• Campaign Finance Institute
• Conference Call: RCLS
• Congressional Papers Roundtable News
• Dirksen Center Research Awards
• National Conference of State Legislatures News
• National Endowment for Democracy Fellows Program
• Visiting Scholars Program
• Working Papers Web Site for LSS

CFI announces a new disclosure portal now available on their website. The portal’s direct address is http://www.cfinst.org/disc_links/index.html

The portal contains deep links -- not just home pages -- for:

• FEC disclosure by candidates, parties, PACs, soft money, etc.
• IRS disclosure of "527" political committees that do not disclose to the FEC.
• Lobbying disclosure reports under the Lobbying Disclosure and Foreign Agents Registration Act.
• State electronic disclosure websites for the states and some cities.
• Select nongovernmental websites for campaign finance data, issue advertising data, nonprofit organizations' tax filings, federal contractors, and more. 

The Research Committee of Legislative Specialists (RCLS) of the International Political Science Association invites researchers in legislatures and parliaments around the world to propose papers for the forthcoming international conference, "Political Parties, Parliamentary Committees, Parliamentary Leadership and Governance." 

The conference in Istanbul is an opportunity to both explore topics continuing from our previous conferences, and to examine the place and functions of parliaments in the geopolitical regions adjacent to Turkey.  These topics will also lead into IPSA's next Triennial Conference in Durban, South Africa in 2003. The conference is sponsored by the Research Committee of Legislative Specialists of IPSA in conjunction with the Political Science Association of Turkey and Istanbul Bilgi University.

Papers accepted for the conference should contain an abstract, and a bibliography in standard format used in the IPSA Review. Participants should bring 25 copies for distribution.    For purposes of broad dissemination, papers should be written in English or French, the two working languages of IPSA. We will attempt to post the abstracts on a website.

We invite the attention of political scientists and other social scientists, and of members and staff of legislatures from around the world, to the themes of our conference. To indicate your interest in giving a paper or in organizing a panel, please contact Prof. David Olson (dmolson@uncg.edu), a  RCLS co-chair, by November 15, 2001. 

For local information, please contact Dr. Omer Genckaya (Genckaya@bilkent.edu.tr) and see his conference website listed at the top of this notice.

The Ashland University Archives has finished adding the congressional papers of Rep. John M. Ashbrook (R-Ohio) to the university archives website (www.archives.ashland.edu). The site includes photographs and RealAudio files of some of Mr. Ashbrook's speeches. Also found is an overview of his collection.

The Baylor Collections of Political Materials has finished processing the papers of Hyde Murray, Minority Counsel to the House Committee on Agriculture, 1958-1978, which was during the time W. R. "Bob" Poage (D-TX) was vice chairman/chairman of that committee. The BCPM contains 1000 lin. ft. of Poage's papers (www.baylor.edu/~Ben_Rogers/Poage/welcome.html). . . The collection also includes about 4 lin. ft. of materials from Hyde's father, Congressman Reid Murray (R-WI) at www.baylor.edu/Library/BCPM/reidmurray.html.

In April, The Associated Press reported that seven missing cartons, documenting the first ten years of Sen. Frank Church's (D-Id) career were found in storage at a Senate Office Building. The papers include correspondence, memoranda, speeches, news releases, and notes from foreign trips. Church passed away in 1984 at the age of 59 after serving four terms in the Senate (1956-1980). His papers are held at Boise State University Special Collections Department (www.library.boisestate.edu/Special/PARGRAPH/mss56.htm). The Senate Historical office shipped the long-lost boxes to Boise to be added to the rest of the collection.

Layne Library at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, South Dakota, has the Sen. Francis H. Case (R-SD) Collection and the Sen. George S. McGovern (D-SD) Collection. The Case Collection consists of his congressional and senatorial papers from 1936 to 1962, as well as photographs, memorabilia and mementos. . . The McGovern Collection consists of George McGovern's personal collection of photographs, papers, and memorabilia. The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University holds his congressional papers. A finding aid to Layne Library's McGovern Collection currently is available in paper format and will soon be mounted on the library's home page (www.dwu.edu/library/).

Missouri Southern State College has the papers of Congressman Gene Taylor (R-MO). The papers document congressman Taylor's 16 years (1973 to 1989) as Congressman from Missouri's 7th District. The publication for this is The Guide to the Papers of U.S. Congressman Gene Taylor of Missouri, published in 1990. The collection is located in the Archives and Special Collections Department in George Spiva Library at Missouri Southern State College.

The Oklahoma Humanities Council recently granted more than $10,000 to the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma. The funds will enable the center to convert two existing in-house exhibits into traveling exhibits. One of these exhibits is titled "Climbing Capitol Hill and Staying," and it highlights the impact that women have made in transforming national government, especially the U.S. Congress... The other exhibit reviews the life of Carl Albert (1908-2000) and focuses on his role in the House leadership.

The Carl Albert Center announces the availability of an Oral History Project Procedures Manual on the Center's web site (www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/archives/oralhist.htm). 

The Dirksen Congressional Center invites applications for grants to fund research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress. The Center, named for the late Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, is a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to the study of Congress and its leaders. Since 1978, the Congressional Research Awards (formerly the Congressional Research Grants) program has paid out nearly $500,000 to support nearly 275 projects. Applications are accepted at any time, but the deadline is February 1 for the annual selections, which are announced in March.  A total of $50,000 will be available in 2002. 

The competition is open to individuals with a serious interest in studying Congress. Political scientists, historians, biographers, scholars of public administration or American studies, and journalists are among those eligible. The Center encourages graduate studentsto apply and awards a significant portion of the funds for dissertation research. 

The awards program does not fund undergraduate or pre-Ph.D. study. Organizations are not eligible. Research teams of two or more individuals are eligible.  No institutional overhead or indirect costs may be claimed against a Congressional Research Award. 

Detailed information regarding the grants program and the application process can be found on the Dirksen Center's website at http://www.pekin.net/dirksen/grantcongresearchaward.htm

The Joint Project on Term Limits is a cooperative effort among the National Conference of
State Legislatures, the Council of State Governments, the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and a group of legislative scholars. The purpose of the project is to assess the effects of term limits on state legislatures and identify successful approaches for dealing with them. 

This joint project among three national organizations of state legislators and a group of
legislative scholars is a unique collaborative effort. Not only is it the first time the three national organizations have undertaken a joint project, it is also the first time that legislative scholars and the users of legislative research have joined together to identify a priority research topic and collaborate on carrying it out. The scholars and the national organizations hope that this project is a model for future mutually beneficial research.

The project will combine three different methods to study term limits: a demographic database on the characteristics of all state legislators; a national survey of all state legislators based on a survey instrument first developed and administered in 1995 by John Carey, Richard Niemi and Lynda Powell before term limits had taken full effect; and in-depth case studies of six term-limited legislatures and a control group of three non-term-limited legislatures. A legislative scholar will be paired with a staff person from one of the three national organizations to conduct the case study in each of the nine states.  The project team has selected Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Maine and Ohio as the case study states, recruited political scientists as investigators in each of those states and held a planning meeting to coordinate the work in each of the case study states.  The control group of three non-term-limited legislatures will be selected at the end of 2002.

A complete description of the project and a list of the project participants can be found at http://www.ncsl.org/programs/legman/aBOUT/jtproject.htm (click through the first screen as a “public user”).

NCSL has developed a list of legislative internship programs and contacts and has begun to offer services to the coordinators of these programs.  The list of programs can be found on the menu page of NCSL’s Trust for Representative Democracy at http://www.ncsl.org/public/civiced.htm (click through the first screen as a “public user”).  Political scientists who coordinate state legislative internship programs in their states are urged to check this list, report any missing information and sign up to participate on the legislative internship coordinator listserve.  The internship coordinators who work for legislatures have held programs at each of the last two NCSL annual meetings, and faculty coordinators are invited to join them.  The next NCSL annual meeting is in Denver, July 22-28, 2002.

NCSL’s short book, The Case for Representative Democracy, is designed to take on cynical public attitudes toward the legislative process and to offer an alternative, more positive perspective on Congress and state legislatures.  One of the reasons that the authors, Alan Rosenthal, Karl Kurtz, John Hibbing, and Burdett Loomis, decided to write this book was their belief that legislative scholars have a much more positive view of American legislatures than do the media or the general public.  NCSL has tested this supposition with an online survey of public attitudes toward legislatures. 

The survey measures attitudes on a scale that ranges from a distrustful view of legislatures to a trustful one on six different dimensions that match the principal issues raised by The Case for Representative Democracy.  Political scientists were asked to respond to the survey through a solicitation on the Statepol listserve.  Out of a total of 1,643 respondents to the survey, 60 (4 percent) identify themselves as political scientists.
 
 

Trust in Representative Democracy by Occupation
	Legislators		Staff		Other Govt		Lobbyist		Media		Educator		Student		Public		Pol Sci
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Very Trustful	119	75	129	40	21	40	24	19	11	18	53	30	103	23	35	15	28	47
Moderately Trustful	29	18	115	36	32	36	28	29	21	34	65	37	169	38	69	29	21	35
In-between	9	6	62	19	34	19	8	31	22	35	43	25	137	31	57	24	8	13
Moderately Cynical	0	0	11	3	15	3	4	14	7	11	10	6	34	8	49	20	3	5
Very Cynical	1	1	5	2	7	2	4	6	1	2	3	2	5	1	31	13	0	0
	158	100	322	100	109	100	68	100	62	100	174	100	448	100	241	100	60	100

The survey is obviously not a scientific one for a variety of reasons, not least because
legislators and staff make up a disproportionate share (29 percent) of the respondents.  But the distribution of responses among different occupations as shown in the following table is nonetheless instructive.  Next to legislators themselves, political scientists are indeed the most trustful group of respondents, coming in ahead of legislative staff and other government officials.  The 82 percent trustful response from political scientists is nearly twice that of the general public.  While the 52 percent trustful responses for the media may seem surprisingly high, the difference between their views and those of political scientists who study legislatures is still significant.  Other results of the survey are similar to other surveys on government trust that show that trust increases with age, level of political knowledge and extent of political involvement. 

A description of The Case for Representative Democracy and the survey instrument itself (“How do you Feel about Representative Democracy?”) can be found on NCSL’s Trust for Representative Democracy web page at http://www.ncsl.org/public/civiced.htm (click through the first screen as a “public user”).  For complete results of the survey, contact Karl Kurtz at karl.kurtz@ncsl.org.

The National Endowment for Democracy is pleased to announce the establishment of the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program to enable democracy activists, practitioners, scholars, and journalists from around the world to deepen their understanding of and enhance their ability to promote democracy. Reagan-Fascell Fellows will be in residence at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, the research and publications arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), located in Washington, D.C.

The International Forum hosts 12-15 fellows per year for three to ten months each. Each fellow will receive a monthly stipend for living expenses plus health insurance and reimbursement for travel to and from Washington, D.C. Stipend levels range from a minimum of $3500/month to a maximum of $7500/month, taking into account the fellow's previous annual income, level of experience, and the cost of living in Washington, D.C.
Limited funds may be available for travel within the United States.

Applicants for Reagan-Fascell fellowships must choose between two tracks: a practitioner track (typically three to five months) to improve strategies and techniques for building democracy and to exchange information with counterparts in the United States; and a research and writing track (typically five to ten months) to conduct original research for publication.

Eligibility: The Reagan-Fascell fellowship program is intended primarily to support practitioners and scholars from new and aspiring democracies. Distinguished scholars from the United States and other established democracies are also eligible to apply. Practitioners are expected to have substantial experience working to promote democracy. Applicants who will focus on research and writing are expected to have a Ph.D. or, for
non-academics, to have published in an area of expertise. The program is not designed to support students working toward a degree.

Application: Applications should be sent by air mail as well as by e-mail to the address below and should consist of the following materials:

• Eight copies of a cover letter
• Eight copies of a 5-10 page description of the proposed project to be carried out while in Washington, DC.

Those choosing the practitioner track should: 1) describe the work that they have been doing to advance  democracy; 2) explain what they hope to accomplish through the fellowship, identifying a feasible fellowship  project that takes into account the specific resources that they would draw on and the activities they would undertake; 3) provide a preliminary outline of the fellowship product (short article, policy memorandum, etc.);  and 4) discuss how the fellowship will strengthen their ability to conduct their work and contribute to the more  effective promotion of democracy in their country or region.

Those choosing the research and writing track should: 1) discuss how their project will advance public  understanding of the theory or practice of democracy; 2) briefly describe how the proposed research  relates to or extends existing literature on the subject; 3) indicate how a fellowship at the International Forum in Washington, D.C., will facilitate this research; and 4) provide a preliminary description of the proposed written  product (article, monograph, or book).
 
• Eight copies of a detailed CV or resume 
• An indication of the preferred starting date and desired duration of fellowship 
• Three letters of reference 

Notification: Late June 2002

For more information, visit www.ned.org/forum/fellowship_program.html, or contact: 
Kristin Helz 
Program Assistant, Fellowship Programs
International Forum for Democratic Studies
National Endowment for Democracy
1101 15th Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20005
Tel.: (202) 293-0300
Fax: (202) 293-0258 
kristin@ned.org

The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma seeks applicants for its Visiting Scholars Program, which provides financial assistance to researchers working at the Center's archives. Awards of $500 - $1000 are normally granted as reimbursement for travel and lodging.

The Center's holdings include the papers of many former members of Congress, such as Robert S. Kerr, Fred Harris, and Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma; Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jeffery Cohelan of California; and Neil Gallagher of New Jersey. Besides the history of Congress, congressional leadership, national and Oklahoma politics, and election campaigns, the collections also document government policy affecting agriculture, Native Americans, energy, foreign affairs, the environment, the economy, and other areas.

Topics that can be studied include the Great Depression, flood control, soil conservation, and tribal affairs. At least one collection provides insight on women in American politics. Most materials date from the 1920s to the 1970s, although there is one nineteenth century collection.

The Center's archives are described on their website at http://www.ou.edu/special/albertctr/archives/ and in the publication titled A Guide to the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives by Judy Day et.al. (Norman, Okla.: The Carl Albert Center, 1995), available at many U.S. academic libraries. Additional information can be obtained from the Center.

The Visiting Scholars Program is open to any applicant. Emphasis is given to those pursuing postdoctoral research in history, political science, and other fields. Graduate students involved in research for publication, thesis, or dissertation are encouraged to apply. Interested undergraduates and lay researchers are also invited to apply. The Center evaluates each research proposal based upon its merits, and funding for a variety of topics is expected.

No standardized form is needed for application. Instead, a series of documents should be sent to the Center, including:
(1) a description of the research proposal in fewer than 1000 words;
(2) a personal vita;
(3) an explanation of how the Center's resources will assist the researcher;
(4) a budget proposal; and
(5) a letter of reference from an established scholar in the discipline attesting to the significance of the research.
Applications are accepted at any time.

For more information, please contact Archivist, Carl Albert Center, 630 Parrington Oval, Room 101, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019.
Telephone: (405) 325-5401.
FAX: (405) 325-6419.
Email: kosmerick@ou.edu

At the 2001 APSA meeting in San Francisco, LSS members attending the section business meeting discussed the possibility of adding a working papers section to the LSS web site.   An example of such a working papers site may be found at the Political Methodology web
site at http://web.polmeth.ufl.edu/.  We have discussed the technical and related policy
requirements of creating a working papers section.  We conclude that it would be technically feasible to set it up with parameters similar to those listed below.

• Any member of the section could submit working papers for posting (uploading) to the LSS Working Papers web site.
• The author submitting a paper would do so by emailing to the editor an electronic file, in MS Word or Word Perfect format. This file would subsequently be converted to PDF and posted to the LSS Working Papers Web Site.
• The author would provide his/her email address, and the web site would provide a link to enable readers to send email messages to the author about the paper.
• Papers would be catalogued alphabetically and by year.
• Submitted papers would be posted at or about the first of each month if received by the 25th day of the preceding month.
• The LSS would provide a statement on the web site to indicate that all work is the property of the author and that no work should be cited or quoted without permission of the author.
• The LSS editor would exercise only minimal editorial discretion; papers would be posted unless they were clearly unsubstantial or improperly formatted.
• All submitted papers must be complete and references supplied.

1.  What is the extent of interest in LSS offering this service, i.e. how many members would choose to submit their work?
2.  Should there be any limit on the number of papers a member could post in a given year?
3.  What would be the effect on the review process of journals for papers posted to the working papers site? How, in particular, would it affect double-blind reviewing?
4.  Should the section allow papers that have been previously presented at professional meetings to be posted to the working papers web site?

In order to address these issues, we offer a a brief survey and the opportunity for members to comment. Please click here to fill out and submit the survey.