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Skowronek's theory of "political time" posits that presidential success follows historical cycles, but it does not specify a unique causal mechanism. Each president merely reacts to their predecessor or to historical circumstance. Scholars of "political time" also suggest that the power of history may be diminishing over time. This article uses theory and evidence to address the causality issue in both instances. First, it shows that economic crises drive political time forward. Second, it argues that recent political commitments to a combination of New Deal and Reaganite ideas and policies have been used to attenuate economic crises. Hence, it is not that the power of history has waned. Rather, the causal nature of political time has been under‐specified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does economic interdependence shape political relations? We show a new pathway to support a commercial peace in which economic interdependence changes strategies for conflict management. The uncertainty arising from political disputes between countries can depress trade flows. As states seek to protect trade from such negative effects, they are more likely to bring their disputes to legal venues. We assess this argument by analyzing why countries bring cases to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Using data on 190 countries from 1960 to 2013, we find that countries are more likely to file ICJ cases against important trading partners than against states with low levels of shared trade. We conclude that economic interdependence changes the incentives for how states resolve their disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and US congressional agendas. Longstanding insights into the influence of political spending on public policy suggest that money can narrow the scope of policy conflicts. I argue that rising inequality should intensify these negative-agenda forces as wealthy interests gain a political advantage relative to other social groups and use this advantage to protect their socioeconomic position by donating to candidates who pursue less disruptive agendas. The expectation is that economic inequality narrows the purview of policymaking and that this is manifest through a reduction in the diversity of the congressional agenda. Empirical analysis supports this position. Error-correction models show that rising inequality is associated with a reduction in the diversity of congressional hearings, bill introductions, and laws. Moreover, it is legislators who are heavily dependent on deep-pocketed donors and political action committees that engage with a narrower range of policy topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid even to those who support its position already. We empirically demonstrate that the US provides more aid to countries who hold unfavorable positions to the US only in the post-Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study an age-old question in political economy: does government spending on welfare ensure peace? This question was at the heart of the European Welfare State model of the early 20th century, and remains relevant today in face of rising inequalities and political conflict. Yet there is limited empirical evidence about this question. We make use of a panel of 12 Latin American countries over the period 1970–2010 to show that welfare spending has led to substantial reductions in conflict across the region. This effect is more pronounced when associated with reductions in inequality and increasing social and institutional trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the state of Sonora, the 2009 Hermosillo ABC Day Care Center fire and the 2014 Cananea copper mine spill highlighted how deregulation and divestiture of state services by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the National Action Party (PAN) served the interests of a few elites, who maintained rule through mechanisms of impunity: in other words, through actions undertaken without concern about the law or repercussions. Although impunity produces a seemingly incoherent set of policy and politics, results from dozens of semi-structured interviews by our team also suggest that exercising power through impunity is part of the culture of governance in Mexico, relying on global ties, but not necessarily requiring any specific individual or party leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the vast literature on Russia’s transformation into a “militocracy”—a state in which individuals with career experience in Russia’s various force structures occupy important positions throughout the polity and economy—during the reign of former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin. We show that (1) elite militarization has been extensively utilized both to describe and explain core features of Russian foreign and domestic policy; and (2) notwithstanding its widespread usage, the militocracy framework rests on a rather thin, and in some cases flawed, body of empirical research. We close by discussing the remaining research agenda on this subject and listing several alternative theoretical frameworks to which journalists and policymakers arguably should pay equal or greater attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethiopia provides one of the clearest examples of a 'developmental state' in Africa. Drawing on a deeply entrenched experience of statehood, the present Ethiopian regime has embarked on an ambitious programme, depending on the central capture of 'rents', to fund a massive expansion especially in communications, education, and hydroelectricity. High initial rates of growth have been achieved. However, the political setting is tightly constrained and the state has not allowed the private sector freedom of action to generate the required levels of production. Ultimate success will depend on the capacity to transform a state that has itself been central to the development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development is no longer simply conceived of as economic growth, but also as encapsulating human development, the role of the developmental state must be rethought. Focusing on the state's ability to deliver collective goods such as welfare has become an important task for developing and developed nations alike, and nowhere is this more important than in China. Consequently, intimate connections between the political and industrial elites are no longer sufficient and may actually be counterproductive to the success of the developmental state. Diverging from traditional developmental states, China shows that incorporation of new stakeholders is not premised on principles of human development. The novelty that China brings to re-thinking and re-articulating a new developmental state framework is that the development state of the twenty-first century can create new alliances such as with non-governmental organisations to meet human development objectives, but substantive change with regards to how the state is organised is not a precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines the key parameters of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ as a governance form that combines planning centrality and market instruments, and interprets how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies are made coherent in the political economic structures of post-reform China. Through examining urban regeneration programmes (in particular ‘three olds regeneration’, sanjiu gaizao), the development of suburban new towns and the reconstruction of the countryside, the article details institutional configurations that make the Chinese case different from a neoliberal growth machine. The contradiction of these tendencies gives room to urban residents and migrants to develop their agencies and their own spaces, and creates informalities in Chinese urban transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the uprising in 1918–1922 of Ismail Agha of Shikak (a.k.a. Simko) in Iranian Kurdistan and how he has been portrayed in Persian historiography. Painting Simko simply as another Kurdish rebellious chief with no nationalist aspirations leaves important questions unanswered. Simko introduced a number of firsts in Kurdish political history to Iranian Kurdistan, yet his innovations have generally been overlooked. Simko was conscious of, informed by, and founded his politics upon the communal distinctions deemed to legitimize varying degrees of Kurdish self-rule. In addition to his political and military activities, Simko co-founded the first Kurdish school in Iran, published the first Kurdish–Persian newspaper, and made Kurdish the official medium of his reign. This article draws on memoirs, personal accounts, and other unexplored primary documents to show a more complex picture of Simko's resistance, problematizes some idées reçues about Simko and his ethno-nationalism, and explores inconsistencies in the existing literature on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically questions the state's hostile takeover of planning regulation followed by experimentation initiated by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has been seeking to subordinate the planning apparatus to market calculus and to short-term political ends. To substantiate this argument, I have examined a large corpus of documents (official government documents, planning records, and court appeals and rulings, and NGO reports) and analyzed the media coverage between 2011 and 2016. By introducing fast-track planning that is firmly controlled by the central state and focusing on the fictitious delivery of housing units, the structure of the planning regulation has dramatically changed. Further, two already-dominant government ministries (Finance and Defense) have been significantly empowered, becoming the supervisors of the reformed planning system. In a state captivated by neoliberal fixation and embroiled in a housing crisis, the restructuring of planning governance has been a means to an end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our political world is impoverished by the lack of the category ‘imperialism’. Academic and media languages have succeeded in consigning it to history. Use of the category imperialism to describe our present condition is often met with derision; it is seen in the bourgeois tongue as too simplistic, as outdated, as Leftist bombast. But what other category do we have to explain the kinds of extra-economic institutional coercion meted out to the Third World during the 1980s debt crisis or to Greece in its ongoing tragedy? Academic and media languages would like to measure these political conflicts in the terms of mainstream social science – as state failure and economic mismanagement, as the imbalance between the greed of unions and the sensibleness of the bankers. Empirical description takes the place of theoretical understanding – a mass of data and information clogs up the arteries, while careful theoretical assessment of the problem is set aside. The Left is on the defensive, unable to explain why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) wants to bomb this country or why the International Monetary Fund wants to extract its pound of flesh from that country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Development projects like schools and latrines are popular with politicians and voters alike, yet many developing countries are littered with half-finished projects that were abandoned mid-construction. Using an original database of over 14,000 small development projects in Ghana, I estimate that one-third of projects that start are never completed, consuming nearly one-fifth of all local government investment. I develop a theory of project noncompletion as the outcome of a dynamically inconsistent collective choice process among political actors facing commitment problems in contexts of limited resources. I find evidence consistent with key predictions of this theory, but inconsistent with alternative explanations based on corruption or clientelism. I show that fiscal institutions can increase completion rates by mitigating the operational consequences of these collective choice failures. These findings have theoretical and methodological implications for distributive politics, the design of intergovernmental transfers and aid, and the development of state capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores on the rise of the U.S. as the world's dominant economy to the geographic advantages. Topics mentioned include the increase of the American tariff barriers since the civil war, the country's ability to export manufactured goods and to access inexpensive raw materials and the importance of power politics during capitalism or social imperialism.

The article explores on the political and economic condition of the Habsburg Monarchy. Topics mentioned include the fundamental crisis in state legitimacy and the rule of law during World War I, the provisions to suspend political activities and military control of the economy and practice of the rule of law embedded in the constitutional state.

This article begins by asking how have elites, who are more fragmented, transitory and precarious than ever, continued to do so well out of discredited, financialised capitalist democracy? One possible answer lies in what I term the new professional econocracy. As the article reveals, an increasing proportion of elite figures at the top of business and government now have educational and/or professional experiences of economics and related disciplines. On the one hand, this provides the basis of a shared professional discourse and accompanying set of norms, values and practices. This unites disparate and mobile elites. On the other hand, such knowledge enables these elites both to move across sectors and to game the economic and accounting systems that they have helped construct. Thus, elites reflexively adapt to, and benefit from, economic rules while also rigidly dictating them to those below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the 2014 Ecuador-sponsored resolution at the UN Human Rights Council to examine the link between Transnational Corporations and Human Rights, in this paper I review the first major discussion at the United Nations of the role of multinational corporations. The report on Multinational Corporations in World Development (1973) for the UN Department of Economic and Social affair launched the (then) new UN Centre on Transnational Corporations. I examine the report in some detail, compare and contrast this with the Ecuadorian resolution from 2014, and reflect on the continuities and changes in attempts to regulate the conduct of global corporations over the 40 years between these two moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of economic downturns for states’ redistributive politics. We track state policies from 1980 through 2010 and illustrate how economic downturns led states to adopt budget-balancing policies by suppressing both the increased spending on programs benefiting the poor otherwise expected under Democratic Party control and the tax cuts for the wealthy otherwise expected under Republican Party control. We also undertake a natural experiment case study—comparing the forty Democratic and Republican governors in office right before (2007–2008) and after (2009–2010) the onset of the Great Recession. We find that Republican governors were less likely to propose spending and increased calls for spending cuts; yet, no similar shift in tax proposals was evident with continued calls for tax cuts to the wealthy. Democratic governors exhibited a similar pattern, but were less responsive and more likely to maintain their earlier policy proposals even after a significant downturn in the national economy. Together, these findings highlight how economic and political conditions interact with one another to shape “who gets what, when, and how from government,” as well as clarify that we must ask and answer these questions separately for taxing and spending to capture the complex politics of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work I analyze and interpret Polish political field as a field of memory. I make three claims. First, I claim that programmatic identities of Polish political parties are weak. Despite this weakness political competition remains fierce, because parties fashion enduring political identities. I identify three mainstream political identities of political actors in Poland, given by their temporal orientation and their judgment of communism. Second, I claim that the field of the political competition predicated on the turn to the past and on moral opprobrium is the particular achievement of the party that captured political power in Poland in 2015. Similarly to its 2005 electoral success, the party narrated the country’s main problem as communist state-capture. It claimed that (former-) communists and their post-dissident allies captured political, material, and symbolic levers of power. This way of presenting the problem polarized the field, casting political opponents as essential enemies, and casting the narrators as country’s saviors. Third, this achievement was possible because the party narrated communism as essentially and existentially anti-Polish: it presented it as equal to Nazism, it made it foreign, and it made it coincidental with Jewishness. It then launched such discursive “weapon” against its present-day opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's “Look East" policy was launched in the early 1990s as part of a concerted effort to elevate the strategic importance of Southeast Asia in the country's foreign policy agenda. The policy has been described as going through various phases, with an accelerated pace and process of interaction in moving from one phase to the next, marked by a broadening and deepening of India’s interaction with the region. This has culminated in the most recent “phase” under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has rebranded the policy as “Act East" to signify a more pro-active and action-oriented approach towards the region. However, has there been any real and substantive change in India’s engagement with Southeast Asia in moving from one “phase" to the next? Does this narrative of phases in India’s post-Cold War engagement with Southeast Asia hold any substance? This article deconstructs the narrative of phases in India’s Look East and now Act East policy and argues that India’s eastward engagement has not been a process of simple linear progression. As such, while the concept of phases in India's Look East policy serves as a useful narrative device, it does not capture the nuances of India's post-Cold War re-engagement with Southeast Asia, which has been far more complex than this narrative suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are not many other issues in South Asia that have attracted as much scholarly attention in the last decade as India's Naxalite or Maoist movement. At least 50 scholarly or political books, several novels, and numerous essays have been published since 2007. What we hope to do in this article is to ask why this movement has generated such attention at this moment in time, to analyse the commentaries that have emerged and the questions that have been asked, and also to identify some of the shortfalls in the existing literature and propose some lines of research to be pursued by future scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, largely based on archival research, highlights two contradictory outcomes of colonial state formation in central Borneo. The first is characterized by territorial consolidation and efforts to neatly sedentarize peoples within each colonial territory, while the second is characterized by pacification that unwittingly liberalized the flows and movements of people and commodities transgressing colonial state boundaries. The 1924 Kapit Peacemaking Agreement in colonial Sarawak is often noted for its significance in bringing a final end to the practice of inter-ethnic headhunting, principally between the Iban of Sarawak and the Kenyah from Dutch Borneo. While it marked the successful outcome of a long phase of colonial pacification and territorial consolidation for both colonial states in Borneo, the agreement's outcome simultaneously highlights the contradictory inter-colonial motives and expectations regarding the resulting increase of cross-border flows of people and commodities. The presented case highlights challenges facing Dutch colonial state formation when attempts to subjugate and sedentarize riverine peoples, who were geographically tied to fluid commodity chains and flows, directly undermined the former's own efforts to establish authority in its borderland frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Chile's entry into the international economy, the performance of the national economy and institutional change during the 1810-1830s. It argues that the country consolidated a successful process of entry into the expanding world economy. GDP per capita was poor, but alternative indicators suggest a more optimistic picture (e.g., agricultural, copper and silver production increased, population grew and terms of trade improved). Furthermore, there were some positive institutional developments. All these changes made possible the sustained growth that took place from the 1830s and must be seen as more important than the growth record itself during the 1810-1820s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complex, dynamic relationship that developed between the Mapuche and Chilean state authorities in the first decades following independence from Spain. The greater part of Mapuche society supported royalist forces during the independence wars, but there were also several leaders who allied themselves with the patriot insurgents and, after the latter's victory, entered into negotiations with the fledgling Chilean republic. This paper investigates the intricacies of these negotiations and, in so doing, draws out some notable continuities between the colonial period and the early independence era. It focuses on the language(s) of negotiation - delving into what Mapuche and Chilean authorities were saying about and to one another - and on the symbolic significance of the parlamentos (mass-meetings), in order to demonstrate that Chile could have adopted an alternative model of government to the (centralist) one we know now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital Development Games (DDGs) have been designed to tackle a variety of international development issues, including gender inequality. This study uses critical textual analysis and a political economic approach to highlight how the development goals embedded in two games, Family Values and Moraba, both aimed at gender equality in Africa, were shaped by the large donor organizations that funded them. Understanding the relationship between game developers and funders is necessary in order to understand how and why DDGs work to reinforce established, and often problematic, development narratives. As smaller nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and independent game developers look to large development institutions to support the production of DDGs, research on the ways in which the ideologies of funding organizations get mapped onto games becomes increasingly important. Further, the findings of this study provide a contemporary example of the ways in which development networks are able to incorporate new technologies and discourses into their work without fundamentally changing their worldviews or their approach to creating change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how do alternative economies emerge, how do they develop and what is their contribution, if any, to transformative politics? Alternative economies proliferate in the countries worse hit by economic crisis and austerity, such as Spain or Greece. Yet the existing literature is stuck in a counter-productive division between celebration and critique. We move beyond this division applying philosopher Daniel Bensaïd's understanding of politics to two alternative food economies, one in the Basque Country and one in Greece. We illuminate the activist strategies and specific conjunctures within which the two alternatives emerged and explain how they develop in the face of political-economic barriers. Alternative economies, we conclude, can be transformational when they are inserted in activist strategies directed to extend conflict, social struggles and challenge the capital-state nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place-making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity-place-nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of 'social muscles', as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing attention to the governing role of capital accumulation and its interaction with the state, this study examines the dynamics of the new wave of suburbanization in China, which is characterized by the development of new towns. New towns essentially function as a spatial fix in China's contemporary accumulation regime. Rather than resulting from capital switching from the primary to the secondary circuits, new towns help to collect funds for the leverage of industrial capital and thus simultaneously sustain both circuits. Meanwhile, the development of new towns is also a process of territorial development, in which municipal governments expand the space of accumulation under strengthened fiscal and land controls and develop a metropolitan structure. Underlying the specific form and dynamics, however, is the worldwide trend of capital switching from declining manufacturing industries in developed countries to the new investment frontier in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners-usually indigenous communities-to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the 'social license' is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores on the history of the U.S. including the political economy, foreign relations and the nation's infrastructure as well as the offshore commercial and military base. It highlights the importance of American community in order to recognize the Americans in the foreign territory. It also cites the rights, protections, and duties of U.S. law for the Americans citizens and residents in the country wherein the nation made treaties and alliances with the polities through internal migrations and negotiations.

By studying the theoretical and empirical work of agricultural economists in pre-World War I and interwar Italy, this article shows that agrarianism was a general paradigm shared across the Italian political spectrum by different political families. Originating in the agricultural crisis of the late nineteenth century, agrarianism was understood differently by different political groups, so that its political meaning changed over time, while the underlying economic principles remained stable. The "democratic agrarianism" of the first two decades of the twentieth century - an effort to increase the number of owner-farmers in the name of the "social utility" of land-evolved into the "productivist agrarianism" of the fascist period, when the regime tried to reconcile under a technocratic leadership the contrast between social issues and land productivity. It declared peasant farmers a protected category of subjects, and put the development of Italian agriculture under the tutelage of the state and its bureaucratic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of practising theory in context reflects current debates in urban studies as well as the history of poststructural thought whose scholarship, informed by postcolonial critique and understandings of ethics and responsibility in international research collaboration, continues to give evident substance to the nature of epistemological violence. This essay takes up the challenge of contextual theory and empirical research through a critical comparative approach that ultimately finds how the expansive gentrification balloon pops as a consequence of assumptions and misassumptions that leave consequential data hiding in plain sight. The contributions of this essay include treatment of the transposition of ideas as a theoretical, methodological and ethical problem, and an original comparative summary of the frequency of 'gentrification' in the news media of ten major cities in addition to the print and online media of Hong Kong. The analysis demonstrates not only how context matters in research design, but also how distinction in the articulation of theoretical argument will be upheld or deflated by knowledge of, and acquired in, context. The essay summarizes the arguments for the larger Interventions forum, and concludes that a critical-theoretical comparative international urban studies generates and builds through refinement of theory in iterative dialogue with historical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional wisdom is that class divisions once prevailed but in recent decades have gradually declined. Indeed, many now suggest that the working class has been voting Republican since the 1980s. The historical evidence on voting in presidential elections does not indicate that there was a decline since the 1950s. If anything, the well-off and more educated have moved somewhat more Democratic, lessening class divisions. There has, however, been a change since the 2008 election, with the working class - whether only whites or all - moving away from the Democrats. This may not mean a decline of the working class voting their interests. It may be that the economic recovery of recent years has done little to help the working class and they have taken a gamble that a businessman will help their job prospects more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long been interested in examining how race and class each shape citizens' political attitudes. To date, however, there have been few efforts to untangle how race and class intersect to shape Americans' political identities and attitudes about public policies. We argue that it is important to investigate attitudes inter-sectionally. Pooling the 2012 and 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies to obtain large numbers of observations of non-whites and individuals with high incomes, we observe patterns of partisan identity, beliefs about racial prejudice, and attitudes about public policies. Our results suggest that race and class intersect in different ways for different groups in society. Increasing income erodes differences in attitudes between Latinos and whites, but has no effect on the large gap in attitudes between African Americans and whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to other affluent democracies, class conflict has not been very intense nor as much of an organizing principle in American politics. However, as wages stagnate for the working class and economic inequality grows, class conflict is becoming increasingly salient. Yet, reviewing recent political science studies, I argue that rather than politics becoming a clearer class "war" between the upper and lower classes, the growing class bias in political mobilization and participation, and the resulting overrepresentation of upper class actors, has prevented a clear articulation of lower class interests or the development of broad policies that benefit virtually all Americans, leading to policies that increasingly benefit upper class individuals and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original survey data to explore the landscape of support for a number of aspects of what might be called "the American Dream:" the notion that hard work is rewarded, and individuals succeed and fail due primarily to their own efforts. In general, I find that Americans generally endorse the idea that hard work leads to success and that economic mobility is possible for those willing to put in the effort, but that there is significant individual and contextual variation in support for those beliefs. I find that most variation in support for meritocratic belief is a function of simple partisan politics: differences between liberals and conservatives, and between Democrats and Republicans, are far more important to explaining meritocratic belief than any other sociodemographic factor. But attributes of the context in which one lives matter as well. Among other things, this paper highlights the importance of local economic decline as an important topic for future research: those who live in communities that have seen their relative economic fortunes drop over the past decade are less likely to believe in meritocracy than those who have seen their communities thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common markers of social class include income, wealth, education and family background. Though these capture staple pedestrian elements of class, they understate something substantial - social class is produced by political experiences. Building on this observation, I argue that social class is constructed and reinforced via political institutions that differentially affect the daily experiences and life trajectories of Americans. Viewing class through this lens (instead of more simply as a function of income or education) enables clarity on two critical features of the American political system: (1) its deeply racialized institutional practices (2) its dual inclusionary/exclusionary governance structures. Most broadly, this essay pushes us beyond a view of class as a set of variables that affect political outcomes and towards inquiry into the ways that political institutions produce class. Ultimately, such a conceptual pivot illuminates additional pathways for transforming economic and political relations in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contributions of the American political scientist Morris Fiorina to the study of partisanship and mass polarization in the U.S. Topics mentioned include the influential work of Fiorina in the voting rights of the Americans on the national elections in the country, the rise and fall of unemployment rates which embroiled in foreign wars and the underlying partisan identification in respond to the political changes in the country wherein partisanship functions both as a stable psychological construct and as a temporary political summary judgment of group performance.

Politicians in the US tend to be vastly better off than the people they represent. But why, and does it matter? In the last decade, scholar of US politics have revived an old line of inquiry into the causes and consequences of government by the privileged, or what I call white-collar government. This article briefly reviews what scholars have learned, and what we still need to know. Most research to date has focused on the effects of government by the privileged; just as the shortage of female politicians seems to bias policy on gender issues, the shortage of politicians from lower-income and working-class backgrounds appears to tilt economic policy in favor of the more conservative positions typically favored by more affluent Americans. Why, then, do so few lower-income and working-class Americans go on to become politicians? On this point, scholars have more hunches than hard evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the statement of the American political scientist Morris P. Fiorina regarding the political system and economic condition in the U.S. Topics mentioned include the shifts between the social disruption and politics associated with the prevalence of violence in the country, the partisanship of the Democratic Party due to the performance of the Johnson Administration along with the changes in the Nixon Administration and the influence of social identity to the voting rights of the minorities and liberals.