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Infrastructure is at the heart of China's presence in global development and is also central to larger debates about Chinese influence. This Element provides a comprehensive account of major, Chinese government-financed infrastructure projects in the Global South since 1949. Using new datasets, it demonstrates that Chinese global infrastructure is distinct in terms of its historical tenacity and massive contemporary scope. But this does not imply that contemporary Chinese global infrastructure or the Belt and Road Initiative should be studied in a vacuum. Historical and comparative perspectives show that contemporary projects often emerge based on similar political logics to those that shaped infrastructure investment in earlier periods of Chinese history and other international contexts. The Element then examines how infrastructure projects have created both purposeful and unintended sources of influence by serving as valuable but risky political capital for host country governments as well as the Chinese government.

Secret Wars is the first book to systematically analyze the ways powerful states covertly participate in foreign wars, showing a recurring pattern of such behavior stretching from World War I to U.S.-occupied Iraq. Investigating what governments keep secret during wars and why, Austin Carson argues that leaders maintain the secrecy of state involvement as a response to the persistent concern of limiting war. Keeping interventions "backstage" helps control escalation dynamics, insulating leaders from domestic pressures while communicating their interest in keeping a war contained.Carson shows that covert interventions can help control escalation, but they are almost always detected by other major powers. However, the shared value of limiting war can lead adversaries to keep secret the interventions they detect, as when American leaders concealed clashes with Soviet pilots during the Korean War. Escalation concerns can also cause leaders to ignore covert interventions that have become an open secret. From Nazi Germany's role in the Spanish Civil War to American covert operations during the Vietnam War, Carson presents new insights about some of the most influential conflicts of the twentieth century.Parting the curtain on the secret side of modern war, Secret Wars provides important lessons about how rival state powers collude and compete, and the ways in which they avoid outright military confrontations.

This book argues that the economic restructuring programmes in Africa devised by the IMF and the World Bank have proved unworkable and unsatisfactory and therefore require their abandonment. In his case studies of Zambia and Zimbabwe, the author asserts that free-market reforms and multi-party systems by themselves are no panacea. What is more important is the enhancement of the human condition through public investment in education, health care, housing and job creation. He recommends that the future growth of the Zambian and Zimbabwean economies lies in self-reliance and that changes must take place from within, instead of being imposed by an outside agent. (DÜI-Hff)

The author explores the role of Western policy, particularly that of the United States, in Southern African politics, from the Reagan era in the White House to the release of Nelson Mandela. He gives a background account of the re-orientation of US policy towards Southern Africa in the wake of the Portuguese coup of 1974. In particular, the book explores and analyses Reagan's policy of "constructive engagement" and "linkage" and argues that the policy, far from being constructive, was a distractive gambit designed to secure a Namibian settlement conducive to Western interests in the region and to delay self-determination in South Africa. The book also examines internal, regional and international factors which led to Namibian independence and to the "reform" of apartheid in South Africa

Multiparty elections can reduce the likelihood of conflict and help dictators secure their rule, but when does a dictator create electoral institutions? Existing research finds that one of the major reasons regimes introduce multiparty elections is to gain information about opposition demands. This article builds on that argument to explain that a regime's finances determine whether or not it is able to benefit from creating electoral institutions. Dictators use the revenue of the regime to invest in different means of deterring opposition rebellion. A regime's first priority is to build repressive capacity, after which it invests in public spending to buy the support of its winning coalition. Regimes only benefit from multiparty elections when they have sufficient revenue to fund repressive capacity but lack the finances to also buy regime security through massive public spending. Low-revenue regimes cannot benefit from elections and high-revenue regimes do not need elections to help secure their rule. I test the implications of the argument for regime spending and the creation of multiparty electoral institutions using a global sample of dictatorships between 1972 and 2014. The results of the hypothesis tests indicate that as revenue increases regimes decrease their shares of spending on repressive capacity but increase shares of spending on the public. The results also indicate the probability that a regime introduces elections rises as revenue increases from a low level, but the probability declines as revenue increases from a high level. The study builds upon the literature for how regime resources and state capacity influence authoritarian strategies of political survival. The findings for spending patterns are consistent with recent research on late modern regimes, and the results for the emergence of electoral institutions are consistent with research that finds dictators must have sufficient resources to survive holding elections.

AbstractRecent innovations in representative bureaucracy push the theory toward the micro‐foundations of who represents and who receives representation. Contributing to the micro theory, I draw from street‐level bureaucracy which recognizes how certain client characteristics beyond a shared identity may make representation too costly. Using data on emergency department visits to Florida hospitals, I explore how the impact of physician‐patient gender matching on client outcomes is moderated by a patient's insurance status. While emergency departments offer universal, public access, services performed on publicly insured and uninsured individuals are reimbursed at a lower rate than the privately insured. These features present an opportunity to test how responsive representation is to different client costs and benefits. The findings suggest that public insurance status is not a barrier for women's representation. However, uninsured women do not see any improvement in outcomes when receiving representation.

What is the link between administrative capacity and wicked problems? Previous literature links capacity to standardized performance outputs, but little is known on the link between capacity and highly complex policy settings. This study examines health outcomes of the opioid crisis—a wicked problem with interdependencies across different drugs with multiple legal and illegal pathways for abuse and dependence. If capacity matters for wicked problems, administrative action should decompose the larger wicked problem into smaller, more achievable solutions. The findings suggest that administrative capacity may allow public organizations to simultaneously manage drug outcomes across the legal and illegal market.

This paper explores Russian culture beginning in the mid nineteenth-century as the leading group of composers and musicians known as the moguchaya kuchka, or The Mighty Five, sought to influence Russian culture and develop a "pure" school of Russian music amid rampant westernization. Comprised of César Cui, Alexander Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, this group of inspired musicians opposed westernization and supported Official Nationalism by the incorporation of folklore, local village traditions, and promotion of their Tsar as a supreme political leader. In particular, the works of Balakirev, Cui, and Mussorgsky established cultural pride and contributed to Russian nationalism. Through studying the works and cultural context of these three influential composers, one can gain both a better understanding of the essence of Russian Official Nationalism in the nineteenth century and an enriched appreciation for the prevalent Russian musical styles and compositional techniques that were employed to achieve a unique "Russian" sound.

This study examined non-traditional undergraduate student's perception of accounting in an introductory
accounting course at five campuses of a Christian university in the southeast region of the U. S. The
consensuses of the student's perceptions were positive over the perceptional items measured. However,
three of the items FORWARD(I am looking forward this course), DIFFICULT (This course will be difficult),
and INSTRUCTOR (The instructor will affect my opinion of the usefulness of this course) indicated a change
between the groups. In the pre-survey response, non-traditional students perceived FORWARD and
INSTRUCTOR higher than traditional students while both groups have an almost identical mean response
for DIFFICULT. However, at end of the semester (post-survey) traditional students now perceived both
FORWARD and INSTRUCTOR higher while non-traditional students now perceived the course to be more
difficult.
The findings in this study support the ideas and premise that non-traditional students are quite different
from traditional students, not just because of the obvious age differences but also because of the differences
in job, related experiences, and their needs as relate to educational institutions.