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Tentative Schedule
of Readings
and Assignments
Summer I 2007
Text:
Charlie Tyer (editor), South Carolina Government, An
Introduction (called Int in readings
listed below)
Monday June 4. The Cultural Context of South Carolina Politics.
I have created
a reading for this on-line for you. You should read it for today and then go
on to the assignments you have to do on it that are due tomorrow. Here is the
link for the reading: Political
Culture and South Carolina
Tuesday June 5. What
you need to do here is go to the blog (click on the
blog link in the left hand frame of this page).
Then read the postings that I have made on political culture. Note that the oldest
post is the first one you need to do because they are listed in reverse
chronological order, from oldest (on Culture) up to the newest one. Not
everyone has to respond to all the postings. I assign the ones you have
to respond to by stating “Respond if your last name starts with the letters
__ to __.” The best way to do this is compose a response on a word processor
and then paste it in the posting area. Make sure that you put your name at
the end of your response, e.g. Bob Botsch.
The postings
are due by 12 noon today – that gives me time to comment on your
answers in additional postings. If you are late, you get an unsatisfactory,
which counts as a zero! Remember that “satisfactory” is worth a 75 and the
rare “satisfactory plus” is worth 100 points. I will not post your grades on
the blog as grades are considered confidential. You
can probably figure out what I gave you from my comments, though at times I
may comment on several posts at once. I will try and periodically email you
as to how you are doing, but you can always call me or email me about your
grads on the posts you make on the blog.
Wednesday June 6 South Carolina's
Many Constitutions
Reading: Cole Blease Graham's
article on SC Constitutions -- click
here
Go to the blog and post answers to questions
as assigned there.
Here are links to on-line copies of the Current SC
Constitution and the
United
States Constitution. If you look at them you can see many similarities.
For example, both have bills of rights (though in the S.C. Constitution, they
are at the beginning rather than added as amendments – the Bill of Rights)
that look very similar. However, the S.C. Constitution is more than twice as
long as the U.S. Constitution, mainly because it has a lot of things about
local government and some “deadwood,” i.e. things that are outdated and not
enforced, in come cases because of federal court decisions that do not allow
them to be enforced.
Thursday June 7 Institutions: The Legislature in a
"legislative state"
Reading: Int.,
ch.8, pp. 202-222. This chapter is more descriptive than evaluative, so we
will have to do our own evaluation of whether the state has benefited from
existing in the political environment of a strong legislature (relative to
the other branches). Ultimately the answer to that question is whether
the legislature has fairly distributed the tax burden to provide the best
possible services that citizens desire and how we compare in opportunity and
quality of life with similar states.
Go to the blog and post answers to questions
as assigned there. Blog postings for this and all
chapters are due at 12 noon today!!!!
Friday June 8. Legislature – continued
Go to the SC Government Website in the left panel and then to branches
of government and then to “find your legislator” using zip codes and find the
state senator and house member for your South Carolina address (if you are
out of state, use your school address). After you locate your state
legislators, go to their site and find the bills they have sponsored or
co-sponsored this legislative session. Look through them and pick one of
interest to you. Find out what happened to this bill as best as you can and
then go to the appropriate blog posting asking you
about the bill and post a comment telling the rest of us the name and
district of the senator or house member and the bill and why it is of
interest and what happened to it.
On the blog this is called “Blog posting for the second day on the legislature.” It
is due today at 12 noon!
Monday June 11 Institutions: the Governor
Reading: Int.,
ch.9 pp. 223-244. The major theme here is the slow progress of the office
from extremely weak to one that is not quite so weak today. However, how weak
it is depends largely on the skills of the occupant.
Go to the blog and post answers to questions
as assigned there. Due at 12 noon today! I will stop making this announcement
each day, as all of you should understand how due dates work by now!
Tuesday June 12. Governor – continued. See blog posting on exploring the governor’s website.
Wednesday June 13. Institutions: The Judicial Branch
Reading: Int.,
ch.10, pp. 245-265. The major theme in this chapter is how the state has come
from what we almost certainly one of the worst court systems in the nation
(in part because it was more of a hodge-podge of make-shift and specialized
courts than any system at all) to a court system that meets most of the goals
of a “unified” court system.
Go to the blog and post answers to questions
as assigned there.
Thursday June 14. Judicial Branch – continued
One of the major points you should have
gotten out of the reading and the blog comments is that
the question of how judges are chosen in South Carolina remains controversial. We
are one of two states that allows the legislature to choose judges with
little to no check of balance on their choice (the other is Virginia). While reforms have improved the
process in recent years to account for the quality of judges and to prevent
legislators from merely electing fellow legislators to the courts (as the
practice was a few years ago), the practice remains controversial. The plan
that most political scientists consider ideal is to have the governor appoint
judges from a list of people deemed to be highly qualified created by a panel
of neutral nominators (usually composed of other judges, attorneys and some
lay people). Then a year later the people get to vote on whether or not to
keep the judge in office. Though only about 1% ever get rejected, it does
give people power to rid themselves of judges they feel are acting poorly and
it does not burden voters to judge professional qualifications and minimizes political
pressures. This is called the Missouri
Plan and is used by about 14 states in some modified form. About
another half dozen states use something like the national model with the
governor making an appointment and then having the legislature confirm that
appointment.
South Carolina’s system, even with its
improvements, is still highly political in that interest groups and politics
place a lot of pressure on legislative judicial elections. Just a month or so
ago we elected a new member of the state Supreme Court after one member
retired. What I want you to do is look at a tv ad
that was run – very carefully – and comment on it – what was the ad trying to
do? Was the ad fair? How effective do you think it was? What does it tell you
about politics in South Carolina? Go to the blog
assignment on this – called “evaluating a judicial tv
ad” -- (where I will repeat the
information above) and post your comments. Here is the link to the ad on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T463tgvvrdg
Friday June 15 Institutions: Local
Government--An Introduction
Reading: Int., ch.1, pp. 1-22. This general
introductory chapter introduces you to the various kinds of local
governments, how their roles have evolved (from wards of the state – called
“Dillon’s rule” -- to having some greater measure of power – called “home
rule”) as a result of many reform movements over the years, and finally an
overview of some of the many issues facing local governments.
Note
how the number of local governments has changed over time in Figure 1 on page
2. You should see that the biggest change is the decrease in school
districts. This is a result of school district consolidation which is done
for the purpose of efficiency. That has not been without controversy because
some local areas do not want to give up local control. More on that later.
Go to the blog and post answers to questions
as assigned there.
Monday June 18 Institutions: Municipalities
Reading: Int.,
ch.2, pp. 23-43. In South Carolina we do not distinguish among
the terms cities, towns, and municipalities. All refer to the legal entities
created by incorporation. Before 1975 each incorporated area was created by a
special act of the legislature (which meant that there was not much
uniformity.) Today all are created by following the rules laid out in the
1975 Local Government Act. This chapter
is about how cities are formed, the alternative forms of government they can
choose from, how they can grow, what they can do and how they pay for it.
Go to the blog and post answers to questions
as assigned there.
Tuesday June 19 Institutions:
Counties
Reading: Int.,
ch.3, pp. 44-73. Everyone lives in a county but not necessarily in a city.
Counties have two sets of masters because of their dual function. They
provide services and are answerable to local citizens in these services. On
the other hand, they are also an administrative arm of the state and answer
to the state government (mainly the legislature in practice, given the power
of that body.) They are units of state government that independently elect
specified officials to carry out state mandated functions (like providing
state courts and support for those courts).
So in some ways they are like municipalities and in other ways very
unlike municipalities.
A theme in this chapter and a major theme in understanding South Carolina and the South generally is what I call
the “two South Carolina’s”
or just “Two Souths” theme. Look at Figure 1 on
page 50. A natural break exists between counties that have more than 50,000
in population (24 of them) and the smaller ones that have less than 50,000
population (22 of them). Then look at the list of counties in Figure 2 on
page 52 and note which ones are the small ones and which are the large ones.
If you know anything about the counties in the state, you will quickly see
that the small ones are typically the poorest counties in the state. You would pass through several of them if
you drive from Aiken to the coast. We have a poor South Carolina with little
political clout because of their lack of numbers (more votes exist in Greenville
County alone than in about the dozen smallest counties) and a wealthy South
Carolina that is centered in handful of wealthy counties with a lot of votes
(the 5 largest counties have well over a million citizens living in
them).
Go to the blog
and answer the questions that are assigned to you.
Wednesday June 20 Institutions:
Special Purpose Districts
Reading: Int.,
ch.4, pp.74-94. Many years ago I served as the political consultant for the
Commission on the Future of South Carolina, a special study commission to try
and look to the turn on the century and consider the direction of the state.
Where were we and where should we go were the questions? I sat in on many
meetings with state legislators and other officials as they heard different
perspectives. One thing kept coming up again and again was that special
purpose district governments (spd’s) were a
disaster in that they were invisible, unaccountable, unrepresentative, and
often tainted with corruption. Moreover, counties now had the power to do all
the things that these spd’s could do by creating
tax districts within counties to pay for services that some area wanted. So
why keep them? Many wanted to legislate them out of business. Then one day
the lobbyist for spd’s appeared and gave one of the
most “in-your-face” lectures I have ever heard. He said that he did not care
whether we liked spd’s or not. They had enough
political power to stop any move to destroy them, so we had better learn to
live with them and to work with them.
And you know what? He was right! Spd’s still
exist and probably will long after all at those meetings are forgotten.
This chapter is about these nearly invisible governments, the most
numerous kind of government in the state (somewhere in the range of 300 of
them, though no one is quite sure as to exactly how many!). As long as they
remain invisible, they are in little political danger from citizens or
legislators who have such close ties to these governments.
One final note before you post answers and comments on the blog. School districts could be seen as a special purpose
government in that they have single purposes, have boundaries that are unique
to them (often crossing county lines) and are no more uniform in how they run
themselves than other spd’s. However, they are certainly
more visible and are so important to the state that they are treated
separately. There is one short section on school districts in this chapter,
so we can think about them as a uniquel kind of
special purpose district. Later we will have a unit on schools alone.
Now go to the blog and answer the questions
that are assigned to you.
Thursday June 21 Midterm Exam
Due at 8 am on Friday morning -- email
to bobb@usca.edu and paste it in the body
of the email.
Friday June 22 Politics
and Processes: Interest Groups
Reading: Int.,
ch.13, pp. 321-342. This particular
chapter, which I wrote for this text, is about the fourth time I have written
an interest groups chapter for a South
Carolina text. I remember that the first time I
wrote the chapter in the early 1980s, I was so impressed by the clout that
interest groups had in the state that I started with the line, “In South
Carolina, all politics is interest group politics.” Each time I have rewritten it I have
slightly modified that characterization based on research I had done for that
particular rewrite. Today I would still conclude that interest groups are
very powerful, but they have lost some clout as the interest group landscape
has broadened with more competing interests and as political parties became
better organized.
With that in mind, go to the blog and answer
the questions that are assigned to you.
Monday June 25 Politics
and Processes: Parties and Elections
Reading: Int.,
ch.14, pp. 343-374. This chapter does
a good job in describing the history of political parties in South Carolina up to
2000 when the book was written. Fortunately for us, the trends that the author
noted in 2000 have continued so that the conclusions remain true.
Let me give you the broad themes. After the end of Reconstruction
(1876) following the Civil War when
Republicans (mainly black Republicans) dominated the state because of federal
intervention (from 1868-1876), the state as well as the South in general was
dominated by the Democratic Party, whose main purpose was to maintain white
supremacy and prevent further federal intervention. This one party system,
called “factional” politics was really no-party politics because the
Democrats were really not organized as a party with any purpose other than to
maintain the status quo. It encouraged short-term policies, corruption, and
voter apathy.
Things changed with the federal intervention of the Civil rights
movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the two parties flipped on
the question of civil rights. Republicans, led by Barry Goldwater and Richard
Nixon, sought votes from angry whites, became the anti or at least go-slow
party on civil rights. The Democrats, under the leadership of John Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson, promoted civil rights legislation. With blacks voting in
roughly the same percentages as whites, both parties organized in the South
and in South Carolina.
Of particular importance in South
Carolina for the organization of Republicans was
the decision of Strom Thurmond to become a Republican in 1964. Over the next
25 years thousands of whites followed him, first voting Republican in
national elections and eventually voting Republican in state elections and
adopting a new party identification. In the 1980s and 1990s the two parties
were quite competitive.
But the trend was in the Republican direction. The activation of the
Christian fundamentalist movement and the rise of a range of moral issues in
which the Republicans staked out the conservative side attracted many whites
in South Carolina’s
conservative culture to the party. Wealthy retirees moved to the state and
brought their Republican identifications with them, though they were not as
conservative on moral issues like abortion or race relations. By 2006 it was
clear to many observers that South
Carolina had become a state in which the
Republicans were far stronger then the Democrats and that Democrats could
only win state-wide elections in special circumstances.
However, long term trends do give Democrats some hope. The influx of
Hispanics, who will eventually start voting, will help Democrats. And less
religious newcomers will begin to weaken the attraction of conservative moral
issues. Young people are less likely to be strong Republican and might vote
for attractive Democrats – if the Democratic Party can recruit attractive
candidates. But that is looking 10-20 years down the road. For now the state
is what the text calls a “modified one party Republican state.”
Now go to the blog and answer the questions
that are assigned to you.
Tuesday June 26 Politics
and Processes: State Budgeting and Finance
Reading: Int, ch.12, pp. 303-20.
Few things are more important in politics than where government spends
money. It is one thing to talk about what should be done, but quite another
to pass taxes and then actually spend the money on some program. The next two
chapters are about budgeting and finance, first at the state level and then
at the local level.
Now go to the blog and answer the questions
that are assigned to you.
Wednesday June 27 Politics and Processes: Local Government
Finance
Reading: Int.,
ch.5, pp. 95-126.
Read the chapter and go to the blog and
answer the questions that are assigned to you.
Thursday June 28 Politics and Processes: Planning
Reading: Int.,
ch.6, pp. 127-172.
This is a
complex chapter for two reasons. First, it covers a topic with which most of
you are totally unfamiliar. You may have heard about certain small elements
in planning, like zoning, but that is only one small part of the picture.
Second, it is a long and fairly detailed chapter. While I have included it
under the label “politics and processes,” it can also be seen as an issue
area, because it addresses an issue critical to the future of the state, how
we will manage and control growth. And growth is something that we can all
see all around us!
Now go to the blog and answer the questions
that are assigned to you. Note: this chapter has a lot of questions so each
of you will have about 3 to answer – make sure you get them all done on time
– and as usual, read the answers and responses I make after they are all in!
Friday June 29 Politics and Processes: Human Resource Management:
Personnel
Reading: Int.,
ch.11, pp. 266-302.
Whole
courses are devoted to human resource management and public personnel -- Dr.
Carol Botsch teaches one here. It is a highly legalistic area in which you
could devote an entire career practicing law (representing either employers
or employees). If any of you go to work in the public sector, much in this
unit is directly relevant to you. But even if not, it is relevant to you in
your interactions with state and local employees on an everyday basis.
Now go to the blog and answer the questions
that are assigned to you.
Monday July 2 Policy: Education
In our last two chapters we will turn
to policy. Policies are what a government chooses to do or not to do about
some problem. Policy is always political, because government is responding to
pressures from people and interest groups, involves spending resources that
are taken from someone and spent on someone else, and giving authority to
someone to force other people to do things, things they may not want to do.
We will cover two important policy areas that all states face, education and
criminal justice. Many other policy areas exist that we could cover, but we
have touched on several other policy areas already, such as growth management
and the environment in the planning chapter and race relations in the chapter
on the constitution and in parties and elections.
Let’s start with education. If we
combine k-12 and higher education, the state spends about 40% of its state
spending on education. It is the largest category of spending in the state.
It is also one of the most contentious policy areas in state and local
politics because of the amount of money involved and the fact that it affects
people’s children, and parents get pretty emotional about their
children.
We did not have a chapter on
education in the text we are using, though we have talked about education in
several other chapters, touching on the structure of school districts as kind
of special purpose district and on the finance of schools back in the chapter
on local government finance. Therefore I have created a short reading for you
that gives a brief history of public education in South Carolina and describes some of the
issues and controversies that it faces today. Do the reading and answer the
questions posted on the blog that are assigned to
you (and of course, as usual, read the others as well!).
Link to Education in South Carolina reading: click here
Tuesday July 3 Policy: Criminal Justice
Reading: Int.,
ch.7, pp. 173-201. The criminal
justice system consists of many parts at both the state and local levels in South Carolina and in
other states. The chapter does a good job in describing all the various parts
and introducing many of the issues and controversies that surround criminal
justice. Issues continue to arise even
as I write this brief introduction. The SC Department of Corrections (SCDC)
is about to be investigated by the legislature for possible wrong doings. It
is part of the governor’s cabinet, and the governor has already expressed
fears that this could turn into a “witch-hunt.” But legislative oversight is something that
happens rarely in this state, and investigations are a standard tool for
oversight. The other controversy that has just hit the SCDC is a practice of
withholding food from inmates who break rules like dress code. The SCDC sees
this as inmates “choosing not to eat” and the equivalent of restaurants not
serving people who do not wear shoes. Critics see it as a violation of
federal rulings that one cannot withhold food as punishment under the
protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” in the Bill of Rights.
Neither of these things will be resolved till long after this course is over,
but they illustrate the ongoing controversies that surround criminal justice.
One last note on a difference here in the City of Aiken from most cities. Aiken organized a
Department of Public Safety in 1964 that combined police and fire protection.
Not too many cities do this. Officers were cross trained and respond to both
kinds of emergencies. Most larger cities specialize,
but combining training seems to work well in smaller cities and save
considerable money to taxpayers in providing professional services in both of
these areas. Certainly the level of
service has improved since 1932 when Aiken’s single fire house, then attached
to the local theater, burned down!
EXTRA
CREDIT Blog
comment opportunity. Go to the last blog on the
interview with SCDC Josh Gelinas for instructions.
Thursday July 5 Final Exam
Due
at 12 midnight. Follow the instructions carefully! Email to bobb@usca.edu
and paste it in the body of the email. Good luck!
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