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Colombia, the gateway to the continent of South America, plays a pivotal role in the world politics, insofar as natural resources, geopolitics and national conflicts. In this sense, not only does the world need to pay more attentions to Colombia, but is Colombia at the starting point to request active support to its neighbors on the globe. As will be seen, this paper indicates that how U.S. government recognizes Colombia as a strategic partner, hence, what kind of means and schemes are provided to Colombia by U.S. government, through the analysis of U.S. foreign policy towards Colombia. On top of that, this study gives answers to the questions that why US greatly concerns the Colombia issue and how US government formulates "Plan Colombia" strategies according to the background of US policy to Colombia. In details, this research analyzes that US shows four perceptions about Colombia when it comes to appropriation from 2000 to 2008 reported in "Plan Colombia: Drug Reduction Goals Were Not Fully Met, but Security Has Improved; U.S. Agencies Need More Detailed Plans for Reducing Assistance", US Government Accountability Office, October 2008. To this end, I will observe that how US appropriation 2000 through 2008 is allocated to Plan Colombia operations, moreover, explain that what plans US government agencies carry out under Plan Colombia. In addition, this paper goes on to say that each perception leads US government to set proper operations up with goals by presenting the political significance of Colombia in the American international relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the generational replacement hypothesis to test further that whites residing in the American South are undergoing a secular realignment in terms of their partisan identification. Four Logit models are tested using National Election Studies survey data (1972-2000). Predicted probabilities of "modal" Democratic and Republican respondents show that the generational replacement hypothesis is indeed at work over four cohort categories: the Solid South cohort, the Post World-War II cohort, the Goldwater-Civil Rights Act cohort, and the Reagan-Clinton cohort. As older and more Democratic generations of white Southerners age, they are slowly being replaced by younger and more Republican individuals. Furthermore, these findings hold after controlling for plausible alternative explanations for partisan change (i.e., family income, deep/rim south, gender, urbanism, education, ideology, married, union household, church attendance) and regardless of how one defines the partisan identification dependent variable (i.e., as either strong/weak partisans or strong/weak/leaning partisans). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I demonstrate that executive assaults ? attempts by presidents to suspend basic political liberties ? are a regular feature of South American democracy. Using regression analysis I argue that the prevalence of executive assault is due in large part to the scarcity of state resources in the region. Executive assaults facilitate the implementation of executive distributional preferences by suspending citizens? abilities to avail themselves of basic political liberties to influence state policy. This raises an important question for most South Americans: Given that an imminent increase in state resources is highly unlikely, how can basic political liberties be protected in poor, crisis-ridden democracies? I turn to the Ecuadorian case to provide some potential answers. Using sophisticated qualitative methods, I demonstrate that executive assaults in Ecuador cannot be foiled if either the state security forces or organized kapital present a united defense of the assault. As such, successful opposition to assaults must be tailored to avoid provoking such a defense. Three possible strategies of opposition are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine candidate emergence patterns in the U.S. House in the American South from 1992-2000. This period of elections is distinguished by the rapid ascent of Republicans and the concomitant decline of Democrats. There are many explanations for why the GOP was so successuful in the South for this electoral period, but we look at the role of political geography, an understudied component of candidate emergence. An uncharacteristically large percentage of newely elected Republicans had no previous officeholding experience and we find that this is tied to the fact that so many Republicans state legislators represnted districs that mostly overlapped with congressional districts already represented by the GOP. This geographic bottleneck deterred many politically experienced Republicans from running for Congress. Additionally, we demonstrate that if the overlap of a state legislative distric is substantial with a congressional district held by a representative of the opposing party, then the likelihood of emerging for Congress is much higher for both Democrats and Republicans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]