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Effect of defense expenditures. Defense-growth and defense budgetary trade-offs debates; differences in budgetary priorities of civilian and military governments.

AbstractThis paper presents a case study of the Donbas region, located in eastern Ukraine, focusing on efforts to de‐peripheralize the region prior to and after the outbreak of violence that engulfed it with the Russian invasion in early 2022. It sets out to use the lens of regional science and its sibling field, peace science, to impose some structure for understanding the still ongoing war. It does this by developing an economic history of the Donbas and a conceptual model for thinking about conflict and conflict resolution there. The implications of the model are explored using data on public opinion from 2014, a time of great uncertainty in the region. The model is also used to consider various counterfactual scenarios, and ultimately, to highlight the manner in which a peaceful solution escaped and the region's future was shattered by war. Overall, the paper represents an attempt to use the perspective of regional science to understand a complex and shifting conflict in real time. The project was undertaken with the aspiration that, by adding to knowledge on the Donbas and helping to disseminate awareness of its situation, it may contribute to the eventual recovery of Ukraine and its people.

Economists have explained the 2007–2008 global financial crisis with reference to various market and regulatory failures as well as a macro-economic environment of cheap credit during the precrisis period. These developments had important political causes that scholars of international political economy (IPE) should have been well positioned to study before the crisis. How well did they anticipate the crisis? Although none foresaw all the causes, a number of IPE scholars correctly identified many of the dangers associated with new models of securitization as well as accompanying regulatory failures and the politics underlying them. IPE scholars were less successful in identifying the macroeconomic roots of the crisis, particularly the role of international capital flows in fueling the U.S. financial bubble, but some scholars did usefully explore the politics that contributed to the latter phenomenon. The study of IPE scholarship in this episode contains useful lessons for the field's future.

The inclusion of packaged drinking water (PDW) as a potentially improved source of safe drinking water under Goal 6.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) reflects its growing significance in cities where piped water has never been universal or safe for drinking. Using the case of PDW in Jakarta, Indonesia, we call for theorizing the politics of PDW through a situated Urban Political Ecology (UPE) analysis of the wider urban water distributions in which it is inserted. We do so in order to interrogate the unevenness of individual &ldquo ; choices&rdquo ; for securing safe drinking water, and highlight the ambiguity of PDW&rsquo ; s impact on inequalities in access. We first review research on PDW supply to specify how dominant theoretical approaches used for understanding PDW supply through analyses of the individual making &ldquo ; choices&rdquo ; for drinking water are power neutral, and why this matters for achieving equitable water access. We illustrate these points through a case study of PDW consumption by low income residents in Jakarta, and then identify how a situated UPE framework can help attend to the uneven societal relations shaping different socio-material conditions, within which individual &ldquo ; choices&rdquo ; for PDW are made. For Jakarta, connecting choices of the individual to power relations shaping geographies of urban water access and risk explains the rise in PDW consumption by low income residents as a situated response to the uneven exposure of poorer residents to environmental hazards. We conclude with reflections on how this can inform interventions towards more just distributions of safe drinking water.

The article deals with the conflict as an indispensable element of democracy and politics from the perspective of Carl Schmitt's concept of the political. According to Schmitt, the specific criterion of the political is to be found in the friend-enemy distinction. Denoting the utmost degree of association and dissociation, it corresponds to other antitheses (good-evil, beautiful-ugly, profitable-non-profitable, etc.), but is independent of them and should not be mistaken for them. Understood in this way, the political for Schmitt has an existential meaning, as it characterizes human life as such and as conflict cannot be solved in advance through some general norm or by a neutral third party. Although Schmitt's definition seems to limit the proper phenomenon of the political to the state – which as political unity monopolizes the friend-enemy relationship and excludes enmity from its domestic affairs – the author finds in Schmitt's "secondary concepts of the political" the possibility to think the conflict as the principle of domestic politics as well. This would mean to accept antagonism as inevitable and legitimate, without moral or other disqualification of the opponent, and to subdue conflict to the rules of political quarrel and debate. In the second part of the article, the author discusses Schmitt's critique of liberalism. Although at first sight liberalism seems to be a negation of the political, in the last instance it not only fails to elude the political, but exacerbates and intensifies the conflict. By presenting its claims as universal, it disavows its adversaries as "enemies of humanity", falling in this way victim to political hypocrisies. In the last part of the article, the author considers some similarities between Schmitt's and Hannah Arendt's understanding of the political. Despite all differences between them, these can be noticed in Arendt's treatment of the Dreyfus Affair in the Origins of Totalitarianism, where she makes clear that conflict is not only a threat to the "political entity", but can also be the way in which that entity is saved.

Using a novel biographical database including all Presidents and presidential candidates in Colombia for the period 1833-2010 I show that the value of a political connection can be quantified in terms of the votes transferred within a political network. I consider three types of political networks depending on whether links are created by a cabinet or foreign service appointment and a family connection. I find that a one standard deviation increase in votes received by connections generates a maximum gain of three-fourths of a standard deviation. I also reject for the presence of network endogeneity that may bias the estimates.

Declining political involvement of adolescents in western society has caused widespread concerns about the health of democracy in the future. This study investigates the role of the media in the formation of political attitudes and political mobilization of adolescents. Based on a secondary data analysis of the European Social Survey ( N = 5657), the influence of exposure to news and entertainment content on political trust, signing petitions and consumer politics is assessed in a multi-level regression analysis. Additionally, the impact of the political and educational system on political attitude formation and civic engagement of adolescents is investigated. The results show a higher level of engagement in countries with a well-functioning democracy. At the individual level, news media exposure is positively related to engagement in consumer politics, whereas exposure to entertainment is negatively related to mobilization.

Office-holders periodically face the problem of choosing among a set of career alternatives, and these alternatives customarily include the choice of dropping out of political life, or seeking reelection, or of choosing to seek higher office. This paper assumes that officeholders behave according to a rational calculus in making such choices, and that the main elements involved in the choice process include the probabilities and values attached by the candidate to his alternatives, and the investments required to obtain these alternatives. Political ambition, or the desire to seek higher office, is shown to develop as a product of the investments that politicians make in their political careers, and the investments are shown to be associated with the structural characteristics of community size and electoral competitiveness. The subjects of the research are 435 city councilmen from 89 cities of the San Francisco Bay Region, and the data include information derived from interviews with the councilmen and aggregate election data collected on each city.

Causal inference in research testing rational choice models of unconventional political behavior has been hampered by the inability to use perceptions of the costs and benefits of participation at a given time to predict behavior that necessarily occurred in the past and by ambiguities associated with analyzing behavioral intentions instead of actual participation. Using panel data collected on a national sample in West Germany between 1987 and 1989, we show that variables from a "collective interest" model measured in 1987 - individuals' dissatisfaction with the provision of collective goods, beliefs that group actions can be successful, and beliefs in the importance of their own participation - predict subsequent participation in collective protest activities. Variables corresponding to the private "selective incentives" associated with protest are found to be less relevant. Furthermore, we find that engaging in protest changes many of the perceptions that influence future participation. We discuss the implications for theories of political mobilization. (American Political Science Review / FUB)

Inquiry pedagogies provide opportunities to meet learning outcomes linked to developing scientific literacy. Within a European project intended at promoting Inquiry Based Learning (IBL), this paper presents quantitative and qualitative data about teachers' views of IBL and its enactment in England and Spain. Results show that teachers in both countries hold positive views based on benefits to students and science learning and perceive important systemic and personal barriers to the successful implementation, even after decades of political efforts. Teachers express frustration with the lack of time, teaching resources, classroom management and the demands of curriculum delivery, assessment and accountability. There is an emphasis on hands-on activities and students' motivation but no stress on cognitive and epistemic aspects, showing views not well aligned with current understanding of the type of inquiry that best support learning. Implications for research and practice suggest that there is still a need to expand knowledge about how to support teachers in making the most of this pedagogy.

This article investigates the interplay of natural and human systems with reference to the growing global problem of antibiotic resistance. Among the diverse causes of antibiotic resistance, we focus broadly on three related causes: pharmaceutical practice and the liberal consumption of antibiotics, the use of antibiotic-containing products in the home, and the use of antibiotics in commercial animal husbandry and agriculture. We draw a parallel between pesticide and antibiotic resistance and examine whether lessons learned from one case may be applicable to the other. Although our main focus is a microecological analysis examining how humans are changing their environments, our conclusion addresses larger implications of this problem for global health. Through the theoretical lens of political ecology, we ask how we may address the "tragedy of the antibiotic commons" through public education and consumer activism as well as global health governance.

Explores effect of cyberspace on intraparty democracy and interparty competition; based on party official questionnaire data and content analysis of party web sites.