Term limits, State spending, Budgeting, Institutions,

This article explores how economic downturns shape poverty knowledge. Utilizing a content analysis of 689 articles from three major newspapers from 2006 to 2009, this article examines how the Great Recession has shaped discourses on the meaning and causes of poverty in the United States. I find that contemporary accounts of people in poverty employ a structural/contextual narrative more often than a psychological/moral narrative and focus more on the symbolic, rather than material, aspects of poverty. This study highlights how economic crises create a space for new poverty discourses to emerge that challenge the hegemonic narrative, which stigmatizes and Otherizes people in poverty. However, representations of poverty remain racialized and gendered, as the “new poor” are portrayed as fundamentally different and more deserving of policy action than those who were in poverty prior to the Great Recession.

This article examines the use of the president's pardon power from 1953 to 2000. Two different models are used to describe the pardons process: a presidential model and an agency model. The presidential model takes a top-down approach to the pardons process by viewing the pardon power as a resource that the president can use to advance specific policy goals. In contrast, the agency model views the pardons process as a bottom-up process, with the preferences of officials within the Department of Justice as the key determinant of the number of pardons issued. This article empirically tests both of these models and finds that the president's control over the pardons process is limited by officials within the Justice Department and the actions of past presidents. This is illustrated by an in-depth case study of President Bill Clinton's controversial use of the pardon power.

No abstract