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This article revisits a debate between Jurg Steiner and Paul Johnson
(Johnson 1990; Steiner 1990) over the civic implications of teaching rational
choice that appeared in PS a little over 15 years ago. That
debate summarized key contemporary arguments about the possible civic
implications of teaching rational choice that likely still reverberate in
department and conference discussions today. Despite numerous books,
articles, and conference sessions on the perils and pluses of rational
choice in scholarship, very few empirical studies examine the civic
consequences of learning rational choice in undergraduate political
science courses. This article reports the results of a study that attempts
to do just that; to measure rational choice influences on students'
civic attitudes.

The author reviews three books that he characterizes as a product of the contemporary fears that dominate Western thinking about Saudi Arabia. David Commins The Wahhabi Mission & Saudi Arabia (2006) is a sober historical account of the rise of the Wahhaibyya in the eighteenth century, & the potential for generating the discourse of terrorism despite the decline of the groups hegemony. In Saudi Arabia Power, Legitimacy & Survival (2006), Tim Niblock discusses the challenges to the resilience of the Saudi regime as old mechanisms relating ruler to subject change in the context of global dependence on Saudi oil & gas, radical Islam & security in the Gulf. Anthony Cordesman & Nawaf Obaid address the Saudi national security challenges in National Security in Saudi Arabia to argue that the military & paramilitary capabilities of the regime face social & religious obstacles that could backfire if pressured from outside. The three books sketch the historical, religious, political, & security threats facing the Saudi regime in the post-9/11 era, informing the audience about past, current, & future potential threats facing a Kingdom increasingly defended by outsiders as the sick man of the region. References. J. Harwell

The article provides a systematic test of the consequences of electoral rules for the format of party systems and the frequency of single-party majority cabinets. The test is based on Lijphart's 1994 dataset (extended to 1 November 2002), but excludes some of his cases and introduces an additional indicator of number of parties. Thanks to these changes in research design, the variance explained by multivariate regression is much higher than Lijphart's results, especially in respect of elective parties. However, the post-1990 data reflect a decline in the predictive power of the main independent variable (`effective' threshold). In explaining this decline, the author argues that account should be taken of a previously neglected factor, i.e. the growing destructuration of Western parties and party systems since the late 1980s. Indeed, entering an indicator of such a process into regressions (total net volatility) compensates for all the threshold's lost explanatory power, thus suggesting that structural consolidation is a crucial condition for the operation of electoral systems.

The anthology Neue Theorien des Rechts (New Theories of Law, Buckel, Christensen, Fischer-Lescano, eds) aims at taking stock of current theories of law in its whole content and methodical range. In the introduction the publishing team stresses notably the heavily formal systematic, but regarding the contents anti-hierarchic roots. Its aim is to clarify the vagueness of new theoretical beginnings, traditions and methods into a clear and comparable frame, whilst ranking different theories, but without categorizing them normatively. In the first part of the anthology three contributions present a conceivably broad spectrum on the separation and linkage of law and politics; the second part is concerned in six contributions with the politics of the jurisdiction; the third part, with six contributions, goes into goes detail in the fragmentation of law; and the fourth part discusses the topic of the transnational juridical pluralism in three contributions. In the second part of the article, the author discusses each contribution separately on criteria based on system theory, analysis and speech philosophy, post modernity, and economics. References. O. van Zijl

The paper analyses the motivation behind the Czech Foreign Policy's decision to support the "measures" of the "EU-14" towards Austria in 2000, which was an exception among EU-accessions candidate states. This paper offers two hypotheses explaining the Czech decision to follow the EU-14 measures: defense of European values or international norms vs. the assertion of the national interest. The hypotheses have been constructed with the help of two approaches: the constructivist distinction between "logic of appropriateness" & the "logic of consequentiality" in the state behavior, & the liberal-intergovernmental model of maximizing benefit, i.e. improving the state's negotiation position. The analysis of arguments which were used by the Czech political elite showed that the normative argument & the argument regarding "national interest" were both used in different variations by both advocates & opponents of the "sanctions." Through an analysis of empirical material the author came to the conclusion that detection of motives in foreign policy decisions requires consideration of both of the aforementioned approaches. Obviously, a comparative survey including further research materials could eventually support this conclusion. References. Adapted from the source document.