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Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, the European Union has attempted to reinforce its existing nascent capabilities to combat terrorism. The European Council adopted a comprehensive Plan of Action and reached political agreement on a number of important counterterrorism initiatives, including strengthening of Europol and Eurojust; and the introduction of a European Arrest Warrant. This paper provides a critical analysis of these key operational measures and reveals that the EU counterterrorism policy suffers from an implementation deficit, in large part due to the absence of genuine pro-integration thinking in the area of Justice and Home Affairs. A multitude of political, legal, and cultural challenges still need to be overcome in order to make the EU counterterrorism policy less of a paper tiger and more of an effective counterterrorism device. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates about globalization have revealed conflicting views about the implications of international trade for the environment. Some fear that individual jurisdictions will compete in a "race to the bottom" while others anticipate a "race to the top." Although scholars have developed formal models to explain these dynamics, there have been few detailed comparative case studies examining the influence of international forces on domestic environmental regulation in practice. This paper seeks to fill that gap through examination of the domestic and international determinants of environmental standards for the pulp and paper industry in five countries - Canada, the United States, Sweden, Australia, and Indonesia. The paper situates domestic institutions, ideas, and interest group politics within a global context. The case studies demonstrate that domestic standards have neither converged at the top nor the bottom, as the unique political and institutional context within each country has limited the impacts of intergovernmental competition. However, to the extent that international forces have influenced those standards, it is the upward pressures that, for the most part, have prevailed via two mechanisms. First, international dissemination of research on environmental impacts of pulp mills via trans-national networks of environmentalists and of information on available control technologies among trans-national bureaucratic networks both created upward pressure in each of the countries studied. While this first mechanism turns on political, rather than economic, globalization, the second represents a unique combination of the two. The trans-national network of environmental groups played a central role in generating consumer demand for "chlorine-free" paper, which in turn created market pressure for improved environmental performance around the world. Environmentalists were able to bypass the state and turn economic globalization to their advantage. However, important caveats concerning the confluence of circumstances that fostered environmentalists’ success in this case are considered in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right of return is a critical norm in the international human rights and refugee regimes, and the subject of intense political debate, particularly in the context of the beleaguered Middle East peace process. Although most scholarly and legal discussions of the right of return have focused on the complex case of the Palestinian refugees, the concept of the right of return has also figured centrally in many other displacement situations and repatriation processes, from Georgia and Burundi to Iraq and Bosnia. In recent years, a growing number of advocates have argued that properly interpreted, the right of return entails not only the right of the exiled to re-enter their countries of origin, but more specifically the right to return to and reoccupy their original homes and lands. However, an analysis of the diverse contexts in which the right of return has been evoked demonstrates a much broader range of possible interpretations of the meaning, underpinnings and implications of this claim. This paper presents a preliminary typology of interpretations of the right of return, drawing on examples from different repatriation processes. It argues that in light of the diverse interpretations of this concept advanced by refugee communities, as well as by states and international organizations, the right of return should not be reduced to a claim to regain particular pieces of land, but should be understood more broadly, including as a claim for political membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the various uses of the term, sovereignty, in the text of the Federalist Papers. The author looks into the various meanings of sovereignty as employed therein, such as Carl Schmitt's functional definition of the term. He demonstrates that the understandings of sovereignty was not primarily situated with the American people under the Constitution's framework. He also argues that textual sovereignty is problematic under Schmittian analysis.

Scientists and politicians are reaching consensus that elections must be countable independently of the need to trust the computer software in a DRE voting machine or in an optical scanner. Public trust in elections requires a Voter-Verified Paper Ballot (VVPB), printed by a DRE or scanned by a scanner. But producing the VVPBs is not enough; to do any good they must also be audited. A recount of 1% of randomly selected precincts (as performed in some states) is not sufficient to detect fraud with high confidence, except in statewide races. A recount of 5% would be barely adequate, but would be quite expensive. I propose a new statutory framework that will be as affordable as a 1\% recount but more effective than a 5% recount. It requires a mandatory audit of 1% of precincts, and permits any candidate to demand (and pay actual costs for) an audit of up to 7 precincts. The rule of 1%+7 will give high confidence for both large and small elections. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational researchers have long espoused the virtues of writing with regard to student cognitive skills. However, unlike objective tests, the grading of essays is time consuming. Therefore, peer evaluations have become an increasingly common method by which faculty can integrate written assignments without substantially increasing their workload. Although research into the reliability and validity of peer evaluations has found mixed results, most evidence supports the use of peer evaluations. Unfortunately, these studies frequently committed one or more analytical flaws. The present study employed Generalizability Theory to estimate reliability and a paired t-test to assess validity. The results showed peer evaluation was reliable but its validity was questionable. A new method for computing the minimum acceptable reliability was also introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on Internet-related policy and practice issues in the field of global Internet governance. It examines the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a complex Internet governance-related institution. A distinction has been drawn between Internet governance and e-government and highlights the possible overlaps between e-government work development and Internet governance.

The article offers information on the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association focused on fiscal policy that was held on August 2011 in Washington, D.C. It mentions that taxation is an important determinant of the scope of government. It presents information on the decision-making during fiscal stress related to various states.

The article focuses on the efforts of the international community to address the issue of the growth of nuclear weapons. Topics discussed include increasing acquisition of nuclear weapons by various countries, their nonproliferation strategies, and regional and international stability. Also discussed are weaponization, and nuclear weapons capability.

An excerpt from the book "Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability" by Valerie Sperling is presented.

Corporate capacity is arguably a key determinant of the success or failure of public sector organizations. However, while there is growing evidence on the extent of corporate capacity, few researchers have systematically examined whether it is linked to public service performance. Does a larger corporate centre lead to better or worse performance for the organization as a whole? To answer this question we apply seemingly unrelated regression to measures of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and equity in English local government. We find that the effect of corporate capacity on performance is nonlinear, following an inverted u-shaped pattern, and that its positive effect turns negative around the mean for effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and above the mean for equity. The study therefore suggests that senior managers face important trade-offs between organizational goals when deciding on the appropriate level of corporate capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central bankers’ careers are shown to influence inflation outcomes. I present two theories in which careers explain central bank behavior, develop them in a game theoretic model, and test them using a comprehensive new data set of central bankers’ career backgrounds which spans twenty rich democracies and half a century. Career experiences vary considerably over this sample, and not only mould beliefs about appropriate policy (the socialization hypothesis), but also shape career concerns for central bankers who seek career advancement in either the financial sector or government (the career incentives hypothesis). Accordingly, time series cross-section analysis of inflation shows central bankers with financial sector backgrounds preside over lower inflation, while central bankers with bureaucratic experience produce higher inflation. The magnitude of career effects on inflation is on par with standard measures of central bank independence, and interactive models suggest both socialization and incentives contribute to these career effects. The study of central banks in particular and bureaucracy in general should pay greater attention to individual preferences and their interaction with organizations; institutions alone are not enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines the formation of municipalities in the U.S. It traces change in unincorporated areas over decades to determine how basic dimensions of population heterogeneity affect the probability of a municipal incorporation. The paper also examines how state legislation on local government autonomy affect that probability of a municipal incorporation. To guide the study, I follow theory on local government boundary change and the Tiebout hypothesis--literatures interested in the role of municipal fragmentation in tax-and-service differentials within metropolitan areas. I take advantage of this opportunity to present a boundaries-normalized dataset that can be useful to other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An individual's level of interest in politics has both normative and empirical relevance. Normatively, interest in politics is a component of the definition of a democratic citizen; empirically, interest in politics is a broadly used predictor of political participation. Despite this importance there has been little systematic reflection about how it should be measured, and especially about how to minimize social desirability biases that may prevent some people from admitting a lack of interest. In this paper we present different ways of measuring political interest and validate these measures by using them to predict standard measures of political participation. In this paper we determine whether asking respondents how interested they are in politics compared to other domains produces different results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several states have attempted to rein in or eliminate political parties through a series of reforms. This paper details several such efforts, ranging from campaign finance reform to nonpartisan elections, designed to reduce partisanship or constrain the power of political parties. Not only have these reforms ultimately failed, but they have imposed other costs on the political system that have generally worked against reformers' stated goals. This paper describes some of these costs and concludes with recommendations for addressing a political system dominated by powerful but unpopular parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do historical legacies shape contemporary political attitudes and behavior? The paper proposes a novel attitudinal mechanism through which a distant history of interethnic competition may influence political outcomes in the present. I theorize that outgroup-focused framing of a policy issue can interact with historically conditioned outgroup predispositions at the local level, affecting policy preferences. Using Poland as a test case, the article shows that subnational variation in EU support in the 2003 EU membership referendum was produced in part by the interaction of national-level anti-Semitic framing of the EU and local historically determined prevalence of anti-Semitism. I demonstrate that the anti-Semitic cues promulgated by radical parties resonated with the voters concentrated in the areas with historically large Jewish populations. Even though Jews were virtually eliminated during WWII, latent negative attitudes toward the Jewish outgroup have persisted in these localities and were instrumentalized by political entrepreneurs who sought to mobilize opposition to European integration. The paper also explores alternative structural pathways through which the Holocaust may have affected political preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do leaders evaluate the intentions of and craft foreign policies towards other states? In this paper, I demonstrate that national images, or a set of beliefs about a target state, serve as a lens through which decision makers interpret a state's actions, and choose appropriate policy responses to the state. While images are often initially delineated and promoted by leaders for strategic and political reasons, they are resilient once formed, reinforced by decision makers' cognitive and motivated biases. As a result, images may continue to shape policy even after the original strategic and political settings have changed. In this paper I examine the relationship between the PRC and the United States, from the founding of the former to the beginning of rapprochement by Nixon, with a focus on the Johnson administration. I find that despite changes in the strategic setting, and calls for a reexamination of China policy from political elites and China specialists within government, Johnson and his deputies remained firmly influenced by a hostile image of China and committed to a policy of containment up to the last days of the administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for variation in human development levels across similar communities? Why, for example, have some equally poor, indigenous, highland communities in Guatemala made advances in health and education, in particular, while others have stagnated or regressed? This paper argues that, contrary to an emerging recognition of the role of "ordinary citizens" in peacebuilding or crime reduction, human development requires the complementarity of citizen mobilization and government resources. For example, even in highly organized communities utilizing culturally relevant modes of participation and mobilization - at times with important consequences for local politics and crime - citizens were otherwise unable to coordinate resources and augment the implementation of key programs designed to combat hunger and illiteracy. In most cases, local level grievances and petty party politics interfered with the transparent and intended distribution of critical medical and monetary resources. Only rarely, when state actors at the local level coordinate with traditional leaders, and gain the cooperation and support of the mayor, does local governance allow for measurable gains in human development at the local level. These results are demonstrated through a quantitative analysis of all of Guatemala's 334 municipalities, including difficult to access data from myriad sources, combined with the results of qualitative field methods - including over 100 key informant interviews and the results of focus groups across 6 paired communities throughout the Western Highlands - which aided in process tracing the implementation of a widely acclaimed government anti-hunger program at the village level. By highlighting stark differences in local governance and development outcomes across otherwise similar communities in the highlands of Guatemala, this paper raises important questions about: the role of durable social forces at the local level and their ability - if not taken into consideration - to thwart what are otherwise award-winning development schemes designed abroad or in the capital city; the complications of "local ownership" and local legitimacy with respect to development in complex environments of state-society discord; and the limitations of our knowledge of local forces on human development outcomes, versus peace and security, which operate under different mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have been marked by the emergence of a new breed of social media-fuelled grassroots protest phenomena that have challenged the dominance of political elites in several advanced liberal democracies. Whether it is the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, the #idlenomore movement in Canada or the student-led demonstrations in Chile, they have quickly mobilized narrow segments of the public and have ultimately succeeded in forcing formal political actors to acknowledge their presence. In some cases, they have compelled them into taking their demands into account in their decision-making. This trend is demonstrative of a growing political engagement disconnect between formal political players (e.g.: election officials, political parties) and members of the grassroots. While most of the former are still relying heavily on politicking strategies tailored for citizens adhering to the dutiful or managed citizenship model, an increasingly large portion of the latter are turning to informal political engagement practices better suited to their preferences, interests and personal goals. Specifically, citizens' involvement in the political process is growingly driven by short to mid-term priorities or considerations linked to their private lives and progressively less by their adherence to an ideology, their party allegiances, or their concerns for the greater societal good. This paper will be examining one of these protest movements: the 2012 student movement against university tuition hikes in the province of Quebec, Canada, also known as "Maple Spring." While some facets of this political mobilization phenomenon have been studied in recent years, relatively little is known about its internal dynamic and social media's role in its overall functioning. This movement was characterized by peaceful sit-ins, quasi-nightly demonstrations in the city of Montreal and sporadic riots that were often organized and coordinated through social media services such as Facebook and Twitter. This paper will offer an in-depth look at the #ggi tweeting dynamic between April 22, 2012 and July 31, 2012 as well as news reports and editorials on this movement that appeared in major Quebec daily newspapers (e.g.: La Presse, Le Devoir, Le Journal de Montréal) during the same time period. Specifically, a hybrid quantitative and qualitative content analysis approach will be used to determine in what way, to what extent, and for what reasons different Quebec political players were involved in this protest movement. Moreover, this paper will examine the links between traditional media and citizens' discourse on Twitter. Results will indicate that former informed the latter as protesters frequently used news reports or commentary to support their positions. From a broader perspective, the findings will provide a new look at political tweeting as few scholars have conducted a qualitative analysis of political tweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central goal of description is to explore - that is to establish when, what, how and where something happened - and thereby prepare the groundwork explaining of why it happened. While social science methodology readily acknowledges this division of labor, it treats description as something without much structure that therefore cannot be as systematically evaluated as an explanation. This paper challenges this assumption by showing that description has a distinct structure that consists of five distinct elements: finding and recording of facts, selecting evidence, scaling, and reordering time and space. And given this structure, the quality of description can be evaluated just as systematically as the quality of explanations. The paper illustrates the elements of description and the criteria for its evaluation by drawing on the Goldhagen and Browning controversy from the late 1990s on what motivated ordinary Germans to participate in the Holocaust. This controversy is helpful because both scholars explored the very same documents but ended with very different analyses. The subsequent broader scholarly debate contained many interesting insights into the structure as well as quality of description that has broader implications for social science. In explicating these implications more fully, it is hoped that description will receive more systematic attention and will improve the development of testable hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that voided Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act which deprived Section 5 of its enforcement powers. The paper presents an overview of conditions leading to the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It reviews the Act's effectiveness, a point agreed to by all. It briefly looks at the impact of a black man in the White House on racial attitudes and sketches the current economic and social changes affecting African Americans. The paper then introduces the Supreme Court decision and traces in particular the philosophic and ideological Court precedents that underlay the Court majority's decisionmaking. It moves on to look at efforts to restrict black and other minority election participation prior to the Court majority's decision and then such efforts in the aftermath of the decision. It concludes by questioning the Court majority's argument that the society had changed to the extent the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed. It then asks what the proper role of the Supreme Court is in a democratic society and which branch of government, the Court of the Congress, should legitimately decide such issues as electoral representation. This in turn brings into relevance the question of what should be the Supreme Court's role. The underlying theme is a question as to what constitutes adequate representation in a democratic society.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an institutional explanation for the conflicting trends in inequality both across the Eurozone and within individual EMU member states since the late 1990s. The paper argues that the introduction of the euro created fundamentally different economic policy incentives for peripheral (or 'mixed market economy' MME) and core (or 'coordinated market economy' CME) member states. Firstly, the institutional design of the euro was a political choice biased in favor of deflationary adjustment policies in times of crisis, disproportionately benefiting creditors and capital owners, and leading to falling incomes and higher unemployment in the periphery. Secondly, the institutional incentives of the single currency are the opposite for Northern and export-driven CMEs and Southern demand-led MMEs during economic booms and downturns and respectively. Between 1998 and 2008, lower interest in the poorer MMEs fueled faster growth, increasing wages and lowering returns to capital, which resulted in falling income inequality in the South, while the only way for the richer CMEs to remain competitive within EMU was to practice relative wage restraint and enact structural reforms, leading to lower wages and higher returns to capital, and therefore rising income inequality in the North. The natural result during these 'normal' times was relative economic convergence between the Eurozone member states, both in GDP per capita and in overall levels of income inequality. Between 2008 and 2013, however, MMEs had no choice but to respond to the euro crisis by a series of deflationary spending, price and wage cuts. These policies resulted in deep and long recessions, as well as widening income inequality. The CMEs had the choice to respond to the crisis by instituting moderately inflationary policies domestically, which led to increasing wages and a lower return to capital, causing declining levels in domestic inequality. The logical outcome of the euro crisis was to bring about renewed divergence between its member states, both in GDP per capita, and in national levels of inequality. This 'winner-take-all, loser-pay-all' outcome in the Eurozone - where the richer countries gained at the expense of the poorer ones, while at the same time widening domestic inequality in the periphery - was the result of political choices favored capital over labor in economic policy, reflecting the decline of the importance of national electoral politics within EMU as well as the increased importance of organized financial interests in Brussels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Hobbes, the entirety of that which exists is body, and this body is, I contend, dynamic, generative, affective and emotional. In investigating any phenomenon, one must, to follow Hobbes, proceed from the body and its motions. I argue that Hobbes's persistent materialism ought to direct us toward connecting Hobbes to recent theorizing on affect and emotion. This paper explores Hobbes's account of the body and its corporeal processes, arguing that we can read multiple points at which Hobbes's articulations open onto connections with contemporary thinking on affect and emotion; I illustrate this mode of interpretation these connections through a close reading of Hobbes's account of the state of nature. As I read Hobbes, I theorize these resonances between affect theory and Hobbes, focusing on Hobbes's conceptualization of philosophy, its methodology, and its objective, his rendering of the body, his elaboration of the embodied processes of motion, sensation, and thought, and his theory of the passions. As such, this paper is situated at a conjunction of scholarship on Hobbes and affect theory, and I argue that our engagement with Hobbes benefits from this sort of entanglement. I read across academic disciplines and theoretical traditions to demonstrate the way that emotion and affect are central to understanding politics as such and to engaging with a canonical thinker such as Hobbes, expressing the emotional stakes and intricacies of his theoretical concerns. This essay opens with a reading of Hobbes in relation to Spinoza vis-à-vis embodiment and affect, arguing that they share some philosophical commitments and objectives that connect them to contemporary affect theory and that this generates some affinities in their respective ethical projects. From there, I engage Hobbes's materialist account of motion, sensation, and thought from the perspective of affect and emotion. I contend that not only does Hobbes's philosophy of the body in motion resonate with affect theory at multiple points, but that they share the project of upsetting Cartesian dualism. The subsequent section directly takes up Hobbesian emotion, which I theorize in terms of Sara Ahmed's work on emotion, particularly her concept of an affective economy. Finally, I provide an affective reading of Hobbes's state of nature that uses the preceding sections to trace the material, affective processes - motions, sensations, thoughts, etc. - at work there; this section argues that the state of nature should itself be read as an affective economy. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the entire Hobbesian project proceeds from the body, and that this body ought to be read affectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the place of human rights in contemporary Conservative Party foreign policy thinking. This paper asks three interrelated questions: Firstly, what role have human rights come to acquire in the post - war era? Secondly, how have human rights affected Conservative foreign policy thinking? Thirdly, what are the ideational tensions in Conservative foreign policy over the place of human rights in the early 21st Century? The purpose of this paper is to propose and consider some answers to these research questions. To do this, a mixed methodological approach will be relied upon that combines textual analysis of speeches from leading Conservatives with elite actor interview material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although historical institutionalism encompasses a variety of institutional dynamics, it has traditionally focused on the impact of formal institutions designed and enforced by official entities. The tendency to prioritize formal institutions reflects in part the fact that historical institutionalism grew out of the study of advanced industrial democracies. By contrast, efforts to take informal institutions seriously have derived primarily from research on developing countries and transitional economies where certain types of formal institutions may be less institutionalized than informal ones. An implicit division of analytic labor has thus emerged between scholars of established capitalist democracies who regard formal institutions as the normative barometer for institutional analysis, and comparativists who specialize in countries where key political economic processes occur beyond the scope of formal institutions. The reflexive association of formality with advanced industrial democracies and informality with incomplete development, however, is not only teleological, but misleading. Concepts developed from analyses of endogenous institutional change in varied political economic contexts reveal that the causal mechanisms of institutional transformation are often informal in character. Meanwhile, even though informal institutions have received more attention by comparativists studying developing and post-communist countries, an emerging second generation of historical institutionalists recognizes that even in advanced political economies, informal institutions are relevant in structuring political processes and economic performance. Going forward, direct theorization of informal institutions represents a fertile frontier for comparative politics, particularly when combined with insights from historical institutionalism about institutional stability and change. This paper develops these arguments in four main parts. The first two sections review key contributions in historical institutionalism, starting with now-classic contributions that concerned how institutions structure politics, followed by more recent efforts to explain institutional development over time. The latter studies continue to privilege formal institutions, but upon closer examination, present explanations that include dynamics generated by informal institutions. The second part discusses studies in comparative politics that explicitly engage informal politics, practices, and institutions--but are not necessarily identified with historical institutionalism. The third section proposes that informal institutions be analyzed in a manner that decouples institutional formality from functionality. The case of economic reform in China illustrates how the relative dysfunctionality of formal institutions may give rise to informal coping strategies that facilitate transformation of the original formal institutions in an endogenous manner. Economic reform in developing countries and transitional economies often encounters the challenge of overcoming a "partial reform equilibrium" trap, whereby initial beneficiaries of early reform become political obstacles to deeper liberalization.2 This phenomenon poses a dilemma for historical institutionalism at two points in time, or "critical junctures." The first juncture is the initiation of economic reforms, and the second one is overcoming the partial reform equilibrium trap. Attending to adaptive informal institutions provides insight into how unorganized groups may nonetheless influence policy processes. The paper concludes by identifying promising directions for incorporating informal institutions into historical institutional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analytical framework to systematize and compare regulation that steers the behaviour of parties, interest groups and service-providing voluntary organizations as adopted by advanced democracies, a framework able to travel organizational types and legal systems. This framework aims at examining whether we find different (e.g. more or less constraining) 'modes' or 'styles' of organizational regulation that democratic states tend to adopt, modes cross-cutting distinct types of voluntary organizations (VOs) that fulfil different functions in democratic states and that are therefore usually examined in isolation. Based on our framework, we present a first selection of indicators and apply them to 18 advanced democracies, capturing regulatory constraints on VO formation, operation and dissolution respectively. This first picture points to parallels in the constraints inherent in regulation as applicable to different VO types within the same legal contexts, suggesting the fruitfulness of an encompassing perspective on organizational regulation in advanced democracies as proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates centrality in an informal elite network to the formation of winning coalitions to illustrate how social network analysis (SNA) can explain the internal workings of authoritarian regimes theoretically and empirically. An informal network among Chinese elites is created by noting who has been promoted under whom during their earlier career. An analysis with exponential random graph models confirm that ties between members belonging to the same faction, with the same provincial origin, or with similar pre-P.R. China experiences are significantly more likely. Network position is then used to predict who will be appointed to the inner circle of the Chinese Communist Party, the Politburo, five years later. The network approach indicates that it is the number of patrons that matter, and not just the fact of having one, as earlier studies have shown. Being well-connected to peers, i.e. having one's own clients, matter as well. Complex centrality measures that take into account the individual's overall position in the network can identify patrons and predict who will enter the inner circle even if patrons are unknown. The paper proposes a new theoretical and empirical approach to the understudied informal institutions of authoritarian regimes, and suggests a more principled, but also more nuanced way of measuring one such institution - the personal relationships between a larger set of elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation, and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance we argue that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. We show that the burgeoning literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the outcomes and effect of these designs on more traditional representative fora, at the expense of concerns about their internal procedures. Secondly we argue that despite limitations, replicable systematic comparison of the effects of institutional design is both necessary and possible even at the national level. We present a qualitative comparative analysis of 31 cases of National Public Policy Conferences (NPPCs) in Brazil. Finally, we show that popular deliberative assemblies that vary in their familiarity and their policy area of interest, and that organize their structure and sequence deliberation in different ways can be associated with differential effects on both option analysis and option selection stages of the policy process respectively. The paper proceeds by critically reviewing the relevant literature, presenting the data and describing its operationalization before explaining the different associations between NPPC designs and their effects on legislative activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 U.S. war in Iraq is notable for its duration and foreign policy consequences, as well as the multiple and changing justifications the Bush administration used to explain U.S. involvement. In particular, Bush's use of humanitarian justifications in the Iraq case has drawn the attention and criticism of scholars who argue that this is a case of norm abuse with negative consequences for the future of humanitarian intervention norms. However, the pattern of humanitarian justifications does not match accounts of abuse, raising the questions: What drove the use of humanitarian justifications in Iraq? What drives perceptions of norm abuse? Using regression models and an original dataset based on content analysis of presidential speeches and media reports, the paper tests hypotheses that humanitarian justifications replaced the WMD rationale and that justifications are responsive to changes in public opinion. The paper argues that perceptions of norm abuse are more closely driven by media accounts of the conflict than by the pattern of presidential justifications. These findings have important implications for understanding public perceptions of conflict, the development of humanitarian norms, and future responses to mass atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains how the management of post-secondary educational institutions in the Philippines influences the continuation of the labor export program Using region-level data for years 1989 to 2004, this paper shows a statistically significant relationship between an increase in tertiary enrollment and tertiary graduates, and the number of Filipinos leaving the country on an overseas contract labor. The flexible, unregulated nature of Philippine tertiary education continues to adjust and feed the labor export industry with Filipinos ready to work abroad. But on the other hand, the technical and vocational education developed by President Ferdinand Marcos under the Technical Educational and Skills Training Authority (TESDA) actually plays an important role in reversing this trend so Filipinos are trained for the domestic labor market. Using regional-level data for years 1989 to 2004, this analysis finds a statistically significant relationship between an increase in technical skills and vocational education instituted by TESDA and a decrease in the number of overseas Filipino Workers, controlling for other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes changes in regional electoral behavior and attitudes towards separatism and foreign policy orientation in Ukraine after the "Orange Revolution" and the "Euromaidan," which turned into a violent internal conflict and one of the biggest international conflicts involving Western countries and Russia. The research question is whether the regional divisions concerning domestic politics, separatism and foreign orientation have changed significantly in Ukraine since the "Orange Revolution" in 2004 and the "Euromaidan" in 2014. This paper employs comparative and statistical analyses of voting results of the 2012, 2007, 2006, and 2002 parliamentary elections, and the 2014, 2010, and 2004 presidential elections, to examine effects of historical legacies, ethnicity, language, age, and economic factors on regional support for pronationalist/pro-Western and pro-Russian/pro-communist political parties and presidential candidates. The study also analyses support for separatism in Crimea and Donbas after the "Orange Revolution" and the "Euromaidan." It uses a brief survey, conducted for this study by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in April and May 2014, to examine determinants of pro-separatist attitudes. The paper also employs Razumkov Center and KIIS surveys to analyze changes in 2002-2014 in regional preferences for joining the European Union (EU), NATO, and a union with Russia. The analysis shows that Ukraine after the "Orange Revolution" remained divided along regional lines in terms of support for political parties and presidential candidates and attitudes towards joining the EU, NATO, and a Russia-led union. After the "Euromaidan," such divisions in foreign policy orientation and, to a lesser extent, support for presidential candidates and political parties remained. A significant rise in separatist sentiments helped to fuel separatist takeovers of power in Crimea and Donbas and Russian military intervention in these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant research has argued that religious conflict is more violent than other forms of communal conflict. However, much existing scholarship has failed to distinguish between the presence of a religious distinction and the active use of religion in conflict. This paper argues for a more precise definition of religious conflict emphasizing the use of religious rhetoric by political organizations. With this definition in mind, I test the proposition that religious rhetoric encourages violence through analysis of a new dataset on the behavior of ethnic political organizations worldwide between 1960 and 2012. This analysis finds that the use of religious rhetoric in one year does not have a significant impact on the likelihood of violence in subsequent years. In contrast, participation in violence in one year substantially increases the likelihood that ethnic political organizations will adopt religious rhetoric in subsequent years. I argue that the use of religious rhetoric serves as a means by which violent political organizations signal resolve to rivals and gain moral legitimacy among moderate constituents. This paper contributes to a developing understanding of the relationship between religion and violence as well as a growing literature on the multidimensionality of ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who takes to arms in the struggle for political change? Guided by theory on honor ideology, this paper finds micro-level evidence for a link between attitudes towards men's privilege and women's subordination, and participating in political violence. In recent years, groundbreaking research has emerged concerning the macro-level relationship between gender equality and the peacefulness of societies. Yet, little is known of how micro-level factors, such as personal attitudes towards gender equality and violence, are linked to individual decisions concerning mobilizing for violence. In this paper, we present new and unique individual level survey data on these issues collected in Thailand. A total of 1,200 people - a nationally representative sample of 1,000 Thai men and women as well as a special sample of 'hardcore' political activists (100 red-shirts and 100 yellow-shirts)- were interviewed on issues concerning gender equality and violence. Using factor analysis, we constructed a measure of male honor ideology, consisting of nine survey items tapping different relevant attitudes. In a series of tests, we found that honor ideology strongly and robustly predicts a higher likelihood of engaging in violent political behaviour, in both the political activist and the nationally representative samples. The study thus confirms the theoretical expectations of the relationship between honor ideology and violence, and extends it to the political domain. The ability of an attitudinal measure - honor ideology - to help identify individuals who are more prone to use violence for political purposes is quite unique. To our knowledge, this is the first study in which individual attitudes are found to actually predict engagement in violent political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies find that presidents can influence the public agenda through the rhetoric as expressed in their State of the Union Address. Still, there are several limitations of existing research that I deal with in this paper. Existing research tends to look at one issue area at a time, the issue areas investigated are not a representative sample of issues, and existing studies assume independence in attention across issue areas. In this paper, I take a different tack, looking at presidential influence across all issue areas and using an empirical approach that takes account of interdependence of issue attention across issues. I use data from the Policy Agendas Project for the years 1946-2005, organized into a pooled cross section time series. Results indicate that presidents have a discernable effect on the public agenda, which confirms past research, but unlike past research, presidential effects do not appear to decay across the year. The conclusion put the findings into context and makes recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the 2008-09 global financial crisis (GFC) and the 2010-13 euro crisis were 'systemic' crises with worldwide repercussions. Led by the United States, the global economy dealt with the GFC in a relatively swift and decisive manner: the acute phase of the crisis wound down by the spring of 2009, about seven months after Lehman Brothers' fall. By contrast, it took almost three years before financial markets stopped fearing a disorderly Eurozone breakup. In the absence of a decisive intervention by Germany or the EU, the crisis - though contained by early 2013 after the ECB's pledge to do 'whatever it takes' - was still simmering on four years after its eruption. Why did policymakers respond so differently? This paper will explain the different outcomes as caused by conflicting crisis narratives and distinct ideas about leadership in Washington and Berlin. In the wake of the GFC, the U.S. acted as a responsible hegemon for the world economy, showing 'benign' leadership, while Germany failed to play a similar role within Europe's regional context, instead practicing a form of rule-based 'coercive' leadership. By reviving and extending Charles Kindleberger's original version of hegemonic stability theory (HST), the paper clarifies why the U.S. did and Germany did not define its interest as providing the necessary public goods for the system to recover and sustain itself, including a market for distress goods, countercyclical long-term lending, lending of last resort facilities, and macroeconomic policy coordination. The crucial role of ideas - though constrained by structural factors and domestic institutions - in defining the interests of leading states during crises will be included as a key independent variable in the analysis. The paper will thus breathe new life into the HST literature, expand its explanatory reach into the regional context, and causally infer the consequences of the type of leadership for understanding the effectiveness of crisis responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a series of elite interviews to illuminate the position of the country's major civil rights groups on the central components of the contemporary "education reform agenda." It also analyzes the historical origins and contemporary political dynamics of the growing divide between civil rights groups and teachers unions over school reform and federal accountability policies. The two sides--both crucial members of the Democratic coalition--have long been united by the push for greater education spending but in recent years have engaged in an increasingly charged fight over school testing, accountability, choice, and teacher evaluation reforms which the teachers unions generally oppose. Many civil rights and antipoverty group leaders believe that NCLB's disaggregated data and accountability provisions offer an unprecedented and powerful tool in the fight for educational equity. Many in the education community, however, believe that the law--and new principal and teacher evaluation systems--unfairly hold schools and teachers responsible for resolving educational problems that have their roots elsewhere, in broader social ills like poverty. The divergent views within the Democratic party led commentator Richard Kahlenberg to write a 2008 article entitled "How the Left Can Avoid a New Education War" and the split was on public display in a clash at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008 and during recent debates over federal education legislation in Congress. This paper will provide an overview of the historical relationship between the teachers unions and civil rights groups, identify the factors will have led to their growing divergence on education policy, and examine the possible consequences of this rift for the politics of education and the direction of future school reform efforts in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an empirical test on the relationship between party identification and electoral accountability. In the Western context, partisanship is found to restrict the extent to which representatives are held accountable for their economic performance (Kayser and Wlezien 2011; Tillman 2008), but this mechanism has not been tested in the postcommunist context. Moreover, whether the inverse relationship varies across different political contexts remains unexplored. This paper seeks to fill this void. I further test for the possibility that how Western and postcommunist democracies differ in the relationship would depend on the level of analysis, since a change from being nonpartisan to partisan at the individual level has different political meanings and implications than an increase in partisanship at the aggregate level. Based on a series of individual-level and aggregate-level tests on a range of Western and postcommunist democracies from 1989 to 2012, I find that partisanship does have a negative impact on electoral accountability regardless of the level of analysis. Comparing the Western and postcommunist context, the individual-level analysis reveals that the negative impact is more salient in postcommunist democracies than in Western democracies; however, this tendency is reversed when it comes to the aggregate-level analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the cases of New Jersey and Michigan, both states that have utilized municipal takeover policies in recent years, to examine differences in home rule protection regarding the use of municipal takeover policy. This paper begins with a discussion of the normative arguments regarding the value of local autonomy and local democracy and continues with a review of the history of municipal home rule and its relationship to debates over local autonomy. The paper then presents the case studies of New Jersey and Michigan. Drawing upon primary source data from each state, including legal text, judicial opinions, and court briefs the paper highlights the relationship between home rule and municipal takeover in each state. Findings from the analysis show that home rule protection, whether constitutional or legislative, does not protect municipal governments from municipal takeovers, partially due to decades of eroding home rule principles in both states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationship between political elites and voters at the era of social network service and provides descriptive research on the rhetoric of political elites at the time. On this paper, I divided discussions into two parts. On the first discussion, I argue that social network service changes the relationship between political representatives and voters in that it creases voter's opportunities to have high leverages over their political representatives. This is because social network service endows voters the ability to hold their representatives accountable and responsive. In more detail, social network service's attributions in easing information asymmetry, empowering collective preferences of citizen, and enabling public agenda setting increase voter's opportunities to monitor their political representatives and bring bargaining power back to voters from their representatives. On this second discussion, I apply this argument to a discussion about the rhetoric of political elites at the era of social network service and suggest that social network service increases political elites' incentives to express that they are politically accountable and responsible. This is because social network service increases issue salience of political responsibility and accountability during election campaign and it conditions political elites' strategic calculations on the rhetoric. Using the campaign speeches of U.S. 2008 nominees, I ran corpus analysis on the rhetoric of political elites concerning responsibility and accountability. The result shows that both Barak Obama and Jon McCain intended to express that they are well acknowledged with political salience of accountability and responsibility. However, there was clear difference between them in their priming strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that understanding the particular educational ideology underpinning the federal role in public education is key to understanding the rise of the modern punitive education state. The U.S. education system has become increasingly punitive in the last decade, most notably in the rise in the use of a variety of harsh sanctions for schools and teachers as a tool to hold these groups accountable for student performance. Seeking an explanation for this trend, several political scientists have become increasingly interested in the institutionalization and expansion of federal control of education in the post-War era, particularly beginning with the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Recent scholarship has portrayed the ESEA as the pinnacle of the Great Society's attempt to attack inequality and poverty, with initial success rolled back by conservative mobilization around the school choice and standards movement, and a renewed focus on 'excellence' rather than 'equity' in education. However, little attention has been paid to the ideological terms which the first federal federal expansion into education policy occurred. This paper pushes against the current rollback framework, arguing that federal power in education was premised from the start on a conservative ideology that laid the groundwork for future punitive developments. This paper argues that moment when political liberals succeeded in institutionalizing the federal role in education policy coincided with the moment of consolidation of conservative economic policy that successfully redefined the purpose of education. This meant much of the programmatic structure that emerged from the ESEA incorporated a conservative understanding of public education's purpose, an understanding that is the basis for much of the punitive policies of the modern education state. By ignoring the ideological underpinnings of the ESEA and the fundamental ideological continuity of the education state after its passage, scholars have failed to grasp the role of the ESEA and Great Society liberals in setting the education state on a path towards punitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social information, defined as information about what others have done, are doing or will be doing in future, is a powerful motivator of pro-social behaviour. However there is little research on the role of social information on volunteering, where work has instead examined socio-economic and demographic correlates, the role of personal networks and barriers to participation. In this paper we examine the effect of leader and peer endorsement as forms of social information where such endorsement provides a signal to others that these people value the activity and sets an example that others could emulate. The paper presents the results of a field experiment carried out in the autumn of 2013, which examined the effect of different forms of endorsement on volunteering activity amongst 100,000 students in five UK universities. We compare the effect on volunteering rates of politician, celebrity and peer endorsement from named people who have engaged in volunteering compared with a control group that has no such endorsement. We examine outcome measurements of click-throughs to volunteering unit websites, attendance at volunteering training, registration with volunteering units, and results from an all-student survey seven weeks after the original e-mails. We find student endorsements reduce click-throughs. There are treatment effects for endorsement by politicians on subsequent training. We find heterogeneity in treatment effects for registration and training, with both negative and positive effects of celebrity endorsements. Overall, we find some support for the provision of leader and celebrity endorsement, but confirm negative effects for peer endorsement in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over US policy towards Israel and the peace process is usually framed without explicit reference to American grand strategy. This is so despite the fact that approaches to this issue rest implicitly on broader preferences related to US grand strategy. One of the goals of this paper is to make this relationship explicit. As such, it demonstrates that proponents of an assertive grand strategy tend to view Israel as a strategic asset and resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict as unimportant, while proponents of a cautious grand strategy tend to the opposite conclusions. The paper then analyzes these grand strategies' approaches to the conflict in empirical terms. Here it argues that while Israel is an asset, the peace process cannot be ignored. These insights are then drawn together in the form of a third 'centrist' grand strategy which, it is concluded, provides a better foundation for approaching the Arab-Israeli conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine whether conditional transfers enjoy more support among non-beneficiaries than similar unconditional transfers, and whether\conditionality" has a greater effect on support for transfers when non-beneficiares perceive themselves as different from (potential) beneficiaries. The paper shows that what I refer to as the\otherness hypothesis" is compatible with crossnational survey data from Latin America that indicate that in countries where the poor and rich differ more along regional and ethnic lines, the greater is the resistance among the rich and white for redistribution. It also reports results from survey-experimental studies in Brazil that show that conditionality increases support for transfers only among the rich and/or whites, and has a much greater effect once respondents are primed to think about beneficiaries as different from themselves. Evidence also points to the fact that that priming based on region leads to much stronger increases on the effect of conditionality than priming based on race. Findings suggest that CCTs may help overcome resistance to redistribution in more heterogenous societies, which is precisely where resistance to redistribution tends to be greater. More generally, the paper makes the case that there is much to be learnt by exploring how individual preferences about government transfers vary with non-redistributive aspects of these policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The restrictive legal framework of abortion in Latin America has started to change during the past decade, as legislative reforms and high court decisions have liberalized, to different extents, the abortion laws in Colombia, Mexico City, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Feminist mobilization has been the crucial factor of change in this area of rights, and conservative religious actors have been the main opponents of reform. On its part, political and legal factors contribute to understand the timing and outcomes of legal changes, as well as the capacity of movement and counter-movement to influence reform processes. Based on field work carried out in Mexico, this paper analyzes the main components of the legal and political opportunities that have been relevant in abortion legal reform in that country, which offer important points of reference for other Latin American cases. Drawing on social movement theory and legal studies literature, this paper highlights the importance of relatively stable components of political opportunities such as the type of institutional organization of federalism, which determines the location of abortion policy- and the possibilities of social movements to influence it-, as well as of institutional arrangements and cultural understandings regarding the relationship between State and Church. Regarding more contingent political factors, the analysis of this case confirms that divisions among elites, and in particular post-electoral conflict, may create conditions for rights advocacy actors, whereas politicians' search for legitimacy and short-term electoral incentives may favor counter-reformers, especially at the local level -where there may be greater Church's influence and less accountability mechanisms. With regards to the legal opportunity, the paper highlights the role of the rules of access to courts and legal standing in constitutional review proceedings, as determinants of the types of actors and claims that reach the courts. The analysis of the Mexican case shows how constitutional courts, in their quest for institutional legitimacy, may expand the legal opportunity for the participation of social actors at judicial proceedings, when facing decisions that involve highly controversial issues and social conflicts. Finally, the paper shows how rules of opinion formation at courts may affect final judicial outcomes and the influence of social actors in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deploys Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology and Sloterdijk's genealogy of rage to argue affects connect, stoke, sustain, and orient insurgent Anonymous assemblages. Cruising the memes comprising the image-repertoire of Anonymous allows analytical insight in the tactics, strategies, and 'governmentality' of the hacktivists assembled behind virtual Guy Fawkes masks. Taking ACT-UP as an antecedent to Anonymous contentious political action, this paper argues the affective impulsion to actout(raged) contributes to transvaluing political norms about surveillance, privacy, accessibility, and freedom in contemporary securitized milieus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the effects of the local media market for turnout in municipal elections in Switzerland. Building on the information model of voter turnout, we posit that the exposure of citizens to locally relevant news is important for their probability to participate in local elections. Empirically, we focus on aggregate levels of turnout in recent local elections in 408 metropolitan municipalities in Switzerland. We find that newspaper audience in a municipality, as well as the congruence of newspaper markets with municipal territories both have positive effects on levels of turnout in municipal elections. The paper thereby contributes to an emerging literature showing that the role of the media is important for political participation at the local level, but also beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefit sharing, embodied in international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol (NP), emerged as a counter to the extension of intellectual property rights in developing countries, and has been hailed as a significant step to promote development. This study focuses on benefit sharing in order to compare development strategies in different regional contexts. Contrary to the view that countries base their development strategy on one framework, this paper points out that in implementing specific policies, nations employ various approaches to development. Comparing benefit sharing policies in three nations at various levels of economic development, India, Nepal and Norway, this study points out that diverse approaches have implications beyond national borders. Benefit sharing establishes legal mechanisms to ensure that firms accessing genetic resources do so only with the consent of, and with due compensation to, traditional communities or knowledge holders. In what ways do countries apply market-based or rights based development approaches to frame benefit sharing laws? What implications do these different frameworks have for the implementation of benefit sharing regimes? This study points out that the deviations in approaches have cross-regional implications and that coordination between nations is required to implement benefit sharing and development strategies effectively. The paper is based on a project focusing on access and benefit sharing currently being conducted in collaboration with researchers in India, Nepal and Norway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper offers a possible, partial explanation for the continued operation and ultimate survival of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and direct federal support for the arts in the 1990s: political institutionalization. The thesis of our paper is that during the 1990s an "advocacy coalition" (see Sabatier, 1993) consisting of the NEA and the state art agencies (SAASs) emerged from the institutional environment of American cooperative federalism (e.g., Elazar, 1964) and "marble-cake" intergovernmental relations (e.g., Grodzins, 1993). The advocacy coalition of the NEA and the SAAs formed around a deeply shared and embedded belief in the appropriateness of federal support for the arts in the U.S. and the necessity of the federal-state partnership in its provision. Drawing on Meyer's General Institutional Model for organizational analysis (Meyer, 1994) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's Advocacy Coalition Framework for policy analysis (Jenkins-Smith & Sabatier, 1994; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993), we develop the Institutionalized Political Organization (IPO) model to demonstrate how the emergence of the NEA-SAA advocacy coalition had the primary consequence of institutionalizing federal support for the arts in the U.S. Thus, our proposed paper suggests that the political institutionalization of federal support for the arts in the U.S. provided a resilient and stable political environment that shielded the NEA from congressional threats and enabled American arts policy to continue to operate in and ultimately survive the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]