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Most studies of local outputs in Britain focus on urban authorities, use simplistic measures of the political system and pay little attention to the importance of the administrative system. In this paper an attempt is made to remedy these deficiencies by constructing a comprehensive causal model of output determination in county authorities. The model reveals that in the counties, unlike the boroughs, the impact of political parties is less crucial to the determination of expenditure than modes of policy making and administrative system factors. After comparing these results with parallel county borough findings, they are lodged within existing case studies in order to account for the differences between output determination in rural and urban authorities. The low impact of parties and the predominant influence of administrative system factors in the counties are seen to result from the vestiges of rural culture, with its emphasis on ascribed status and consensus politics, the size of the counties and their councils, which hampered attempts by local parties to act as policy making bodies and necessitated that decisions be made by committees, and the heritage of an ethos of efficient administration.

"Quinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of the "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and agrarian history on present-day quinoa production among the Huanoquiteños. She also looks at the human stories behind the transformation, from the work of quinoa brokers to the ways Huanoquite's men and women navigate the shifts in place and power occurring in the home and their communities. Finally, Seligmann considers how the environmental consequences of mining may impact the Huanoquiteños' ability to farm quinoa and maintain their established way of life. The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa illuminates how Indigenous communities have engaged with the politics and policies surrounding their production of a once-traditional, now-global product"--

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES AND ILLUSTRATES HOW JAPAN conceives the political meaning of many kinds of interdependence and uses this concept to advance what it considers to be its national interests and global interests without upsetting the balance of world interdependence. 'Interdependence' means the mutual vulnerability and sensitivity of all governing-cum-economic units in the world. 'The politics of interdependence' means, then, how actors make strategic use of interdependence with enough self-restraint not to jeopardize the system of interdependence itself. Thus 'Japan's politics of interdependence' means how Japan makes strategic use of interd pendence guided by its own standards of conduct. In this sense, this article is an attempt to combine the following two intellectual traditions: the interdependence literature and the economic statecraft literature to define Japan's politics of interdependence. First, I will summarize three principles of Japan's political conceptualization of interdependence. Then I will illustrate them by some recent examples. Thirdly, prospects for Japan's politics of interdependence will be briefly discussed along with some discussion on the lines of research to be further explored.

This paper offers one small but dramatic example of grassroots responses to urban restructuring. It is a case study of the politics of ethnicity and growth in Monterey Park, North America's first suburban Chinatown. Evolving after World War II from a predominantly white, middle class suburb into a multi-ethnic city, today Monterey Park has the highest concentration of Asians of any city in the United States. Our research addresses two issues: (1) the development of the politics of growth and ethnicity in a multi-ethnic,middle class suburb undergoing rapid demographic and economic change as a result of the rapid influx of Asian people and capital; (2) the role and stands taken by new Asian immigrants and established residents -- Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Anglos --in the struggle for ethnic representation and local control over land use, space, language,and the very definition of community. This paper focuses specifically on the ethnic actors and political currents surrounding the City Council election of April 1988. We used a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods appropriate to a community study: demographic analysis,ethnographic observation of the City Council and political campaigns, content analysis of English and Chinese newspapers, interviews with candidates and community leaders, interviews conducted during precinct walking with the leading candidates, and finally, participation in an exit poll and statistical analysis of results.

This is the second issue developed by members of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network's Thematic Area 10, Water and Violence. Research done by members of this TA focuses on how violence, whether systemic-structural, subjective, symbolic, or in any other of its many forms, has become the key mechanism through which the relations between human beings, and between humans and Nature, are de-structured and reconfigured, and new kinds of relations are created, producing new forms of territorial, social and political power and domination. TA10 aims to explore, examine, and contribute to a better understanding of the often-traumatic experiences emerging from these processes of social reordering, whose consequences of socio-ecological dispossession can be observed in the form of environmental deterioration and destruction of the material basis of life, and most notably in the case of water sources. Its objective is to also contribute towards the development of conceptual and methodological frameworks that place the emphasis on understanding and explaining how the use of violence as a mechanism has an impact in the evolving forms of water politics and management currently being implemented worldwide, particularly looking at the consequences of these processes, as well as at the potential alternatives to confront the rapid increase of inhuman and anti-democratic practices and discourses in the processes of water control and accumulation. Within this framework, the present issue, organized by Dr Karina Kloster, from the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), includes four articles that are the result of ongoing research covering experiences of water-related violences and injustices identified in Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. Many of these events are the result of criminal activities carried out by governments' security forces, illegal groups, and other violent actors, often working jointly to impose the appropriation of land, water, and other resources belonging to rural, indigenous and peasant communities. The issue is an ...

The Obligation to Serve: Marshall and Universal Military Training / William A. Taylor -- To Mediate Civil War: Marshall and the Mission to China / Katherine K. Reist -- The Advocate of Airpower: Marshall and an Independent U.S. Air Force / John M. Curatola -- Military Posture for Peace: Marshall and the National Security Act / Sean N. Kalic -- To Harness Atomic Power: Marshall and Nuclear Weapons / Frank A. Settle Jr. -- The Patient Is Sinking: Marshall and the European Recovery Program / Michael Holm -- An Alliance by Default: Marshall and the North Atlantic Treaty / Ingo Trauschweizer -- Return to the Pentagon: Marshall and the Korean War / Jared Dockery -- The Freedom to Serve: Marshall and Racial Integration of the U.S. Military / Jeremy P. Maxwell -- Conclusion: Good and Faithful Servant / William A. Taylor.

Examines some of the hermeneutic puzzles by focussing on 1 aspect of Arendt's reflections on judgment in particular. Discusses judgment as a moral faculty. Arendt called judgment 'the most political' of all our cognitive faculties. Follows her inconclusive reflections to develop a phemonological analysis of judgment as a moral faculty and criticises her problematic separation of morality from politics. (Abstract amended)

This article addresses one prominent expression of the interplay between politics and law in international cooperation: the dynamics of bargaining in the settling of compliance disputes. Our central argument is that the formal structure of dispute settlement systematically shapes the likelihood and terms of negotiated compliance settlements. We introduce an ideal type distinction between interstate dispute settlement, where the authority to sue states for non-compliance resides exclusively with states, and supranational dispute settlement, where this authority is partly or entirely delegated to a commission or secretariat with a prosecutorial function. We hypothesize that systems relying on supranational prosecution are more effective in addressing noncompliance, and more likely to mediate the impact of power asymmetries on dispute settlement outcomes, compared to systems relying on state-initiated complaints only. We find support for this proposition in an in-depth comparison of dispute settlement and compliance bargaining in the World Trade Organization and the European Union, and in a brief survey of experiences from other international organizations.

This article examines the shifting terrain of politics in Thailand since 1992. To do so, it re-evaluates the democratization literature that sought to understand the relationship between Thai civil society and democratic consolidation and explores the disagreements within activist networks that have emerged in recent years. These simultaneous analyses reveal that (1) the civil society literature was itself political, and (2) that such a characterization obscured the growing schisms within the activist networks thought to comprise civil society around questions of democracy. To demonstrate this argument, I describe the overlapping terrain of government Thaksin created and its effects on coalitions of urban activists. These shifting frameworks of government reduced the power of many previous activist networks by redirecting money through new state agencies like the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI). They also exposed the kinds of power relations central to the longstanding project of governing the poor that many citizens had to engage with in order to gain state benefits. Although many citizens continue to participate in these projects, they have begun to express their demands for autonomous political voice elsewhere. What is at stake in these disagreements and Thailand's larger political quandary is not the boundaries of civil society, but rather a contest over who is a proper political subject and what constitutes proper politics. (Contemp Southeast Asia/GIGA)

The politics of financial reform represent a genuine test case for American politics and its institutions. The Obama administration's proposed reforms pit common (largely unorganized) interests against well-organized and wealthy minority interests. I describe how the withering and unfolding of financial reform has occurred not through open institutional opposition but through a quieter process that I call institutional strangulation. Institutional strangulation consists of much more than the stoppage of policies by aggregation of veto points as designed in the US Constitution. In the case of financial reform, it has non-constitutional veto points, including committee politics and cultural veto points (gender and professional finance), strategies of partisan intransigence, and perhaps most significantly, the bureaucratic politics of turf and reputation. These patterns can weaken common-interest reforms, especially in the broad arena of consumer protection.

"This study examines Russian politics in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras using sociologist Robert Merton's middle-range theory. It analyzes ideology, decision making, political culture, public opinion, and democratization and offers an innovative approach to the study of Russian politics in the twenty-first century"--

This is an edited collection of essays on various aspects of the 2010 Kosovo Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice. The main theme of the book is the interplay between law and politics regarding Kosovo's independence generally and the advisory opinion specifically. The book tells the story of the case, places it within its broader political context, and so attempts to advance our understanding of how such cases are initiated, litigated and decided, and what broader purposes they may or may not serve.

This dissertation analyzes the impact of dynasticism on contemporary political violence. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, I seek to demonstrate that high levels of dynasticism and kinship-centered politics increase a state's vulnerability to large-scale outbreaks of civil war violence. In my first chapter, I briefly review two current strands of political science research: analyses of the causes and contributors of civil wars, and the much smaller literature on the influence of dynasticism on contemporary politics. I then synthesize these research agendas to argue that political systems heavily shaped by kinship and dynasticism may be particularly prone to feuding and vendettas between political elites. I further hypothesize that this feuding culture can in turn increase a heavily dynastic state's vulnerability to broader civil war conflicts. In my second chapter, I elaborate on the theoretical mechanisms underlying this hypothesis. I combine insights from research into ethnic violence with a widespread review of kinship literature drawn from other social science fields such as anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology. I show that the three main theoretical approaches emphasized in the ethnic conflict literature (essentialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism) can also be applied to the smaller scale of kinship-based conflict and explore the potential implications of each theoretical approach. In my third chapter, I rely on the detailed genealogical and conflict records surrounding the dynastic relations of early modern European monarchies to test the effectiveness of each theoretical lens. Based on a statistical analysis of the correlation between relatedness and the likelihood of wars between monarchs, I argue that wars between monarchs were primarily shaped by social expectations regarding which kin merited loyalty and which constituted untrustworthy inheritance threats. From this, I conclude that a constructivist approach focusing on cultural norms and kin identities is likely to most effectively capture the causes of kinship-based conflict. In my fourth chapter, I extend my analysis into the present day through a case study of dynastic politics in the Philippines and its relationship with that country's ongoing civil war conflicts. I statistically analyze the correlation between the prevalence of dynasticism among each Philippine province's elected officials, on the one hand, with sub-state variation in civil war conflict onsets, on the other. I find a significant positive relationship between increased conflict and the polarization of political offices between competing dynasties in a province. I conclude that this evidence is consistent with the theory that provinces split between competing dynastic elites tend to see this conflict spill over into civil war incidents through competing dynasties' destabilizing political feuds. In my fifth chapter, I test whether the relationship between kinship and political conflict can be generalized beyond the Philippines. I use consanguineous marriage, the practice of endogamously marrying cousins or other close relatives, as a proxy for the type of strong kinship-focused traditions associated with dynasticism. Using country-level estimates of consanguineous marriage rates and civil war onset data, I find a positive correlation between higher rates of consanguinity and civil war. After eliminating possible alternative explanations, I conclude that there is evidence supporting the theory that particular kinship practices are associated with heightened civil war in a wide variety of countries today. In my final chapter, I address the salience and importance of this insight for future research and policy planning. I begin with a qualitative case study of the ongoing Yemeni Crisis. Through this case, I show how kinship politics at the heart of the Saleh regime has exacerbated and promoted the country's ongoing civil war. Through this case, I demonstrate that the politics of dynasticism can play a central role in provoking a modern civil war. I conclude with a discussion regarding how academics and policymakers might better understand and address the importance of kinship and its complex relationship with political violence today.