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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]

Normative influence in the international environment is not power free, nor does it always flow from transnational actors acting in apolitical ways. Powerful state actors are often in the business of norm promotion in efforts to reshape regions in ways that favor their interests and beliefs. Drawing on the empirical example of US efforts to promote a new set of regional norms in the Middle East in the 1990s (Israeli inclusion in regional relations, cooperative security concepts, and liberal economic cooperation), I argue that attempts to project norms on to regional settings are difficult and often fail. The American failure to reshape the regional order suggests important lessons for how norms are created and promoted and why they are not accepted evenly across the international system. To account for both norm resistance and varied responses to American-backed norms in the Middle East, the paper considers a variety of scope conditions drawn from the social psychology literature on persuasion and political science work on socialization. While existing explanations can largely account for the general pattern of failure, additional factors based on national identity, role conceptions and leadership beliefs must be introduced to better account for variation in how actors respond to normative persuasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to advance a discussion of the strategic challenges inherent in different coalitional choices that social movements make. Not only do grievances and resources influence alliance patterns, but movements that survive over the long-term do so in part because they successfully manage the dilemmas associated with different coalitional positions. In the first section, I discuss the risks and trade-offs that accompany particular types of alliances, and introduce a typology of different alliance patterns that social movements might form. Then, I illustrate this argument using the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) as a case study, tracing the specific alliance patterns that have emerged throughout the movement?s history in Brazil. Finally, relying on interviews with MST activists within the leadership structure as well as at the grassroots level, I discuss how recent changes within the movement?s membership base might affect their future strategic choices and attendant alliance patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relationships between democracy and different forms of ethnic conflict. Only recently have scholars sought to unpack ethnic conflict and take seriously the variations in causes and dynamics of different forms of dissent. This article continues in this direction by considering how institutions interact with various kinds of ethnic strife, both to understand ethnic conflict in general and to consider more seriously the impact of democratic structures on communal conflict. We consider three different forms of ethnic conflict?protest, conflict among groups, and violence against the state. In particular, we focus on whether ethnic conflict rises or falls due to the dynamics of the election cycle. We perform analyses, using a time series-ed version of the Minorities at Risk Dataset from 1985-1998. We find that each form of dissent is, indeed, distinct, and that elections are not as destabilizing as expected. Indeed, some forms of conflict decline during elections. We discuss our results and the implications for broader debates about political institutions and ethnic conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable gap emerges in the study and development of political theory, located between political philosophy, the history of ideas and post-structural theory. In addition to importing methodologies from philosophy and history, political theory has to develop its own methods and research questions and to reconnect the analysis of political thought with other branches of political science. The paper argues for a ?political theory of politics? that needs to explore the conceptual and ideational structure of core political features of collective social life that involve decision-making, the regulation of conflict, the mobilization of support for those activities, and the construction of political visions. Political thinking requires analysis as a fluid set of conceptual and discursive ?solutions? to issues such as the following: manufacturing stability, handling coercion, the conceptual control of political space and political time, the management of diversity, ambiguity as controlled indeterminacy, rights as a ranking and prioritizing (or rationing) concept, political commitment/allegiance, not political obligation, as a mobilizing concept, and the conceptualization and rhetorical marketing of political failure. Examples of some of the above are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal legal recognition of same-sex couples that provides at least some rights and responsibilities of marriage has spread rapidly throughout Western Europe, beginning with Denmark in 1989 and now in eight other countries. This article draws on conceptual frameworks of institutional change from several social sciences to explain why the nine countries recognize same-sex partnerships, while other countries with similar economic statuses, social histories, and religious traditions do not. One strand of theory focuses on the efficiency-enhancing potential of institutions, and a second strand of theory focuses on the conflict over institutional change. This paper uses both quantitative regression analysis and Qualitative Comparative Analysis of efficiency-related and conflict-related variables, including social norms, religiosity, political resources, and economic incentives, to explain the pattern of SSPR adoption. The findings suggest that tolerant attitudes toward homosexuality, low religiosity, and high levels of cohabitation are the primary predictors of a country?s legal recognition of same-sex partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contending historical narratives, whether produced by historians or social scientists, revolve around substantive issues that are unique to the history of a particular country or era. However, certain common points of concern surface when the relationships between different strands of historical scholarship are compared across areas. Such points of concern not only suggest markers through which contemporary historians locate their contributions within existing research, but also speak to broader theoretical and methodological issues in such fields as comparative politics and historical sociology. Situating and comparing historical scholarship across areas according to a generalized template is a valuable strategy for bringing compartmentalized groups of historians and area specialists into dialogue with one another, while also making their debates intelligible in terms of general disciplinary concepts and theories. For the comparativist, this also represents a new strategy not only for constructing fresh interpretations of cases, but also for fending off charges that these interpretations are marked by inattentiveness to historical controversies and selective use of convenient narratives. This paper identifies and compares several strands of historical research evident in Japanese and Russian studies in order to illustrate how these may be differentiated in terms of a standard set of generalized questions that reflect broader theoretical and methodological concerns in the social sciences. This is evident in differences between ?universalist? and ?particularist? treatments of Japanese and Russian history, each of which also evinces ?positive? or ?negative? images of the past insofar as these narratives have obvious normative or prescriptive implications. It is also evident in the extent to which the language employed to characterize temporal processes suggest evolutionary continuity or change punctuated by critical turning points. In addition, it is possible to compare the conditions under which revisionist modes of historiography gain ascendance, as well as the differences in the substantive indicators of ?revisionism? across contexts. Albeit the coverage of historical scholarship is necessarily incomplete and selective, and although the dimensions of comparison represent but one way to explore multiple strands of historical scholarship, it is hoped that this exercise can demonstrate the utility of ?structured-focused? comparisons of historical scholarship across areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an advanced, conceptually oriented introduction to Qualitative Comparative Analysis ? QCA (including its Fuzzy Sets extension), an overview of the current state of the art in QCA, and a discussion of best practices in the use of QCA, both general and more technical, with a special focus on QCA and counterfactual analysis. We begin by examining two analytic procedures commonly used by comparative researchers and contrast these techniques with correlational analysis, the main analytical engine of mainstream quantitative social science. We then discuss the state of the art of existing QCA applications, by trying to map the diversity and scope of these applications. Following this, we first lay out some more general guidelines to engage in a ?good? QCA analysis. This is followed by a list of more specific, technical and procedural guidelines in the form of ?best practices?. One of these guidelines has to do with the exploitation of ?remainders?, i.e. non-observed configurations. This leads us to discuss more in-depth one of the most powerful features of QCA: counterfactual analysis. We conclude by sketching several of QCA’s future prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Despite the presence of enduring bilateral rivalries, recurrent militarized interstate disputes, and notoriously violent internal political processes, South American states have paradoxically avoided a major intra-regional war since the end of the Chaco War in 1935 between Bolivia and Paraguay. Contending that realist and liberal explanations are inconclusive, this paper advances an alternative explanation: the ?Militarist Peace? hypothesis. This proposition centers on the socio-political role of the military institution at both national and regional levels. I argue that through an evolutionary, social process, the military of the region developed common socio-economic values, beliefs, principles and objectives. This fostered the armed forces? increasing identification with the interest, progress and success of the transnational and national dimensions of the military institution in South America. The increasingly transnational identity of the military transformed their traditional mission as protectors of the state from external threats to national political players and guardians of the state from internal political foes in their respective polities. The direct consequence of this evolutionary dynamic is the ?external-peace-and-internal-violence paradox? in South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes a closer look at the impacts of the decentralization policy driven by the Raffarin Government. After winning both the 2002 Presidential and Parliament elections, President and Prime Minister started a variety of reforms, which are influencing each other heavily. There is a good reason to talk of connections as both the policies are neither independent nor is there any evidence that one of them might completely explain the other one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is causation unitary or plural? The unitary view, implicit in most work adopting a positivist epistemology, has recently been criticized by a number of writers. These writers claim that the unitary perspective betrays a narrow conception of causation and is not reflective of the broad range of causal arguments present in the field of social science today. Instead, these writers suggest that the field of the social sciences is characterized by a plurality of causal assumptions (epistemological, ontological, or logical) and an associated diversity of research designs. Causation is plural, not unitary. Evidently, there are many ways to think about causation. Indeed, once we head down the analytic road it is not clear where we might stop, or ought to stop. Causal arguments are, in principle, infinite in their diversity. It is equally evident that the type of causal argument one chooses to adopt is likely to affect one’s choice of research design. In this respect causal pluralists offer an important corrective to a naïve positivism. However, the pluralist view of causation raises several difficulties. First, causal typologies such as those as sketched above may over-state the ontological, epistemological, and/or logical different-ness of causal explanations in the social sciences. More important, whatever diversity of causal logic in fact characterizes the contemporary social sciences there is little profit to be gained from a plural account of causation. If causation means different things to different people then causal arguments cannot meet. They are apples and oranges. Thus, insofar as we value cumulation in the social sciences there is a strong prima facie case for a unified account of causation. The crucial caveat is that this unified account of causation must be sufficiently encompassing to bring together all of the arguments that we refer to as causal in the social sciences. Unity is useful, but not if achieved by (arbitrary) definitional fiat. I argue that there is an underlying concept of causation shared by all (or most) protagonists in this debate. The core, or minimal, definition of causation held implicitly within the social sciences is that a cause raises the probability of an event occurring. This understanding of causation, which is borrowed from but not wedded to Baysian inference, provides common semantic ground on which to base a reconstruction of causation. I argue, second, that rather than thinking about causation as a series of discrete types or distinct rules we ought to re-conceptualize this complex form of argument as a set of logical criteria applying to all arguments that are causal in nature (following the foregoing definition), across fields and across methods. I argue, third, that in coming to grips with causation it is helpful to distinguish between the formal properties of a causal argument and the methods by which such an argument might be tested. The two questions, What are you arguing? and How do you know it is true? are logically distinct and call forth different criteria of adequacy. My final argument, and the core of the paper, concerns the specific criteria that are commonly applied to causal argumentation and proof. I argue that sixteen criteria apply to the formal properties of causal argument and eight apply to the choice of research design (the task of demonstration or proof). It will be argued, therefore, that causation in the social sciences is both more diverse and more unified than has generally been recognized. It is more diverse insofar as the criteria applied to causal argumentation surpasses the implications of even the broadest of the causal typologies sketched above. There are multiple dimensions by which causal arguments are rightly judged. It is more unified insofar as these criteria apply across existing fields, methods, ontologies, and epistemologies. This perspective does not dispute the diversity of empirical approaches evident in the social sciences today, including textual, ethnographic, experimental, statistical, and formal methods of analysis (often grouped into three large camps -- interpretivist, behavioralist, and rational choice). What it does is to call attention to the remarkable commonalities that underlie these apparently heterogeneous approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of scholars are turning their attention to the phenomenon of policy diffusion, as an outgrowth of debates about globalization. As this dialogue develops within political science, it may help to look at how other related social science fields have approached questions of diffusion. Some social science fields have long considered diffusion a central phenomenon of interest and have developed a range of methods for its study. This paper reviews the main approaches to the study of diffusion and develops a framework for understanding the contribution of different social science literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes multi-level social-ecological systems robust? In this paper we look at the institutional configurations that affect the interactions between resource, resource users, public infrastructure providers and public infrastructure. The framework we propose helps us to identify potential vulnerable parts of a social-ecological system to internal disturbances. Especially the tensions between resource users and public infrastructure providers are key in potential robustness of the social-ecological system. Design principles originally developed for robust common-pool resource institutions seem to be a good starting point for the development of design principles for more general social-ecological systems. Specific attention is given to cases where multiple interacting scales are an important characteristic of the social-ecological systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ‘electoral engineering’. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. This study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contrasting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define the electoral incentives facing parties, politicians, and citizens. By changing the rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior among politicians and citizens. Reformers believe that electoral engineering can solve multiple social problems, whether by mitigating ethnic conflict, strengthening voter-party bonds, generating democratic accountability, or boosting women’s representation. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior. To consider these issues, this paper sets out the theoretical framework, derived from the introduction to a new book ‘Electoral Engineering’ forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, New York in Spring 2004. The book compares the consequences of electoral rules and cultural modernization for many dimensions of political representation and voting behavior, including issues of electoral behavior in patterns of party competition, the strength of social cleavages and party loyalties, and levels of turnout, and questions of political representation in the gender and ethnic diversity of parliaments, and the provision of constituency service. Systematic evidence is drawn the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems based on surveys of parliamentary and presidential contests held in over thirty countries ranging from the United States, Australia and Switzerland to Peru, Taiwan and Ukraine. The book concludes that formal rules do matter, with important implications for the choice of electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are losers of coalition games to do? Parties that lose in coalition bargaining need not sit passively as the opposition doing nothing. Rather, we should expect them to consider acting strategically to improve their chances of winning in the next iteration of the coalition game. In this paper I develop spatial coalition models that incorporate opposition party attempts to improve their position relative to voters and other parties. I examine a pivotal coalition system model, an alternational coalition system model, and an unconstrained coalitional model, based on a standard Downsian unidimensional policy space. I then incorporate in these models the Rikerian strategy of introducing a new issue dimension for the final multidimensional heresthetics model. The conclusion focuses on comparative statics and empirical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within this paper, we attempt to grapple with a problem that has long confronted individuals within the social sciences: what do you do with alternative historical accounts of events and what does a comparison across these accounts tell us? To address this problem, we explore an approach where distinct accounts are juxtaposed against one another, trying to gauge the degree to which such a juxtaposition can inform us about what actually took place. Normally individuals either collapse all source information together or they select one source to examine. We feel that it is useful to maintain the integrity of each source and to explore similarities and differences across sources. For our analysis, we employ the use of a dataset that we just completed on the Rwandan genocide across five sources by the cell, commune and province for 100 days. Our analysis presents us with very different interpretations of the genocide; some fit directly with existing convention while others vary quite significantly. While all sources agree that something took place, they vary with regard to exactly who did what to whom and when - largely in line with why they were compiling information in the first place and for whom they were collecting information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and toxicology -- recently conceptualized as "Toxicogenomics" - has extremely important implications for understanding human behavior and improving public policies. After indicating the conceptual changes in social science that this approach requires, I summarize two research projects that illustrate the relevance of toxicogenomics to policy issues: first, the chemical compounds (silicofluorides) used for over 90% of water fluoridation in the United States; second, the assessment of superfund sites needs to consider multiple toxins (both determining their presence and measuring their uptake) as well as behavioral and health effects (understood from the perspective of toxicogenomics). Both examples reveal enormous potential benefits of this approach (including lower rates of learning disabilities, substance abuse and violent crime) and indicate sources of disproportionate harm for minorities that conventional social scientists do not identify. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the development of the concept of "political arts" within several of John Stuart Mill's texts. Mill is commonly classified as a liberal utilitarian who was also preoccupied with establishing the basis for social science in service to the cause of social progress. Recently, scholars have questioned the image of Mill as a "typical liberal." In order to extend such revisionary work, I have undertaken an examination of his writings about social science. What I have found is a skepticism regarding the possibility of a science of politics as a precursor to the political arts. Instead of criticizing Mill for his "failure" to illuminate the proper relationship between these two activities, I contend that there is much to learn through exposing the reasons for Mill's uncertainty. The tension between the science and art of politics is brought to light through a focus on Mill's mode of theorizing - the way in which Mill employs ambiguity and "many-sidedness" within and across his works. This mode of theorizing is especially effective within his political writings. While Mill explicitly advocates for the authority of science in politics, he implicitly acknowledges that the (democratic) political world erects many barriers to scientific knowledge about its workings. Mill's work on the political arts is worthy of consideration as it captures the difficulties involved in the application of political science within a democratic society. I conclude that Mill was correct to frame his writings with a scientific basis for the political arts - even if such a project is actually futile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of deliberative democracy attempt to reconcile moral pluralism and political obligation by suggesting that citizens have a moral requirement to give reasons to each other that are impartial in nature. I argue in this paper that though such requirements have a powerful logic behind them, the resistance of moral particularism to assimilation to norms of impartial deliberation - exemplified by religion’s continued public role in democratic life - has the potential to privatize political life, undermining deliberative democracy’s broader political goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an assessment of the practical and academic undergirding of the Managing-for-Results (MFR) philosophy, with special consideration regarding its application at the local government level. The focus of most MFR theory and training materials is on the structure of programmatic content (especially the design of strategic planning and performance measurement systems), without regard to human resource, political power, and symbolic concerns regarding implementation. In a study of fourteen "reputation leaders" on performance measurement, we find that the latter organizational frames determine a substantial amount of the variance in the successful implementation of MFR programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we seek to advance the literature on institutions and policymaking. We argue that the trade off between credibility and decisiveness is not as stark as generally thought. In particular, when broad and participatory (deep) coalitions are married with institutional configurations that lead to and support concentrated veto authority, the tension between decisiveness and credibility can be substantially alleviated. More generally, we argue that the policymaking environment is best conceived as the product of both institutional and coalitional variables. We demonstrate how coalitions and institutions interact via the cases of skills development policy in Singapore and Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The content of actor beliefs and the way in which they form these beliefs play a central role in intentionalist accounts of political behavior, perhaps most explicitly in a widely applied class of game theoretic models. Presenting a signaling game of ethnic mobilization, this paper challenges the claim that such models constitute a rational choice version of interpretive social science and sketches a hermeneutic perspective on strategic action that suggests the importance of mental models in belief formation. History creates emotionally charged mental models that generate biased beliefs about the choice context and the costs associated with different strategies, leading to different choices of actions by agents with different mental models. In order to provide a rational interpretation of significant political events, it is necessary to specify the causal mechanisms linking history and emotion to the beliefs that drive rational choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution to pluralistic political methodology, this paper draws on Alker's experience in teaching IR513 Historical and Social Science Research Methods to an international group of graduate students in the International Relations Ph.D program at USC. In that course, historians' writings on historiography are dialectically opposed to social scientific methodological texts (and the contents of a required multivariate statistics course) as a way of broadening students' awareness of methodological alternatives in politically and internationally oriented research practices. Because of the provocative philosophical contrasts it suggests with popular Political Science teaching texts like those King, Keohane and Verba (1994) and van Evera (1997), particular attention will be given to a number of cliometrically-relevant theses offered by R. G. Collingwood in his The Idea of History (1994). Particularly challenging is his claim of the emergence in the 19th Century of a new, methodologically self-conscious, autonomous form of scientific history, based on principles different from those guiding the natural sciences, positivistic historiography, or the other social sciences. Rather than attempt to adapt existing, naturalistic styles of statistical/causal/econometric research practices to historical materials in the manner of the quantitative, behavioral cliometrics of the 1950s-1970s, the present effort draws on a wider range of conceptually and technically suggestive literatures from the humanities, linguistics, cognitive and computer science for operational representations and strategies more closely consonant with the ontological, epistemological and methodological tenor of Collingwood's historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to address what the issue of sovereignty means for indigenous people's politics in settler-state contexts such as the United States and Canada. As a way to conceptually forestall presumptive divisions caused by the privileging of state sovereignty in these settings I propose an approach called 'postcolonial political science,' the overall pursuit of which is to gain the least predetermined analysis of the politics of non-dominant groups such as indigenous tribes and nations. A postcolonial political science approach thinks through the notion of political space by means of, most notably, placing at the center rather than the margins of the analysis the boundaries that too seamlessly shape and define how we come to know the contours and content of the relationship between people, power and space. In the effort to draw out this discussion with regard to the present day relevance of postcolonial political science, I offer the notion of a third space of sovereignty as a way to understand the political experience of and claims for sovereignty that do not readily ally with the political epistemology of settler state contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there is one point that the critics of liberalism almost all agree upon, it is that liberal neutrality is an unappealing and perhaps incoherent doctrine. Many contemporary liberals do not endorse the idea of neutrality, and even those liberals most identified with the idea have backed off it in certain respects. In thinking about the challenges posed by cultural and linguistic diversity, the idea of neutrality seems especially unpromising. Nobody has made this point as clearly or forcefully as Will Kymlicka. 'The idea that government could be neutral with respect to ethnic and national groups', he argues, 'is patently false'. 'In the areas of official languages, political boundaries, and the division of powers, there is no way to avoid supporting this or that societal culture'. The aim of the present paper is to challenge this widely accepted assumption that liberal neutrality is irrelevant to thinking about cultural and linguistic diversity. Focusing on the problem of language policy, I argue that liberal neutrality represents a coherent position that should play a modest, but not negligible, role in the construction of a normative theory of language politics. A rehabilitation of the idea of liberal neutrality as part of what I will call a 'hybrid' theory of language policy points to a distinctive and appealing way of making the case for minority language rights and also to an understanding of the reasonable limits that can be placed on such rights. [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]

The paper compares three cases of transitional justice highlighting the problem of ex post facto punishment. The Czech and Hungarian decisions on extensions of limitation periods for political crimes and German border guards decisions can best be analyzed in terms of political justice: they are part of a larger effort to achieve a fundamental change in the basis of political legitimacy. All these court decisions engage in explicit political arguments about the most suitable legal response to past injustices, but the requirements of justice and the rule of law are constructed very differently across the cases. A broad range of these interpretations seem prima facie plausible. Yet even though transitional justice decisions seem tailored to one particular context, it is possible to identify criteria for distinguishing trials that can serve liberal purposes from others that can only be shows of political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the fundamental assumption that ‘elected organizations are (therefore) accountable’ does not -- as is often assumed by both [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]

In this paper I propose and defend a scheme of civic service. I argue that a well-designed scheme of this kind is an important element in the political theory of republican liberalism. The signal feature of the proposed scheme is that it will require no one to perform such service, but it will allow only those who have served, or who have been excused from service because of incapacity, to hold the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike recent studies in the fields of cultural studies or geography the concept of location as a category of social or cultural analysis does not figure prominently within contemporary political theory. In the investigation of the formation of political community geographic or cultural location may provide important insights into the coherence of the boundaries of community. Emphasizing location in the study of political community, however, also prompts a reconsideration of the role of location in classical political thought. My paper will explore Aristotle’s notion of topos and Giambattista Vico’s theory of sensus communis in their treatments of classical rhetoric. I will focus on how the ideas of topos and sensus communis at the foundation of rhetoric contain a particular theory of location. Topoi are the topics, mental locations, or commonplaces, organized by the speaker in the act of rhetoric. Meticulously outlined in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, they serve as the core forms or ?containers? of rhetoric, memorized by a speaker and called upon during a speech or argument. Location as a concept in political theory assists not only in understanding the margins and limits of a community, but also in critically assessing how communities come together. In the philosophical thinking of Aristotle and Vico rhetoric is a form of speech that brings about agreement within a community, even in the face of the contestation of argument. My analysis of topos demonstrates the function of rhetoric in the structuring of community and the quality of political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that political theorists should use Johannes Althusius’s _Politica_ in their social contract classes. It brings out the importance of Christian social thought for the social contract tradition. It provides a missing dimension and missing resources not provided by other early modern social contract theories. If twentieth century theortists of the sexual, natural, and racial contract had consulted Althusius, they might have found useful resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is divided into three parts. First, I describe briefly some of the main drivers of the anti-globalization backlash, focusing in particular on growing anxieties in the industrialized countries that the social embeddedness side of the equation is losing out to the dictates of globalization. Second, I sketch out the broad universe of innovations in global governance, focusing on the dynamic interplay between civil society organizations and the transnational corporate sector around the challenges of globalization. Third, I summarize the key features of Kofi Annan's Global Compact, which engages the corporate community in promoting human rights, labor standards and environmental sustainability in its global domain, but does so in partnership with civil society, labor and the international as well as domestic public realms. In conclusion, I argue, with due appreciation for the irony, that the corporate sector, which has done more than any other to create the growing gaps between global economy and national communities, plays a key role in bridging them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses how well four theoretical approaches--which emphasize external pressure, rational learning, cognitive heuristics, and symbolic imitation--can account for the diffusion of innovations across countries in its three distinctive characteristics, namely its wave-like character, its geographic concentration, and its creation of similarity amid diversity. The cognitive-psychological approach, which invokes the heuristics of availability, representativeness, and anchoring, emerges as most persuasive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of identity politics has spawned a wide range of responses in political thoery and practice. The thesis of this paper is that identity politics constitutes a fundamental challenge to one of the founding assumptions of liberalism: the abstract universal citizen. The new politics of identity, by bringing identity into the political sphere, reveals the veiled identity of the neutral citizen. It suggests a new politics in which identity is the central focus of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of emotions in politics is an increasing concern in political science (Marcus et al. 2000, Crawford 2000, Falgar 1997, Wallace 1993). Adding to recent work on emotions in classical political theory (Koziak 2000, Cooper 1999, Sherman 1997, Nussbaum 1994, 2001), I argue that Aristotle perceived rational action and political speech as requiring a congruous, or symphonic, interaction between reason and emotion. Specifically, the paper examines Aristotle’s theory of emotions, or pathe, in relation to his political philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been disagreement over the effects of political sophistication on susceptibility to framing effects in political communication. This paper respecifies framing effects, which differentially influence citizens with different levels of political knowledge. The hypothesis is that there is a non-linear relationship between level of political knowledge and susceptibility to issue framing. Using the 1989 NES pilot study, I show that this hypothesis is generally supported. The findings suggest that the influence of the media is more significant than we have expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a well-known passage in the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in language and language seemed to repeat it inexorably." The thesis of this paper is that for most of the past century views about the nature of the scientific enterprise, the relationship between the social and natural sciences, and the nature, configuration and aims of social scientific inquiry have similarly been held captive by series of pictures. The most recent picture, I will maintain, is not quite the Wittgensteinian picture of knowledge generally but rather a more specific picture of natural scientific inquiry. Along Wittgensteinian lines, however, I contend that this misleading picture frames our understandings of science in ways that foreclose consideration of a number of promising options for rethinking the nature of social and political inquiry. Indeed, so powerful is this image that many of those who strive to resist the impulse to pattern political inquiry on one or another model of natural scientific inquiry remain in the grip of it. If one attends, for example, to some of the recent analyses of political inquiry advanced by supporters of the Perestroika movement, it is evident that aspects of this picture continue to shape and color their arguments. Consequently, even when these writers aim to vindicate what are in my view generally laudable ideals of theoretical and methodological pluralism, they do so in ways that threaten to perpetuate a variety of distortions and oppositions and to blunt the critical force and effectiveness of their own arguments. In what follows I shall therefore maintain that if the recent issues raised by the Perestroika controversy are to succeed in prompting a discussion about the nature and aims of political inquiry that yields something more than yet another dreary reenactment of the methodenstreit, it may be important to make this picture explicit and to show how it misleadingly figures both our view of natural science and our understanding of the enterprise of political inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most promising techniques that have emerged from the text-as-data movement, methods for estimating latent traits from textual data have found application across a broad range of topics. Yet attempts to apply these computer-based approaches to the analysis of judicial opinions have been both rare and unconvincing. The present paper considers the application of text-scaling methods to the analysis of a well documented body of case-law: the 16 opinions rendered by the German Federal Constitutional Court on European integration. Unsupervised text-scaling (Wordfish) appears to generate reliable results, especially for the first 14 opinions. Judicial position estimates on what is interpreted as a pro/anti-integration dimension are broadly in line with the doctrinal accounts encountered in EU law textbooks and law review articles. They are also shown to be consistent with estimates from supervised text-scaling (Wordscores). These results demonstrate that the basic assumption underpinning the application of text-scaling techniques to party manifestos and legislative speeches-that word choice is driven by rhetorical considerations{also holds for judicial discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing attention to decentralization in comparative politics, the role of local governance in wider patterns of state-society relations remains under-theorized and little understood. To address this deficit, this paper presents an empirical theory of multilevel local linkages, civil society and the state. The theory reformulates the theory of state infrastructural power to take into account local institutions and civic organization under conditions of representative democracy. The theory proposes a relationship between two sets of institutions that are usually considered separately, and as separate: institutions of local government and territorial administration and the organization of civil society. Together, these institutions link local government to civil society, and local governance to policymaking at the heights of the state. Alternative models of this infrastructure furnish the basis for a novel empirical typology of infrastructures for multilevel local governance. The models depend on state and local elites, on local civil society, or on an integrated multilevel system of policymaking and civic organization. Comparative historical analysis of France, the United States and Sweden shows these variations to be the result of long-term, endogenous trajectories of institutional development. The institutional logics of the models emerged with the consolidation of local state infrastructures and civic organization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The twentieth century policy state, devoted to social welfare, economic development, and other collective ends, consolidated infrastructures of local governance around distinct institutional logics in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innumeracy amongst survey respondents in estimating a country's immigrant population is a well-known problem for the social sciences (Herda 2010; Nadeau et al 1993). In general, individuals, especially if they are prejudiced against or perceive immigrants as a threat, are predisposed to overestimate the immigrant population at the country level. If this tendency can be generalized to other contexts such as neighborhoods, research that use subjective assessments of immigrant populations at lower levels of inquiry might be biased. Using survey data from Sweden, this paper compares individuals' subjective assessments of the immigrant population in their neighborhoods with actual register/census data. The results show that subjective assessments correlate at least moderately with objective assessments. In contrast to previous research, we find that, under control for the objective number of immigrants in their neighborhood, prejudiced people bias their response by giving lower estimates of the number of immigrants in their neighborhoods. Finally, we show that the subjective measurement tend to yield analogous effects to the objective measurement in regression models when predicting generalized trust. However, when predicting attitudes towards immigrants, the objective and subjective measurements render somewhat disparate results. Overall, our results point to that the subjective assessment of immigrant populations should be used with some caution, especially if the interest is attitudes and prejudice towards immigrant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verification and Validation are legally required evaluations that the Defense Department must make of any system, model, or simulation it deploys. With extensive experience and detailed protocols for verifying and validating natural science based systems, DoD now faces the problem of how to conduct such evaluations for the social science based systems, models, and simulations it is increasingly interested in acquiring. Employing an "epistemological ladder" or hierarchy linking ontology to data, this paper will analyze the verification and validation process as entailing analogous questions about warrantability of inferences and accuracy or generalizability of findings appropriate at any step in the ladder. Analysis of the confusing impact of the "two cultures" idea and its importance within influential philosophy of science texts, along with the particular history of validation and verification concepts within the American military, will be used as the basis for presenting a unified approach to the problem. The usefulness of the approach is tested in a mapping exercise of key debates between quantitatively and qualitatively oriented political science methodologists and of the conventional wisdom reflected in recent DoD documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-dimensional indices currently employed in the social sciences, such as indices of democracy (e.g. Freedom House, Polity, Vanhanen) or the "Human Development Index" (HDI) , use aggregation procedures based on simple arithmetic means of the various dimensions (FH, Polity) or, at best, multiplication (Vanhanen). As has been rightly criticized by many authors (Munck/Verkuilen 2002, Berg-Schlosser 2007, most recently Coppedge et al. 2011), these procedures blur many important distinctions of the respective components ("lost in aggregation"). This problem becomes even worse when respective country ratings and rankings are based on such aggregated indices, as with the HDI, but also assessments of the "quality" of democracy in various countries. By contrast, this paper proposes an alternative procedure based on set theory and fuzzy set scores. This allows the calibration and aggregation of several components in a multi-dimensional vector space by retaining the individual contribution of each component. A special macro has been developed for this purpose. The usefulness of this procedure is demonstrated both for indices of democracy and the HDI. This also has important implications for the practical-political use of such indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few ideas in political science enjoy more prominence than Hobbes' claim that the state of nature is the state of war of all against all. Hobbesian war is most often invoked in the study of international politics, yet finds limited empirical support. Paradoxically, Hobbes' thesis is rarely applied systematically to intrastate conflict. In this paper we aim to fill this gap in the literature and revisit his seminal hypothesis that anarchy fosters the use of anticipatory force. Focusing on the anarchical domains that emerge after forcible seizures of power in sub-Saharan Africa, we demonstrate that nearly half of these irregular regimes experience what we call co-conspirator rupture, in which the same individuals who collaborated to seize power end up violently turning on each other. Consistent with Hobbes' expectation, most co-conspirator ruptures take the form of preemption as comrades maneuver to eliminate their brothers-in-arms out of fear they themselves face imminent elimination. After demonstrating the regularity of this phenomenon crossnationally, we undertake an in-depth case study based on original field research of the irregular regime that comes to power after the overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko in former Zaire. The case study illustrates how the commitment problem and erosion of trust-the key mechanisms that we argue drive co-conspirator preemption-contribute to the collapse of the post-Mobutu order and the outbreak of Africa's Great War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper on the ideology of American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson on political science. Topics discussed include Emersonian politics, Emersonian political agents, and Emersonian skepticism regarding political relationships and knowledge. Also discussed is the politics of sympathy.

Reporting on a study of both internet and environmental governance against a backdrop of fiscal, technological, and political uncertainties, this paper examines key factors from these literatures in comparative perspective. Particular attention is paid to level of analyses and coprocesses. Highlighting fourteen key elements from both research domains, it identifies commonalities across the two governance arenas. Keywords: Co-processes; Environmental Governance; Internet Governance; Multi-stakeholder policy-making; Knowledge Transfer. [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]

Do different policy designs generate their own distinctive patterns of politics and power relations? That question has been one source of debate in the scholarship on the politics of policy making that has developed over the course of more than four decades. The progenitor of this line of inquiry is, of course, Theodore Lowi's "arenas of power" idea. The scholarly literature on arenas of power, or policy typologies, that followed Lowi's initial conception and his own refinements is considerable. Several conceptual approaches have supplanted the policy typology paradigm, including punctuated equilibrium theory, the advocacy coalition framework, and the social construction of policy targets. In light of these new and apparently more powerful approaches for understanding the policy-politics nexus, does the arenas of power idea remain viable? This paper investigates that question by re-examining the origin of the typology approach and by exploring it's commonalities with the newer frameworks. I argue that Lowi's original thinking had already captured some of the insights contained in the newer frameworks, and that a synthesis of the arenas of power approach with one or more of the newer approaches can advance policy theory. I explore the potential for, and the obstacles to, such a synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although learning is one of the most widely-acknowledged determinants shaping policy processes, the concept remains theoretically and methodologically under-developed in the policy process literature. Most notably, there is an incomplete understanding of the factors affecting "upscaling," or moving from individual-level learning to collective-level learning. As learning continues to occupy research agendas of policy process research, this paper seeks to provide insights from the diverse social science literatures that examine individual learning in collective context to better understand the nature of the learning process and learning products, and the factors that support learning. We examine the treatment of learning within two major policy process frameworks -- the advocacy coalition framework and institutional analysis and development framework -- and compare how they define learning and what insights they offer for understanding how learning translates from the individual to collective level. In understanding the translation from individual to collective level learning, we focus on the explanatory factors that can be gleaned from both frameworks to explain how and when learning is likely to upscale from individual to collective levels. We identify important complementarities between the two frameworks in examining these factors and conclude with developing a set of propositions for studying learning in policy processes. These propositions highlight how the nature of the issue of concern, characteristics of the collective actors, and characteristics of the institutions governing a collective setting will all factor into the likelihood of learning emerging in policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper is motivated by the rationalism / constructivism contrast in the International Relations (IR) field. By reinterpreting this contrast we seek to redirect reflection about theoretical synthesis in the field. Our argument has four steps. First, we introduce a broader intellectual setting for the rationalism / constructivism contrast by situating it as a contemporary iteration of the economic / sociological contrast classically articulated throughout the history of the modern social sciences. Second, we pragmatically give concrete content to each side of this contrast in relation to recent IR. Engagement with Weber and Parsons helps us to subdivide the economic side into parametric vs. strategic variants, and the sociological in terms of traditional vs. value-rational action. Third, we argue that synthesis of economic and sociological approaches is both viable and desirable in concrete studies of strategic interaction. Fourth, to conclude, we compare our argument to recent efforts to promote analytic eclecticism in political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]