Statute Midwifery: Nurturing Passage of a State Student Publications Act.
This paper reviews research concerning the attitudes that principals, journalism advisers, high school journalism press association directors, and student editors hold toward student publications, and it reviews research concerning effective political strategies. The study focuses particularly on the strategies employed by supporters of student press legislation in Arkansas, where such legislation, despite the state's politically conservative orientation, was passed finally in 1995. A detailed history of attempts to draft legislation palatable to all parties involved shows how convoluted a process it became. Supporters of the Arkansas Student Publications Act found that it was only by applying information from both surveys of those associated with high school publications and surveys of those involved in the political processes that they were able to draft successful legislation. First, supporters built a wide base of support for their proposed bill. When that base of support seemed about to unravel, they framed the issue in terms all could appreciate and also compromised on some issues. Second, supporters found effective legislative sponsors, all of whom were well-respected Democrats with rural constituencies, and two of whom were experienced legislators who had either media or teaching backgrounds. Third, and perhaps most importantly, supporters negotiated with the opposition before the opposition had a change to mobilize its forces. They managed to convince the opposition that the proposed act was a win-win-win situation for administrators, advisers and students. (Contains 24 references; 5 appendixes contain successive drafts of the bill). (Author/TB) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. *********************************************************************** Statute Midwifery: Nurturing Passage of a State Student Publications Act
The Influence of Issues On Choice of Voting Cues Utilized By State Legislators
HE decision-making process of legislators has been a subject of extensive research. Although most of the early work limited its analy-*sis to Congress, a growing body of literature has explored voting behavior in state legislatures. An innovative modification of the traditional survey design developed by Kingdon (1981) for the analysis of congressional decision making has recently been applied to three state legislatures by David Ray (1982). Kingdon suggested several basic problems with the traditional use of surveys
The Salience of American State Politics
Research emphasizing the correlates of state policy outputs and the performance of particular institutions has overshadowed the role of the citizenry in the drama of state politics. One question of basic concern is the relevance of state government and politics for the inhabitants of a state. At the level of public policy and institutional performance the answer to this is factual and straightforward. The nature, amount, distribution, and to some extent the quality of a state's services and policies can be specified. Since states perform most of the traditional functions of governmental units and since these functions affect the fortunes of the citizens, state politics has an obvious, tangible, objective relevance for a state's inhabitants. At another level, however, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here we are dealing with the idea of what is subjectively relevant. Large numbers of people apparently pass their lives being touched by political institutions in a variety of ways without becoming particularly interested in or involved with these institutions. Other people become intensely, purposively related to these same institutions. Still others fall along a continuum between these two poles. If substantial variations exist in the general salience of politics, there is little reason to doubt that the same conditions may be found in particular subsets of political matters. In the case at hand this subset consists of the cluster of institutions, actors, and processes known as state political systems.