Suchergebnisse

In this examination of women's involvement in formal & informal politics, the author calls for an expansion in the range & diversity of political leaders. The author also calls for more large-scale, collaborative, & multi-method research designs. The absence of an agreed upon definition of leadership is the result of the dominance of male-defined & male-dominated environments. Since the study of women in political leadership positions is the study of a limited universe of women, generalizations are difficult. Three strains of emergent research on women in office are delineated. In addition, the author stresses the need for new research on feeder institutions & the military, the power of women in politics, policy issues that are not explicitly gender-related, & research that examines whether or not the number & proportion of women has reached, or surpassed, a "critical mass.". J. Harwell

In this chapter of Life after Reform: When Bipartisan Campaign Reform Meets Politics, the authors address the impact of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) on presidential politics to predict that the law will generate two tiers of candidates & increase the importance of the "invisible army" of pre-campaign fundraising. The problems of soft money & front loading are discussed in the context of public financing created by the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). The choice by presidential candidates to opt out of the public finance system in favor of reliance on outside money is discussed. The authors analyze three scenarios of the impacts of BCRA had existed in the 2000 primary elections to argue that BCRA will strengthen incentives against use of the public finance system by presidential candidates. 2 Tables, 4 Figures. J. Harwell

I appreciate the opportunity to address such an august group of students and faculty. When Amy invited me to join you, and she certainly is a very persuasive person, I debated long and hard on what kind of talk to give since I study politics comparatively. Although much of my work is infused with law and history, and a smidgen of culture, economics, and geography, I work largely at the intersection of politics, history and law, and have coined the awkward though accurate term, "Polegalorian," to describe what I do. My research is concerned broadly with how indigenous peoples generate, participate, and are subject to these and other important forces. My research also deals with how and why the American constituent states, international bodies, and the federal government act in the manner they do towards aboriginal peoples.

This work is by a serious scholar who had previously written a fine book on peasant politics in Egypt. Interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world may be dismissed as naive given the notorious reputation of the region for autocracy and dictatorships. Yet Nathan Brown insists on taking constitutional developments in the region seriously, and he meticulously covers most constitutional developments over the span of the last century. But the book could have been easily condensed into a scholarly article. In the first part of the book, for example, which stretches into page 94, he provides the reader with a blow-by-blow account of constitutional developments in select Middle East countries. It contains very few insights, and the author breaks no new grounds; the developments were previously covered in many other works (for example, Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East, 1992).

Realist international relations scholars have approached the connection between economics and security in two ways. Cold War-era realists derived the national interest from the international balance of power, and assessed the utility of both military and economic instruments of statecraft. A second realist approach, advanced by E. H. Carr in his 1939 The Twenty Years' Crisis, places interstate competition in the context of another struggle over wealth and power in which no-one's primary concern is the national interest. That is the realm of capitalism (and resistance to capitalism). That deeper set of connections between economics and security was overlooked in Cold War IR literature, at considerable cost to our understanding of world politics. Understanding why Carr's 'historical realism' was bypassed can help pave the way for a more fruitful realist approach to comprehending a new era in world politics.

The motor of international politics has been war among the leading states. The most developed states in the international system—the United States, Western Europe, and Japan—form what Karl Deutsch called a security community, which is a group of countries among which war is unthinkable. These states are the most powerful ones in the world and, so, are traditional rivals. Thus the change is striking and consequential. Constructivists explain this in terms of changed ideas and identities; liberals point to democracy and economic interest; realists stress the role of nuclear weapons and American hegemony. My own explanation combines the high cost of war, the gains from peace, and the values that are prevalent within the security community. Whatever the cause, the existence of the community will bring with it major changes in international politics and calls into question many traditional theories of war.

Past research shows that authoritarian individuals hold strong opinions about a variety of political and social issues, such as race relations and military conflict. What has not been established, though, is the amount of general political knowledge that authoritarians possess. In this study, three groups of college students were administered Altemeyer's Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale; most of them also received items assessing general political knowledge and specific knowledge about the 2000 presidential election, as well as items assessing interest in politics. Relative to students with low RWA scores, those with high scores possessed less political knowledge; moreover, they expressed less interest in learning about politics. In general, authoritarianism was unrelated to how individuals got their political information or how credible they found their sources. The implication that authoritarians hold strong attitudinal beliefs with weak political knowledge is discussed.

Learning would seem to be a natural topic for the academic study of international politics. Interest in dynamic processes, however, and in learning, in particular, has been uneven, while the impact of contributions to date has been mixed. State Learning and International Change provides a thorough, thoughtful application of a complex biological learning model to international politics. The text is engaging and well written. Modeling and philosophy of science issues are addressed with aplomb and humor. For example, the author refers to the residue from social Darwinist applications of biological models to social science as "pesky," discusses stocasticity and pleiotropy with reference to striped and spotted cross-eyed bandersnatches, and mentions "deranged mutant-killer-monster snow goons" as a possible method of biological selection, all in the space of a few pages (pp. 59–67).

Joseph Heller, associate professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem who has previously written about the transition from the Palestine Mandate to Israel
(including a study of the Stern Gang and of Zionist politics in the pre-state period), examines a
period of great interest to students of contemporary Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as
to those who focus on Zionism, Israel, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. He analyzes the
internal decision-making of the Zionist Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) leadership in
Jerusalem from the end of World War II until the armistice agreements at the termination of the
first Arab–Israeli War (the Israeli War of Independence; al-Nakba for the Arabs)—in
other words, the events leading to and immediately following the creation of the State of Israel.

Analyzes the complex dimensions underlying the concept of party competition & argues that this complexity cannot be simplified into a rational-choice analyses of parties, party systems, & electoral behavior. The one-dimensionality & ambiguity of the concept of competition was taken uncritically from economic theory & applied to politics. Arguments by G. Simmel, J. A. Schumpeter, & A. Downs concerning competition are considered. However, many of assumptions regarding competition do not fit within politics, whose empirical reality is often complex, messy, & multidimensional. Economic & political markets have different characteristics. This approach is criticized based on detailed consideration of the basic nature of competition in the two different markets, giving attention to contestability, availability, decidability, & vulnerability. All four factors interact & create a more complex situation with tensions that simple models cannot capture. 1 Table, 1 Figure. L. A. Hoffman

Confirmation politics for judicial appointees is an exhaustively studied phenomenon, but the politics of appointment for independent agencies is less well understood, because nominees are very rarely rejected and the Senate fails even to hold a recorded vote for most appointees. However, alternative evidence of conflict between the president and the Senate is available: the length of time it takes to fill a vacancy on a board or commission. An empirical assessment of FCC vacancies, based on an exponential regression model of vacancy duration, demonstrates that statutory restrictions on the partisanship of the board significantly deteriorate the efficiency of the appointment process. In addition, the appointment of minorities (though not of women) occurs only after unusually drawn‐out appointments. A straightforward test of whether divided government leads to extended vacancies turns up negative.

Traditionally, the politics/administration dichotomy is referred to in the study of public administration as the founding dichotomy. Debates on its tenability are as old as its discovery. In the arguments put forward, however, no attention is paid to the epistemological nature of dichotomies. This article tries to fill this gap. It is usually assumed that dichotomies have a contradictory nature. By looking at the logic of contradictions, and arguments relating to the use of logic in social practice, it is concluded that this is a false assumption. They are to be interpreted as conceptual constructs with an ideal-typical status. This reinterpretation of the nature of dichotomies helps to clarify the debates on the politics/administration dichotomy. It implies, for instance, that rejecting the dichotomy because of its contradictory or unrealistic nature is misguided.