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This study expands previous research on political endorsements by focusing on the tone of the endorsement, rather than the endorser or the presence/absence of any endorsement at all. Using a 2×2 experimental design and a sample of 906 registered voters from a midwestern U.S. state, this study measures the effect of positive and negative endorsements on the voter perceptions of the endorsee, endorser, and unendorsed candidate during a partisan primary election campaign. Results support the idea that positive endorsements generally improve voters' attitudes toward the endorsee and the endorser and negative endorsements generally hurt voters' perception of the unendorsed candidate. Further interaction analyses show that factors such as a voter's existing enthusiasm for politics, government, and politicians can moderate the effect of endorsements. The findings are in line with the proposition of the Social Judgment Theory and support the existing literature on the effect of endorsements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Second World War, the Middle East has been mentioned in connection with the national interest of America manifested by US presidents. This paper looks at the US foreign policy in the Middle East from Truman to Clinton on the premise that the US foreign policy has contributed to creating a breeding ground for dissatisfaction toward the US In this context, the paper focuses on the doctrines in use from the time of President Truman to Clinton. Thus, every American president has a doctrine, and this doctrine tells what political line the president follows regarding domestic and foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Potential adversaries of the United States have concluded that upgrading and diversifying their nuclear forces is vital to their defense posture and to prevailing, whether at the negotiating table, on the battlefield, or in future crises with the United States. They seek to use their nuclear forces to coerce partners, fracture alliances, and shape regional security dynamics and future military campaigns. These actions will help leverage their nuclear forces, and create hybrid conventional-nuclear strategies that will ensure future crises or conflicts will include a nuclear dimension from the outset. It may also extend across multiple phases and domains. Since the end of the Cold War, US nuclear deterrence has been marginalized and stovepiped in favor of conventional deterrence. This article asserts that thinking about conventional deterrence independently or otherwise detached from US nuclear forces is not sufficient to counter hybrid nuclear-conventional strategies. Rather, it advocates on behalf of better integration between nuclear deterrence strategies and nuclear deterrence operations with US conventional defense policy, strategy, and planning processes. As such, it supports the call within the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review to "strengthen the integration of nuclear and non-nuclear military planning" and offers initial steps forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's call for the U.S. government to make the nation's clemency system more efficient, fair, and effective as of 2017, and it mentions mercy and the Clemency Project 2014 program that was established under then-American President Barack Obama's administration. Pardon attorneys and the U.S. Deputy Attorney General are addressed, along with clemency boards, the late U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, and state clemency systems in South Carolina and Delaware.

Calls for public-private partnerships to address U.S. cybersecurity failures have become ubiquitous. But the academic literature and public debate have not fully appreciated the extent to which the United States has already backed into a de facto system o f "public-private cybersecurity. " This system is characterized by the surprisingly important, quasi-governmental role o f the private sector on key cybersecurity issues, and correspondingly by instances in which the federal government acts more like a market participant than a traditional regulator. The public-private cybersecurity system challenges scholarly approaches to privatization, which focus on maintaining public law values when governmentfunctions are contracted out to private parties. The informal and complicated structure o f public-private relationships in cybersecurity renders concerns about public law values at once more serious and more difficult to remedy. This Article first explores the line between public and private functions and provides a descriptive account o f the public-private cybersecurity system. It highlights the relative roles o f the U.S. government and private sector in four important contexts related to international cybersecurity threats: (1) disrupting networks o f infected computers used by transnational-criminal groups ( "botnet takedowns "), (2) remediating software vulnerabilities that can be used for crime, espionage, and offensive operations ("zero-day vulnerabilities "), (3) attributing cyber intrusions to state-sponsored attackers, and (4) defending privately-owned systems and networks from sophisticated, nation-state-sponsored attackers. The Article then uses the public-private cybersecurity system to challenge and complicate existing scholarship on privatization. Procedurally, the public-private cybersecurity system differs from traditional privatization because private actors--not the government--decide what functions they should perform, and private actors operate outside o f the contractual frameworks that have traditionally restrained private contractors. Substantively, the cybersecurity context implicates public law values addressed in prior work--including accountability, transparency, and due process or fairness--but it also raises additional concerns about security and privacy. Evaluating how the public-private cybersecurity system attains and falls short o f public law values yields broader lessons for cybersecurity governance and for privatization. The public-private cybersecurity system shows that concerns about public law values are not unidirectional--sometimes threats to public values come from the government, not the private sector. On the other hand, while empowered private parties play a crucial role in cybersecurity and in many ways currently support public values, this alignment is a present fortuity, not a structural feature, and so may shift in the future, posing new threats to public law values. These complexities require new kinds o f context-dependent solutions to safeguard public law values. The Article concludes by suggesting several such remedies for the public law failings it identifies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the foreign relations between the U.S. and France from 1991 to 2003 in the framework of the Iraqi crisis. It examines the evolution of the Iraq question before the 2002-2003 crisis, with emphasis on the 1990s. It looks at the President George Bush's road to war in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to understand the nation's decision to invade Iraq. It examines the attitude of France in confronting the U.S. plans which culminated in French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's 2003 United Nations speech regarding the disarmament of Iraq.

Women are drastically underrepresented in American political institutions. This has prompted speculation about the impact of electing more women on policy and the functioning of government. Examining the growing presence of women in Congress, I demonstrate that women do exhibit unique policy priorities, focusing more on the needs of various groups of women. However, the incentive structure of the American electoral system, which rewards ideological purity, means that women are not likely to bring more consensus to Washington. Indeed, women's issues are now entrenched in the partisan divide. Since the 1990s, the majority of women elected to Congress have been Democrats, who have pursued their vision of women's interests while portraying Republican policies as harmful to women. In response, Republican women have been deployed to defend their party, further reducing the potential for bipartisan cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uncovers strong evidence that polarization has developed in presidential candidate trait evaluations. Unlike for ideology or policy preferences, the distribution of trait evaluations has become increasingly bimodal and clustered toward the poles. This change stems in part from a more polarized choice set, but perceptions of candidate extremeness are asymmetric, with partisans perceiving the other party's candidate, but not their own, as extreme. In addition, the increased salience of racial and moral issues helps explain trait polarization. Racial attitudes among Republicans have become both more conservative over time and more potent in explaining trait evaluations; among Democrats, racial attitudes have neither changed over time nor become more potent. Moral values among Democrats have grown more liberal over time and more potent in explaining trait evaluations. Among Republicans, however, moral values have not become more conservative, but have become a more potent predictor of trait evaluations. We discuss the implications of the emergence of trait polarization for understanding problematic features of contemporary American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on survey data from ANES, Gallup, Pew, and other polls, this article examines attitudes toward the parties and the party system from 1996 to 2014. A previous Poll Trends analysis of the parties, through 1995, found antipathy toward the party system but not toward the parties themselves. The data since 1996 demonstrate that extreme discontent now extends beyond the party system to the Republican and Democratic parties. The data also show that Americans have grown more likely to see sharp differences between the major parties, and to perceive both parties as too ideological. As for the party system, Americans express a high degree of ambivalence. On one hand, many believe that the major parties do not do an adequate job of representing the people, and that the country needs a third political party. On the other hand, there is skepticism that a third party would improve the quality of American democracy. Surveys continually register almost no support or even willingness to seriously consider support for a third-party candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. foreign policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. It responds to several reviews of the author's book "American Foreign Policy & Its Thinkers" which appear elsewhere in the issue, by scholars such as Melvyn Leffler, Wilson Miscamble, and David Milne. Particular focus is given to domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, nations and organizations with which the U.S. has experienced conflict, and the overall trajectory of U.S. foreign relations. Topics discussed include the Wisconsin School of diplomatic history, capitalism, and imperialism.

In October 2013, the President and Congress failed to agree on an appropriations bill or continuing resolution to fund government services. That inciting incident prompted a sixteen-day government shutdown. The effects of this shutdown created a chain reaction emanating from Independence Avenue to Wall Street to Main Street, crippling government services, and costing the country billions. Historically, the separation of powers has helped the U.S. political system to thrive. However, the 2013 crisis shows that sometimes the checks and balances written into the Constitution exacerbate, and are insufficient to manage, breakdowns that can grind the government to a halt and cast a shadow over the entire country. This Comment applies the concept of systemic risk, borrowed from the study of financial institutions and the sciences, to analyze these sorts of catastrophic political breakdowns. It models the political branches of the federal government as a system of nodes (the agencies and branches of the federal government) and links (the instruments by which they exert influence over each other). Through modeling, this Comment argues that the federal government shutdown is similar in form and consequence to systemic breakdowns in mechanical and institutional designs. The modeling also makes it possible to identify ways to increase the robustness, or resilience to systemic risk, of the political system. This Comment offers and examines three robust design features in the federal government context that have been gleaned from institutional design research in financial, political, and industrial fields: redundancy, feedback, and quality. These design features serve a dual role. First, they permit a careful scrutiny of the systemic risks inherent in our legislative process. Second, they are a lodestar by which a more robust federal government system can be plotted. Considering the dire consequences of the most recent federal government shutdown of 2013, academics, politicians, and jurists can and should consider the threats posed by systemic risks and the value of designing for robustness to mitigate future breakdowns in the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. President Barack Obama's request for the nation's Congress to enact statutory authorization for military actions against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist organization as of 2015. According to the article, the proposed legislative bill would rescind America's 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq, but it would not affect the country's 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Afghanistan.

The article discusses the relationship between the U.S. government and the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 1995 in connection with the perspectives of American officials regarding the ICC exercising jurisdiction over the crime of aggression under certain circumstances. The Rome Statute of the ICC is addressed, along with a 2010 Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda and international criminal law. Then-U.S. President George W. Bush's administration during the early 2000s is examined.

The ability to monitor state behavior has become a critical tool of international governance. Systematic monitoring allows for the creation of numerical indicators that can be used to rank, compare, and essentially censure states. This article argues that the ability to disseminate such numerical indicators widely and instantly constitutes an exercise of social power, with the potential to change important policy outputs. It explores this argument in the context of the United States' efforts to combat trafficking in persons and find evidence that monitoring has important effects: Countries are more likely to criminalize human trafficking when they are included in the U.S. annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and countries that are placed on a 'watch list' are also more likely to criminalize. These findings have broad implications for international governance and the exercise of soft power in the global information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extended party network (EPN) theory characterizes political parties in the United States as dynamic networks of interest groups that collaboratively support favored candidates for office. Electoral predictions derived from EPN theory have yet to be tested on a large sample of races. We operationalize EPNs in the context of organized interest contributions to U.S. House campaigns. We deduce that support by a partisan community of interests signals the ideological credibility and appeal of a candidate. EPN integration overcomes voter ambiguity surrounding challengers' ideological preferences, and resources provided by these coordinating interest groups promote a consistent message about the candidate. Using data from the 1994-2010 cycles, we apply network analysis to detect EPN support of challengers and find that EPN integration substantially improves the electoral prospects of challengers. The effect of EPN integration is distinct from that of campaign resources. The findings provide support for EPN theory, as applied to congressional elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disagreements over whether polarization exists in the mass public have confounded two separate types of polarization. When social polarization is separated from issue position polarization, both sides of the polarization debate can be simultaneously correct. Social polarization, characterized by increased levels of partisan bias, activism, and anger, is increasing, driven by partisan identity and political identity alignment, and does not require the same magnitude of issue position polarization. The partisan-ideological sorting that has occurred in recent decades has caused the nation as a whole to hold more aligned political identities, which has strengthened partisan identity and the activism, bias, and anger that result from strong identities, even though issue positions have not undergone the same degree of polarization. The result is a nation that agrees on many things but is bitterly divided nonetheless. An examination of ANES data finds strong support for these hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO's crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show's didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its "openly class-based" politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]