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North Africa is notable for the remarkable stability of its political systems despite the increasingly hostile social and economic environment in which they operate. In part this results from their current security engagement with Europe but more important, perhaps, is the shared political culture that informs them despite the great differences between them and their failure to fulfill the principles upon which they were, for the most part, founded. This is, in part, typified by the very similar mechanisms they have each developed to ensure political continuity, based either on monarchical succession or dynastic republicanism. It is less clear, however, that they will be able to resist the most recent challenges arising from Islamist social movements, although the new political dispensations that might emerge may not be so very different from their predecessors. Adapted from the source document.

Analyzing macro-political processes is complicated by four interrelated problems: model scale, endogeneity, persistence, and specification uncertainty. These problems are endemic in the study of political economy, public opinion, international relations, and other kinds of macro-political research. We show how a Bayesian structural time series approach addresses them. Our illustration is a structurally identified, nine-equation model of the U.S. political-economic system. It combines key features of the model of Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson (2002) of the American macropolity with those of a leading macroeconomic model of the United States (Sims and Zha, 1998; Leeper, Sims, and Zha, 1996). This Bayesian structural model, with a loosely informed prior, yields the best performance in terms of model fit and dynamics. This model 1) confirms existing results about the countercyclical nature of monetary policy (Williams 1990); 2) reveals informational sources of approval dynamics: innovations in information variables affect consumer sentiment and approval and the impacts on consumer sentiment feed-forward into subsequent approval changes; 3) finds that the real economy does not have any major impacts on key macropolity variables; and 4) concludes, contrary to Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson (2002), that macropartisanship does not depend on the evolution of the real economy in the short or medium term and only very weakly on informational variables in the long term.

Over thirty years ago, the Supreme Court in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. commanded courts to uphold federal agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes as long as those interpretations are reasonable. This Chevron deference doctrine was based in part on the Court's desire to temper administrative law's political dynamics by vesting federal agencies, not courts, with primary authority to make policy judgments about ambiguous laws Congresscharged the agencies to administer. Despite this express objective, scholars such as Frank Cross, Emerson Tiller, and Cass Sunstein have empirically documented how politics influence circuit court review of agency statutory interpretations in a post-Chevron world. Among other .things, they have reported whistleblower and panel effects, in that ideologically diverse panels are less likely to be influenced by their partisan priors than ideologically uniform panels. Leveraging the most comprehensive dataset to date on Chevron deference in the circuit courts (more than 1,600 cases over eleven years), this Article explores administrative law's political dynamics. Contrary to prior, more limited studies, we find that legal doctrine (i.e., Chevron deference) has a powerful constraining effect on partisanship in judicial decisionmaking. To be sure, we still find some statistically significant results as to partisan influence. But the overall picture provides compelling evidence that the Chevron Court's objective to reduce partisan judicial decisionmaking has been quite effective. Also contrary to prior studies, we find no statistically significant whistleblower or panel effects. These findings have important implications for the current debate over the future of Chevron deference. Our findings identify a significant, overlooked cost of eliminating or narrowing Chevron deference: such reform could result in partisanship playing a larger role in judicial review of agency statutory interpretations

Our mind strives for statements of configuration and statements of consequence. Where different things stand in relation to one another, that is configuration. How successive events arise from one another, that is consequence. We grasp far more easily disposition in space than process in time; further an incomplete "geographic" account can be valid as far as it goes while an incomplete "historic" account can be highly misleading. The difference in difficulty and reliability between "where" and "how" statements is at a maximum in politics. It is therefore not surprising that political science should have dealt mainly with configurations.

Globalisation is a multidimensional phenomenon and should be conceptualised as a process rather than an outcome. Economic, political, cultural and societal elements are involved in the complex set of interactions we can define as globalisation. However, a key factor, which is frequently ignored is the importance of politics in shaping and guiding this process. For example economic liberalisation and deregulation, the form which economic globalisation has thus far taken, did not emerge from impersonal market and technological forces. Governments, especially those of the United States and Great Britain, followed explicit policies of currency controls relaxation, the reduction in trade barriers, and the retreat in the role of the state in the economy generally. Despite the power of the economic forces thus released, politics remains a key potential player and globalisation is not necessarily irreversible. Given the indeterminacy of the outcomes of globalisation, four alternative theories of the future are presented and analysed.