Suchergebnisse

Both the Bush administration and the American Congress have shown a lack of interest for African affairs. This means that, as in the past, American policy with respect to the continent will be defined, for the most part, by the State Department and Secretary Colin Powell, as well as by those tending to the bureaus responsible for Africa. The main line of rupture from the Clinton administration should be manifest by a geostrategical vision of Africa based on close ties to the principal regional powers on the continent. (Polit afr/DÜI)

A fundamental divide has emerged over how portfolio payoffs are distributed among parties in parliamentary coalitions. On one side lies very strong empirical evidence that the parties in a governing coalition tend to receive portfolios in one-to-one proportion to the amount of legislative support they contribute to the coalition, with perhaps some slight deviations from proportionality coming at the expense of larger parties that lead coalition negotiations. On the other side of the debate lies a stream of formal theories that suggest the opposite - that parties in charge of coalition negotiations ought to be able to take a disproportionately large share of portfolio benefits for themselves. In this article, we address this disjuncture by re-examining the empirical connection between legislative seats and portfolio payoffs with the aid of a new and more extensive dataset, a different method of analysis, and what we see as a more valid operationalization of the dependent variable. This operationalization involves the inclusion, for the first time, of evidence concerning the importance or salience of the portfolios each party receives, as opposed to just their quantity. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of our findings for the debate over the rewards of coalition membership in parliamentary democracies. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Perez, Louis A., Jr.: The War of 1898: the United States and Cuba in history and historiography. - Chapel Hill/N.C. : University of North Carolina Press, 1998. - 171 S

... assuming that the world realm will be composed of more than one territorial unit, we can assume that the security, diplomacy, law, commerce, the evolution of culture and of civilization will be influenced by the dominance of the nation-state in the future and that sovereignty, as his major characteristic "will continue to be an essential qualification, in law as in practice, for membership in the international community." But on the other hand, there are proposals for the establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly in the U.N. to represent the people rather than states of the world. It is difficult to pronounce the final judgement about sovereignty, we can only presuppose that the concept of sovereignty in the future is likely to become "even more blurred and indistinct" than it is at present. (SOI : MO: S. 112)

enth.