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This paper examines the competing political justifications presented in the United States for policies designed to support and to restrain American hegemony from 1980-2000. During this period, the political questions about US hegemony shifted significantly: from whether US hegemony would survive the Cold War to what the US role as the lone superpower should be. Domestic political groups differed over the aims and effectiveness of proposed grand strategies to sustain hegemony, adapt to its loss, or benefit from it, and they disagreed over how those strategies would affect the US economy and society. What explains the differences in their views and how they adapted those views when international conditions changed between the 1980s and the 1990s? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reaction to the events of September 11 highlights the urgency of an ethics of engagement in world politics. Whilst the US government imposes its ‘solutions’ on the world, intellectuals seem to mainly stare in disbelief. An apparently unbridgeable gap has opened between those who see a need to make the world ‘secure’ and those who either oppose war in principle or object to what they regard as imperialist imposition, or both. This paper takes its cue from the work of Jacques Derrida to explore the need, for intellectuals, to elaborate on what responding to the Other may mean at this time. In this context, it draws particular attention to the nexus of responsibility and forgiveness and to the significance of remembering an identity that does not derive simply from the desire secure oneself in the face of the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American and coalition armed forces performed masterfully in conventional combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the aftermath of these conflicts, however, the coalitions have had less success establishing conditions for the departure of outside military forces and transition to stable civil governance. These difficulties in making the transition from violent conflict to stable governance are just the latest examples of a regrettable and frequently recurring motif. This study explores the appropriate civilian and military roles in post-conflict situations (with emphasis on the analysis of military roles). It addresses the overlapping relationship between military and civilian efforts and explores insights from recent American and United Nations experiences. The paper attempts to clarify appropriate roles for military forces and common pitfalls of military efforts in post-conflict situations. It also suggests some policy recommendations, particularly for the American government, to better integrate military and civilian efforts to achieve stable, long-term solutions for post-conflict areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how secondary states experience unipolarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the most marked characteristic of the emergence of hegemony is the prospect of discrete military contests decoupled from a constraining and magnifying bipolar stand-off. The United States globally, and others regionally, are more able to use force without fear that the conflict will spill over into nuclear armageddon or draw in a balancing rival to shore up the enemy. The result is greater freedom to wage war for less-than-vital interests and to less-than-unconditional surrender. At the same time, when the interests are substantial, it raises the prospect that a state can push its war aims to unconditional surrender without fear that another state will intervene to prevent the total defeat of an enemy as would happen in a classic multipolar world. For the United States this can be seen in a number of cases from the 1990s to the present fought as coercive enterprises (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo/Yugoslavia, and Iraq in the interim between the first and second Gulf Wars), and two fought as total wars (Afghanistan and the second Gulf War). In all of these cases, the target states/entities have often been loosely described as ?authoritarian regimes.? However, while the bulk of the targets are similar, there are vital differences between the Taliban regime and Saddam Hussein?s Iraq, for example, which may indicate entirely different dynamics under coercive pressure. Given that all of the cases involve targets in which only a few individuals rule, this paper?s core question is, ?How do ?the few? behave under coercive pressure?? Broken down, several sub-questions emerge: Do authoritarian regimes present unique coercive challenges vs. a rational unitary actor approach since they may be more concerned about personal survival than the aggregate welfare? Thus, are authoritarian regimes immune or hardened to conventional coercion in which state rather than elite interests are targeted? Conversely, are authoritarian regimes uniquely open to coercive deals which entail behavior change in exchange for their staying power? Similarly, are they relatively hardened to threats of total war which may paradoxically shore up their domestic position as the population to rallies behind the once despised leader and against an invader? What is the recent track record for coercion against authoritarian regimes? Is the high cost but relative finality of total wars a more promising approach for the hegemon than the lower cost but more constrained compellence approach? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore some of the conceptual difficulties associated with explaining individual participation in extremist politics. Policymakers and scholars interested in the mo-tivating factors behind terrorism and extremism need to move beyond the limited assump-tions associated with traditional analyses that all too frequently presume that individuals are engaged in a constant struggle to accrue the greatest number of material goods. Certainly individuals do strive for pecuniary gain. Still, such a framework may be better apt to describe the employee who changes one workplace for a higher paying substitute or even the astute politician altering their party?s platform in a bid to appeal to the electorate?s sway. Conjec-tures that all people seek to improve their material lot fail to explain the sacrifices made while engaging in other activities, particularly politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we look again at the distinction between independent voters "leaners" and partisans. We find some important similarities between "pure" independents and independents classified as "leaners." We argue that although independent leaners may be similar to partisans on some measures, they are behaviorally and attitudinally distinct from partisans in important ways. Even more importantly, the behavioral similarity between partisans and leaners changes when there are more than two candidates on offer. The behavioral similarity of leaners to partisans emphasized in previous studies can thus be understood as a product of the forced choice between the two parties that typifies the American political system. When more options are available, independent leaners take advantage of those options and do not remain loyal to the two big parties in the same measure as partisans. The position of independent leaners in the US is thus loosely analogous to the position tactical voters in multi-party systems in that they are compelled by the party system to choose between the lesser of two evils. Our argument suggests that earlier results and interpretations of independents reflected the specific two party choice settings of the 1950s through the 1980s. Furthermore, even assuming a behavioral similarity to partisans, leaners have distinct attitudes towards politics and the political system that put them far away from being standard Michigan model-type voters. We begin by presenting a brief review of the sizable literature on this topic. From here we present some simple evidence that supports an alternative interpretation of leaners as neither partisans nor "pure" independents, but as "critical citizens." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the origins and growth of the National Federation of Independent Business from 1943 until the present. It illustrates the relationship between interest groups and American political development in a contemporary setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do different communities volunteer for different types of organizations? Why do some communities have much higher rates of volunteer participation than other, similarly situated communities? The author develops a new conceptualization of civil society that classifies civic organizations continually rather than categorically. This conceptualization serves as the basis of the Community Volunteerism Model, which utilizes a state-in-society approach to explain the types and rates of volunteering found in communities. Citizen images of state and individual responsibility for caring for society determine the type of organizations (community-based or issue-based) prevalent in that community. The practices of state and social institutions (how well they legitimize, organize, and fund volunteers and their organizations) determine the rate of participation in that community. The model is tested using the cases of the United States and Japan, and the paper concludes with some implications of this model for the study of comparative civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the legislative victories of the civil rights movement, low-income African Americans have continued to face rising levels of poverty as well as political, economic, and social isolation over the past three decades. Because of this ongoing relationship between civil rights and economic justice, civil rights organizations have all, at times during their history, chosen to advocate on behalf of low-income African Americans. To determine the factors contributing to organizations’ attention to the representation of the poor, this paper examines cases of the prioritization of anti-poverty issues by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. These case studies demonstrate the importance of structure, method of political mobilization, and relations between organizations to interest group representation of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting a new political party is always a costly endeavor, but it is a well-known fact that doing so and challenging the existing two-party system usually ends up in miserable electoral defeat under the first-past-the-post voting system, at least in most circumstances. If this is the case, why would anyone want to launch a third party in such a situation in the first place? Employing the concepts of organizational repertoire and organizational form, hitherto used primarily in sociological research on social movements, this paper seeks an answer to this question by investigating why a couple of reformist social movements, prohibitionists and labor reformers, began forming their own political parties several years after the Civil War. In the course of analysis, two subproblems to the original research question are addressed. First, why did the social movement leaders think creating a political party was better suited to achieve their reform than their previous mode of action? Second, even if forming a political party was superior to their earlier organizational form in terms of policymaking, why did they think that they could win elections once they formed a political party? My analysis, which treats these reformers as utility-maximizing actors rather than narrow-sighted zealots, reveals that the political experience of the immediate past, namely the rise of the Republican Party and its conduct of the war, served as an organizational model that changed their views on political parties and party system change in a positive way. This experience convinced the reformers to follow its course by starting a party founded on a reformist political issue, thereby realizing their reform through federal public policy after a party realignment, just as the Republicans did, in the reformers’ view, with the slavery issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The socioeconomic effects of technological change have political implications. A ’disturbance,’ such as the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, brings about new public policy issues even as it establishes new organized interests in the Washington lobbying community. This paper explores how organizations adapt to these uncertain policy environments; it combines face-to-face interviews with Washington policy office representatives from a random sample of organizations involved in Internet policy debates with compiled data on the extent of involvement by each organization. The evidence shows that organized interests faced substantial difficulty developing lobbying capacity, selecting which issues to add to their agendas, and locating like-minded allies. Initial results show that, in addition to the problems they encountered creating an initial Washington presence, new entrants faced more difficulty than established interests in building lobbying capacity, developing an agenda, and forming coalitions. These strategic and organizational differences among organized interests are hypothesized to affect the resolution of several major Internet policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long viewed the creation of public parks in the 19th century as a reflection of American democratic ideals. A commitment to egalitarianism on the one hand meant that natural wonders could be set aside for the use and enjoyment of all people, not just for the wealthy few, or for royalty. Meanwhile, institutions governed by popular sovereignty reminded lawmakers that growing public demands for forest preservation should be heeded. Yet according to some environmental historians (such as Roderick Nash), parks and democracy are more than compatible ideas; they connect in ways that are explicitly causal. This paper explores what might be called the ‘democracy thesis’ through a narrative case study of the Adirondack Park. A content analysis of 19th century newspaper editorials published in New York between 1864 and 1894 reveals that democratic rhetoric was frequently invoked in support of the creation of a public park in the Adirondacks, but that argument ultimately had little influence on state legislators. Not only does Nash overemphasize consensus on democratic norms and traditions, he overlooks important class and regional conflicts that continue to shape the tension between conservation and preservation today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the rubric of American political development this paper addresses a two-fold problem: 1). the question of antebellum state-building and the American weak state; and 2). the question of the periodization of the American presidency. As we know, the state formation literature draws a positive relationship between war and state formation. However, the American case poses a paradox: during the antebellum period, the United States was both war-prone and, as the literature in American political development argues, a weak state. As regards the second point about the inherent weakness of the antebellum American state, I argue otherwise. The Polk presidency and its conduct of the Mexican War represents a critical case of both antebellum state-building and the centralization of executive power. My hypothesis is that the Polk administration engaged in purposeful, institutionalized, state-building during the Mexican War. Contra the current literature in American political development which focuses attention on the post-1877 period, I develop two claims related to antebellum state-building: 1). that a robust central state began to develop prior to the Civil War and, in fact, the state that wins the Civil War is, in large part, the state that was built during the Mexican War; and 2). that the Polk presidency exhibited some of the features of the modern-presidency, including covert diplomatic and military action, war-making without the consent of Congress (at the start of the war), and centralization of the executive branch, particularly in directing tactical military policies, all of which led to higher levels of political insulation and discretionary power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the relationship among the three branches of the U.S. federal government is critical to understanding our political system. This paper focuses upon the relationship between the judicial and the executive branches. We attempt to provide significant new information related to the nexus between these two branches. Our primary interests revolve around issues of political power, influence, and decision-making. For example, do Supreme Court justices show deference towards the Solicitor General? Are their votes congruent with the positions taken by the Solicitor General?s office? Are certain justices more likely to show support for the executive branch? Is this related to political party? Do issue or policy areas affect the level of support by the justices? Has there been any changes or trends, overtime, in terms of this inter-branch interaction? We will try to advance our knowledge about this relationship by examining cases which included an amicus curiae brief filed by the Solicitor General?s office between 1953-2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two volumes of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America offered the image of an accomplished and successful American democracy. Tocqueville lived nineteen more years after the publication of Volume Two and although he never wrote a third volume of Democracy, he continued to be interested in American political events and exchanged a number of important letters with his American friends. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes published in 1835 and 1840? If so, which of his views did change and why? Did the evolution of his views of America affect his theory of democracy? This paper seeks to answer these questions by examining Tocqueville’s correspondence and, to a lesser extent, his participation in the constitutional debates of 1848 in France. Its purpose is to reconstruct from the letters that Tocqueville exchanged with his American friends after 1840 what the third volume of Democracy might have looked like if it were ever written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 was passed to make the solution to the problem of a double vacancy in the presidency and vice presidency more democratic. That was Truman’s stated goal, as he viewed the previous Act as less legitimate. The problem is that the current law privileges ‘democracy’ at the expense of ‘energy’ in the executive, especially as that energy is reflected in the unitary nature of the presidency. Hamilton explains in Federalist #70 why unity in the executive is important, both for the purposes of energetic leadership and accountability. Now, however, the possibility that a successor under the 1947 statute could be from a party other than that elected by the people diminishes the energy that is key to this branch of government. This paper explores the central constitutional question surrounding the issue of double vacancy: whether the current law is the best we can do to meet the two goals of providing for the possibility of a double vacancy while still retaining the energy that typifies the office of the presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements and other ‘exogenous’ interests play an important yet insufficiently understood role in presidential politics. With this paper I will explore the various theoretical understandings of exogenous interests and the presidency, and then examine the case of President Reagan and regulatory politics. I explain that Reagan built new regulatory structures that survive today, and thus created a new regulatory politics according to his obligations to exogenous interests. I argue that presidential policymaking is compelled by the imperatives of responding to exogenous political forces like social movements, organized interest groups, and key voting blocs. I find evidence that three exogenous interest groups, the business sector, right-wing social movements, and the Democrats, were forces that compelled Reagan’s policymaking decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systematic racial exclusion and exploitation, a daily reality for hundreds of millions of people in the Americas, is paralleled by another deeply embedded pattern of social hierarchy – the Western system of patriarchal power in the family, community, and polity, perpetuated through socialization, law, and physical force, which European colonialists also brought with them, when they transplanted both the best and the worst of Christian civilization to the Americas. Because both American racialism and patriarchy are fundamental features of politics in this hemisphere, it seems clear that an argument for centralizing racial politics in political analysis is incomplete, if it does not explain how patriarchy and racialism are related. To that end, this paper links an emerging postcolonial racial regime theory with Pauline Schloesser’s theory of racial patriarchy (from The Fair Sex, 2002). The postcolonial racial regime theory holds that institutional legacies of European colonialism, throughout the Americas, shape racially stratified societies in which descendants of African slaves, American indigenes, and migrants from Asia have been systematically disadvantaged by rigid systems of legal, political, and economic inequality. The theory of racial patriarchy identifies a historical moment–at the founding of the United States–when the call for white women’s citizenship in the new nation was successfully rebuffed by linking women’s legal subordination to the same "natural" order which justified propertied white men’s domination of Blacks, Indians, children, and white commoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the critical role that families play in the lives of citizens and the health of the polity, little attention has been paid to the role that the state should adopt with respect them. Instead, dominant versions of liberal political theory generally focus on individuals conceived apart from their relationships with others. Insofar as they consider families at all, these theories treat them as part of citizens' private lives, an area from which the state should properly remain aloof. This conception of the family-state relationship has contributed to a family policy in the United States that fails to support families and the goods associated with them. Recent revisionist versions of liberal theory, however, have begun to set the stage for rethinking the relationship between the state and the family. In focusing attention on the strong relationship between what William Galston calls the "moral culture of liberal society" and the health of a liberal polity (1991: 6), these discussions suggest (although they don't often explicitly recognize) the importance of the family's role. And in moving the discussion from seeking an impossible-to-attain neutral position for the state toward a position that makes no pretense toward neutrality yet ensures individuals considerable autonomy, these debates open the field for new conceptions of the family-state relationship. They also move the ground of debate away from simple consideration of the value of liberty toward recognition of a wider range of goods and a richer conception of human flourishing. In this paper, I begin the project of developing a sustained theory of the family-state relationship on this new terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My appreciation of Murray Edelman's pervasive influence on the contemporary study of politics began with a series of articles published in the years just before the completion of his classic book The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Like the title of that book, these analyses were founded on a chiasmus of profound importance: the symbolic uses of politics turned out to be also about the political uses of symbols. These initial forays into the political world of symbols began in the late 1950s and were to begin a process of transforming political science into the critical discipline it has in part become. For years, students of politics would begin with Edelman's contemporary invocation of the age-old insight that appearances were deceiving and the truth of politics lay beneath the surface. For many students beginning their studies on contemporary U.S. politics, Edelman was to become their Plato who taught them about the appearance/reality contrast as it was materialized in the current scene and dressed up on the present-day garb of mass mediated politics. I was one of those many students and my political science is still informed in a profound way by the first moments of awe and wonder that came with reading Murray Edelman's critical dissections of the contrast between appearance and reality in contemporary U.S. politics. The formative effects of that moment of epiphany were to be repeated again and again for scores of graduate students who went on to follow Edelman's lead and learn to practice a critical eye on the surface appearances of contemporary politics. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses survey and focus group data to explore conceptions of citizenship held by the public in the United States and Great Britain. It shows how liberal and cultural pluralist understandings are impeded by communitarian thinking in both nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the policy proposals for improving life in U.S. metropolitan areas come from non-academic groups yet, collectively, these organizations have received little scholarly attention. Using approximately two hundred reports by citizens groups in Cleveland, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and St. Louis as well as on-site interviews with key participants in each group, this paper examines the issues they address, the policy cycle stages they emphasize, the processes they use, the geographic scale they cover, the units they seek to influence, the values they stress, the implementation tools they favor, the advocacy strategies they employ, and the impact they have had. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Reagan’s attempted constitutional reconstruction. While Reagan has been treated as a ?reconstructive? president, a president who attempted to ?engage the nation in a struggle for its constitutional soul,? the so-called Reagan Revolution is by and large seen as a stalled constitutional revolution because it did not bring about the kind of constitutional reconstruction or transformation that FDR’s New Deal wrought. Yet, on federalism and the enumerated powers of the national government, Reagan articulated a constitutional vision that was at odds with the ?Constitutional Revolution of 1937,? and one that, after a lag, the Rehnquist Court began to articulate. In this Reagan has unsettled the New Deal Constitution and brought federalism back to the table as a viable constitutional issue. But he did this in a peculiarly New Deal style: by way of judicial appointments. This suggests that constitutional politics underlie the Court’s recent claims to judicial supremacy and that the political branches have a hand in shaping constitutional meaning even in the absence of great constitutional moments Indeed, constitutional change and discontinuities may come in more subtle forms, suggesting that constitutional politics is an ordinary, rather than extraordinary, feature of American constitutionalism. We see this with Reagan’s revival of federalism: the Rehnquist Court has broken with the New Deal, but in doing so has continued, rather than settled, a constitutional debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this paper is to briefly describe the evolution of presidential executive orders and to consider their place in American political and constitutional development. I suggest that the history and significance of executive orders can best be understood in terms of two of the three dimensions that Stephen Skowronek discusses in The Politics That Presidents Make, namely constitutional and secular time. I conclude with a few thoughts about the implications of my account for Skowronek’s analysis and for American political and constitutional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on formal U.S. and EU works on the politics of delegation by incorporating EU-specific features: the legislative and executive role of the Commission, the legislative and executive role of the members of the Council of Ministers, the fact that many European policies are executed by the different national administrations, and the variety of decision rules for the adoption of EU law. The model produces three main findings: 1) in case of unanimity and a new law, member states agree to restrain their own national administrations at only an intermediate level of policy conflict within the Council and the equilibrium level of national discretion first decreases then increases as policy conflict within the Council increases, 2) compared to unanimity, majority voting facilitates the adoption of legislation that restrains national authorities, shifts powers from national administrations to a supranational Commission and increases the discretion of a supranational Commission, 3) in codecision, a supranational Parliament with preferences similar to those of the Commission reinforces the dynamics of majority voting, a national Parliament may lead to an inversion of this dynamics. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant assumptions about youth in the United States, as well as legal decisions that both draw on and reinforce these assumptions, limit the rights of all young people. This has a particularly destructive impact on those young people who either identify as gay/lesbian/bisexual or who fail to conform to normative gender roles. In this paper, I connect the issues that these youth face to the lack of rights faced by all young people. I argue that those who care about young people who fail to conform to sex/gender norms need to be part of redefining parental rights and responsibilities. Finally, I suggest that the Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a important beginning for this redefinition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an extended summary account of my recently completed book manuscript on the history of democratic theory in American political science. The focus is on the internal discursive evolution of the democratic vision in the discipline and on the concepts of state, pluralism, and liberalism as the axis of paradigmatic transformations in that vision. The primary emphasis is on the period from the early nineteenth century to World War Two, but an Epilogue considers later developments and casts contemporary democratic theory against this historical background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given its temporal centrality in American history, it is surprising that Walt Whitman's 1871 prose work, Democratic Vistas, has not received greater attention from students of American political thought. Not that temporal location alone should rule what we scrutinize and what we ignore as political theorists and historians of ideas, but when a work lies on a fault line between two epochs in history and political thinking, it provides a unique window into the nature and meaning of that transition and an opportunity to analyze the dynamic between political theory and historical change. One reason we read Hobbes's Leviathan, for example, is its historical proximity to the English Civil War, the Treaty of Westphalia, and the rise of the modern nation-state. Similarly, we read Paine's Common Sense and Madison, Hamilton and Jay's The Federalist Papers in dialogue with the events surrounding the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and the struggle for ratification. Theoretical text and historical moment, in these cases, are inextricable: each offers a window into the other. While Democratic Vistas certainly has a lesser claim to historical importance than these three works, its proximity to the American Civil War and its location within the struggles of Reconstruction and the dawning Gilded Age make it a text with a similar, though lesser, potential to encapsulate an era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clergy are uniquely situated both to shape the interplay of religion and politics in the United States and to mobilize others to take action to address political and social problems. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the factors that underlie attempts by clergy in four mainline Protestant denominations to mobilize their congregations to pursue policy-relevant programming within the church, with special attention given to the ways in which gender influences these attempts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]