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This is a much revised version of my review of Eberle's Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics, which originally appeared in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 2003. Here, however, I revise some of my earlier views, arguing that the Principle of Public Justification, which requires that all non-wrongful coercive laws must be able to be rationally validated by all citizens does not endorse any so-called "principles of restraint" on the part of citizens. The moral principles connecting what laws are wrong to what sorts of speech and action is required of citizens are much more complex than is usually realized. Given this, I argue that justificatory liberalism places no onerous demands on religious citizens. Nevertheless, I continue to argue that Eerble's position manifests disrespect for the moral equality of other non-religious rational moral persons. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study develops and tests a multi-level explanatory model of local government contracting for services, based on a review of the voluminous literature in this domain. The results indicate that among the strongest determinants of local government contracting are factors relating to contract management capacity, political factors, and legal constraints. Moreover, both state and local level variables have an impact on local government contracting for services, suggesting that local decision making about service delivery alternatives is endogenous to the broader context of governance. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the basis of deliberative democracy and theories of Habermas and Rawls. It discusses the problem of consensus and social contract theory and the consensual bases of deliberative democracy and the reason why modern successors to social contract theory still rely on consensual agreement as the basis of legitimacy. Aside from this, it also explains the concept of political liberalism as well as a non-consensual justification for deliberative democracy.

Locke claims that his moral and political teaching is capable of a fully rational demonstration. It would seem then that Lockean citizens are expected to grasp the rational bases of their regime. But Locke was notoriously vague or incomplete on what the rational demonstration entailed, in matters of theology especially but in others as well. I examine this question in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Government, and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and conclude that Locke did not expect most citizens to grasp the full philosophical demonstration of liberalism, but would understand a simplified version of it. This, however, risks leaving eliberal culture in an unsettled state. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article attempts to examine one possible attribute to the political environment that is source effects. It argues that political nature of advice and information impacts the applicability of prospect theory to a number of political situations. Experimental findings that show source effects both amplify and reduces framing effects were discussed. It also provides a review of past prospect theory scholarship in political science.

The article examines the dynamics of political preferences within the Russian electorate from 1995 to 2004. during the 1996, 2000 and 2004 campaigns, the shifts of ideological preferences of the voters in Russia reflected the changing degree of electoral support for major political parties in legislative elections and presidential candidates.

The article determines the role of political reputation as a shield or stinger in political predicaments. It also determines the role of identification in policy evaluations. Identifying with a politician can also protect to some degree from the negative effects of political scandals, past research suggested.

A short essay suggesting aspects of modern politics which require reconceptualizing the intsitutions of representation away from the conventional emphasis on parties, elections, legislatures and legislative-executive relations. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representation and Its Discontents: Figures for Post-Western Politics The modern trope is representation. In art, architecture, communication, literature, law, philosophy, religion, and especially in politics, representation has been the modern project. In developing ancient mimesis and medieval imitatio, representation becomes the master trope of western civilization and politics. Action, contract, leadership, legitimacy, meaning, symbolism: all supposedly amount to representation. The ambition becomes to benefit from representation as re-presentation. What is present(ed) in one place, time, or form gets re-presented in another, ideally without losses that matter but with gains that do. On this, there is general agreement. By post-modern times, though, representation can seem inadequate or perverse. Ample difficulties of representative democracies, representational arts, represented histories, simulated actions, inauthentic identities, pseudo events, parasitic relations, Potemkin villages, fraudulent photos, fake documents, false copies, inferior knock-offs, mass reproductions, and more testify to its troubles. Modern and modernist architecture fail their own representational purposes, the literary endeavors of modernity and modernism deplete their representations or de(con)struct themselves, and the modernizing impulse of epistemology to representationalize any event or experience impedes rather than promotes knowledge. The defects of representation are more and more prominent; the defenses of representation are less and less plausible. Some innovations in politics and other projects turn on strategies to correct or improve representation. Neo-liberal notions of communication and governance stem from sociology and cybernetics. Neo-socialist images of de-centered states and de-colonized cultures flow from cultural and literary studies. Neo-conservative forms of authority, competition, and tradition issue from epistemology, ecology, and anthropology. Libertarian ideas of agency come from economics. Yet most of these responses continue to rely on representation -- and to misconceive the politics emerging in new social movements, non-governmental organizations, electronic communications, and other markers of our postmodern unto post-western settings. New devices and dynamics of politics encourage different figures for making sense of them. The argument is not that modern conditions and needs have vanished entirely from our political scenes. Nor is it that representational practices are impossible or irrelevant for recent politics. Instead the essay shows how representation is not the only political trope for us. The revisions and revitalizations of representation do not suffice for what we are doing and feeling. As our acts, institutions, and other devices depart from modern templates, we do well to make better political sense of their topics and turns. After evoking discontents with representation, this essay explores several of its main alternatives, drawing from diverse theories and politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that social sciences and cultural studies both specify the conditions under which a phenomenon occurs, and these conditions can be refined further by learning from the critiques of each other's methodologies. Whereas positivist approaches are likely to take actors' interests as given in international relations, cultural studies posit them as framed by dominant ideologies or power structures.

This article introduces a conceptual framework for making sense of attempts by elected presidents to restrict the exercise of basic political liberties called executive assaults. Three different types of assaults were identified and examined as to their degree of operationalization. It argues that the only way to defeat an executive assault in Ecuador is for particular business associations or firms to mobilize against it in ways that do not antagonize the state security forces.

The article examines a small sample of war literature to help the public, mostly noncombatants, understand the struggle, pain, and costs of war. War shrinks one's world and the experience of war itself alters even one's expectations. War literature shows readers the many varied ways that war changes a soldier, citizens, and all involved.

This article presents a formal and systematic study of enjoyment in politics based on the views of political scientist Slavoj Zizek who said that "all politics relies upon, and even manipulates, a certain economy of enjoyment. It contends that the concept of enjoyment in political science can be an important category. As a category it can help in the understanding of the intensification of global corporate capital and the generation of new forms of guilt and anxiety.

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

This article contends that in terms of the intrinsic loyalties of voters ethnic and class-based political parties are indistinguishable from one another. It explains that voters' use of varying criteria to judge the parties are what distinguishes them. As far as voters as concerned, ethnic parties are judge based on their defence of ethno-nationalist programmes.

In many legislatures, making laws involves two distinct stages. One is the commonly-recognized lawmaking procedures involving committees, floor debate, amendments, backroom deals, voting, and other such activities. The other stage is the less-visible designing of the parliamentary rules that govern the legislature and define exactly how a bill is considered. First the legislature must choose its rules and only then may the legislature write laws, using those rules. This project explicitly recognizes this two-stage process and considers its effects on a standard social choice problem. In this setting, contrary to the fears of Riker (1980), allowing endogenous choice of institutions (the rules) can control the ``chaos'' of multi-dimensional majority-rule preferences. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the status of the South African National Assembly ten years after democracy in installed in South Africa. It focuses on the autonomy of the legislature as a measure of the country's transition from dictatorship to liberal democracy. Some of the factors that can help determine whether the National Assembly is functioning as a countervailing power that facilitates both horizontal and downward accountability are pressures of patron-client politics, formal political rules and level legislative salaries, among others.

This article contends that in studying the concept of American Empire, scholars should conceptualize international structure in network and relational terms and not along the lines of historical empires and within the context of unilateralism or multilateralism. It explains that studying the concept of American Empire along the lines of historical empires or unilateralism will fail to account that the putative American Empire is an informal one and that it operates as relations between and among sovereign states.

Cooperation has been a focus of intense interest in the biological and social sciences. Yet in spite ofa tremendous effort to develop evolutionary models and laboratory experiments that explain the existenceof cooperation in humans, relatively little effort has been invested in documenting the prevalence oflargescale cooperation in well-mixed populations and the extent to which it may be the result ofbiological or social forces. In this article we study voter behaviour as a form of cooperation thatbears close resemblance to theoretical models in which individuals in a large population make anonymousdecisions about whether or not to contribute to a public good. Matching public voter turnout records toan adult twin registry, we compare concordance in political behaviour between monozygotic and dizygotictwins. The results show that the decision to cooperate by choosing to vote is primarily determined bygenetic factors. These results suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency tocooperate and that biological evolution has played an important role in the development of politicalcooperation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]