If the Clinton administration “looks like America,” then we have become a nation of lawyers and lobbyists.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that almost all of the top jobs in the Clinton administration are filled by lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats. Unlike his predecessors in the White House, Bill Clinton never had any experience outside of politics and government. Among Clinton's top advisors only his Chief of Staff, home-town friend Thomas McLarty, was recruited from the business world. (Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, was a power company executive at the time of her appointment but most of her career was spent as a Washington-based lobbyist for the power industry.) Nor is there any significant military experience represented on Clinton's top team, although several members are veterans.

Clinton's pledge to bring to Washington an administration that “looks like America” presumably meant more minorities and women appointed to cabinet-level positions. Clinton's initial cabinet team includes three women—Attorney General Janet Reno, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. Three African Americans serve in the Clinton cabinet—Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Agricultural Secretary Mike Espy, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown; and two Hispanics head departments—HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and Transportation Secretary Frederico Pena. Comparisons across administrations depend in part on the definition given to “cabinet-level” post in each administration. It appears that the Clinton administration is slightly more “diverse” than that of his immediate predecessor.

No modern political system, with the possible exception of a few dictatorships, can produce close to a 100% turnout of all those who are legally eligible to vote. But imagine a democratic system in which almost all citizens of voting age were enrolled on the electoral register and in which most of them actually voted, sometimes producing an estimated turnout in excess of 90% (Crocker, et al. 1987). Such systems already exist, i.e., Australia, Sweden, but producing a registration level and voter turnout rate of such magnitudes would be a sharp departure from the anemic levels witnessed in contemporary American politics. In the nation's most recent elections only about two-thirds of the voting age population were registered to vote and only slightly more than half bothered to cast a ballot in presidential election years (it was 55.9% in 1992). It is data like this that helped create the climate for congressional enactment of the National Voter Registration Reform Act of 1993, often known as the “motor voter” bill.

As we will show, achieving significantly higher levels of electoral participation are possible, but this particular reform bill is not the likely vehicle. Further, we will demonstrate that making it very easy to register and vote may not have an obvious partisan tilt in favor of the Democrats. And contrary to some advocates of election law reform, easing access to the ballot may not significantly increase turnout among the current non-voters, who are disproportionately low income, blue collar and service workers, the unemployed minority group members, and the young.

Do states have the authority to limit the legislative terms of their members of Congress? Up until very recently this question was merely hypothetical, pondered by those with the luxury to ask and develop answers to an assortment of constitutional “what if's.” However, the success of the term limitation movement across the nation has moved this hypothetical question to the center stage of relevant constitutional debate.

Voters in fifteen states, including California, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington, have now approved initiatives to limit the number of terms served by their members of Congress. In nine other states term limit advocates are actively gathering signatures to place similar initiatives on the ballot in 1994, some for the second time. By 1995, as many as 24 states could have adopted initiatives to limit congressional terms. In the remaining states activists continue to lobby for legislation to limit the terms of state and federal legislators.

Since a state's authority to impose term limits on members of Congress is of questionable constitutionality, it is likely many of these initiatives will end up in litigation (see Barnicle 1992; Corwin 1991; Greenberger 1991; and Kovacevich 1992). Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state-imposed term limits on members of Congress have already been filed and dismissed in Missouri and Florida. Legal action is pending in Nebraska and in the state of Washington where House Speaker Tom Foley has teamed up with the League of Women Voters to challenge the constitutionality of that state's term limitation initiative. The legal strategy against term limits has succeeded in overturning one initiative.

Throughout the past two decades, the number of women in elected politics has been increasing slowly, but incrementally. Women remain most underrepresented at the national level, with little prospects of parity in the near future (Whicker et al. 1993). By 1992, women held only 30 or 5.6% of the 535 seats in the 102nd Congress, 28 in the House and two in the Senate (CAWP 1992). Much media focus on increased activism and advances caused the 1992 elections to be labeled in the press as “The Year of the Woman.” Indeed, the number of female members of Congress did jump to 54 or 10.1%, not quite doubling (47 in the House and seven in the Senate) (Krauss 1992), but substantial percentage gains in the number of seats held by women obscured the fact that women remained underrepresented relative to their proportions in the population by over 40%.

At the state level, the number of women is larger, but still proportionately less than their share of approximately 50% of the population. In 1991, women were still only 18.3% of all state legislators, but nationwide, their numbers had increased from 344 in 1971 to 908 in 1981, to 1365 in 1991. The numbers of women in state legislatures, then, have been increasing incrementally, if slowly (Dodson and Carroll 1991). Incremental growth in women attaining state legislative office continued in the 1992 elections. For the 1993 session, the total number of women members was 1517 (20.4%), of which 338 were state senators (17%), and 1179 were state representatives (21.7%) (CAWP).

One of the question marks of the 1992 presidential campaign was how television would cover it. After the debacle of campaign coverage in 1988, television vowed to do better. At issue was the amount of substantive information vs. the time spent on the horse race, strategy, and campaign events.

Campaign coverage is important because of the role of information in democratic choice. Essential to democratic participation is the opportunity to choose among alternatives. Given alternatives, citizens can say “yes” or “no,” thereby giving consent to the policies which best represent their interests (Schattschneider 1975, 138). Schattschneider also emphasized that the alternatives must be relevant to voters' concerns. Unfortunately, television coverage of elections does not emphasize information about public issues.

Another important aspect of campaign coverage is its potential effect on election outcomes: public opinion is shaped by the tone, quantity, and content of the candidates' coverage.

Questions about the political effects of news, the nature of campaign information, and the relationship between democracy and information provide an interesting framework to examine campaign communication in 1992. Did television news offer voters adequate issue information? How did talk shows compare to news in terms of information? Finally, what impact, if any, did the two formats have on the outcome of the election?

This paper will examine Bill Clinton's news coverage and talk show appearances from June 2 to July 22.

The process of how to amend the U.S. Constitution is the least discussed and least examined aspect of the Constitution. The vagaries surrounding the amendment process were highlighted in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment gained momentum and eventual ratification.

Compensation of Members of Congress: The Twenty-Seventh Amendment

As one of the original proposals accompanying the Bill of Rights, and first proposed in 1789, the congressional pay raise amendment was included in order to limit the ability of Congress to change the compensation of its members. It was proposed by James Madison and later passed by both houses of Congress. The amendment stated: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of senators and representatives, shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.” Three state conventions, concerned that members of Congress might arbitrarily grant themselves salary raises, proposed that no salary improvements should occur before the next election of representatives (Livingston 1956).

One of the most important responsibilities that I have as an American National Government teacher is convincing my students that the rudimentary characteristics of civitates (the art of government) may be found in virtually all levels of community life, and that the health of our democracy depends on an educated public which can be depended upon to act with civic responsibility. But it is obvious to me that my students are torn between the appreciation and pursuit of democratic ideals—individual rights, liberty, justice, equality—and a burning conviction that politics has about as much to offer as the plague.

Substantively, the American Government course begins with a suggestion on my part that as we approach the 21st century many Americans find contemporary life to be complex and hostile. It does not take much effort to convince a class that we face many serious problems: economic uncertainties; never-ending international crises; social divisiveness that splits us into different factions hostile to one another; and, perhaps most disturbing, the distinct possibility that as our leaders, our political parties, and even our constitutional system fail to cope with these problems, the United States is becoming ungovernable.

The Freedom of Information Act was conceived in partisan planning, went through its gestation period immersed in public relations and saw the light of day in 1966 because of a political deal. But that's all right. The same process 200 years ago developed the Bill of Rights with its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression—a freedom which becomes an effective tool of democracy when citizens, using the Freedom of Information Act, can find out what their government is doing.

A bill of rights to protect citizens against government excesses was proposed in the closing days of the Constitutional Convention but was voted down by those delegates, including James Madison, who saw the move as a political ploy to block the plan for a strong federal government (Madison 1987, 630).

Madison almost lost his race for a House of Representatives seat in the 1st Congress because his opponent, James Monroe, raised the issue of Madison's vote against a bill of rights in the Constitutional Convention (Rutland 1987, 308). Madison promised to work for a bill of rights if he was elected; he kept his promise, demanding that the 1st Congress give as much attention to protecting citizens' rights as to creating the agencies of the new government and solving its monetary problems.

The European Community (EC) is poised between 31 December 1992, the target date for the completion of the internal market, and the coming into force of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) upon ratification by Germany. The TEU presents integrationists with the constitutional structures for a decisive move to federation whose legal foundations currently run far deeper than popularly represented. Consequently there is urgent need for informed public participation in the shaping of European structures. Furthermore, there is growing discussion in the EC institutions on proposals for a European Constitution directly enacted by Union citizens. At the same time, the recent currency upheavals culminating in the weakening of the exchange rate mechanism raises questions of the stability of the EC's foundations. This article aims to provoke debate by raising arguments on a series of issues in the light of the legal approfondissement and in reaction to it. Section I summarizes the constitutional advance of the EC prior to the TEU towards the legal system of a federal nation. Section II raises the issues of spill-over, nationalism, democratic deficit, debate, referenda, social marginalization, and rights in the light of this undiscussed approfondissement.

In a recent paper in this journal, Butler and Van Peek (1990) advocated analyzing patterns of electoral change in the USA with the swing statistic—the average change in the share of the vote won by two parties contesting successive elections. The generality of their case was countered by Rose (1991), who showed that most liberal democracies do not have two-party systems; thus the swing statistic, which involves comparing the performance of two parties only, conceals more than it reveals of the pattern of electoral change in most situations. His preference was for the separate study of the “ups and downs” of each party.

In a riposte to Rose, Gibson (1992) argued for the superiority of swing over the single party measures. His case was built on a curious argument, however. On the basis of goodness-of-fit statistics, he showed that a combination of independent variables relating to the characteristics of constituencies in Greater London predicted variations in swing better than they predicted variations in the performance of individual parties. Such analyses in no way indicate the superiority of swing as a measure of electoral change, however; they merely demonstrate that swing is more closely correlated to some independent variables than is another measure of change. Gibson's argument is a case of a spurious correlation.