No abstract

In an age of diminished resources for higher education, the ranking of programs takes on special significance, particularly for programs that rate poorly in the eyes of their peers. Before cost-conscious administrators use the apparent precision of the National Research Council's 1995 ratings to justify rewarding highly rated programs, and penalizing those that fared less well, an analysis of the factors that contribute to ratings success—particularly department size—draws attention to the importance of factors that lie outside the range of departmental control.Our motivation is only partly ‘academic’. As members of a faculty that rated poorly in this exercise (UB political science ranked 72nd out of the 98 programs surveyed on faculty quality and tied for 48th on “effectiveness”), we have a special interest in reminding our colleagues, and especially our administrators, that our less-than-stellar performance reflects a variety of considerations, only some of which are our “fault.”Rating academic departments as the NRC has done by relying on peer perceptions (nearly 8,000 graduate-faculty members participated in the ratings survey) involves tapping into a complex set of social processes that are not easily measured. However, we contend that the outcome of this process can be modeled successfully and parsimoniously with a six-variable model of the “determinants of ratings success.” We estimate the parameters of this six-variable model in this article, and show that the most statistically robust and important predictor of ratings success—department size—reflects a characteristic of departments that is beyond their control, and has no direct bearing on the quality of the members of the departments concerned, while a second important indicator—the proportion of full professors—is at least in part similarly beyond departmental control. Our confidence that this model taps central features in the ratings game is enhanced by the consistency of its performance in explaining the ratings of other social science departments.

A recent political anthropology argues that the character of Canadian parties' constituency election campaigns is largely determined by the nature of their local associations' nomination politics, as shaped by the electoral appeal of the constituencies in which it takes place. Three characteristics of the nomination process define a model that suggests there are only four basic types of candidate in Canadian elections, each producing a distinctive campaign organization and style in terms of both constituency activity and the integration of the local campaign with that of its national party. In this article, we use the data from a national survey of local associations of the national parties to explore the applicability of the proposed typology and test hypothesized party organizational and campaign relationships that flow from this theory of local campaign politics.

Recent studies of the effects of campaign spending by political parties and candidates at elections in Canada and elsewhere have established the importance of local constituency campaigns. However, particular claims to measure the effects of campaign spending on the vote have been questioned on methodological grounds. This article revisits the question of whether local spending matters in Canadian federal elections. Responding to some criticisms of earlier work, this analysis presents the results of two parallel regression analyses (the first employing two–stage least squares estimation, the second using three–stage least squares techniques) of the effects of local spending in the 1993 and 1997 elections. The results offer strong confirmation that comparatively greater local spending by candidates enhances their vote shares, and diminishes that of rivals, albeit to different degrees for different parties and elections.

This article explores the impact of the partisan homogeneity/heterogeneity of a variety of group environments on patterns of voter turnout for recent presidential elections in Erie County, New York. Copyright (c) 2007 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.