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This papers examines the current state of American politics in the light of some traditional conservative political ideals. Drawing particularly on Edmund Burke's concerns about the dangers of unrestrained political will, the paper argues that many of the institutions to which we have looked to temper raw political will have been undermined. Finally, the paper suggests that because the American right has been the major protagonist in, and beneficiary of, the present erosion of countervailing institutions, it falls to the left to protect these conservative political ideals. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial mapping of American political evolution that Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have accomplished over the past decade and more is of enormous significance to the subfield of American Political Development (APD). But the mathematical complexity of the procedure which Poole and Rosenthal devised for classification of congressional roll call has hindered APD (and undoubtedly other) scholars from fully appreciating the full significance of what Poole and Rosenthal have accomplished. No straightforward explanation that is at once accessible, intuitive, and fairly rigorous is currently available. This paper seeks to fill that gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant assumptions about youth in the United States, as well as legal decisions that both draw on and reinforce these assumptions, limit the rights of all young people. This has a particularly destructive impact on those young people who either identify as gay/lesbian/bisexual or who fail to conform to normative gender roles. In this paper, I connect the issues that these youth face to the lack of rights faced by all young people. I argue that those who care about young people who fail to conform to sex/gender norms need to be part of redefining parental rights and responsibilities. Finally, I suggest that the Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a important beginning for this redefinition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an extended summary account of my recently completed book manuscript on the history of democratic theory in American political science. The focus is on the internal discursive evolution of the democratic vision in the discipline and on the concepts of state, pluralism, and liberalism as the axis of paradigmatic transformations in that vision. The primary emphasis is on the period from the early nineteenth century to World War Two, but an Epilogue considers later developments and casts contemporary democratic theory against this historical background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers meta-reflections on the field of comparative politics, that is, the study of politics around the world through the comparison of different countries. It presents and elaborates a general framework for assessing social scientific knowledge that identifies four main products of research: concepts and conceptual systems, theories and theoretical systems, descriptions, and explanations. It applies this framework to the field of comparative politics and, with regard to each of these four research products, it identifies baseline practices and knowledge, the strengths and weaknesses of research practices and results, and outlines key challenges and opportunities. The importance of articulating ideas drawn from different perspectives, as well as the different aspects of the research process, is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1992, the Clinton campaign ran on the slogan, "It’s the economy, stupid!" Eight years later, Al Gore "lost" to George W. Bush, despite the fact that many Americans believed the economy was the best it had been in their lifetimes. While economics matters in politics, an even more important calculation in determining how citizens vote is their sense of a candidate’s and a particular pary’s public values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both political science and science studies are studies of the common, of efforts to come together, to discuss, deliberate, and decide. The most exciting work in the human sciences in the last thirty years is in the sociology of science and in closely allied fields, yet this work has been ignored by practicing political scientists. I explore three lessons that we political scientists need to learn from the sociology of science. First, that there are no data, only facts: the truth is not out there, we have to make it. Second, facts are made somewhere: policy is locally produced, that is to say, it is produced in places located within a network of people and things. Third, to understand how and where policy is produced we need to follow the actors into the sites where they produce it. This third lesson has been followed in political science, almost uniquely, by Richard Fenno, in his masterful studies of American congressional representatives and senators. Yet by reading Latour, we can learn to take Fenno's approach into every area of political research. In particular, we need to follow the actors in international relations, since the study of international institutions succeeds only inasmuch as it produces microstudies of how and where particular international norms and institutions are constructed. Certainly, we political scientists do not need to read science studies in order to become more scientific: we need primarily to learn from the methods that are practiced in science studies, not from the science that is the object of those practices. One thing we can learn from recent sociology of science is that we need to become less "scientific," that is, less wedded to the goal of general theory, and thus better able understand how particular political choices are made, executed, and revisited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phrase sciences politiques was first used by Condorcet, and taken up as political science by Jefferson and Hamilton. The American Framers and their critics had to make up political science as they went along, in order to argue for (or against) a federal constitution from first principles. To do so, they drew on Scottish and French social science. We trace the influence of Scots (especially Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith) and French (especially Condorcet) thought on the first generation of political science. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that regime instability in countries with presidential form of government is more likely under multiparty system, when institutional design is biased for one party and when partisan players are unilaterally impatient. It offers a model of endogenous institutional breakdown in presidential regimes. The model present empirical puzzles such as the historical survival of presidentialism in the U.S. and its breakdown in Latin America since the 1980s.

In contemporary American political thought the issue of memory and the dream of America have largely centered on Louis Hartz’s (1955) now classic The Liberal Tradition in America and scholarly reaction to its main thesis of the relentlessness of Lockean liberalism in American political discourse. As alluded to above memory serves to authorize an individual’s experience of and participation in the world. In a similar way collective memory authorizes the public/political sphere in which individuals must situate themselves and find a path in the company of others. This paper engages the question of authority in politics and the founding of the public sphere. The Hartzian thesis and Thomas Dumm’s (1987) elaboration of and reaction to it will map the terrain of American memory and the implications of that remembrance for the authorization of the dream of the American public sphere. With that in mind, I intend to explore the dimensions of a radically democratic rendering of that dream by Sheldon Wolin in his attempt to explode and multiply the narratives comprising collective memory and hence authorizing the public sphere in America, raising questions about the role remembrance has to play in our understandings of and hopes for politics. Through Arendt’s work on the nature and importance of authority in politics and her interpretation of the uniqueness of the American Revolution I hope to develop a critique of Wolin’s construal of remembrance and narrative as warrants for the creation of truly democratic political space. By way of a preview, the purpose at hand is not to discredit Wolin’s vision, but rather to deepen its meaning by probing what he leaves unattended to and what Arendt tantalizes us with--namely the centrality of emotion, of attachment, to founding the political realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]