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In passing a watered-down piece of legislation (in July 2006), the Senate missed a critical opportunity to truly strengthen Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and protect voters against voting rights violations on a national scale. Had the Senate been less concerned with interest group pressure and political symbolism and more concerned with addressing voting violations, it would have been able to act as a deliberative body and create legislation more in line with the needs of the people. Instead, Congress failed to modify and strengthen the bill to ensure that its twenty-five-year extension protected all voters facing discrimination and inadequate representation. The Reauthorization bill does not serve national interests, the interests of minority voters, or the legacy of the civil rights leaders for whom the legislation is so aptly named. The proper response would .have been for the Senate to withstand the interest group pressure and delay action until Congress had sufficient time to draft legislation adequate for the task at hand-protecting the rights of all Americans while providing states and localities with incentives to comply with a national law.

Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

Contemporary literature in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind points to the locus of significant unresolved theoretical and methodological issues in political theory and political science, and particularly to the persistently anomalous status of mental concepts. The manner in which political and social theorists have accessed and deployed this literature, however, has been highly selective and conceptually problematical. The purpose has often been to justify prior agendas, and issues relating to how brain processes are involved in an explanation of political phenomena have not been satisfactorily confronted. Cognitive science is itself a highly contested field with indigenous theoretical difficulties, and it is necessary to sort out and analyze the salient positions in this conversation and to begin, at least tentatively, to assess critically its implications for both social theory and empirical research and to suggest a direction for further investigation.