Community colleges face challenges with the high rate of retirement of community college presidents and the need to replace them with qualified leaders. Although leadership research has identified a number of desirable attributes of community college presidents, there is little research on the attributes sought by both faculty leaders and board members in an effective community college presidential applicant. This exploratory qualitative study sought to fill that gap. Its additional purpose was to examine how these two groups make a decision when differences occur. Attribute theory served as the conceptual framework that guided the study. Seven faculty leaders and 3 board members responded to questionnaires and participated in interviews on the attributes they deemed most important. Data were analyzed by using open and axial coding. Findings revealed that faculty and board members agreed on these key attributes of a community college president: communication skills, decision-making skills, honesty, problem solving skills, and vision. However, faculty discussed them from the perspective of what happens inside the institution, while board members discussed them from the perspective of what happens outside the institution. Applicants and committee members need to be aware of the importance of serving internal and external constituents. Both faculty and board members indicated using a democratic, collegial method to come to agreement when differences occurred. Social change implications include enhanced satisfaction and retention of community college presidents and thus better stability and performance of their institutions.

The war in Vietnam divided America into two groups, those who supported the war and those who opposed. At wars end, the divisions did not disappear. Instead, the nation was split on the question of amnesty for draft and military offenders who avoided service during the war. Gerald R. Ford, upon his ascendancy to the presidency, was left with the monumental task of resolving the fate of draft and military offenders and ushering in an era of unification and reconciliation by answering the amnesty question. This study examines the factors surrounding President Ford’s decision to extend clemency to draft and military offenders of the Vietnam era. President Ford was faced with the need to heal the nation, but confined by the possibility of exacerbating the divisions within America regarding amnesty. In deciding to extend clemency, Ford was influenced by draft and military offenders themselves, the debate on amnesty, including its coverage in news media and the symbolic nature of the debate, public opinion and Ford’s personal and political influences. These influences led Ford towards a middle path in his attempt to resolve the issue of amnesty. Ford’s clemency program offered conditional amnesty, a concept supported by the majority of Americans, to draft and military offenders in order to provide them with an opportunity to return and contribute to the rebuilding of America in the post-Vietnam era and begin the healing process by trying to appease all considering the amnesty question.

The war in Vietnam divided America into two groups, those who supported the war and those who opposed. At wars end, the divisions did not disappear. Instead, the nation was split on the question of amnesty for draft and military offenders who avoided service during the war. Gerald R. Ford, upon his ascendancy to the presidency, was left with the monumental task of resolving the fate of draft and military offenders and ushering in an era of unification and reconciliation by answering the amnesty question. This study examines the factors surrounding President Ford’s decision to extend clemency to draft and military offenders of the Vietnam era. President Ford was faced with the need to heal the nation, but confined by the possibility of exacerbating the divisions within America regarding amnesty. In deciding to extend clemency, Ford was influenced by draft and military offenders themselves, the debate on amnesty, including its coverage in news media and the symbolic nature of the debate, public opinion and Ford’s personal and political influences. These influences led Ford towards a middle path in his attempt to resolve the issue of amnesty. Ford’s clemency program offered conditional amnesty, a concept supported by the majority of Americans, to draft and military offenders in order to provide them with an opportunity to return and contribute to the rebuilding of America in the post-Vietnam era and begin the healing process by trying to appease all considering the amnesty question.

Presidential policy making in Congress is a lengthy, difficult process that involves developing a policy initiative, proposing it to Congress, and winning the legislature’s support. Recent empirical findings indicate that, although centralizing the policy making process eases a president’s managerial burdens, it may also decrease the likelihood of presidential policy success in Congress. Alternatively, decentralizing the process increases the likelihood of policy success, but constrains the president’s discretion over policy substance and incurs greater administrative burdens in the form of managing differing viewpoints, contradictory interests, and increased information flow. Such findings present an intriguing puzzle: how can presidents balance their managerial and information needs and costs to maximize their policy success in Congress? Solving this presidential dilemma can have substantial payoffs for the White House. I argue that agency input provides presidents with a degree of bureaucratic expertise and objectivity, process transparency, and agency support, which imbues presidential proposals with bureaucratic legitimacy and aids their passage into law. To test my hypotheses, I conduct a series of empirical analyses of pooled cross-sectional logistic regression models using a dataset on presidential legislative proposals over the period of 1949-2007. I find that agency input and presidential signaling are key components to increased presidential policy success in Congress. I also find that the employment of agency input for policy development decreases the number of changes made to the substance of a presidential initiative from its proposal stage to its passage into law. Because the substance of a proposal matters, sending a stronger signal for a proposal developed with agency input should have a stronger, positive influence on legislative success. To explore this possibility, I also incorporate the role that voluminous presidential signaling plays at high levels of agency input and find that it has a particularly potent, positive influence on legislative success and on lowering the extent of change to policy substance in the Senate. In light of these findings, I prescribe a new policy making strategy with agency input at its core. My conclusions should also provide an impetus for scholars to reconsider conventional wisdom regarding presidential-bureaucratic management and legislative policy making.

¡§Strategic voting behavior¡¨ means that when there are three or more candidates competing in one certain election, voters, under rational consideration, think that their most favorite candidate has no chance of winning at all, and recognize that their voting for this candidate will cause their least favorite candidate to win; therefore, voters can only choose to vote for their second favorite candidate to avoid from their most undesirable outcome. In the 2000 presidential election, the three major contenders of Lien Chan, Chen Shui-bian, and James Soong were equally competitive, which created a context of strategic voting. This study therefore used ¡§strategic voting¡¨ as a main theme to investigate the voters¡¦ voting behavior in the 2000 presidential election. The present study analyzed data at both macro and micro levels. At the macro level, it was found that lots of KMT¡¦s votes shifted to the campaigns of either Chen Shui-bian or James Soong, which more or less demonstrated voters¡¦ low stability for partisan voting in this election, and to some degree was a result of voters¡¦ strategic voting behavior. At the micro level, it revealed that Lien Chan, who was considered the most competent, was always voters¡¦ second best choice before the election. That is, voters felt neutral towards Lien Chan, who was neither voters¡¦ most favorite candidate nor the least desired one, and additionally Lien Chan had long been the weakest in the poll, which made him the most likely to be abandoned. The result of the election also showed that among the voters who adopted the strategy of ¡§abandoning someone to save another¡¨, fewest chose to ¡§save Lien Chan.¡¨ Hence, voters did have ¡§strategic voting behavior¡¨ in the 2000 presidential election, and Lien Chan obviously claimed the highest percentage of voters¡¦ abandoned candidate.

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Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1960. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-196).

Current literature in the fields of political science and communication exhibit confusion over the existence and effect of corporate influence on a newspaper's daily transactions. Does newspaper ownership affect content? Previous research answers this question "yes," "no," and "maybe." I conduct a longitudinal, time series study across 1,366 newspapers and nearly 30 years to answer the question of whether newspaper ownership affects the papers' presidential campaign endorsements in election years. With demographics data and vote returns as well as newspaper ownership and endorsement information, this study looks at newspaper consolidation and the effect of ownership on endorsements. The results shed light on the current confusion. Changing ownership has a partisan effect on endorsements: Ownership change causes a newspaper to endorse the Republican presidential candidate but has no effect on a newspaper's likelihood of endorsing a Democratic candidate.

Religion and gender have been found to play significant roles in shaping po- litical attitudes such as party identification and ideology. While much of the focus has been on the "religion gap" and the "gender gap," little empirical research has explored how religion affects the political attitudes of men and women differently. Using a 2004 Pew survey, this study examines how religion and gender interact to affect four different areas of President Bush's approval in 2004: general approval, economic policy approval, foreign policy approval, and social policy approval. The results support a "religious gender gap" theory, where the effect of gender on presi- dential approval varies across levels of religious commitment. For general, economic policy, and foreign policy approval, secular men and women are more similar on average than highly religious men and women. For social policy approval, highly religious men and women are more similar on average than secular men and women.

The basic task of this thesis is to analyse the political visions of Václav Klaus. The start point is Klaus's entry into high politics in 1989 and the final is the period of his presidency, i. e. the present time. The first part briefly discusses Klaus's professional career before 1989. The following chapter discusses the input Vaclav Klaus in politics, his role in the division of Czechoslovakia and subsequently his position after the establishment of the independent Czech Republic (the position of Prime Minister of the Czech government and since 1997 head of the main opposition party). Next part of the thesis is concerned to the position of the President in relation to the government, the legislature and the judiciary. The President's powers are defined in terms of both constitutional theory and in relation to how the powers developed in conjunction with the practice. There are such examples of presidential vetoes. The thesis also discusses Klaus' attitudes towards selected key issues such as internal politics and presidential powers under it, the relationship with the European Union, relations with Russia, relation to environmental issues, the views of the civil society and NGOism). The aim is to answer the question of how developed during the time of Klaus' political visions, and analyse their consistency. The thesis does not discuss the evaluating or analysing the Klaus's views as such, but only examines the sources of these ideas, their development and their integrity.