Suchergebnisse

Like other volumes in the series Issues in Political Theory, which Weale edits with Peter Jones, this book combines an overview of the topic suitable for advanced undergraduates and above with an original argument reflecting the author's distinctive perspective that is likely to stimulate fellow specialists. The combination is an attractive one, which, when it works—as it does in this case—ensures that we do not get the sort of deadly dull textbook that merely rehashes other people's ideas. There are two novel features of Weale's argument. The first is his justification of democracy in terms of its capacity to enable members of society to advance their common interests as political equals in a situation of human fallibility. The second is his attempt to delineate the form of democracy, including the type of representation and decision rule, most likely to promote this purpose. I take each in turn.

This volume purports to explore questions about the changing role of nonprofit organizations in contemporary urban America. The stated theme is to explain how and why such organizations "attempt to sculpt the landscape of urban policy and political action rather than simply react or adapt to it" (p. 1), although the nine articles do not embrace it with equal rigor. The editors, who also contribute a chapter, further state that the text will explore "when and where such efforts are effective and when and where they are not''(p. 1). These are timely and important issues, given the Bush administration's stated goal of increasing reliance on nonprofit organizations.

Over the past decade the study of environmental justice has sparked considerable debate, with conflict often exacerbated by conceptual and definitional muddles, scarcity of pertinent data, and disagreement over which methods to employ. This book by the late James Lester and his colleagues is unlikely to diminish the controversy. Yet, as a comprehensive attempt to clear out the conceptual underbrush and bring hard data to bear on difficult empirical questions, the book merits attention by all those concerned with issues of environmental equity. The preliminary findings have been presented at conferences from 1994 on, and many are already familiar with this research. As the authors note, however, they began with a skeptical posture toward the strident assertions made regarding environmental justice. In the end, they reconsidered that position and found much evidence to support concern over environmental inequities in U.S. society.

One defining feature of a constitutional democracy is that the defeat of the governing party in a general election leads to a peaceful, orderly, and more or less routine change of government. Given the inherently combative nature of electoral politics and the potential for disruptive action by the losing side, this is no small achievement, and when it happens it is justly celebrated. Transitions in constitutional regimes, moreover, provide a unique if momentary window through which to view the mainsprings of political power. This volume is a study of the 1995 transition from New Democratic Party (NDP) to Progressive Conservative (PC) rule in the province of Ontario. It makes an important contribution to the sparse literature on transitions in Canada and in parliamentary regimes generally. For students of comparative government, it usefully complements recent work on presidential transitions in the United States, particularly Charles O. Jones, Passages to the Presidency: From Campaigning to Governing (1998).

In this paper we investigate whether there are any tactical motives behind the distribution of grants from central to lower-level governments. We use a temporary grant program that is uniquely suitable for testing theories of vote-purchasing behavior of incumbent governments. The temporary grant program differs from traditional intergovernmental grants in several aspects, most importantly in the sovereign decision-making power given to the incumbent central government. We find support for the hypothesis that the incumbent government used the grant program under study to win votes. In particular, we find strong support for the Lindbeck–Weibull/Dixit–Londregan model, in which parties distribute transfers to regions where there are many swing voters. This result is statistically as well as economically significant. We do not, however, find any support for the model that predicts that the incumbent government transfers money to its own supporters.

A specter is haunting the Trilateral Democracies—this specter is called civic malaise. It has visited these countries before; rearing its head for the first time a quarter-century ago, proclaiming the demise of democracy due to the inability of governments to respond to the onslaught of waves of new forms of participatory democracy and political action. (Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, 1975). Too much democracy, as it were, may be too much of a good thing. Fortunately many of these dire predictions have not materialized, perhaps partly because they were highlighted a quarter-century ago. The sequel, Disaffected Democracies, celebrates the silver anniversary of the original Crisis of Democracy. This successor volume is similarly concerned with the fate of democracy in rich countries. These democracies are "troubled" (p. 7), so the argument goes, because their public institutions are undermined by declining confidence in government and sagging interpersonal social trust. The authors of this edited volume situate the sources of these "disturbing" (p.13) developments squarely in the political sphere. In other words, the origins of the decline in confidence in political institutions is not explained by a frail social fabric but, rather, by failures of government and politics themselves. Despite a tight focus on the temporal (the last 25 years) and spatial (the Trilateral countries) parameters of this edited volume, it is refreshing to see so many diverse and innovative diagnoses as to what is ailing the rich democracies.

The 1994 elections were watershed elections in several respects. Perhaps most significantly, the Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1953. In the process, the 1994 elections also swept into office a large, relatively homogeneous group of 73 House Republican freshmen determined to change the political system. With size comes an opportunity for power in Congress, and the 73 Republican freshmen elected in 1994 were determined to exert considerable influence over the legislative process. Not since the 1974 elections produced the 76 freshmen Democrats (i.e., the Watergate Babies) have political scientists focused so much attention on a single class of legislators. Timothy Barnett's Legislative Learning is a nice complement to similar books already written about this interesting group of legislators, including Richard Fenno and Michael Armacost's Learning to Govern: An Institutional View of the 104th Congress (1997) and Nicol Rae's Conservative Reformers: The Republican Freshmen and the Lessons of the 104th Congress (1998).

Jacqueline Stevens grapples with the meanings of political society and affiliation and how we think about what constitutes family, nation, ethnicity, and race. How do we come to know ourselves and others through these political artifices and naturalized identities? Her project is to trouble our complacencies and make visible the arbitrary practices that produce the inclusions and exclusions of the "state-nation" (p. 43). She examines democratic, communitarian, and liberal theories of political society and finds little attention there to the problem of membership and the ways groups are constituted. Birth, the family, ethnicity, and national origin are undertheorized or considered to derive from natural, ancestral ties. Stevens addresses these inadequacies, and superbly reveals the centrality of birth and kinship practices to political societies.

Max Azicri writes with acumen on the Cuban revolution in the very different decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and he offers an insightful assessment of the changes and challenges of the 1990s. His objective is to answer the puzzle of what he calls the "Cuban miracle": the island's surprising survival in the face of the deep economic crisis associated with the collapse of the socialist bloc and the ongoing "punitive" policies of the United States. Azicri is not the only scholar to attempt an interpretation of Cuba in the 1990s. Susan Eckstein (Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro, 1994), Ken Cole (Cuba: From Revoution to Development, 1998), Julia Jatar-Hausman (The Cuban Way: Capitalism, Communism, and Confrontation, 1999), and Robin Blackburn, ("Putting the Hammer Down on Cuba," New Left Review, July-August 2000 (4): 5–36) are among those who have examined the nexus of Cuba's past and future in the post–Cold War context. An explosion of travel writing also demonstrates the intrigue of contemporary Cuba, as does the list of new detective thrillers—some of them bestsellers—with a Cuba setting. Azicri's book has a distinctive place in this literary landscape.

The hope of ordering collective purposes through rational speech stretches back to the earliest historical attempts at theorizing political practice. Public reason has been a particularly prominent theme in political theory for the last decade and is central to discussions of deliberative democracy. Recent work on public reason is motivated by the belief that contemporary political procedures lack adequate norms and spaces for public engagement in intelligent, informative civic debate sensitive to deep differences in values. Fred Frohock's thought-provoking book covers much familiar ground, yet it also contributes a number of key ideas and a dose of realism to a research program now in a stage of self-criticism.

Happiness, unhappiness, and depression are not the usual foci of political science or economics, but Robert Lane demonstrates their importance. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies is a worthy companion to and extension of Lane's earlier work, especially The Market Experience (1991). Lane employs psychology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and medical research to convince economists and democratic theorists that biological and psychological research can enrich their often unrealistic assumptions about well-being and behavior. He argues that in affluent societies there is growing unhappiness, growing depression, and declining marginal utility of income to produce happiness. These are accompanied by mistrust and increasing political negativity, which further undermine happiness. The dominant Western image of individualism ignores that people often do not know what makes them happy, which undermines prevailing market and democratic premises (p. 284).

Communitarianism has long suffered from vagueness: what is community? What about it, if anything, is necessary or good? What are the boundaries of morally relevant communities? Often those who attend to the claims of community tender these questions with too little rigor. Not so Andrew Mason. His new book has three main purposes: to map the meaning of community, to assess the claims of political community in relation to communities below the level of the state, and to evaluate the claims of political communities with respect to the global community. In addition to a number of rigorous and thoughtful clarifications and a comprehensive overview of recent debates between liberalism and its critics, the book offers arguments of its own which are often more bold than its judicious manner suggests. It deserves careful attention by all who have attempted to sort through the tensions between liberalism and community.

Ronald Chilcote is a leading radical political economist, and this book is a fine illustration of his well-earned reputation. It is a comprehensive survey of most of the major writers and themes that have dominated the literature on liberal and radical political economy, organized historically and by schools of thought around key concepts: class, state, imperialism, and transitions. The core of the book focuses on these four conceptual areas.

This detailed historical study focuses on Protestant natural law theories in the early German Enlightenment (explicitly excluding the French and British sectors) and traces their influence, or fate, through Kant. Despite its title, it is more than a specialist tome devoted to an historically isolable development, and it is not merely a subsidiary, underlaborer's attempt to recount the prehistory of Kant's achievement. Rather, by tracing several important background currents through the period concerned, Hochstrasser illuminates the odd historical fact that German enlighteners at the end of this span knew or thought so little of those at its beginning. The central topics are eclecticism; the so-called "histories of morality" that were part of its self-conscious legitimation method; the rationalism-voluntarism split in early modern natural law; and the associated distinction among moral philosophy (ethics), natural (positive) law, and international law (ius gentium) that developed out of these debates.

One of the sharpest and most consequential divisions in international relations lies between those who believe that international politics is a realm unto its own and those who see the lines between domestic and international politics as both permeable and pertinent. For the former group, the consequences of anarchy swamp any potential for politics to be ordered at the international level as it is within states. In this view, the dynamics of domestic political life, such as the rule of law, norms of trust, or the independent effects of institutions, are foreign to the international system.