On October 15, 1991, the United States Senate approved the appointment of Judge Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 52 to 48. The presidents's selection of Judge Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall as the Court's lone African-American justice and the hearings that preceded the Senate's confirmation of his appointment initially engendered questions about his qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court and his conservative political positions. Later, queries arising from accusations of sexual harassment took center stage. In fact, in the weeks immediately preceding his confirmation attention turned almost entirely from his judicial qualifications and his political positions to allegations of sexual harassment.

Thomas's confirmation is a story of racial politics enmeshed with gender politics and the conservative social agenda of the Reagan-Bush administrations. It is important to understand this process if one is to fathom some of the events that followed in the wake of this judicial appointment.

“The wrenching testimony of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, accuser and accused, constituted a defining moment for the country that will forever change how the U.S. Senate reviews Supreme Court nominees” (Biskupic 1991, 2948). Thus did sober, factual Congressional Quarterly judge the consequences of the Hill-Thomas hearings. Most news accounts were considerably more fervid. Reporters as well as commentators claimed that the hearings demonstrated that the confirmation process is a complete fiasco.

The Hill-Thomas hearings did not expose some fundamental flaw in the process per se. To be sure, a lot of less than admirable behavior and some procedural misjudgments characterized the latter part of the Thomas confirmation hearings. But a situation such as this one will always be difficult for the Senate or any similar body to handle. Structural changes in the process cannot make it easy or painless. Most of the “reforms” proposed would not work or would be counterproductive.

According to a second theme in the media coverage, the hearings demonstrated that senators—at least the ones on the Judiciary Committee—are incompetent, inadequate for their jobs, and out of touch with the American people. To the contrary, I think that both Democrats and Republicans followed strategies that made excellent sense given the political context in which they operated. Incompetence is not the problem.

If the simple process and personnel-based critiques are off base, was the widespread disquiet the hearings generated misplaced? There are reasons for concern but somewhat more subtle ones than those most often raised.

Until recently, the nomination of a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court had little public opinion relevance. Questions might be raised about the nominee's qualifications, perhaps including his or her liberalism or conservatism, but the American people tended to acquiesce in Court appointments. That changed during the Reagan administration, when opponents of the president's choice of Robert Bork decided that public opinion did matter and effectively campaigned to turn the public against Bork.

The Thomas nomination, however, raised even more questions about public opinion. Race and the role it should play in Court nominations was as important as Clarence Thomas's legal opinions. And, as soon as Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment became public, other aspects of public opinion came into prominence.

Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped produce and was also a product of the 20th-century civil rights movement. President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed him, a man who had made his professional career in a rapid succession of civil rights appointments in the same Republican administrations that were attempting to reconstruct the policies that Marshall and his successors in national civil rights organizations had created and interpreted.

That Bush nominated Thomas, whose policy positions were so opposed to civil rights law as it had been legislated and implemented, did not prevent these organizations from being riven by disagreement over Thomas's fitness. When Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment became public, these organizations' opinions of the Thomas nomination became even more problematic.

The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court offers an opportunity to observe the influence and effectiveness of the civil rights lobby on an important policy question.

Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hill's accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black women's reactions to that television coverage.

Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the women's movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen women's status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.

In announcing his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court on July 2, 1991, George Bush described him as “a fiercely independent thinker with an excellent legal mind,” and proclaimed his belief that Thomas would “be a great Justice.” While many legal and political commentators had predicted that Clarence Thomas stood an excellent chance of being Bush's nominee to replace the retiring Thurgood Marshall, few were quick to echo Bush's assessment that Thomas was:

… the best qualified at this time …. Clarence Thomas … fits my description of the best man at the right time. … I kept my word to the American people and to the Senate by picking the best man for the job on the merits. (New York Times, 2 July 1991)

Even as Bush offered Thomas's name in nomination, the skeptics were muttering about the hyperbole that surrounded the announcement. Thomas's total lack of courtroom experience and his generally undistinguished record as a jurist led many to question his qualifications to serve on the High Court. Concern with his general absence of legal credentials prompted the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary to rate Thomas merely as “Qualified”—making him the only nominee with such a low rating to serve on the Supreme Court.

The authority and prestige of the United States Supreme Court have always rested on its support from the other branches of government and, perhaps even more importantly, on the support of the American public.

It is an enduring myth that heads of state and other international leaders are often more admired abroad than at home. The prophet is not without honor, save in his own country. It has been argued, for example, that Richard Nixon's popularity in other countries continued to grow during the Watergate crisis almost in inverse proportion to its decline in the United States. In fact, there has been no systematic study of the popularity of political leaders outside of their own countries. The little evidence that exists suggests that, although important leaders are often admired by foreign political elites when they are unpopular at home, the reaction of mass publics is less clear. Thus, European political leaders were often sympathetic to the plight of Richard Nixon as the Watergate affair evolved between 1973 and 1975, but mass public opinion was far more negative.

Charles de Gaulle did not fit the pattern, at least not in the United States. His 30 years of world prominence, 1940-70, may have produced a roller-coaster pattern of popularity in France, but the limited data we have indicate that in the United States, he became increasingly unpopular as he consolidated his power during the Fifth Republic, and, in the process, challenged the “hegemony” of the United States. Among American political elites, he seems to have been consistently unpopular, and revisions in that assessment were not to come before his second retreat to Colombey in 1969.

On the centenary of de Gaulle's birth (and the 20th anniversary of his death), we undertook a reevaluation of the current public status of de Gaulle in America through a survey of a select group of opinion leaders whose preoccupations would enable them to form considered judgments about him as a political leader, and whose judgments would be transmitted to succeeding generations of university students.

Shortly after the demolition of the Berlin Wall, PS: Political Science & Politics published an article, “Socialism and Militarism,” which purported to demonstrate a positive causal relationship between socialism and militarism. Authors Thomas R. Dye and Harmon Zeigler (1989, 801) presented data and analysis leading them to conclude that “militarism is a much more pervasive characteristic of socialist nations than capitalist nations.” This finding is supportive of Payne (1989, 110) who, in Why Nations Arm stated, “the Marxist regimes are considerably more militaristic [than non-Marxist countries].”

For their examination Dye and Zeigler employed the resource allocation measures of military spending as a percentage of gross national product and the number of military personnel per 1000 population as indicators of militarism, and the classification system of Gastil (cited in Dye and Zeigler 1989) in defining national political economy types. Using this information Dye and Zeigler generated four tables that ostensibly demonstrate that socialist countries are more militaristic than capitalist countries. It is arguable, however, that Dye and Zeigler's conclusions are dubious because of the definitions and measures they have chosen to use for both socialism and militarism.

Humankind is in the midst of largescale transition marked by telling differences but profound similarities. Throughout this world, political systems are becoming more participatory and less authoritarian. For want of better or more accurate terminology, this worldwide phenomenon generally is termed the process of “democratization,” which may be defined as the process of moving from an authoritarian to a democratic political system.

We political scientists in the United States have taken U.S. democracy for granted. We have also observed the difficulties and many failed attempts over time in achieving democracy in other parts of the world. Now, given the worldwide democratization movement, we are increasingly being asked—rightly or wrongly—for our advice. And so we are called upon to be reflective, analytical, and introspective about democracy.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a process by which printed text is detected and transformed into a computer text file. OCR consists of two basic processes: scanning and recognition. Scanning, performed with a device called a scanner, digitizes the printed page, creating a coded graphics version of the text that may be stored on disk. That coded version transforms the scanned image into pixels, and it is readable by graphics programs.

The separate recognition process translates the picture of an “A” into the letter “A.” A new file is created in a format determined by user instructions. That file is readable by word processor, statistics, and/or database software supported by the OCR program used.

OCR is a technique that can be useful to political scientists. For example, research notes taken from printed sources, rather than being laboriously typed, could be scanned, processed, and saved as a file readable by a word processing package. Content analysis might be almost completely mechanized. Numerical data from government reports could be scanned rather than entered by hand and then made readable by a spreadsheet, database management program, or statistics package.