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The article reports on a research by the author in which she intends to study the issues related to the stability of democratic government. The research is based upon a detailed listing of all the qualities that make up a working democracy and examines the theories of democratic transition and consolidation. Finally she addresses the democratic deficit that has begun to emerge in the U.S.

This section presents abstracts of several business policy and strategy conferences held in the U.S. as of August 2003. 'Complementary Resources and the Prediction of Post-Acquisition Performance,' by David R. King, Rebecca J. Slotegraaf, Idalene F. Kesner and Tom Lenz shows that acquisitions, on average, do not improve firm performance. 'Exploring Competing Motivations Behind the Acquisition of High-Technology Targets,' by David R. King represents a significant contribution by demonstrating conflicting findings in existing merger and acquisition research may result from alternate motivations behind merger and acquisition activity. 'Strategic Inertia Determinants: Analyzing the Size, Middle Manager, and Competitive Intensity Mix,' by Willie Edward Hopkins, Ajay Menon, Christian Homburg and Shirley Ann Hopkins, revisits firm size as a determinant of strategic inertia. 'Restructuring in Japanese Companies: Foreign Ownership, Strategic Investments, and Firm Performance' by Parthiban David, Toru Yoshikawa and Abdual A. Rasheed shows that foreign ownership leads to reduction in research and development and capital expenditures as well as improvement in performance, especially for firms with high free cash flow that are likely to have the most severe agency problems.

The past year witnessed an event unprecedented in modern telecommunications history. An otherwise obscure telecommunications policy debate spilled outside the rarefied airs of Congressional Committees and the Federal Communications Commission's eighth floor to rage across the Blogosphere, major newspapers, YouTube and episodes of The Daily Show. This contentious discussion centers on an issue known as "network neutrality," defined broadly as the non-discriminatory interconnectedness among data communication networks that allows users to access the content, and run the services, applications, and devices of their choice. As Congress debates whether network neutrality protections should be written into current legislation, the battle lines have been drawn between large telecommunications companies who own the pipes, on one side, and Internet content companies and public interest groups, on the other. This paper contextualizes recent events in relation to historical telecommunications antecedents. In doing so, we critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the current network neutrality debate and offer a set of guidelines for a new understanding of network neutrality. The paper concludes with an exploration of the social and political ramifications of this broader conception of network neutrality. We suggest that this "new network neutrality" provides a proactive foundation for creating a more democratic Internet. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concedes that voter turnout, low level of political knowledge and general apathy toward politics is a sign that our democracy is in crisis as ordinary citizens are no longer participating in the rule of their country. Believing that participation is learned and not an inherent trait, this paper examines the current education system to see where it fails to facilitate political socialization. Judging the current political science, government and civics curriculum in public education to be insufficient, this paper examines alternative teaching methods that politically engage students. Secondly, the paper examines the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, implemented by the current Bush administration, to see how it affects resources and curriculum, and measures teachers' abilities to inspire students to learn. This paper cites surveys of textbooks and teacher and administrator interviews. Teaching methods like service learning that appear to engage students in politics are highlighted to encourage teachers to implement them into their current curriculum. Unequal education for students in low income and minority communities was found to inadequately socialize those students into passive rather than active citizens. Lastly, broader education reform is suggested for further study. These suggestions are just the first step to create a new curriculum that will inspire students to become responsible active citizens in their democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to evaluate Bruce Ackerman?s theory of dualist democracy. He distinguishes two different decisions that may be made in a democracy. The first is a decision by the people themselves, which is designated as higher lawmaking that embodies the general will of the people; the second is a decision by government, which is designated as normal politics. The objective of Ackerman?s two-track theory of democracy is to resolve the tension between self-government and the rule law in American constitutionalism. I attempt to demonstrate that Ackerman?s idea of dualist democracy is a virtue-centric, populist, republicanism. His synthesis relies on the premise of the priority of self-government over the rule of law. It constitutes a solid alternative to the recent neo-Roman republicanism of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, which emphasizes law-centric republican constitutionalism. The relevance of dualist democracy is explored via a contextualized analysis of the virtue-centric republicanism from Hannah Arendt to J. G. A. Pocock and Hanna Pitkin. Ackerman?s interpretation of the Federalist Paper as the main intellectual resource of his project is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade the two largest democracies of the world, i.e., India and US have been constantly coming closer. Advent of satellite channels and beginning of economic liberalization program in India has generated a keen interest in U.S. affairs. US has become the hottest destination for Indian software professionals. Sociologists have been expressing deep concern regarding Americanization of Indian youth because of channels like MTV and Hollywood movies. 911 attacks on US and ensuing war on terror have been extensively covered and scrutinized by Indian media. Indian media has a love-hate relationship with US. On the one hand Indian media admires American democracy, entrepreneurship and rule of law, on the other it is portraying war on terror as hegemonistic design intended to turn international politics completely unipolar. While deepening commercial ties and joint military exercises between the two countries are being welcomed by all sections of media, certain quarters are vehemently critical of US attack and subsequent occupation of Iraq. The reason Indian government dithered, debated and ultimately decided not to send troops to Iraq can be attributed to media?s vociferous opposition. Bush administration?s unstinted support to Musharraf government in Pakistan is being termed by Indian media as the most glaring example of ?double standards? in war against terror. Indian media accuses that in spite of having full knowledge of terrorist camps in Pakistan, Bush administration has refused to take penal actions against Pakistan. This paper will deal with how media has covered America?s war on terror and what impact it has had on Indian public opinion and decision making process. The perception of Indian media regarding the burgeoning American hegemony in new world order will also be analyzed in this paper. The paper will make suggestions regarding what role media can play in bringing these two countries together in their mutual fight against terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether constitutionalism presupposes the existence of a ?people.? After reviewing some of the relevant literature, the paper makes three claims. First, there are multiple varieties of constitutionalism. Only those varieties that aim at self-government presuppose the existence of a people, and not all constitutions need have that goal. Second, there are multiple conceptions of self-government which correspond to different conceptions of what a ?people? is. Third, there is a plausible version of constitutional self-government that presupposes only modest conditions for the existence of a people. In particular, it presupposes the right to travel, a common discourse, and a widely (though not unanimously) shared sense of mission, but it does not presuppose shared values, character, ethnicity, or (except in a very thin sense) heritage. These conditions are probably satisfied within the United States. The paper therefore concludes that it is possible to interpret American constitutionalism as an effort to secure a form of self-government that does presuppose the existence of an American people, but that does not presuppose the existence of shared American values, an American character, or an American ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the foreign policy thinking of neoconservatives, a group that distinguishes itself from others with its pessimistic outlook about world affairs and its belief that the U.S. should spread its values and ideals to the rest of the world, by unilateral force if necessary. This paper argues that the neocons? imperial project of imposing American values (especially democracy) on the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, has certain limits. The most important limits are related to the nature and character of American society, politics, and government. Moreover, people on the receiving end of U.S. power may be ambivalent towards American values and ideals. In order to illustrate these points, I draw on the example of post-war Iraq. It has become clear in Iraq that the neocons overestimated the capacity of the U.S. for nation-building which is a necessary condition for building an empire and establishing a decent democracy. Neocons also underestimated the cultural difficulties involved in transforming the political landscape of Iraq and the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that, in conjunction with relative power, ideational changes in US nationalism explain long-term variation in American democracy promotion strategy, including its most recent iteration in the Bush administration. The paper concludes by using this perspective to critique the neoconservative approach to extending liberal values and instituions in the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of America’s increasing diversity, research into the impact of community heterogeneity on civic and political participation has burgeoned in recent years. To date, the literature on the subject has revealed an intriguing inconsistency about the participatory consequences of heterogeneity In his recent book Democracy in Suburbia, Oliver finds that people who live in communities with greater economic diversity have higher levels of engagement in localized political action, like voting in local elections and contacting local elected officials. Likewise, a forthcoming book by Gimpel et al argues that heterogeneity leads to greater political engagement. In contrast, a number of economists have found that economic, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity all lead to a decrease in participation. However, in a recent review essay surveying this literature, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn note that fifteen recent papers by economists on the subject of community heterogeneity all conclude that heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. While at first glance the economic and political science literatures appear to be empirically incompatible, a closer look reveals that they are actually theoretically consistent with one another. It is important to note that these apparently divergent studies have examined different forms of participation. Mistakenly, the literature on participation often indiscriminately groups disparate activities together, notwithstanding considerable evidence that various forms of participation are qualitatively different from one another. Recently, Scott Keeter and his colleagues have conducted a massive study of participation in the United States, and upon analyzing an array of different activitiesconcluded that there are essentially three participatory dimensions (Jenkins et al. 2003). “Civic” activity, by which they mean non-political efforts like volunteering in the community, is a different dimension of participation than activity that communicates political preferences. This paper reconciles the seeming contradiction regarding the effect of heterogeneity on participation. It shows that civic activity, like volunteering, is facilitated in homogeneous places, while people are more likely to express political voice in communities that are heterogeneous. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most theoretically coherent and analytically consistent type of heterogeneity is not racial or economic (the focus of the current literature). Instead, it is ideological heterogeneity. The analysis employs the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, which consists of representative samples drawn in 40 communities across the U.S. Because of the study’s hierarchical design, it is possible to construct aggregate measures of heterogeneity for each community in the sample, including the dispersion of political ideology (operationalized simply as the standard deviation of political ideology within the community). These data, however, also require attention to the statistical complexities of hierarchical data, and are thus modeled using hierarchical linear modeling. This method of estimation simultaneously accounts for individual- and contextual-level variables, ensuring that each of the model’s parameters is measured with the appropriate standard errors. In sum, this paper offers a theoretically-grounded explanation for an apparent contradiction in the literature on community heterogeneity and participation, thus helping to illuminate the impact of diversity on America’s civic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between property rights, freedom, and democracy? Traditional theorists have focused on property rights as the cornerstone of democratic government and free society, while critics have countered that the promotion of property rights limits the expression of those ideals. This paper historicizes the debate, focusing on the American company town as a property-rights regime. The paper argues that property rights in this setting were decisive in limiting freedom and democracy in ways that public towns typically did not. That is, company-owned towns operated apart from the legal and political restraints that tethered nineteenth century municipalities ? however imperfectly ? to more democratic forms and outcomes. In contrast, profit maximizing company town owners arbitrarily regulated whatever aspects of life they thought necessary, and were typically free from public restraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the quantitative conflict literature employs data sets that draw a large portion of their cases from 1945-1990. This historical period coincides with the U.S.-Soviet bipolar competition and security arrangements associated with that competition. A debate within the democratic peace literature has emerged between those who view the democratic peace as a general phenomenon, and those who see democracy?s effect on international conflict as largely a function of the particular circumstances of the Cold War alignment. The critics of a general relationship between democracy and war focus specifically on the role of the United States as a leader of one of the bi-polar alliance blocks The possibility that observed relationships between democracy and war could be dependent on the particular historical circumstances of the Cold War raises the question: To what extent are other empirical findings about international conflict also a function of the hegemonic influence exercised by the superpowers during period? Using ordinal logistic regression to examine the pattern of third party joining this paper re-examines the extent to which the relationship between democracy and intervention as well as the relationships between variables commonly used to explain third party interventions in the conflict literature, such as proximity, power status, democracy, trade and alliances, are a function of the intervention choices of the United States during the Cold War. The paper finds that the intervention choice of the United States is by far the most important predictor of the intervention choices of other third parties to interstate wars. And that accounting for the intervention choices of the United States ?explains? away much of the general relationships observed in earlier studies. Interestingly enough though reduced in substantive importance, a statistical the relationship between shared democracy and joining remains even after accounting for U.S. intervention choice in this period. This finding suggests that the relationship between shared democracy and third party joining is not entirely dependent upon the exercise of American leadership during the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early days of the Cold War, prominent students of American foreign policy firmly rejected the notion that the United States could initiate preventive wars against its adversaries. Preventive war is a persistent theme in the history of international politics. Unlike a conflict fought over a specific disputed issue, preventive war is fought to prevent the erosion of relative power to a rising adversary (even though that adversary does not pose an imminent threat). The logic of preventive war simply asserts that it is better to fight a war today under more favorable circumstances than to face a possible war in the future after an adversary has achieved military gains that raise the likely costs and risks of war for the dominant state. Despite the apparent rationality of initiating military conflict under these conditions, preventive war presents serious normative problems that have traditionally been considered too odious for a democratic state to overcome. Morgenthau, Kennan, Brodie, and Kissinger, among others, all argued that for democracies, launching preventive wars is taboo. More recent scholarship claims that no democracy has ever fought a preventive war because democratic public opinion simply considers preventive war, in the absence of a clear impending threat, to be morally abhorrent (even against a morally abhorrent adversary). ..ASA-Events of the past year, however, fundamentally challenge this claim about democracy and preventive war. Less than a year after President Bush declared that America would not tolerate unbalanced dictators seeking weapons of mass destruction, the United States was engaged in a preventive war against Iraq that ended with the destruction of the Iraqi regime and American occupation. Coupled with the president’s National Security Strategy of September 2002 that articulated a general vision of fighting pre-emptive wars in such cases, this event generated broad speculation and debate over whether America would turn its military might next against Syria, Iran or North Korea. In this period of weak international constraints on how America uses its power abroad, the potential for domestic constraints becomes crucial for understanding the degree to which American hegemony will be restrained in coming years. This paper examines several aspects of this issue. First, it measures the extent of anti-preventive war sentiment that actually exists in the United States as reflected in Congress and among the American public. Evidence for this question was generated from content analysis of the congressional debate over war with Iraq and public opinion surveys before the war. Second, it examines a related question: does congressional and public support for war with Iraq mean that the logic of preventive war has fully trumped the normative limits that may have prevented the United States from engaging in this particular form of war in the past? The paper presents evidence showing that domestic support for war cannot be explained outside the context of the terror attacks of September 11. It was not the purported threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction development that motivated majority support, but the link the administration drew between Iraq and terrorists that moved many to accept war. Third, the paper examines whether 9/11 has produced a shift in domestic attitudes about preventive war that extends beyond the Iraq case. To what extent do members of Congress and the public accept the general logic of preventive war as articulated in the administration’s pre-emption strategy? To what degree does anti-preventive war sentiment still exist in the U.S. after the Iraq war? To what extent are members of Congress and the public willing to support the logic of preventive war in other cases? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intervention of the international community ? and specifically the form of new multilateralism activated by the Organization of American States (OAS) ? to crises in Peru and Venezuela. Although from a comparative politics perspective, these two cases present striking contrasts, with respect to the study of global governance it is the commonalities in the response that attractions attention. Reshaping existing regional sovereignty norms and practices, both interventions contained extensive ?internal? as well as ?international? components in which the boundaries or barriers between diplomacy and domestic politics were blurred. The centrepiece of both initiatives was the establishment of a ?mesa,? an OAS-facilitated dialogue roundtable or forum involving key domestic political and civil society actors from government and opposition in a sustained collective effort to negotiate a consensual and peaceful solution to political crisis. In the body of the work the process of this ?tale of two mesas? is traced through three distinctive components: the actors at the table; the agendas; and, relative achievements. As our paper demonstrates, significant differences between the two mesa processes make it difficult to articulate a single, coherent model. Nonetheless, we conclude that both the Peruvian and Venezuelan mesas exemplify a promising mode of multilateral intervention: ?intervention without intervening.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the three predominant views on the latest war on Iraq--the anti-war perspective, the pro-Bush administration perspective, and the Arab world’s unique perspective--Operation Iraqi Freedom was about securing the U.S.’ oil supply, promoting democracy, and the re-colonization of the Middle East, respectively. Above all else, this war was about preserving the existing regimes of the Middle East and Gulf region as much as possible. The U.S. had other sources to compensate for the presumed loss of Iraqi oil, and has been instrumental in keeping repressive regimes in power. Similarly, the existing system has served the U.S. well, and a redesign would have entailed too great a risk to current U.S. interests. What is at stake for the U.S. is the stability of the Gulf region, which has been increasingly disturbed by three salient factors: the emergence of politically active Islamist organizations; more frequent challenges by democratic forces; and a genuine push to re-integrate Saddam Hussein’s Iraq into the world community. This paper explains American foreign policy from an Arab world perspective, taking into account recent regional developments with clear implications on the U.S.’ behavior. This paper discusses the nature of American foreign policy as a product of the socio- and political dynamics of the Gulf region; it is presented here as a reactive policy, but not a dependent policy. The U.S. has maintained control of its standing in the Arab world while adapting to new conditions to protect its national interest. In this context, this analysis is a departure from other studies emphasizing America’s global power, imperialism, and/or oil as the driving force of its foreign policy; the Arab world/Gulf region is treated as a unit of analysis, with its own internal dynamics eliciting changes in America’s foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the intervention of Iraq, democracy has become one of the hottest issues within international relations. Whether, where and how the United States (and the international community) should promote democracy around the world have become central questions in the policy debates with regard to a host of countries including Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and many others. While optimists see a democratic world order emerging, sceptics argue that democracy is a uniquely Western artefact that can never be successfully replicated in non-Western cultures. Especially Islam and democracy is considered to be incompatible with each other. This paper focuses on the relationship between culture and democracy. Can democracies be ?crafted? in different cultural settings, or are there certain preconditions and structural combinations that are needed for a progress toward democracy? To what extent can differences in democratic level be explained by civilizational differences? Based on two datasets on democratic performance (Polity IV, and the Freedom House Index) for the period 1973-1998, this paper concludes that the applicability of democracy ? defined by any of the measures ? is dependent upon civilizational belonging. Nevertheless, electoral democracies perform better in more civilizations outside the West than liberal democracies do. The Islamic and African Civilization is particularly resistant to democracy ? electoral or liberal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States are usually described, in general discussions of American as well as comparative politics, as the most constitutionally stable democracy, and as a model of presidential system ‘engineered’ by the creative minds of framers dedicated to establish a democracy based on separated institutions checking their respective use of delegated power. This paper challenges this mechanic approach to constitutional design and evolution. It argues, through historical and theoretical evidence, that the American constitution (much like most constitutions generally, and like the French Fifth republic constitution specifically) could have lead, in the early phase of its implementation, to either a presidential system or a ministerial government, given the combined influences of historical forces and the political sensibilities and strategic actions of the nation’s first leaders. The American constitutional construction has been the product of unstable and temporary coalitions, not the straightforward design of a coherent and cohesive majority. The process is full of doors left open, interpretative disputes, and turning points in the implementation phase, and this project first reviews the different ‘constitutional moments’ of the American constitutive process, and replaces these turning points in a larger political and historical context, as products of historical struggles and legacies of competing visions of governance. The key element of our analysis is to make better substantive use of observations made by different scholars: namely that American revolutionaries, in their efforts to construct a republic, sought not to get rid of the architecture of institutions of Great Britain, but to improve them by setting up mechanisms that would prevent the corruption that had perverted British politics. The British institutions were for the new American political leaders, both their main source of inspiration and the very system they had built so much resentment against. After the frustrating experience of the Articles of the Confederation, the United States Constitution was to be the perfected synthesis of two extremes, executive corruption and legislative tyranny. The two institutions newly constructed had different historical roots: while the presidency was essentially a transformation of the British Crown and Cabinet, Congress was the refinement of much more recent and radical idea of democratic governance. The challenge was to make democratic, efficient and stable not only the institutions themselves, but their interaction as well. This paper indicates that the early United States went, from 1789 to 1800, through a much more floating and unstable implementation phase than what is generally believed: an uneasy struggle of each institution to test and practice its potential for subordination, to assert its prerogatives, and to find its place in the constitutional order. Next, the paper traces the evolution of clauses, statutes, and behaviors that could have led the United States on the evolutionary path towards ministerial government, or a close version of it. We will first look at the design of the constitution and look for clauses that signaled the erection of a presidential system, but left the door open for different ulterior developments: selection process, presence of Cabinet members in the House, senatorial power of appointment, presidential power of removal, … We will then examine the early implementation phase to identify when and how the original model could have taken different equilibration paths. Much attention is given to historical evidence regarding Alexander Hamilton’s political entrepreneurship, his critical attempt to shape executive-legislative relations, and his underlying desire to morph his executive function into prime ministership -in a tellingly similar fashion as the British Lord Treasurer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of political thought traditionally read Tocqueville’s writings as a strong endorsement of the institutions and political culture he encountered during his travels through America. Indeed, Democracy in America is undoubtedly the text most frequently cited by modern scholars seeking to glorify the American democratic experiment. This paper joins a burgeoning literature in the field that seeks to take seriously the very important criticisms he leveled against America’s political institutions and cultural traditions in the text of Democracy in America. The central argument of this paper is that Tocqueville believed America’s long-term potential as the primary vessel for the expansion of equality in the modern world was significantly circumscribed by what he saw in relations between the races. Unlike previous studies that have taken up Tocqueville’s commentary on race relations, this paper argues that the Frenchman’s examination of the status of free blacks represents was his most important contribution to the subject. This is so because it bridges to the concerns about democratic despotism (or majority tyranny) that Tocqueville expresses in the first book of Democracy in America. Paying careful attention to this linkage not only reveals Tocqueville as a critic of America’s democratic political institutions and culture, but it also shows that his insights are far more applicable to modern race relations than those made by the celebrated twentieth century critics Gunnar Myrdal and W.E.B. Du Bois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drug policy poses a fundamental challenge to American democracy. Nowhere is this more evident than in its impact on marginalized communities. To be sure, scholars have noted the social problems associated with the implementation of drug laws of the 1980’s, including: continued drug use and addiction; increased incarceration; and spread of drug-related illnesses. Additionally, civil rights activists attack the individual rights’ restrictions central to drug policy. Still, less attention has been paid to other ways in which drug policy harms citizens’ democratic experiences, particularly those of marginalized community members. The focus of this paper will be to examine the effects of contemporary drug policy on the political expressions and experiences of African Americans. Using Harlem as a case study, this paper confirms the argument that a racial gap exists across Americans’ perceptions of the drug problem. Factors influencing this cognitive divide include: 1) the disparate impact of drug legislation; 2) the symbolic messages communicated by political leaders about drug victims and culprits; and 3) the distrust and suspicion of the political motives of the government by African Americans. This study uses interviews, contextual and survey data to explore the democratic implications of these racial disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against certain features of one prominent account (by John Rawls) of democratic legitimacy, justice, and rights. The paper also argues for an alternative account. Rawls argues in his later writings (well after A Theory of Justice) that to set out some basic conditions for constitutional democratic legitimacy, we need an account of justice appropriate for the "domain of the political", we need "an overlapping consensus" of "reasonable comprehensive doctrines" about what is just, we need need citizen endorsement of "constitutional essentials" as described in the account of justice. On a Rawlsian view, religious, philosophical, or moral comprehensive doctrines that try to say what is generally valuable in human life cannot be enforced without the oppressive exercise of state power. I argue that a better philosophy would be more qualified about comprehensive doctrines, more empirical and disconfirmable, not so Kantian. Rawls is right that the legal enforcement of religion is likely to require the oppressive exercise of state power but wrong to say that enforcing philosophical and moral comprehensive doctrines can be ruled out across the board as involving the oppressive exercise of state power. This depends on the "comprehensive doctrine". I question Rawls’s rejection of what he calls "comprehensive doctrines’ that would enforce the ideal of autonomy (e.g., some of Joseph Raz’s views). Only if we defend the possibility of some philosophical and moral doctrines being used in correcting the societal consensus on "constitutional essentials", and effectively advocating constitutional reform, can we avoid political dogmatism about the nature of democratic legitimacy, justice, and rights. I offer some empirical and political confirmation of my view by drawing on what Cass Sunstein argues about socioeconomic rights embedded in the South African Constitution among many others, an arrangement that could be drawn on to criticize the American Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability of the democratic peace (DP) thesis to a rapidly changing global security environment and, more specifically, to examine the motivation of the United States, the most prominent democratic power, to use force for the promotion of peace through the spread of democracy. In this paper, we distinguish between traditionally accepted instrumental, normative, and institutional use-of-force motivators that apply to democracies and non-democracies alike, but we also add a discussion of contextual use-of-force motivators which are unique to democracies. The basic assumption underlying the DP argument is that democratic states are less prone to wage wars than non-democratic states. But, if democracy makes states more peaceful, why do democratic states still use force? Illustrating each motivator in light of contemporary U.S. national security decisions shows that the DP thesis can provide valuable insight into the reasons why democracies may continue to use force and, in the extreme, wage war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adverse weather events such as earthquakes, tornados and floods affect thousands of people around the globe every year. The responses to such adverse events by national governments differ from country to country. While some states protect their populations relatively well, in others people suffer tremendously. The goal of this paper is to explore the political sources of this variation. Political factors have been acknowledged to play a core role in determining the degree of damage to people's lives and personal properties caused by natural disasters. Surprisingly, however, there is a lack of empirical research on the role of political institutions in disaster prevention and mitigation. This paper addresses this research gap and tests the effect of democracy and institutional quality on the degree of natural disaster damage using time series cross section data from the International Disaster Risk database, Varieties of Democracy Project and the Quality of Government dataset. Democracy with its freedom of speech, participation and representation and quality of government, which improves provision of public goods and policy implementation, are believed to minimize the number of people affected by natural disasters. We posit that democratic principles and high institutional quality are both crucial for building resilience and neither of the conditions is sufficient for disaster prevention and mitigation. The results support our expectations and show that higher institutional quality is associated with fewer people suffering the consequences of natural disasters only when egalitarian democracy is high. Additionally, if institutional quality is low, more democracy is associated with more human suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

We begin with a discussion of the president’s ministerial function, specifically as it relates to his ability to inspire the polity and serve as the nation’s moralist. The paper then explores what it is about the American context that makes this function one of the presidency’s most important. We then cite specific examples from recent administrations to illustrate the ways in which contemporary chief executives have fulfilled their ministerial role. Finally, the paper concludes by relating the role of minister-in-chief to the broader question of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central tenet of democratic theory is that the elected should reflect the preferences of the citizenry. However, despite generating contradictory and directly testable hypotheses, leading representation theories have not yet been empirically tested. This paper bridges this gap by testing the conflicting predictions of two important representation models, the Standard Control Model (Bernstein 1989) and the Alternative Control Model (Arnold 1990, 1993). The results demonstrate that legislators reflect constituents? preferences even on issues about which citizens know little. A shift in constituents? ideology from moderately conservative to moderately liberal corresponds to about a 30 point change in the probability that a legislator will vote for a bill. This research is important because it provides the most conservative test of representation?if representation occurs on issues about which citizens have little knowledge, it seems certain to occur on issues about which citizen knowledge is high. Consequently, this research provides substantial evidence for the Alternative Control Model. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the IEA Civic Education Study has been to examine in a comparative framework the political socialization of adolescents as they prepare to undertake their roles as citizens in democracies. Approximately 90,000 students from the modal grade for 14-year-olds from nationally representative samples in twenty-eight countries were tested during 1999. This paper focuses on the predictors of four different types of political engagement: electoral, partisan, volunteer, and protest. The potentially influential factors to be examined are knowledge of democracy and skills in interpreting information, sense of trust in government related institutions, several aspects of the schools (perceptions of curriculum, sense of efficacy developed in the school culture, perceived encouragement of discussion in the classroom, and current participation in organizations). The countries included in this presentation include Australia, England, Greece, Norway, and the United States. The theoretical base for the paper is Wenger’s work on communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many commentators of late have bemoaned the demise of manliness in the modern world. This paper argues that manliness, understood as courage (andreia), is not in decline. Instead, it appears in another form. By turning to Tocqueville’s assessment of courage in America, it is demonstrated that what has been superceded is not courage and manliness in general, but the martial courage of the old European order. In America, Tocqueville sees what is in this paper called economic courage. Interpreting this aspect of Tocqueville’s thought reveals that the source of this new manliness lies in the American woman. From their deep adherence to the dogma of equality, American women establish and reinforce Tocqueville’s feminine democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]