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Judges, Politicians, Bureaucrats

In our unit about judges, politicians, and bureaucrats, both our speaker and our literature discussed the role of public service and how to work cooperatively to accomplish tasks and pass legislation. Specifically, the speaker and the class literature in “Give the People What They Want” and “Thinking About Judicial Behavior” discuss similar ideas about who makes compromises based on seat vulnerability and the use of earmarks, and the importance of public and civic service in changing the course of public policy to benefit your community. The speaker focused on a statistical breakdown of the House of Representatives, dividing conservatives on the far right and liberals on the far left and a group of moderate democrats and a group of moderate republicans. During this discussion, he talked about how certain democrats and republicans force their candidate to undergo a series of litmus tests to prove that they are the most conservative or the most liberal. He further...
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The Public: Protests

The speaker discussed many aspects of public involvement that was both consistent and inconsistant with the readings and class discussion. Her experiences as a campaigner and an organizer shed light on the role of the public and how it effects public policy and government responsiveness. In particular, our speaker addressed the role of violence in protests, establishing legislative priorities, and holding a protests to empower a group and that is neglected and show a display of solidarity, or to empower the organization and its members. In our class discussion, we discussed the role of violence in protests. Our professor, in response to a question posed about the topic, said that violence can be a grey area in which there is never a right or wrong answer. The speaker addressed this point by discussing what could be considered violence. The speaker felt that there is a distinction between tactical violence and senseless violence. She described senseless violence as acts of vi...
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The Public: Speaker 1

            The speaker, the articles and the class discussion covered a wide array of the public's impact on the development of public policy. The greatest overlap in thought was the speaker’s discussion of how polls effect politician’s crafting of legislation and the Washington Post article about the Republican’s decision in Congress to move forward with health care bills, despite being viewed unfavorably by the people. Other agreements between the speaker’s discussion of polling and the class discussion of public opinion existed revealing trends in public engagement and its effect on the creation of public policy.             In the Post article, the authors discuss the Republican leadership’s decision to craft “unpopular” legislation because of their voter’s belief in trustee-style representation, rather than the delegate style representation. Since t...
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Think Tanks

            This week’s speaker highlighted many points of overlap between his experience in the world of think tanks and the academic literature presented in class. In addition to the overlap, he also expanded on the many roles and “idioms” that are found in a think tank to expand its credibility and its influence. The speaker also introduced many new ideas about the strengths and weakness of think tanks that were not mentioned in the readings             Both the literature and the speaker discussed the important niches found within the think tank infrastructure, specifically the scholar, policy aid, entrepreneur and the journalist. Despite the overlap in the categories, the speaker expanded on each of these roles. The speaker expanded on the ideas of the scholar and entrepreneur, stressing there are no “pure” academic scholars as there would be at a un...
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Special Interest Groups

The visit to the interest group provided real life experience and information that forced me to think critically about my view of interest groups and the role they play in American politics. I went into the meeting with a common view of corporate interest groups: a political entity that stops or promotes legislation in accordance with a corporation’s agenda. My perception certainly changed, but I still feel that interest groups, specifically corporate interest groups, are heavily problematic in pushing legislation that does not benefit the majority of people. One of the most interesting things about the visit, was determining how the interest group was similar and different to the definitions and examples that were discussed within academic setting of our class discussions and literature. Most of the similarities I noticed between the group and the literature was the composition of client companies in the interest group. In class, we discussed that interest grou...
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