage process—problem representation, opt…
Ronald Reagan as Legislative Advocate
Scholars and popular commentators agree that the economic policy initiatives of President Reagan's first two years left a legacy that altered the role of government and circumscribed the opportunities of his successors. But the consensus fades when it comes to assessing the role of the president himself. Can Reagan be credited not only with framing and publicizing the ideas but also with personally advocating them in the legislative process? Or d…
Presidential Leadership and Ideological Consistency
In his influential 1968 biography, Arthur Larson suggested that President Eisenhower's beliefs and commitments underwent a far-reaching transformation as his experience at managing the economy matured. The “modern Republican” of the 1952 campaign had, by 1958, abandoned the aspiration toward an enlightened but restrained liberalism, and set his course by the sort of inflexible conservative policies associated with the Republican Old Guard
After the Critical Election
The concept of critical realignment has shaped much of the thinking of political scientists and historians about the processes and patterns of change in American politics. Research on re-alignment has, however, tended to focus on successful cases and to concentrate on the electoral breakpoints rather than the process of regime formation, with the result that little systematic thinking has been devoted to the question of why some electoral upheava…
Thinking About Economic Interests
Clinton and the Economy
M. STEPHEN WEATHERFORD is professor of political science and chair of the department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. LORRAINE M. McDONNELL is professor of political science and education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is part of a larger project on presidential leadership in economic policy. Their most recent published work is “Ideology and Economic Policy in the Reagan Years” in Looking Back on the R…
Tax Policy and Presidential Leadership
How do “ideas” help to account for political outcomes? The age-old question of the role of ideas has been given new life recently, partly in response to the imposing structure of theory that has been built around economic or rational choice explanations, with their emphasis on interests and material circumstances rather than ideas. Few outside of the most abstract economic model-builders hold that ideas have no impact on policies, but there is li…
Crime, policing and the perception of neighborhood safety
The Puzzle of Presidential Leadership
Political science can offer few theoretical generalizations about the exercise of presidential power. From one perspective, this is no disadvantage: there are few presidents, and presidential leadership so intrinsically involves the interplay of ideas and persuasive deliberation that success depends on personal traits and the fit of the president's ideas with the times. Striving for inductive generalizations in such a case would mistake rote scie…
Responsiveness and Deliberation in Divided Government
At the heart of the puzzle of representation is the responsibility to construct policy that both responds to the separatist pull of local constituencies and meets the republican aspiration that government leaders define and promote common interests. The difficulty of balancing responsiveness and deliberation is heightened by divided government, where pursuing a competitive course leads to stalemate, while compromising too readily threatens to und…
Measuring Political Legitimacy
Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an en…
Mapping the Ties That Bind
any of the most worthwhile theoretical and methodological challenges social scientists face spring from phenomena that link different levels of aggregation. For some concepts, the system-level manifestation is the summation of properties of individuals aggregate demand for a product or district partisanship, for instance. For these, the challenge is in properly formulating the aggregation rule that produces the social choice. The difficulty of th…
Domestic adjustment to international shocks in Japan and the United States
Economic interdependence complicates domestic policymaking by interposing the decisions of foreigners in the loop that links policy instrument settings to economic outcomes. Nowhere was this vulnerability to external decisions demonstrated more forcefully—even for the world's major economies—than by the energy supply shocks of 1973 and 1979. The oil shocks posed challenges that offer unusual insight into the way nations choose policies: their sev…
The international economy as a constraint on U. S. macroeconomic policymaking
International economic factors increasingly influence American trade and exchange policy, and interdependence also circumscribes the autonomous choice of domestic policies. But the growing concern of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) policymakers over the potential for macroeconomic policy coordination to enhance national as well as world welfare implies that international economic relations present opportunities rather…
Measuring Political Legitimacy
Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an en…
Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes
Politicians and journalists appreciate the fact that economic conditions are politically important because voters punish national administrations for bad macroeconomic policy performance. Nevertheless, scholars have been divided over the question whether economic conditions affect voters' choices of candidates in elections. The weight of results from aggregate studies suggests that economic downturns do have political costs but research at this l…
How does government performance influence political support
Economic Voting and the "Symbolic Politics" Argument
Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of "symbolic" preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the d…
Economic ‘Stagflation’ and Public Support for the Political System
Declining trust in politicians and political institutions is one of the most dramatic and well-documented trends in American public opinion. Confidence in religious, educational and other institutions has also waned, but emphasis has focused on diminished political trust, both because it may summarize a wide range of diffuse grievances and because it might indicate an increased potential for disruptive action, political violence and instability. …
Interpersonal Networks and Political Behavior
The social context of political decision making is a critical component of explanations of political behavior. Little research, however, has focused on direct observation of the social circles that transmit political information and influence. This paper describes local, neighborhood-based social networks as influences on individual political attitudes. I propose and estimate models of the sources and impacts of interpersonal networks in the mass…
Public Opinion and Foreign Policy
Do presidents incorporate the preferences of the public into their foreign policy decisions? Previous scholarship has begun to sketch out the sources of variation in the policy–public opinion linkage, but we still lack a clear understanding of the factors that increase or decrease presidential responsiveness. To better explore the relationship, we conceptualize presidential foreign policy making as a five-stage process—problem representation, opt…
Evaluating Economic Policy
Previous research on economic voting has focused on the link between economic policy attitudes and candidate choice, taking the existence and formation of policy evaluations for granted. Arguments about the appropriateness of electoral control over economic policymaking, however, implicate directly the sources and the quality of those issue opinions. This research investigates the way in which policy evaluations on macroeconomic management are fo…
Organized Interests and the Common Core
Among the notable aspects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the diverse array of interest groups supporting them. These organizations must now apply the strategies they used so effectively in advancing the Common Core to stem mounting opposition to it. This article draws on theories of political and policy learning and interviews with major participants to examine the role that CCSS supporters have played in developing and implementing…
Mapping the Ties That Bind
any of the most worthwhile theoretical and methodological challenges social scientists face spring from phenomena that link different levels of aggregation. For some concepts, the system-level manifestation is the summation of properties of individuals aggregate demand for a product or district partisanship, for instance. For these, the challenge is in properly formulating the aggregation rule that produces the social choice. The difficulty of th…
Evidence Use and the Common Core State Standards Movement
Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other types of evidence. By drawing on elite interviews, we find that CCSS promoters and developers used e…
Responsiveness and Deliberation in Divided Government
At the heart of the puzzle of representation is the responsibility to construct policy that both responds to the separatist pull of local constituencies and meets the republican aspiration that government leaders define and promote common interests. The difficulty of balancing responsiveness and deliberation is heightened by divided government, where pursuing a competitive course leads to stalemate, while compromising too readily threatens to und…
The Interplay of Ideology and Advice in Economic Policy-Making
Political business cycle models propose an attractive rationale for presidents to manipulate the economy: it is a way to win votes. But there is little empirical support for the hypothesis. The problem with positing that vote maximization leads to political business cycles is clear: the incentive is universal; the facilitating economic and political conditions occur frequently; but the outcome occurs seldom. Why is it that only some presidents re…
Recessions and social classes
Recognizing the Political in Implementation Research
The widely publicized opposition to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is in marked contrast to its relatively uncontroversial development and adoption—a contrast that points to the importance of understanding how the politics of enactment differs from the politics of implementation. In this article, we draw on the research literatures on enactment, implementation, and policy feedback to outline the reasons that the poli…
After the Critical Election
The concept of critical realignment has shaped much of the thinking of political scientists and historians about the processes and patterns of change in American politics. Research on re-alignment has, however, tended to focus on successful cases and to concentrate on the electoral breakpoints rather than the process of regime formation, with the result that little systematic thinking has been devoted to the question of why some electoral upheava…
Thinking About Economic Interests
The Politics of School Busing
Tax Policy and Presidential Leadership
How do “ideas” help to account for political outcomes? The age-old question of the role of ideas has been given new life recently, partly in response to the imposing structure of theory that has been built around economic or rational choice explanations, with their emphasis on interests and material circumstances rather than ideas. Few outside of the most abstract economic model-builders hold that ideas have no impact on policies, but there is li…
Reciprocal causation in a model of the vote
The Eisenhower Transition
Eisenhower is credited with steering a course between ideological extremes, his “presidency of consolidation” implying that his economic policy traced a smooth, unitary path. Instead, I argue that his is a twofold legacy. Eisenhower's most frequently cited actions, such as modifying Social Security and unemployment insurance, involved moderating the pace but maintaining the direction of past policy. But in relation to the New Deal labor policy re…
The Wages of Competence
The financial crisis, the deep recession, and the Democrats' huge losses in the 2010 midterm election, have focused attention on President Barack Obama's economic policy leadership and the framing of the economy as a campaign issue. In this article, I evaluate three alternative explanations for the Democrats' showing on the economy: the severity of the financial meltdown and the resulting recession; the president's key economic initiatives, the s…
Crafting an Education Reform Agenda Through Economic Stimulus Policy
The economic stimulus enacted during President Obama's initial weeks included a down payment on his ambitious education reform agenda. By combining short-term policy with reform, the strategy gained his administration three advantages: a discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on his agenda; and the ability to shape the national reform disc…
Crime, policing and the perception of neighborhood safety
A Time of Turmoil
Errata: In Table 2.13, p. 57, the percent leaning Republican is 8%, not 11% In Table 5.17, p. 133, the election year should be 1976, not 1972 In Table 5.4, p. 148, the election year is 1976, not 1979
Tolerating Political Dissent
Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes
Politicians and journalists appreciate the fact that economic conditions are politically important because voters punish national administrations for bad macroeconomic policy performance. Nevertheless, scholars have been divided over the question whether economic conditions affect voters' choices of candidates in elections. The weight of results from aggregate studies suggests that economic downturns do have political costs but research at this l…
The Politics of School Busing
Recessions and social classes
Interpersonal Networks and Political Behavior
The social context of political decision making is a critical component of explanations of political behavior. Little research, however, has focused on direct observation of the social circles that transmit political information and influence. This paper describes local, neighborhood-based social networks as influences on individual political attitudes. I propose and estimate models of the sources and impacts of interpersonal networks in the mass…
Evaluating Economic Policy
Previous research on economic voting has focused on the link between economic policy attitudes and candidate choice, taking the existence and formation of policy evaluations for granted. Arguments about the appropriateness of electoral control over economic policymaking, however, implicate directly the sources and the quality of those issue opinions. This research investigates the way in which policy evaluations on macroeconomic management are fo…
Reciprocal causation in a model of the vote
Economic Voting and the "Symbolic Politics" Argument
Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of "symbolic" preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the d…
A Time of Turmoil
Errata: In Table 2.13, p. 57, the percent leaning Republican is 8%, not 11% In Table 5.17, p. 133, the election year should be 1976, not 1972 In Table 5.4, p. 148, the election year is 1976, not 1979
The Role of Presidential Ideology in Economic Policymaking
Economic ‘Stagflation’ and Public Support for the Political System
Declining trust in politicians and political institutions is one of the most dramatic and well-documented trends in American public opinion. Confidence in religious, educational and other institutions has also waned, but emphasis has focused on diminished political trust, both because it may summarize a wide range of diffuse grievances and because it might indicate an increased potential for disruptive action, political violence and instability. …
The Interplay of Ideology and Advice in Economic Policy-Making
Political business cycle models propose an attractive rationale for presidents to manipulate the economy: it is a way to win votes. But there is little empirical support for the hypothesis. The problem with positing that vote maximization leads to political business cycles is clear: the incentive is universal; the facilitating economic and political conditions occur frequently; but the outcome occurs seldom. Why is it that only some presidents re…
How does government performance influence political support
The international economy as a constraint on U. S. macroeconomic policymaking
International economic factors increasingly influence American trade and exchange policy, and interdependence also circumscribes the autonomous choice of domestic policies. But the growing concern of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) policymakers over the potential for macroeconomic policy coordination to enhance national as well as world welfare implies that international economic relations present opportunities rather…
Domestic adjustment to international shocks in Japan and the United States
Economic interdependence complicates domestic policymaking by interposing the decisions of foreigners in the loop that links policy instrument settings to economic outcomes. Nowhere was this vulnerability to external decisions demonstrated more forcefully—even for the world's major economies—than by the energy supply shocks of 1973 and 1979. The oil shocks posed challenges that offer unusual insight into the way nations choose policies: their sev…
Mapping the Ties That Bind
any of the most worthwhile theoretical and methodological challenges social scientists face spring from phenomena that link different levels of aggregation. For some concepts, the system-level manifestation is the summation of properties of individuals aggregate demand for a product or district partisanship, for instance. For these, the challenge is in properly formulating the aggregation rule that produces the social choice. The difficulty of th…
Measuring Political Legitimacy
Political legitimacy is a key concept in both macro and micro theories. Pioneers in survey-based research on alienation and system support envisioned addressing macro questions about legitimacy with the sophisticated empiricism of individual-level methodology but failed; and a succession of innovations in item wording and questionnaire construction only led to an excessive concern with measurement issues at the individual level. I return to an en…
The Puzzle of Presidential Leadership
Political science can offer few theoretical generalizations about the exercise of presidential power. From one perspective, this is no disadvantage: there are few presidents, and presidential leadership so intrinsically involves the interplay of ideas and persuasive deliberation that success depends on personal traits and the fit of the president's ideas with the times. Striving for inductive generalizations in such a case would mistake rote scie…
Responsiveness and Deliberation in Divided Government
At the heart of the puzzle of representation is the responsibility to construct policy that both responds to the separatist pull of local constituencies and meets the republican aspiration that government leaders define and promote common interests. The difficulty of balancing responsiveness and deliberation is heightened by divided government, where pursuing a competitive course leads to stalemate, while compromising too readily threatens to und…
Tax Policy and Presidential Leadership
How do “ideas” help to account for political outcomes? The age-old question of the role of ideas has been given new life recently, partly in response to the imposing structure of theory that has been built around economic or rational choice explanations, with their emphasis on interests and material circumstances rather than ideas. Few outside of the most abstract economic model-builders hold that ideas have no impact on policies, but there is li…
Crime, policing and the perception of neighborhood safety
Clinton and the Economy
M. STEPHEN WEATHERFORD is professor of political science and chair of the department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. LORRAINE M. McDONNELL is professor of political science and education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is part of a larger project on presidential leadership in economic policy. Their most recent published work is “Ideology and Economic Policy in the Reagan Years” in Looking Back on the R…
Thinking About Economic Interests
Presidential Leadership and Ideological Consistency
In his influential 1968 biography, Arthur Larson suggested that President Eisenhower's beliefs and commitments underwent a far-reaching transformation as his experience at managing the economy matured. The “modern Republican” of the 1952 campaign had, by 1958, abandoned the aspiration toward an enlightened but restrained liberalism, and set his course by the sort of inflexible conservative policies associated with the Republican Old Guard
After the Critical Election
The concept of critical realignment has shaped much of the thinking of political scientists and historians about the processes and patterns of change in American politics. Research on re-alignment has, however, tended to focus on successful cases and to concentrate on the electoral breakpoints rather than the process of regime formation, with the result that little systematic thinking has been devoted to the question of why some electoral upheava…
Political science (38 works) · Politics (36 works) · Law (32 works) · Law (29 works) · Economics (23 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Public Administration (17 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (15 works)