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In recent years, the public choice school, which has dominated the debate on metropolitan governance since the 1980s, is facing new intellectual challenges. Like the reformers during the first half of the 20th Century, many urban scholars and practitioners are again demanding more integrated governance structures for sprawling metropolitan areas. There are also fundamental differences between the early reformers and the current advocates of a new regionalism in metropolitan areas. The new conceptions can be seen as the latest step in a dialectic development of governance paradigms. Whereas the early reformers adopted a technocratic, "steering" perspective and proposed a consolidated regional city, the public choice advocates relied on an individualistic "choice" approach to propose decentralized and (territorially or functionally) fragmented government structures. The latest turn of the debate goes beyond a pure instrumentalist view on political institutions which is embodied in both traditions. Social constructivists understand the attempts for "boundary (re)drawing", which is at the core of all metropolitan reform plans, primarily as a process of constructing/ constitutionalizing individual and collective identities. This paper presents an analysis of distinct definitions of fundamental governance goals and the corresponding proposals for institutional design. Very different understandings of "democracy" can be described in Abraham Lincoln’s terms: Early reformers based their plans on a top-down perspective on democracy as "government for the people", rational choice advocates stress the bottom-up concept of "government by the people" and social constructivists focus their attention on "government of the/of what people" - an aspect which is gaining center stage in a world where socio-economic and cultural spaces of flows are superposing traditional spaces of place. The formula for economic success has changed from focusing on effectiveness (a concept based on welfare theory) over efficiency (based on political economy) to competitiveness (based on trade theory). Dominant definitions of social justice have been transformed from equality over equivalence to equity/difference. The paper uses those different definitions of core values and the corresponding proposals for institutional design to analyze the discourse on institutional reform in metropolitan areas in the United States from the 1950s to the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three decades ago, most Western nations experienced a shift in health policy. While downplaying their belief in treatment technology, the potentials of preventive public health were suddenly viewed upon with unbridled optimism. As a Canadian report argued in 1974, this potential required governments to 'get into the business of modifying behavior', i.e. to counter lifestyle diseases by getting citizens to exercise more, but eat, drink, and smoke less than they used to.Despite the clear and early identification of goals and target groups, the experience of public health policy has been less than successful. Many citizens in the developed world already know what they are supposed to do and yet they almost never conform with the goals of policy makers in the field. What accounts for this gap? Is it because citizens never listen, or is the goal setting of public health policy to blame? This paper seeks to advance our understanding of policy failures in public health and other forms of preemptive action. The paper is motivated by the view that the interaction of knowledge and politics is currently an underdeveloped topic in the public policy literature, partly because knowledge is often reduced to a somewhat technical input factor. Undertheorized in public policy is both what knowledge is and what it does for the evaluation of policy success or failure. As the public health case illustrates, there is no linear relation between knowledge, governmental action, and successful changes to individual behavior.In order to improve policy theory on the topic of knowledge, this paper combines a more traditional style of public policy case comparison with ideas drawn from a Foucauldian perspective on knowledge, power and subjectivity. Clearly associated with discourse analysis, this latter perspective focuses on how various knowledge forms structure our conception of healthy citizens and the prospects of governmental action.Based on a larger study of public health documents in the United States and Denmark between 1975 and 2005, this paper demonstrates that two highly different systems of health care and welfare provision has experienced similar difficulties in putting knowledge into action. This similarity supports the claim that there is a proprietary logic of policy failure within this area, part of which has to do with governing through knowledge, and part of which is due to the preventive character of this policy area.The experience of policy failure generates new health promoting instruments, and in particular both countries have shifted its efforts from reporting statistical knowledge to focus much more on strategically designed forms of health communication. This result leaves public health policy in a normative dilemma, however, because while policy makers generally seek to give individuals more responsibility for their own health status, their communication is predesigned on the premise that people do not listen and are not able to meet the responsibility handed to them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What US post-Cold War strategies towards potential nuclear proliferant countries have been most successful and why? Two answers to this question have been given: a realist answer in which the outcome of strategies is determined by the balance of expected material (military and economic) benefits and sanctions, and a constructivist answer that posits social (prestige, status, and role) benefits and sanctions as the determinants of success or failure. In this paper, through analysis of the two US-DPRK nuclear crises, I argue that neither of these answers is sufficient; both social and material tools must be used in concert and in the right way in order to provide the proper balance of incentives and disincentives to slow proliferation. I elaborate realist and constructivist frameworks, testing deterrent (negative-feedback) and spiral (positive-feedback) models of interaction. I break down interactions into individual events using both content and discourse analysis, then connect these interactions to nuclear moves by North Korea. I analyze events coded into the IDEA framework, enabling separation of the material and social implications of each event. I then use vector autoregression to uncover action-reaction cycles between the United States and North Korea. Furthermore, I analyze the discourse that surrounds these events qualitatively in order to uncover complex multiple-country causal patterns and domestic-international interactions. I connect these interaction patterns to nuclear outcomes and find that a combination of social benefits and clear, coherent, and credible material deterrence is effective in slowing nuclear proliferation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the military and economic rise of China a threat to powers such as Japan and the United States? This paper examines this question using the theoretical predictions of realist theories (classical realism, neo-realism, and power transition theory), liberal theories (classical liberalism and neo-liberalism), and constructivist theory. While the qualitative analysis of Chinese, American, and Japanese behavior indicates some support for each theory, classical liberalism and constructivism are most strongly supported by the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate between France and the U.S. leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq highlighted two very different interpretations of the same principle of international law: the use of anticipatory action in self-defense. This paper examines the question of how states arrive at different interpretations of international law, theorizing that the method of interpretation a state adopts is constituted by the legal tradition of that state. Legal tradition is the historical development of law within a state that results in socially constructed beliefs about the role of law in society, the proper creation of law, and the sources of law that are binding. A state's legal tradition not only shapes how state decision-makers view law generally, but also provides the framework for which international legal principles become internalized into the domestic law. Each of these attributes contributes to the perception state decision-makers have towards law, which in turn shapes how they interpret existing international law. To test this theory, I conduct four of case studies examining the way legal tradition shaped interpretation of the international law of anticipatory intervention in self-defense. I use the contemporary example of the debates over intervention in Iraq as a focal point for this examination. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the first systematic analysis of the linkage between cultural worldviews, partisanship, and the making of U.S. foreign policy. Although partisan disagreement over foreign policy reflects the interplay of complex causes, ideological and cultural divergence has been at a minimum salient and at a maximum determinative of foreign policy differences in the post-Cold War era. Since the Cold War ended, America's political parties have demonstrated foreign policy preferences that differ in consistent and coherent ways that correspond to the distinctive cultural worldviews that underlie and differentiate them from each other. Embedded in this observation are three supporting claims that this study synthesizes and supports through a systematic overview of foreign policy "key votes" taken from the Congressional Quarterly Almanac between 1989 and 2004. First, partisanship exerts a discernible influence in foreign-policymaking. That is, the parties will choose different policy options under the same circumstances in at least some cases and do so in consistent ways. Second, the parties can be differentiated from each other by reference to their underlying cultural worldviews in a manner consistent with expectations identified in recent studies of partisan polarization. In other words, the parties look at the world from distinct cultural perspectives that yield different value judgments and policy preferences, including in the foreign policy realm. Third, cultural worldviews matter to the conceptualization of U.S. foreign policy and the definition of the national interest. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sanctions on Iraq (1990-2003) posed an excruciating moral and strategic political dilemma. The sanctions caused immense human suffering, while doing little to unseat Saddam Hussein from power. For some, this reality created an urgent moral imperative to lift the sanctions immediately, at whatever cost. But given the absolute brutality of Saddam's regime, lifting the sanctions - and awarding the tyrant a significant political victory - seemed at best a problematic moral stance. Saddam bore some responsibility for the horrific effects of the sanctions, both in his refusal to comply fully with UN disarmament resolutions and in his cynical manipulation of the flow of humanitarian relief for his own domestic and foreign political ends. The difficult moral decisions were compounded by perplexing strategic concerns. The sanctions succeeded in preventing Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, and significantly weakened Iraqi military capabilities, but at the same time actually strengthened Saddam's domestic position, and by the late 1990s had evolved into a potent instrument of Iraqi foreign policy. Because sanctions are often presented as an 'ethical' or 'humane' alternative to war, they carry a particular moral burden which makes them an easy target for accusations of hypocrisy. This paper argues that the distinctively moral tone of the international argument about Iraq explains otherwise puzzling outcomes: the empowering of an otherwise quite weak transnational activist network; the rhetorical entrapment of the United States and the UK into backing the creation of an unprecedented humanitarian relief programme within the sanctions regime ("Oil for Food"); the sudden collapse of compliance with the sanctions in the late 1990s; and ultimately the failure of the United States to win international backing for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The strategic payoffs to moral argument generated great incentives for hypocrisy, which had the unfortunate result of stripping away the very possibility of generating legitimacy not only for the sanctions, but for virtually any policy towards Iraq. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a model of how foreign policy implementation produces rules of international security. It focuses on the Proliferation Security Initiative as an illustrative case study. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postwar officials in Japan, like their counterparts in Germany, faced the daunting task of rebuilding their country’s relationships with other states and of placing these relations on a new foundation to replace the discredited politics of their recent past. In these circumstances, Konrad Adenauer and the CDU in Germany moved quickly to cement alliance ties with the West, to pursue broader institutional arrangements in Europe, and to commit themselves in general to arrangements that limited rather than reasserted the power of the German state. Superficially, Japan appears to have followed a similar course through its defense pact with the U.S. and its constitutional renunciation of military forces. Yet Japan’s decisive postwar Prime Minister, Shigeru Yoshida, embraced none of these goals. Although he sought strict limits on the Japanese military establishment, he was eager to reassert the power and sovereign right of the Japanese state. Moreover, he embraced the international commitments of the Defense Treaty only with great reluctance. And, even so, he was roundly criticized for having gone too far. A constructivist analysis of language, rules, and order helps to account for Japan’s postwar choices. Trying to find its place in a new international order, Japan confronted a specific instance of a generic problem of order. Speech act theory identifies three strategic pathways for managing such problems, leading to three different cultures of order: Hobbesian (or directive), Lockean (or assertive), and Kantian (or commissive). Postwar circumstances ruled out one of these, the Hobbesian strategy, in Japan (and Germany). Despite their similar structural positions, Japan and Germany made different choices from among the remaining alternatives--choices that continue to reverberate in contemporary Japanese and German foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project combines social theories concerning communicative action and the influence of culture on states’ security policies to examine multinational crisis management in the Balkans through the 1990s. By examining how the United States, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and France collaborated in response to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo I have been able to isolate specific, security-related cultural incompatibilities that contributed to their inability to collaborate quickly and effectively. My central claim is that each state possesses a distinct ‘security-related culture? that provides state leaders with understandings about which actions are possible, appropriate, and favorable. How these understandings are articulated in different institutional settings account for whether collaboration will proceed effectively or contentiously.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the divide in ethical theorizing between deontological and consequentialist traditions, I argue that for most international relations scholars concerned with ethical argument, the deontological and the consequentialist concerns are intimately linked. One reason that many constructivist norms scholars have focused so clearly on careful empirical research is that we believe (at least implicitly) that we need to know something about the empirical consequences of norms in order to judge their ethical desirability. But we lack more explicit and systematic guidelines about how to link principles and consequences in ethical argument. My discussion examines related questions of consequences, comparison, and counterfactuals to try to offer some insights for normative thinking from the realm of empirical constructivism. I illustrate my arguments with reference to two current human rights issues: the debate over the U.S. use of torture and the debate over the impact of the increasing use of global human rights trials. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]