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A conference paper about the Federalist Papers' theory of institutional power is presented. It mentions that the work in this paper has revealed and interrogated the theory of institutional power which is presented throughout the papers in spite of the plural authorship. It further discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the theory which reveals about American political development and its relation to the unfortunate tendency in American political science.

This paper will examine how extreme partisanship in the United States Senate has prevented any significant collaborative efforts between the President Obama and Congress. I argue that the United States Senate is undergoing a modern era of disunion. The conditions in the Senate can be directly traced to the concerted efforts of Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to maintain ideological purity among his caucus members for the purposes ensuring that President Obama's has a failed presidency by asserting a Republican agenda that is aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Democratic initiatives. The Constitutional responsibility for shared governance has been severely compromised by conservative factions of the Republican Party. Subsequently, members of Congress who wish to find compromises across party lines are shut out of the political process. I propose that the restoration and continued health of the American democracy is dependent on the members' ability to reassert their influence collectively into the political process through engaging their colleagues and constituencies in the process of deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Federalist Papers' theory of institutional power in the United States. It mentions that public views institutional power as the dynamic relationship between and among formal constitutional powers, institutional organization, and constituency. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses in the theory. It adds that the theory relates with American political science to study each institution separately instead of as a system.

The article discusses the failure of the U.S. government in achieving good foreign intelligence that has led to the events of September 11, 2001. It informs that from the starting of the U.S. Republic, the need for good intelligence in wartime has been critical. The U.S. President George Bush mentioned that foreign intelligence forms the basic part of the constitutional authority.

A conference paper about the adoption of school interventions for youth obesity prevention in the U.S. is presented. It utilizes cross-sectional probit analysis and fifty state data through 2007 to analyze the adoption in different categorical school interventions. The findings reveal that the state government is more likely to adopt the school intervention of setting competitive food nutritional standards.

This paper presents a newly compiled aggregate measure of issue competence for the Republicans and Democrats based on 2,450 survey items on issue competence over six decades. Using quarterly time series data between 1980 and 2008 we test three theoretical propositions about the issue valence of U.S. parties: citizens' ratings of party competence on valence issues tend to move in common over time, consistent with the existence of a prevailing mood in public opinion, controlling for partisan bias; issue valence is driven by presidential performance when the party is in power, but by other valence indicators when the party is in opposition; and, the effect of valence exerts a substantive influence upon electoral support. The paper therefore reveals that existing performance measures of party choice are useful indicators of competence, but issue valence provides a valuable contribution to explaining party choice. The implications are significant for the analysis of electoral choice in U.S. politics and for our understanding of dynamics of public opinion and party competition [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The superpowers' Cold War nuclear arsenals have been frequently mocked as "arsenals of folly" that greatly exceeded the requirements of deterrence. This paper instead demonstrates that the U.S. arsenal was principally driven by the political economy of U.S. military commitments to Europe. Ultimately the least bad option for the United States given constraints was to plausibly threaten nuclear first use, which in turn required plausible damage limitation by destroying Soviet nuclear forces. This paper demonstrates that this logic inexorably drove U.S. nuclear doctrine and posture, and in fact had the desired effect on the Soviet leadership of making nuclear first use seem plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various media and academic sources alleged the politicization of United States intelligence leading to the 2003 Iraq War. However, two government bodies tasked to investigate the overall intelligence prior to the Iraq War, the Senate Select Committee and the Silberman-Rob Commission, concluded that intelligence was not politicized prior to the war. These conflicting views create a puzzle. Was intelligence politicized prior to the Iraq War or was it not? This question addresses the larger issue of the nexus between the intelligence community and decision-makers in the U.S. foreign policy-making process. Recognizing the intelligence community as an important actor in foreign policy-making, this paper first examines the meaning of intelligence politicization within the existing academic literature. Building upon Alexander George's framework of trade-off dilemmas in Presidential decision-making, it places existing concepts of intelligence politicization into an adapted framework that accounts for both policy-makers and intelligence professionals. The paper then uses this framework to assess the specific case of the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, analyzing the period between the 9/11 attack and the start of the 2003 war. It most specifically scrutinizes the official reports issued by the above investigative bodies and concludes that intelligence politicization did indeed occur prior to the Iraq War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the appropriateness of the use of religious language in the American political sphere. The paper will make use of public reason and public discourse theories by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and Michael Walzer. Rawls, Habermas' and Walzer's theories have ample overlap despite their many disagreements. Their primary agreement is that the highest levels of government must remain secular, a stance I adopt. However, Habermas and Walzer see religion as a part of general will formation. Religion helps to form morals and values, so completely striping religion from the public sphere would overly restrict who could participate in public debate. I agree with Walzer and Habermas on this point and argue that Rawls' public reason (without his postscript) was overly restrictive and ultimately undemocratic. I then applied my theory to examine three recent examples of religious language in the political sphere: a speech by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee stating that the U.S. Constitution should better adhere to the bible; a statement opposing abortion released by the Society of Jesus; and the Supreme Court case questioning whether "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance was a violation of the Establishment Clause's rules regarding separation of church and state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has gauged the growing significance of political satire in our current political climate (Baumgartner 2007, 2008; Baumgartner and Morris 2006, 2007, 2008; Baym 2005, 2007; Holbert 2007; Prior 2005; Young 2004). This paper is part of a lager project that asks why there are so few conservative satirists in American politics today. There are several possibilities, to include the satirists? inherent liberal nature, the entertainment media?s liberal bias, and the liberal inclinations of the younger viewers who comprise much of satire?s audience. Two more possible explanations are the focus of this paper: That satire is steeped in an anti-establishment tradition; and that satire mirrors the existing political climate, which today is cynical, sarcastic and untrusting of government. This is the second half of an historical examination of political satire. The first half looked at early satire, from the Founding to the post-WWII era. This paper begins with the advent of television and moves to the 1970s. Richard Nixon said "Sock it to me" on Laugh In, which led to President Gerald Ford announcing: "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" Following that was presidential candidate Bill Clinton on the Arsenio Hall Show, Attorney General Janet Reno?s SNL "Dance Party," and presidential candidate John Edwards announcing his intention to run on The Daily Show. This paper uses historical analysis to show that when society is amenable to political criticism (an inherently liberal notion), satire will flourish and in post-War America the changing nation was indeed amenable. By examining the past we can better understand the present significance of American political satire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many papers use regression discontinuity (RD) designs that exploit "close" election outcomes in order to identify the effects of election results on various political and economic outcomes of interest. Several recent papers critique the use of RD designs based on close elections because of the potential for imbalance near the threshold that distinguishes winners from losers. In particular, for U.S. House elections during the post-war period, lagged variables such as incumbency status and previous vote share are significantly correlated with victory even in very close elections. This type of sorting naturally raises doubts about the key RD assumption that the assignment of treatment around the threshold is quasi-random. In this paper, we examine whether similar sorting occurs in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S., and national and/or local elections in a variety of other countries, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, India, and Brazil. No other case exhibits sorting. Evidently, the U.S. House during the post-war period is an anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue of relevancy on the Constitution's division of war powers between the President and Congress to the 21st century realities of terrorism and war. It states the interpretation of the American Constitution and Federalist Papers written from the perspective of strong advocates of the Constitution. It also mentions that Federalist Papers are considered as the most authoritative account of the arguments and intentions of the Federalists.

What is it to become a citizen? Over the last ten years, the US and the German governments have been vociferously advocating for naturalization as a mechanism for social inclusion and national security. But how do immigrants perceive becoming a citizen? This paper explores what being a citizen means to immigrants in New York and Berlin. Through intensive interviews, thick description and using grounded theory, I unearth how new naturalized citizens think and live citizenship in their everyday lives. I question the importance of the developmental model that has been the standard understanding of naturalization for the last hundred years. I discover that naturalized citizens engage specific citizenship frames to explain what citizenship is to them and why they naturalized. These frames include a benefit seeking, a claims making, a hyperpolitical/ bureaucracy avoidance, a circumstance securing and a developmental approach to understanding what citizenship means. I compare the thoughts, opinions and experiences of permanent residents and naturalized citizens in New York and Berlin, two cities with receptive policies toward immigrants located in countries with polar opposite citizenship policies. Based on the data, the paper includes policy prescriptions for how to think about naturalization as a policy goal, how to make it more meaningful and more likely to achieve the ends desired by the respective governments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the re-emergence of debate over the concept of responsible party government (RPG). Many contemporary scholars argue that we have recently achieved something quite close to RPG, and that the results have been unfortunate. A variety of ills have been attributed to the alleged development of RPG: polarized parties that encourage deadlock while also allowing overly-rapid policy shifts; increased corruption and special interest influence; a breakdown in checks on the executive branch; and increased public distrust and alienation. My paper will argue the following: 1) Although the US has seen the emergence of parties that are more internally pure and differentiated, this alone does not constitute the fulfillment of the RPG model as originally understood; 2) Current party politics are still often unprogrammatic, with undeveloped policy platforms and few mechanisms for party responsibility; 3) Political science is not currently able to say definitively on the basis of scientific evidence that partisan polarization is a bad thing, and it would not be sensible to reform our political system to avoid something that is not clearly a problem, and may yet be a virtue; and, 4) Since a return to a mid-twentieth century style of "bipartisan moderation" is impossible, a better course of action may be not to abandon the idea of RPG, but to actually fulfill it by adding more responsibility and policy content to the US party system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the work of scholars who study foreign policy decisions by courts as well as legal scholars who have noted an anecdotal trend of court deference to the political branches of government when deciding cases involving international law. It puts these anecdotal observations to the test by empirically examining if courts faced with cases involving international law follow the attitudinal model or instead defer to the expressed preferences of the political branches, particularly the Executive branch. This will build on a paper I am presenting at the Southern Political Science Association, which examines international law cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. It will study whether the lower courts follow the same patterns of decision-making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the nature and character of corruption and presents a general overview and comparison of corrupt practices in the United States and China. Neither country is corruption free but the United States has a substantially lower rate of perceived corruption than China. To understand United States corrupt practices, the focus is on three areas: (1) bureaucracy, (2) political practices, and (3) business. Today, the U.S. bureaucracy is generally clean but historically, this has not always been true; in the second areas of U.S. political practices and in the third area of U.S. business activities, the following is generally the case: laws, law enforcement, public expectation, and professional standards guide transactions and control/reduce corruption. In contrast, the Chinese political system is very different and unlike the United States, their political context does not allow for a neat separation into the three areas of bureaucracy, political practices, and business activities. In fact, the relevant Chinese activities usually reflect a blend/confluence of these three categories. To understand Chinese corrupt practices, the paper focuses on the nature of collusive corruption, the ineffectiveness of corruption control through harsh penalties, the centrality of law to state stability, and the importance of law enforcement. The paper ends with a discussion of clean bureaucracy and the conclusion that the United States, however different and however imperfect, can offer a useful comparison to China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a much larger study that uses the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy as a window into understanding the influence of non-judicial and other non-governmental actors on the development of constitutional meaning. Using a de-centered or interpretive technique, the paper challenges the narrative that the rather drastic constitutional shifts that occurred in the areas of federalism in the mid-1990s can be attributed to President Ronald Reagan and an aggressive constitutional agenda pursued by his Counselor turned Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Using evidence drawn from an in-depth examination of the speeches and writings of actors associated with both the early Federalists and the Reagan Administration as well as data gathered from personal interviews, this paper presents a richer, more nuanced, and more complete narrative of the origins and real impacts of what many have referred to as the 'Reagan Revolution' in the law. In doing so, it makes a strong case for what I'll broadly refer to as an interpretive approach to the study of constitutional change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several valuable analyses of the roles of U.S. Supreme Court clerks have furthered political science's understanding of these important quasi-judicial actors. This paper applies the institutional insights provided by these works to a case study of the controversial fourth section of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). The study considers whether both the theory and content of this section were largely the work of one of the crop of clerks who worked for the Justice during the October '06 Term.Justice Kennedy's vote and his authorship of the majority opinion were unsurprising. However, the content of the controversial Section IV might be considered unexpected; its paternalistic approach to abortion rights is inconsistent with the otherwise libertarian arguments that he has employed in previous abortion cases (this part of the paper draws on my forthcoming book about Kennedy's jurisprudence). I hypothesize that this might be explained by the presence, within the quartet of Kennedy's clerks, of an individual who successfully wrote these particular views into the Justice's opinion.At the end of the day, the name on the opinion in Carhart is Kennedy's. He bears the public burden of shouldering responsibility for the opinion's content. However, recent studies have told us never to underestimate the importance of the men and women who clerk for members of the U.S. Supreme Court. In order to understand Section IV, might we have to accept that it is a good example of clerkish control? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a conceptual understanding of the political potentials of 'the public', predicated upon the phantom character of the public that Lippman, Dewey, and Habermas cast as a problem, whereas I argue it is at the heart of an opportunity.This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the public's political character. It argues that this must be understood in three steps. First, one must look at the historically specific invitation to agency extended to the public. This invitation is found sedimented in law, institutions and culture. Secondly, it is necessary to accept that this invitation does not have a precise addressee in the sense of a 'true' public. It invites a disembodied public to act. The combination of these two aspects of the political public then conditions the third step that has to be analyzed to understand specific political consequences of the public. This concerns the ways in which the public is enacted. Conceptually, such enactments take the form rhetoric calls synecdoche, a part expressing a whole, and are characterized by five traits. Enactments of the public are (1) dependent on external recognition, (2) always contestable, (3) mutually constitutive of the part and the whole - the public - it attempts to enact, (4) either bringing the public to bear as an actual presence or a virtual shadow, and (5) necessarily normative operations predicated upon the substitution of an 'is' - that the public is disembodied - by an 'ought' - that someone should nonetheless be allowed to enact it 'as if' it was not. The argument thus rejects a notion common to the work of Habermas, Dewey, and Lippmann, that the public should be understood in terms of a true embodiment with specifiable normative consequences. Instead, the paper lay out a model of the political public that provides the possibility of analyzing the prospects of the public of today, and its contribution to social cohesion and social change, and not only lament its failures in the light of what it could potentially be in the future. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate over the state of American hegemony by looking at the US current account deficit (CAD). The growth of the latter has continued almost unabated since 1982 reaching the epic proportions of 6.15 percent of GDP in 2006. As a result, the US national economy has become increasingly dependent on imports of foreign goods and foreign capital which has not been used for productive investment but has helped sustain both high government spending and mass consumption. What has made this possible is the special position of the dollar as the world's key currency which confers on the US the right of seigniorage - the privilege to profit from the use of the dollar as international reserve, invoice, and vehicle currency as well as to accumulate debt in its own currency. However, the paper dollar - the present day key international currency - is backed neither by gold nor by a large and growing productive economy since asset price inflation has in the meantime replaced production as the main source of income generation in the US. In addition, the accumulation of external deficits over the years has turned the one time world's biggest creditor into the world's biggest debtor. How can then the continued willingness of foreigners to accept payments in dollars and to invest in dollar-denominated assets be explained? This paper argues that the mythology surrounding the 'growing' US economy has transcended into a peculiar common sense that has helped sustain the status quo so far. However, this informal dimension of US hegemony emanates from a formal one - social forces and institutions that constitute its material basis. Thus, this paper further argues that the phenomenon of the US CAD can acquire its full meaning only in an analysis of the structural changes in the US and global economy that have been underway in the post-World War II period including the shift from production- to finance-led mode of accumulation along with the transnationalization of production and finance. The argumentation in this paper proceeds as follows. Productive power was the original basis of US hegemony. The postwar regime of intensive accumulation known as Fordism relied on the mass production-mass consumption nexus grafted on the coordinated rise in productivity and wages that was further supported by the government's management of aggregate demand. However, because of certain idiosyncratic features of the American economy and business model, since the late 1960s, the US has been plagued by recurrent crises of overcapacity and overproduction often more severe than those experienced by its Western European and Japanese junior partners. Falling profitability and weakening competitiveness encouraged diversion of savings and investment to finance and led to the erosion of the production-led mode of accumulation. The outward economic expansion of US Transnational Corporations has also contributed to the hollowing out of the US domestic economy and thus not only to the worsening competitiveness of the latter but also to its growing internal and external indebted-ness. While the domestic base of mass production disintegrated, the Fordist social norm of mass consumption was strengthened and maintained through the importation of foreign-produced consumer durables as reflected by the ballooning trade deficit. These tendencies were made coherent and sustained by the privileged position of the US dollar as 'the Money of all money' (De Brunhoff, 1978) which conferred upon its owner the right of seign-iorage whose 'spoils' broadly defined to include not only seigniorage income and the benefits derived from the large-scale recycling of American debt, but also the ability to profit from ex-change rate manipulation of the dollar gave further impetus to the erosion of the US productive economy... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of economic sanctions in Taiwan's decision to reverse its nuclear weapons efforts. Sanctions have long been derided as an ineffective tool of foreign policy, particularly in "high politics" issues such as nuclear weapons programs. Contrary to the prevalent view, in this paper I demonstrate that economic sanctions led to nuclear reversal in Taiwan through the "compellence" mechanism. Drawing on the literature on coercive diplomacy, the paper concludes that Taiwan's dependence on the United States for its very survival facilitated successful US coercion to reverse its nuclear weapons program. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by providing an overview of contemporary anthropological perspectives on and approaches to the study of state terrorism. This is followed by analysis of the politics of the definition of ‘terrorism’; terrorism in reality and propaganda, or subjective, political, and objective perspectives on terrorism; and the politics and taboos of ‘terrorism studies’ and the ‘terrorism industry’. The paper then concludes by presenting a power-conflict theory of modern state terrorism fundamentally relating it to three dominant global trends of the past half-century â€" growing inequality, increasing oppression and human rights abuses, and the massive growth of state power in the world today. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the deep structure and long-term developments in the Western community, “the West” in short. What is underneath the recent conflicts between the U.S. and Europeans? Is it all about the Bush Administration, post 9/11 U.S. foreign policy, or the rupture over the Iraq war? Alternatively, are we witnessing the beginning of the end of a happy transatlantic relationship, the gradual withering away of NATO, as some scholars had already predicted after the end of the Cold War? I start with a few remarks on the nature of the Western order. Second, I comment on the degree to which we can see the transatlantic relationship in crisis. The third part of the paper addresses what we can learn about the sources and causes of the current crisis. Fourth, I discuss the various scenarios for the future of the Western order. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development, production and use of biological weapons (BW) is prohibited by international treaties. Details of this prohibition have been codified in the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, which forms the core of the BW control regime and contains the core norms of the regime. This paper follows a reflexive approach to international norms, in which norms are not immutable, but subject to change over time and in which certain social practices can lead to norm contestation and change. Clearly such a norm contestation is more likely to have an impact on regime evolution if the norms are contested by a great power like the United States of America, rather than a norm contestation by, say Belgium. Applying such a reflexive approach to the norms of the biological weapons (BW) prohibtion regime, the paper will proceed in four steps. It will first provide a brief outline of the conceptual underpinnings of the approach to norms of international regimes and their contestation. Second, it will describe the normative structure of the BW prohibition regime as it presented itself during the 1990s. This will be followed by an analysis of social practices within the USA, as they manifested themselves in discursive interventions by actors in the political system . The fourth step will trace the impact of this norm contestation on the international level, where the social practices to be analysed will focus on the negotiations for a Compliance Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), their collapse and the setting-up of the so-called "New Process" to strengthen the effectiveness of the BW regime. The paper will conclude with a (preliminary) assessment of the implications of the norm contestation through the US on the international level for the future of the BW prohibition regime and its normative structure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That states and markets are ‘mutually constituted’ has become a respectable position in both political science and sociology. For all its respectability, however, there are few works that explicitly theorize this mutual constitution. Building on works on state formation in comparative politics and comparative historical sociology this paper proposes a framework for studying this mutual constitution, which is expressed as a function of the power relationship between pre-state governing elites and capital holders in a society. Power is defined as dependence, and as such is not an attribute of an actor or a group of actors, but a property of the social relation under investigation. The paper further uses this framework to illuminate the effects of colonialism on state and market formation by comparing such relationships in the United States to those in India over time. This is done by linking the variation in the relationships between rulers and capital holders to changes in the structure of capital markets across countries and over time within the same country. This problematizes institutions as legacies of past relationships and thus affords us a better understanding of how and why such relationships and their institutional avatars change. Also, by changing contrast spaces from intra developed country comparisons or intra developing country comparisons to historical comparisons between now-developed countries and now-developing or underdeveloped countries that we can throw new light on phenomena or conceptual categories that are often taken for granted in the context of the now- advanced industrial 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]

After the August 1998 collapse of Russia’s economy, the widespread notion in U.S. popular and political culture of a feminized Russia in desperate need of U.S. assistance gave way to frustration with the fallen superpower’s seeming inability or unwillingness either to institute lasting political reform or stabilize its economy. This paper utilizes this conceptual shift as an analytical lens through which to ask, “Why did U.S. legislators’ sudden desire in the late 1990s to halt human trafficking coincide with clashes over who should most appropriately take the blame for what seemed to be the wholesale failure of U.S. Russia policy?” The paper argues that in U.S. policy, “trafficking” has become synonymous with sex trafficking (i.e. the illegal transnational trade in the bodies of (usually) women and girls for (predominantly) heterosexual sex), which, in turn, has become inextricably linked with victimized Russian women. According to the prevailing rhetoric, these women ostensibly need to be saved from emasculated Russian men, who, unable to cope with the transition to capitalism and democracy, are incapable of supporting or protecting them in the way that “real” men should. As a result, Russian men, particularly political elites, have been implicitly identified as the chief opposition not only to attempts to end sex trafficking, but also to the success of U.S. Russia policy. As the foundation of this claim, the paper uses a textual and discursive analysis of the U.S. congressional hearings that led to the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and of the Russia-related sections of the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Admiration and resentment of America are deeply rooted in the current international system even among countries that are traditional US allies. This paper distinguishes in its first part between critical opinion, skepticism and prejudice as different lenses through which to view anti-Americanism and then details six different types of anti-Americanism. In the paper's next two parts these categories are confronted with data from Australia and New Zealand and the different historical trajectories in the evolution of anti-Americanism in these two countries. The fourth and final section seeks to identify commonalities, if any, across the two political settings and, in the efort to test for the effect of geographic proximity, makes some comparisons to anti-Americanism in Mexico and Canada. The expected finding is that the paper will point to a plurality ofdifferent types of anti-Americanisms, a condition that reflects the pluralis mof world politics more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghan warlords have recaptured the West's attention in recent years. Since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan (2001- ), these violent non-state actors have been heralded as fearless allies in the fight against Islamic extremists that threaten regional and global security. Yet, Western observers have simultaneously derided warlords as threats to Afghanistan's fragile political order. This paper aims to situate this conflicted reaction within a wider historical and comparative context by returning to the West's most formative exposure to Afghanistan, the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42). A critical reading of primary and secondary sources reveals that longstanding Orientalist archetypes about the 'Afghan people' and their decidedly non-western ways continue to influence contemporary Western thought about Afghan warlords. This paper concludes that the recent concern about Afghan warlords should be understood as part of the West's longer construction of a violent 'Other' in Afghanistan. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important concepts in the field of political ethics is the idea of a moral dilemma - understood as a situation in which an agent's public responsibilities and moral imperatives conflict in such a way that no matter what the agent does she will in some way be committing a moral wrong. In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the notion of a moral dilemma has undergone a profound reconceptualization in American political discourse, and there has perhaps been no more important cultural forum for that conceptual revision than the quintessential post-9/11 melodrama, FOX Television's 24. This paper first describes and then critically evaluates America's new model moral dilemma as portrayed on 24. Focusing specifically on 24's Season Five (the year the show won the Emmy for Best Dramatic Series), the paper shows how 24's creators have substituted in the public mind almost a parody of the standard philosophical account of a moral dilemma in place of the traditional notion. Their methods for this conceptual revision have included both an extravagant, even baroque portrayal of the grand dilemmas which confront Jack Bauer and his fellow patriots, on the one hand, and on the other, a subtle de-valuing of the moral stakes in the more pedestrian variety of moral conflicts Bauer and company must overcome in their quest to keep America safe whatever the cost. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine several of the actions of President George W. Bush and argue that in his assertions of presidential authority he has pushed the boundaries of presidential power further than the Constitution allows. Four instances of President Bush's claims to extraordinary presidential authority will be examined: his suspension of the Geneva Agreements in 2002, his denial of the writ of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror, his order that the National Security Agency monitor messages to or from domestic parties in the United States without a warrant, and his use of signing statements. The paper will conclude that the principles of constitutionalism and the rule of law are basic to the United States polity. Insofar as President Bush, in cases such as these, has refused to acknowledge the constitutional limits on his executive authority, he has undermined both of these fundamental principles. ..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]

This paper analyzes and contrasts gubernatorial and legislative influence in agency rules and regulations in state administration overtime. In addition, it compares and contrasts the influence overtime of the two institutional oversight actors with state courts, professional associations, and clientele groups. Utilizing data from American State Administrators Project (ASAP) surveys administered in the 1978 to 2004 time-period, we describe and assess the level and pattern of influence of these policy actors in this central administrative function. Who is minding the store? Who has access to the store? We find remarkable stability in the extent and patterns of influence of these actors on agency rules and regulations. A partial answer to the question we pose is that the governor may have more of an oversight role in this area than is commonly credited to him. The remainder of the paper considers the impact of gubernatorial and legislative control, agency size, agency head tenure, and agency type on the influence of these institutional and non-institutional actors on administrative rule making. Our most prominent finding is that who is minding the store and how wide open for access the door is very much a function of the type of agency in question. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As observers from around the nation look for ways to raise civic engagement of young people both in and out of the classroom, a new nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign training program aimed at young people in Maine called "A Rising Tide..."(ART) has been in place from 2004 through the present.. ART offers a promising model to give students practical knowledge of how to run campaigns or run for office someday themselves. Drawing upon an interview with the executive director of the program and a survey of program graduates, this paper traces the development of ART, how it compares to other campaign training programs and how it affected its graduates. The final section of the paper considers ART as a model other states might choose to examine. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of the relationship between religion and public life. Rather than examining the full range of ways in which religion might be related to civic and political engagement, it assesses one particular analytical approach to religion as a means by which to assess how religion might shape public engagement. Broadly speaking, the paper examines whether the particular way in which Americans express their religiosity has become more privatized over the past several decades and whether the privatization of religious faith is then linked to diminished patterns of engagement in public life. Because the paper seeks to track changes over time, it employs a variety of studies and depends on the use of identical, and frequently employed, measures of religion for purposes of measurement comparability across time. As a result, a relatively simple, yet revealing, measure of different forms of religious expression is constructed and applied across a variety of publicly available data files to address three basic questions about religion and public life: (1) Have the ways in which the American people manifest their religious faith changed, if at all, over time? (2) Are the ways in which people are religious related to the ways in which they engage in public life? and, (3) Is religion similarly or differentially related to civic and political activity and has this relationship changed over time? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars assume that religious values, attitudes, and discourses have shaped American politics since the founding era despite official adherence to the principle of church-state separation. Many presidents have used religious symbolism and rhetoric as a political strategy for electoral gain, to influence public policy, and to justify military action. Presidents are also widely viewed as the "high priests" of America's "civil religion," because they perpetuate the widely shared American perception that God has particularly blessed the United States (Bellah 1967). Nevertheless, our knowledge about the nature and role of religious rhetoric is extremely limited at this time. Religion and politics scholars and sociologists often assume that religion influences presidential leadership, but their assumption has not been subjected to rigorous empirical testing. Moreover, presidency scholars have ignored the role of religion on the American presidency. Our paper marks the beginning of a major study of the ways in which presidents strategically employ religious rhetoric. We are principally concerned with the question of whether and how the use of religious rhetoric by presidents has varied over time. In this paper, we begin the process of analyzing presidential rhetoric by assessing the use of substantive and symbolic religious rhetoric in the public speeches and statements made by Ronald Reagan during his first term in office, 1981-1984. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the reigning conception of party change in America. Whether dressed as realignment theory, politics in "political time," or merely empirical analysis with little theoretical superstructure, this idea asserts that presidents are the agents of party development. Further, we can recognize change only after a major on-year electoral shift (1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932). I show this view to be theoretically naive and historically inaccurate.More than simple critique, I offer an alternative model. Forming a new party is fundamentally an exercise in coalition building. For a variety of reasons, regimes develop opposition. Yet these malcontents do not inevitably form a new party. Instead, this group (often heterogeneous) must negotiate its disagreements and raise an organizational structure. Both, I argue, are done in Congress. Regional elections - by state and single-member district - allow opposition members to win office with local appeals. Once in office, legislators must solve the basic dilemma of social choice: molding their manifold complaints against the incumbent into a single (perhaps coherent) platform. This might be simply a matter of logrolling, in which case leaders can "buy" cooperation from wavering members. Likewise, rule change can rivet a coalition together (Reed's Rules) or pull one apart in hopes of establishing something new (the revolt against Speaker Cannon). The most important party-building work comes before the newly-minted opposition wins its first presidential election.After outlining its theory, the paper goes on to offer several illustrative cases. Given the limitations of a conference paper, these are exploratory, not actual tests of my approach. We see that activities in Congress, forging a coalition prior to contesting presidential elections, mark important changes in the 19th Century party system. "Jeffersonian" Republicanism, "Jacksonian" Democracy, along with the Whig and Republican parties, all spent years building durable legislative coalitions before winning the presidency. Recent developments follow a similar logic. Moreover, third-party movements fail when reaching for the White House without gaining a legislative foothold (Free Soil, Liberal Republican, Populist, Progressive, Socialist, and others).As the paper will show, when considering changes in the nature of the American party system, we must lend Congress a central role. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bush Administration's definition of political success in post-Saddam Iraq has changed almost as frequently as their rationale for the initial military invasion. Gone are the heroically optimistic predictions of peace, economic development, religious tolerance, and multi-cultural civil society in Iraq, which would then serve as the first falling domino in an irresistible cascade of democratization throughout the Middle East. Chastened by rising military, financial, and political costs, the Administration now speaks more soberly of satisfaction with a fairly stable, some-day reasonably democratic government for the New Iraq.Despite the fact that the characterization of success has been a moving target, one definition of abject political failure in Iraq has remained a constant: the fragmentation of the country into separate, possibly warring ethno-religious enclaves. The Bush Administration's emphatic warnings regarding the consequences of Iraqi balkanization have been echoed by the governments of at least eight Arab countries in the region.Notwithstanding the Administration's best efforts, however, recent events indicate that civil war and territorial partition are increasingly likely outcomes. For instance, July 2006 was the bloodiest month so far in terms of sectarian violence in Iraq. The peril of the situation was inadvertently acknowledged the following month by a leaked diplomatic note to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the note, the outgoing British ambassador to Iraq William Patey warned that civil war and a division of Iraq "is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy". Patey's warnings were echoed just hours later by two senior American military commanders in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. Iraq's former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has stated, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." Given the preexisting hostilities between the ethnic and sectarian groups of Iraq, partition of the country in the event of civil war is increasingly probable.The heuristic exploration of just such a hypothetically fragmented Iraq is the subject of this paper. Specifically, it will apply traditional geopolitical methodologies of analysis to assess the political, economic, and military viability of an Iraq trisected into Sunni, Shi'a and Kurdish political entities. In doing so, the paper will trace the roots of ethno-sectarian conflict in Iraq and compare Iraq to two divergent models of national devolution.The paper concludes that the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised from a geopolitical perspective, that the demographic conditions within Iraq suggest that civil war and partition are likely outcomes, and that while the Kurdish and Shi'a regions would be quite viable as independent states, the Sunni rump state would face daunting political, economic, and military challenges. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 appeared to have shattered once and for all the once reified notion of sovereignty. Where once power was defined in terms of warheads and military personnel, it now lay in the hands of those simply with the will to do what others would not. The goal of this paper is to explore the creation of the 'other' in the security discourse that has followed 9/11. It will explore the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the strengthening of the sovereign in the homeland while such sovereignty is being undermined abroad. It will also address the definition of the 'other' in this discourse. During the Cold War, the other was clearly defined, it had borders and armies that were visible and so the story goes, predictable. The current situation is radically different - the enemy has lost its visibility, the argument of this paper will be that in order to fight the War on Terror, the US had to first create its enemy. This paper will explore how that enemy was created not just as the Rogue states of the 'Axis of Evil' but also as individuals such as Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein and multiple 'Enemy Combatants' held at Camp Delta. The goal will be to highlight these paradoxes and the challenges they present to the conventional boundaries between political and international relations theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory of seat change in U.S. House elections. The theory contends, in short, that a substantial part of the impact of national electoral forces on seat change acts indirectly through the intervening variable of challenger quality. District and aggregate level models of challenger quality are estimated using a new database of House challengers. Jacobson's district level model is estimated using pooled data from the 1946-2002 elections. Krasno and Green's district level model and a revised version of their model are estimated for each of the 1946-2002 elections. Jacobson's aggregate level models of relative challenger quality are estimated using data from the 1946-2002 elections. A new aggregate level model of challenger quality is developed in this paper. The overall performance of the new model as measured by explained variance is comparatively greater than for earlier models. The impact of national forces on challenger quality is moderate at best. A new seat change model including challenger quality as a causal variable is introduced and estimated for the 1954-2002 elections. Estimates of this model demonstrate that challenger quality is an important cause of seat change. In addition, the impact of both national and district electoral forces on seat change, acting through the intervening variable of challenger quality, is estimated using data from the 1954-2002 elections. The indirect impact of national forces on seat change is moderate. Finally, an alternative measure of challenger quality constructed from data originally gathered in order to construct Krasno and Green's measure of challenger quality is substituted for Jacobson's traditional measure. The substitution improves the overall performance of the new aggregate level model of challenger quality presented here, but the additional gain in the performance is small. In conclusion, the analysis presented here provides empirical support for Jacobson and Kernell's strategic politicians theory. However, the theory has limited explanatory power. The impact of national forces on seat change acting through challenger quality is not large enough to account for much of the observed seat change that occurs from one election to the next. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]