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The article reports on a research by the author in which she intends to study the issues related to the stability of democratic government. The research is based upon a detailed listing of all the qualities that make up a working democracy and examines the theories of democratic transition and consolidation. Finally she addresses the democratic deficit that has begun to emerge in the U.S.

Adverse weather events such as earthquakes, tornados and floods affect thousands of people around the globe every year. The responses to such adverse events by national governments differ from country to country. While some states protect their populations relatively well, in others people suffer tremendously. The goal of this paper is to explore the political sources of this variation. Political factors have been acknowledged to play a core role in determining the degree of damage to people's lives and personal properties caused by natural disasters. Surprisingly, however, there is a lack of empirical research on the role of political institutions in disaster prevention and mitigation. This paper addresses this research gap and tests the effect of democracy and institutional quality on the degree of natural disaster damage using time series cross section data from the International Disaster Risk database, Varieties of Democracy Project and the Quality of Government dataset. Democracy with its freedom of speech, participation and representation and quality of government, which improves provision of public goods and policy implementation, are believed to minimize the number of people affected by natural disasters. We posit that democratic principles and high institutional quality are both crucial for building resilience and neither of the conditions is sufficient for disaster prevention and mitigation. The results support our expectations and show that higher institutional quality is associated with fewer people suffering the consequences of natural disasters only when egalitarian democracy is high. Additionally, if institutional quality is low, more democracy is associated with more human suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the U.S. constitutional politics is presented which was prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including American political life, liberal democracy of the U.S., and the political thoughts of political scientist Herbert Storing.

The Occupy movement sweeping the country has drawn critical attention to the need to develop new economic models that enrich communities rather than a small group of investors that have little or nothing to do with the communities from which their wealth is extracted. This need is nothing new, of course, especially for New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, although liberal capitalism among other factors has produced long-running economic disasters in many cities that parallel the natural disaster that befell New Orleans. However, there is more at stake here than economic resources. In fact, as I will argue in this paper, addressing the problem of wealth extraction also requires addressing the separation of economics and politics through the democratization of the economy. Specifically, this paper will examine the role of cooperatives as democratic institutions and an important element of the solidarity economy, giving attention to their historical development as a way of drawing out their democratic character. The size and extent of cooperatives in the U.S. is not often recognized, yet with some 120 million members (and 800 million members worldwide), cooperatives may represent the world's largest democratic social movement. Indeed, the nature of cooperatives as democratic enterprises must be better understood, as they vary considerably in terms of size, shape, and the degree to which they adhere to their founding principles of egalitarianism, shared property and democracy. For example, while worker cooperatives are often regarded as the paradigmatic case of a democratic enterprise, they remain fully engaged in the capitalist logic of production for exchange rather than use. By the same token, the consumer cooperative model gets away from the problem of exchange-value vs. use-value, but their large size may mitigate against participatory frameworks in favor of the kind of alienated representative governance that tends to produce apathetic, disinterested publics. Two models, an associative model and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, will be considered as ways to address some of the problems of democratic deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The choice of a governance regime has ceased being an exclusively domestic process. Though debates continue about its effectiveness and morality, democracy promotion has become a channel of virtual global governance, shifting and modifying the domestic authority of the democratizing country. However, the conditions and the extent of similar shifts are yet to be understood. This paper analyzes the conditions and the potential impact of the policies of the main democracy promoters, the EU and the USA, on the democratization processes of Armenia and Georgia. Special attention is paid to elections and civil society building projects as a way of influencing the choice of the authority and the choosers. This paper adapts the international socialization framework by introducing new variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A half-century after the civil rights movement, blacks and whites in Alabama and the South seemingly have come to terms—terms that will amaze outsiders—about living together in a halfway house of racialized politics. A New Racial System has taken hold as the region develops a politics of biracial accommodation despite its hard racial history.For most Southerners, the Old South is dead; Southern Democracy is a memory; the Republican Revolution has been consolidated; and two-party competition is a reality in various parts of the region. Most importantly, descendants of slaves and slave-owners have reconciled pressures for systemic progress with certain aspects of their cultural pasts; and the civil rights movement of the 1950s-'60s has morphed, rather curiously, into a new order for the new century.This paper will analyze contemporary southern politics as neither the stark past nor an idealized future. Based on his background as a political science professor and public official, the author proposes that the South now is a halfway house of racialized politics in which white politicians and black politicians attempt to secure for themselves and their constituents the blessings of democracy and the goodies of political life. (The presenter of this proposed paper is a longtime political scientist who also served in the U.S. Congress, as Alabama's Secretary of State, and as an Alabama State Legislator. He is the author of a new book, The South's New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History.) ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have attempts to force democracy by military force, whether by the United States and other external interveners, generally been unsuccessful? This paper suggests that there are at least four causes. The first is the fact that the motives and goals of the intervening actors may not easily translate to democracy. The second is that domestic factors of the neighborhood are often not taken into consideration. The third factor is that aid targeted specifically at democracy may not be sufficient and/or wisely used. Finally, general support by the international community may not be as helpful as it might be. The paper also suggests avenues for future research into the concept of forced democratization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the problem of the proper constitution of the war powers has narrowly focused on legal reforms to promote inter-branch dialogue on the use of military force. The 2008 National War Powers Commission Report is a primary example of this approach and this paper will highlight its limitations and uncover alternatives. Instead of legal reforms - which have failed in the past - what is needed is a view towards the political regime as a whole; one that looks to material rather than legal checks on the use of force. This democratic approach works to develop and maintain a mobilized citizenry that constrains and directs military policy by serving as a check on elites. This paper demarcates the outlines of a theory of democratic war powers through the application of a range of political and legal theory to the proposals of the Commission. A regime approach provides a means to reestablish democratic accountability for the use of force through the political constitution of a tension between the people and their nation's use of arms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a lot of interest in how party primaries affect the characteristics of candidates, most work has focused on U.S. presidential candidates, limiting scholars’ ability to compare the effects of primaries across large numbers of candidates. The gap is understandable, as it is rare for parties to use different selection methods simultaneously across districts. In new democracies, more experimentation takes place. One such case is Mexico, where the two largest parties used a variety of selection procedures to choose their 2006 candidates for plurality district seats, from open primaries to designation by the national leadership. Since re-election is prohibited, there were no unopposed incumbents. This paper looks at how selection methods affect the candidates chosen, drawing on two surveys, of congressional candidates prior to the 2006 election and of congressional deputies in March 2008. Since the decision to hold a primary is separate from who wins the primary election, I use a Heckman two-stage model to control for selection sample bias. The paper analyzes whether candidates selected in primaries are systematically more moderate or more extreme than the median candidate for each party. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two foundations of American democracy are the citizen-soldier and the necessary support by the citizenry for its government waging war. This paper is not focusing directly on the validity of these democratic foundations, the efficacy and dilemmas of creating citizen-soldiers, nor judging those who have or are serving. Rather, the paper strives to demonstrate how popular culture can be utilized in an academic setting to illustrate and examine these foundations. The Political Fiction and Film (PF&F) course discussed in this paper addresses, inter alia, the following questions: Why and how should Americans pay attention to their government's war-making actions? What is the intersection of Americans understanding of war, the government's support for and ability to wage war, the role of the military in carrying out war, and the role of citizen-soldiers to fight these wars? To this end, I have created an upper-division, political science course to assist students in analyzing American values toward the military and war, as well as to understand the dialectic process between popular culture and the American citizenry in shaping and being shaped by our reasons to fight. This course is different in that its basis is the use of film and literature as the primary learning tool and subject matter. Films and literature provide essential heuristic tools for today's technological-focused students, as well as the "mirrors" to illuminate popular culture and public perceptions of war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats democracy as a problematic yet under-theorised feature of the relations between states, as shown by the US and EU understood as "states unions". In such systems, the retention of the units' sovereign status is fundamental to their anti-hierarchical design yet subject to ongoing contestation, leading to ambiguity over the nature and extent of units' sovereign status. Given this context, the paper analyses how democratization - the process of appealing directly or indirectly to the people to settle political conflict - brings to the fore the question of the hierarchical relationship between the system and the units in the US and EU. In the antebellum US, the original settlement for preventing hierarchy broke down as both the Union and the units sought to justify their positions in an appeal to the people to settle political conflict. Similar appeals by EU member states and European institutions during treaty re-negotiations have likewise led to a clash over the proper locus of popular sovereignty. Hence the US and EU experiences serve to expose the potentially adverse consequences of democratizing relations between states. Consequently, the paper suggests that whereas democracy within states is associated with the improvement of relations between such states, the extension of democratic practices beyond the state poses profound difficulties for political organization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques assimilation norms in mainstream immigration literature, including literature that views itself as progressive, on 3 levels: the economic lens with which nearly every aspect of immigration to the U.S. is viewed; the primacy of the nation-state in all accounts that is obfuscated, thereby obscuring undemocratic aspects of assimilation norms; and finally the legal context of reception that shapes immigrants' experiences and which must be taken into account when assessing the "success" of the assimilation process. More broadly, the idea that assimilation norms are peaceful, mutual, consensual (and so on) is questioned and very briefly, the paper argues for post-national citizenship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using John B. Thomson's book Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age as a model, this paper will examine three late twenteith century scandals, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Lewinsky Affair to determine how and under what circumstances scandal impacts on American Foreign Policy. If Thompson is correct, what he labels the media age and other modern developments have created an environment where scandal cannot be marginalized and treated as aberrations. Scandal is part of an accelerating pattern of political discourse that has a particularly powerful impact on liberal democracy and foreign policy creation. Increasingly, foreign policy decisions are distorted by domestic scandal. When we factor in some interesting American cultural variables the problem of scandal and foreign policy becomes even more acute. Using Thompson's scandal typology: money, power, and sex, this paper explores whether some types of scandal have grater impact on foreign policy decisions as well as the manner in which scandal distorts foreign policy decisions in harmful ways. Finally, the paper will explore the question of whether the quickened pace of scandals in the United States in the Bush administration is a harbinger of permanent change in the dynamics of American Foreign Policy. Indeed fear of scandal may become more important than external threat. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the apparent tensions and divergence in approach between the United States and the European Union in efforts to promote democratic reform in the Middle East. Since this issue rose to prominence in 2002, the two sides of the Atlantic have often been viewed as taking diametrically opposite views of the relative urgency of Arab democratization, and of how best to achieve progress toward that goal. Yet, in a thorough review of diplomacy, official development assistance, and democracy assistance funding and programs, this paper finds that the divergence is more apparent than real. The paper finds significant similarities in the two actors' strategies and in their mix of democracy promotion activities. Yet both the European Union and the United States find reasons to sustain rhetorical divergence, and an element of strategic competition also colors their respective policies. The paper concludes that -- even if unintentional -- policy convergence between Europe and the United States in promoting democratic reform in the Middle East is not only evident, but may improve further over time. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Do states provide more foreign aid to those nations from which they can import oil? What is the relationship between foreign aid and imports/exports of oil? The current literature offers many of foreign aid determinants but little of this literature has explored the effect of oil imports on the amount of foreign aid received by the oil exporter. This paper's working hypothesis is that if state A buys oil from state B, state A will be inclined to give less foreign aid to state B. From the point of view of state A, the logic behind the inverse relationship is that the exporter's oil revenues in a sense finance the exporter's economy, so there is less need for foreign aid from state A to state B. The demand for oil and its byproducts is highly inelastic, and the revenues earned by oil exporters are substantially large. Importers consequently reduce their commitment of foreign aid to oil exporters. On the other hand, following "resource curse" literature, oil exports are related to the level of democracy in an oil-possessing country that may experience higher levels of corruption and lack of transparency and accountability of the government. Democracy is also correlated with foreign aid as donors tend to reward good governance and democratization. For these reasons, democracy is included in the model as an independent variable.To test this hypothesis, a time-series cross-section regression analysis is employed utilizing panel corrected standard errors and country fixed-effects. The analysis includes 81 countries from 1996 to 2004 for a total of about 700 observations. The states in the sample are all the countries of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the former Soviet Union, regardless of their possession of oil and regardless of whether they receive aid from the United States. The dependent variable is the amount of aid per capita received from the United States. The United States is selected as a donor for this study because of its prominence in provision of foreign and importance in the international system. The results of the regression analysis show that the value of oil imports to the United States has an inverse and statistically significant relationship to the amount of foreign aid the United States provides to an oil exporter. Democracy is positively related to the amounts of foreign aid. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, nuclear debates in the United States have centered on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This “unspeakability” is mirrored institutionally and, ultimately, this silence leads to depoliticized and sanitized policy paths and political realities. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in policy decisions concerning nuclear technology and the phenomenon of “nuclear reclusion” in the public realm. Given the undisputed destructive power of nuclear weapons, the US tendency toward depolitization and secrecy short circuits democratic accountability. I will examine two cases toward this end: This paper compares the memorialization of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US. How do our collective memories differ? Can methods of remembering history lead us toward different policies or aid us in creating memories of the future that include open debate and de-sanitized nuclear policy? This paper seeks to analyze how nuclear memory operates within the democratic state, and how we bridge the apparent incongruity with global nuclear realities and the (re)creation of democratically accountable nation-states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, race has played a prominent role in framing US’ attitudes and actions in regards to Latin America. From independence onward, the Latin republics were greeted with doubt and derision as American policymakers argued that they lacked the racial pedigree to sustain legitimate democratic governance. Racial constructions of Latinos (as inferior, unstable, treacherous, weak, etc) figured heavily in the US interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America that took place throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. In that era of popularly perceived white superiority, the influence of racialized thinking on American policies is not surprising. With the end of legalized discrimination and the dramatic shift in public beliefs starting in the 1960s, we would expect modern American policies to be color-blind. However, this is not the case. Most notably in the arena of drug policy, Latin American states continue to receive much different political, military, and economic treatment from the US compared to countries whose citizens are white. This discrepancy is strikingly illustrated in US â€" Colombia relations. Drawing on elements of history, sociology, and post-structuralist thought, the paper scrutinizes this paradox by analyzing a major component of American drug policy â€" Plan Colombia (2000). By employing a critical discourse analysis to examine the language surrounding this legislation, the paper seeks to draw out the impact of racialized thinking upon contemporary US policies towards Colombia and to generate insights into how race may continue to affect United States attitudes and actions towards the region as a whole ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the content of Alexis de Tocqueville's political categories has been voluminously studied, his use of religious categories in moral argument are only occasionally noted and almost never explained. In this paper I argue that Tocqueville's use of the category of Providence in Democracy in America I is best understood in relation to the history and practices of Jansenism. Secondly, I argue that Tocqueville's use of the idea of Providence points to his use of other Jansenist categories as well, especially the idea of an 'order of justification.' Tocqueville's use of this concept allows him to defend the democratic social state as a set of political and social relations independent from the world of religion while maintaining that the ultimate ethical justification of the democratic social state is that it is, in fact, an expression of divine will. The approach I follow in this paper is closest to that of Jean-Louis Benoit in Tocqueville Moraliste because I view Democracy in America I as moralist work, intended to move the reader emotionally and provoke action. Tocqueville's use of Jansenist categories owes the most to his reading of Pascal but Pascal is by no means the only Jansenist in Tocqueville's intellectual genealogy. Without an understanding the connections between Pascal's religious and political ideas, our understanding of the influence of Pascal on Tocqueville remains incomplete. The advantage of using the history and ideas of Jansenism is that it gives a mechanism of transmission and a hierarchy of ideas that more robustly explains the influence of Pascal on Tocqueville. Moreover, it is certain that Tocqueville knew Pascal was a Jansenist. In the next section of this paper I explain the basic philosophical substance of Jansenism with a special focus on Pascal's use of Jansenist categories of the hidden God, an 'order of justification.', and Providence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a major question candidates must address in campaigning for the presidency of the United States. In a pluralistic democracy with a constitutional commitment to religious freedom and church-state separation, how, if at all, should a president's religious beliefs influence his or her governing? Should he or she use the bully pulpit of the presidency or the appointive and coercive powers of the executive branch to translate his or her religious convictions and church teachings into public law and public policy? If so, how, when and on what issues? The paper examines this issue through an analysis of three major speeches given by political leaders in the last two generations: the Houston speech of President Kennedy in 1960, the Notre Dame address of Governor Cuomo in 1984, and the Texas address of Governor Mitt Romney in 2007. This analysis raises a deeper question: has the official American Catholic Church moved away from supporting the strict separationist position of John F. Kennedy in 1960 to advocating a more active and interventionist approach to recent Catholic presidential candidates? And if so, why? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the debate pro and con over the initiative process has many aspects, the question at the heart of the debate is majoritarianism. This paper--which is unfinished and in progress--attempts to place the debate over initiatives against a background of theoretical discussion on the subject of majority rule. A preliminary section considers a variety of claims that the initiative is not really a majoritarian process, but rejects them. The rest of the paper in its present form, deals with mid-20th century theorist Willmoore Kendall. Early in his career he was a "self-confessed" defender of "absolute majority rule." Later, he developed a more nuanced position. Later versions will also consider Elaine Spitz, whose "Majority Rule" in the 1980s examined how majorities are formed. It is not expected that the paper, when completed, will dramatically influence the debate over direct democracy, but it may help show how the issues in that debate match with more general debates over majority rule. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends analyses of tax policy in Swank (2006). The earlier article argues that, through competition-driven diffusion, the highly visible 1980s market-conforming reform of corporate taxes in the United States shaped subsequent tax policy reform in other nations. It also argues that there are substantial reasons to believe that domestic political and institutional forces shaped policy maker assessment of the benefits and costs of neoliberal tax policy and, in turn, the pace and depth of tax reform. In the current paper, I expand my treatment of democracy and internationalization, their interaction in shaping tax policy, and the time period for empirical analysis. Using new data and analysis of 1982-to-2002 corporate tax rates in 16 nations, I find, consistent with Swank (2006), reforms in U.S. taxation influence subsequent tax reforms in other polities; in the long-term, all polities shift toward the U.S. neoliberal tax structure. The short-term responsiveness to US tax reforms is, however, notably stronger where liberal market institutions are dominant. Analyses also show that trade openness and capital mobility, domestic economic conditions and fiscal pressures matter. The degrees to which institutions coordinate markets and disperse political power also have direct effects on the transformation of tax policy. There is modest evidence that recent tax change in a nation's full set of competitors shapes current tax reform, but little evidence that domestic shifts of median voters, right party governance, or political signals on imminent tax reform from competitor nations significantly influence the spread of neoliberal tax reform. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current representation of Hispanics in state government throughout the United States. The analysis explores Hispanic educational attainment in relation to representative bureaucracies in state government. The findings of this paper suggest further research to be conducted in explaining bureaucratic representation beyond Hispanic growth rates in demographics. Bureaucratic representation appears to be challenged by underlying factors that relate to the attainment of a critical mass in state government demographics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the question of whether and to what degree citizens are responsible collectively for the actions of their state. In contrast to current accounts of collective responsibility which focus on causality or affect as means for transmitting responsibility, the paper develops an alternative account, the "authorized state" model. This model, drawn from core intuitions of the social contract tradition, sees collective responsibility as being transmitted through the state as the agent or representative of its citizens. Having developed this model as an ideal type, the paper then assesses under what circumstances the model is most applicable, arguing that it is most relevant (1) when a collective undertakes unified, often violent or coercive action (such as in war), (2) when that action is undertaken through democratic procedures relatively free of manipulation or deception and (3) where such action does not entail the application of collective punishment. The paper finally applies the model to the U.S. war in Iraq to assess the collective responsibilty of U.S. citizens for the outcomes of that war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception into American politics, the Internet has been a source of great debate for scholars in numerous fields. Many scholars feel the jury is still out in considering questions such as the Internet's ability to better deliberative democracy, heighten social capital, and encourage citizens into the political system. Questions still surround our ability to determine the Web's potential versus actual influence in these and other topics of American politics. In attempt to offer answers to some of these outstanding questions, this paper offers new insight into how social capital is created on the Web. Drawing on a case study of the 2006 Connecticut Senate election, including an in-depth interview and content analysis of YouTube videos, this paper points to the Internet as an important contributor in unseating Joe Lieberman from his position in the Democratic Party. I argue that four main characteristics of challenger Ned Lamont's digital campaign earned him substantial social capital from his blog supporters. These four characteristics are valuing a Web presence, embracing interactivity, empowering the liberal blogosphere, and maintaining relations with this blogosphere in the post-election era. I also describe how political history dating back to the 2004 election caused incumbent Joe Lieberman to take a very conservative approach to his online campaign, thus limiting him from attaining such social capital.This research demonstrates that, while it may not be the end-all-be-all solution for scholars who see a decline in deliberative democracy and social capital, the Internet does have the power to play an important role in the revitalization of American politics. Although only a single case, the Lamont campaign gives us perspective and encouragement on how social capital can not only be build online, but also maintained. With the Internet still in its infancy in our politics, time will tell how widespread this type of impact will be in the future. By examining future candidates at different levels of government, scholars will be able to better understand other characteristics that may or may not attribute to the construction of social capital online. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexis de Tocqueville was only one of many French liberals who visited America in the nineteenth century, and yet his account of America is read to the almost total exclusion of those presented by his fellow French writers. In the spirit of trans-disciplinarity, this paper will turn away from Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a work of political theory in order to focus upon the experience of travel as a factor informing Tocqueville's vision of America. More than this, however, this paper will seek to locate Tocqueville's journey within the broader context of the other voyages to America undertaken and written about by his French contemporaries, thereby spanning the period from the early 1830s to the period immediately after the Civil War. Some of these accounts were written by friends and acquaintances of Tocqueville, some by those he saw as rivals and competitors. Into the first category fall J-J Ampère, whose 2 volume Promenades en Amérique was published in 1856 and Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, author of Huit mois en Amérique: lettres et notes de voyage (1864-65). In the latter fall Michel Chevalier, author of Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord (1836) and the unlikely-named Guillaume-Tell Poussin, author of several books on America, including Considérations sur le Principe démocratique qui régit l'Union Américaine (1841) and of De la Puissance Américaine (1843). In this way the paper intends to cast light on the 'mirage' of America and the long-cherished European hope of finding not just a lost paradise but the possibility of establishing and founding a new civilization and ideal republic. Yet as these accounts make clear, if American reality could be embellished so as to provide an image of a radiant future, it also gave intimations of the dangers that the future held in store. To that extent the collapse of the American dream was foretold in its very beginnings. However, by focussing upon these travel writings the intention is to show how the lived experience of America shaped the views of these writers about the nature of a democratic society and how this in turn shaped their perceptions of the possibilities in their own country. The paper will conclude by comparing these accounts with the most recent travelogue/philosophical analysis provided about America from the pen of a French liberal: Bernard Henri-Lévy's American Vertigo. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue outlined in this paper is that U.S. democracy promotion in Africa occurs only when it is convenient for the superpower from the West. Analyzing the countries that comprise the Gulf of Guinea – which share commonalities of recently discovered oil reserves, marginally democratic or nondemocratic regimes, and friendly relations with the U.S. - this paper illustrates how U.S. foreign policy continues to be shaped more by motives of self-interest than by real concern for the promotion of democracy and constitutional liberalism. The gap that exists between political rhetoric and policy is especially noteworthy in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the increased focus of the U.S. on democracy promotion in the Middle East. Given the renewed efforts to thwart terrorism by pressuring authoritarian regimes to open up politically and increase human liberties, the ongoing friendly relations between the U.S. and authoritarian regimes in arenas outside the Middle East border on hypocrisy. Despite recent rhetoric by U.S. policymakers concerning freedom and human rights advancements in Africa, actual U.S. policy in the Gulf of Guinea region belies the fact that U.S. economic interests still subvert the professed desire to see democracy succeed on a global scale. United States involvement in the Gulf of Guinea has important implications for the ability of individual countries in the region to avoid the ‘resource curse’ and to establish viable institutions. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two centuries after Hamilton and Jefferson staked out their controversy, we are still searching to understand how the state of the public mind affects the prospect for good government. How much should the electorate understand about government, its functions, its undergirding theories, the nature of man, and the lessons of history? By what signals can we perceive that public opinion in a representative democracy may not be adequately enlightened to preserve the nation's best interests? Is the protracted build up of national debt an indicator that the public mind is debilitated? To get at these matters I search the Federalist Papers for clues regarding the qualifications for a healthy public mind and an enduring democratic republican regime as understood by Publius. The paper concludes that our American heritage is not secure if the public does not understand the nature of their liberties and the requirements for enduring preservation of political institutions. The public must have the understanding and will to resist the accumulation of debt, such debt eventually hazarding the interests of the electorate. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the issue of presidential tenure from the perspective of the founding generation. The main concern is to understand the theoretical underpinnings of the debates over presidential tenure, especially focusing on the concepts of power and democracy. Guided by a conceptual focus on power and democracy, the paper proceeds chronologically. It first looks at the issue of presidential tenure during the colonial period, examining the differing models of royal governors. Next, it analyzes the state constitutions forged in the wake of independence to understand the main views of executive power and tenure. The Articles of Confederation are also addressed in this section. Third, the debates surrounding presidential tenure at the Convention itself are examined. The major views and plans-with regard to length of term and possibility of reeligibility-are analyzed, with an emphasis on the final product, a four year term with unlimited reeligibility. The arguments at the time of ratification, particularly the debates in the writings of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, are also addressed. Finally, a two dimensional theoretical chart is offered to help focus the connections between power, democracy, and executive tenure historically and contemporarily. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the conference paper titled "Do Human Rights Matter? A Global Analysis of U.S. Foreign Economic Aid Allocation" prepared for the "International Studies Association Annual Meeting" held in Honolulu, Hawaii. It examines the effect of human rights violations on the decision of the U.S. to allocate aid to recipient countries. The paper mentions that the promotion of democracy has been the constant U.S. foreign policy goal following World War II.