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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 use of buprenorphine in medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in opioid addiction and argues in favor of a balanced approach for expanding access to buprenorphine in the U.S. It also discusses the risks of the use of methadone in MAT. It also examines governmental policy regarding buprenorphine.

This study revisits Carter and Scott's model of congressional foreign policy entrepreneurship (2004, 2009, 2010) to evaluate how a new generation of legislative innovators, including Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, may influence US foreign policy. Specifically, this study proposes two new types of foreign policy entrepreneurs in Congress—"revolutionaries" and "mercenaries"—and examines their different motivations, policy objectives, and strategies to attempt to influence or change state behavior. Case evidence suggests that in a new era of partisanship and polarization, more complex models of players, strategies, and measures of success are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on a multilevel approach to the behavior of members of Congress, this article explains why Arthur Vandenberg, J. William Fulbright, and Jesse Helms were particularly active chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It draws parallels between their careers and shows that similar factors explain why they were active: (a) crucial international events convinced them to play a leading role in the foreign policy debate; (b) the US political and social environments created policy windows for their activism; and (c) they possessed the necessary skills, interests, and convictions to play such a role. Our approach also explains why the three chairs displayed different types of activism (Vandenberg relied on legislative and nonlegislative collaboration with Harry Truman, Fulbright primarily on nonlegislative opposition to Lyndon Johnson, and Helms on legislative and nonlegislative opposition to Bill Clinton). Furthermore, this article explains why Fulbright was less successful than Vandenberg and Helms in convincing Congress and the President to adopt key legislations he introduced in the Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of congressional polarization has led presidents to seek alternative ways to pursue their agendas through staffing. I argue presidents use excepted appointments, which are excepted both from advice and consent and competitive hiring processes, when ideological conflict within the Senate is high. I also argue that Schedule C appointments specifically are concentrated in agencies ideologically similar to the president due to their advisory nature. I find preliminary support for these hypotheses using Office of Personnel Management data on Schedule C appointees from 1998 to 2013. In sum, this study shows that excepted appointments are an important yet understudied tool in the president's administrative toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to the role of President of the United States were noted as benchmarks in our country's history. There was a strong societal belief that his historic elections reflected a shift in societal attitudes towards racial differences, primarily between Whites and people of color, specifically African Americans; however, public discourse over time revealed deep-seated hate for the country's first African American president. Despite his efforts to fight for social justice for all, he received unrelenting opposition from Congress, and the US public was subjected to horrifying racial attacks on Obama, his wife Michelle, and his daughters that went largely ignored and dismissed. The racist tenor of the US became much clearer with the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential run. What is more troubling is that Christian evangelicals came out in full force to elect a man whose very being is the antithesis of what it means to be a Christian. To better understand this national and global phenomenon, this critical essay will explore the various arguments that White Christian evangelicals have used to rationalize the election of a man whose policies and behaviors are in direct opposition of Christian ideologies and sensibilities. This contradiction was not lost on many others within and outside of the Christian world, including Black Christians and other evangelical communities of color who have had a range of reactions to the racism that has been revealed by their fellow White believers. Thus this essay will offer greater insight into the gulf that exists in the racism of the Christian community through the lens of this historic political election. It will also aim to offer suggestions for reformation in the Christian community that can potentially serve as a model for positive race relations in society and the larger political landscape of the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, governments have invested in the creation of two forms of knowledge production about government performance: program evaluations and performance management. Prior research has noted tensions between these two approaches and the potential for complementarities when they are aligned. This article offers empirical evidence on how program evaluations connect with performance management in the U.S. federal government in 2000 and 2013. In the later time period, there is an interactive effect between the two approaches, which, the authors argue, reflects deliberate efforts by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations to build closer connections between program evaluation and performance management. Drawing on the 2013 data, the authors offer evidence that how evaluations are implemented matters and that evaluations facilitate performance information use by reducing the causal uncertainty that managers face as they try to make sense of what performance data mean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address used a perfected and condensed form of ultimate defınition consisting of an ideological argument, an underlying mythic narrative, and a value system. These three components served to redefıne the American Dream and to reinforce the limited role of government, placing the responsibility for curing America’s ills on the individual rather than the federal government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transatlantic burden-sharing debates often centre on defence expenditures and participation in missions out-of-area. An analysis of US strategy for cooperation with Nordic and Baltic countries during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies reveals how the United States has worked to promote security export much more broadly. It pursued contributions through in-area military installations, military partnership and missions, and political/economic cooperation promoting security and stability in Northern Europe, the Euro-Atlantic area, and far away. Global strategies and specific thinking regarding contributions from this region formed US policies. Developments were not linear; the United States took on commitments, even as it promoted increased burden-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Because the Supreme Court can decide only so many cases per term, justices carefully target which cases they hear and which parties they supervise. We focus on their decisions to hear cases involving states as parties. We believe justices use the agenda power to target states with whom they disagree ideologically. Granting review allows justices to keep an eye on wayward states and to remind them of the ever-present threat of Supreme Court review. The results support our theory. Justices are significantly more likely to grant review to cases involving ideologically unfriendly states—and these results are exacerbated in salient cases. These findings suggest justices are more aggressive agenda setters than commonly believed. In addition, the findings suggest that even the so-called federalism revolution of the Rehnquist Court was driven by policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a novel theory on Supreme Court impact that makes several key contributions beyond existing accounts. We argue that policy-oriented justices are particularly attentive to the impact of their precedents within the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We provide a framework in which both Supreme Court and circuit-level influences drive U.S. Courts of Appeals responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. Principally, we argue that the Supreme Court’s use of its summary decisions, which explicitly reference its formally argued decisions, increase circuit court utility of the High Court’s precedents. We test our predictions using new data on appeals court responses to the Supreme Court’s precedents. The empirical results support our account and shed new light on the hierarchical dynamic within the American federal judiciary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's comment on the article "Does Compact Development Make People Drive Less?" by Mark Stevens. The author says that the article would not offer the advice U.S. policymakers seek when considering compact development as part of their strategy to minimize the social costs of driving. He also says that the study risks sending a misleading signal to policymakers by ignoring the impact of other factors on the effect of compact development.

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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.

As a new and unpredictable administration takes power in Washington, the relationship that the United States will have with its European allies remains unclear. There is understandably concern on both sides of the Atlantic about what this change will mean for the US relationship with NATO and the security guarantees that have been in place for almost 70 years. These concerns are not without foundation: just days before his inauguration, President-elect Trump once again described NATO as 'obsolete'. Contradictory statements made by Trump and his candidates for Secretary of Defense and State raise further questions about the direction of US security policy, as well as the country's priorities. The Harmel Report was precipitated in part by the approaching 20th anniversary of the alliance in 1969 which caused NATO to rethink and redefine itself in light of changing realities. The incoming Trump administration is raising questions that are again exposing divisions among members of the Alliance which could prompt re-evaluation that could strengthen the institution by reaffirming its relevance in light of a resurgent Russia. Or the result could be to further the pattern whereby the United States pursues policies deemed to be in its own national interest at the expense of Europe, while simultaneously, the European countries develop their own policies, both individually and collectively, that minimize or exclude the United States. This article takes a historical perspective to explore the evolution of the trans-Atlantic relationship to the present and to speculate on what the past might tell us about the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial inequalities in criminal justice are pressing problems for policymakers. Prior literature suggests elected officials promulgate punitive, racially disparate criminal justice policies due to partisanship and racial fears, but scholarship has yet to explain how and why elected officials address racial problems in criminal processing. This article introduces the framework of racial disparity reform policymaking. A racial disparity reform is a policy that seeks to reduce distinctions in criminal justice institutions' treatment of racial groups. Elected officials pursue these policies due to ideological beliefs in civil rights ideals and political interests in appearing to solve social problems. Using an original database of policy enactments, this article first presents the distribution and types of reform measures adopted by elected officials in all 50 states between 1998 and 2011. It then examines social and political explanations for when state legislatures and executives adopt racial disparity reforms. Policy enactment is predicted by worsening problems of racial disproportion in criminal processing, Democratic control of elected branches, and the absence of judicial efforts to improve racial fairness within a state's criminal justice system. Similar dynamics encourage the development of different measures types within policies. Such ideological and problem-solving explanations for racial disparity reform show a potential for elected officials to forge more racially just criminal justice practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the issue is presented in which the editor discusses topics addressed within the issue including the 2016 Presidential Election in the U.S., the rhetorical criticism of political campaigns and the candidacy of American politician Hillary Clinton.

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.

In this article, we explore the relationship between Americans' attitudes toward immigrants and immigration and their attitudes toward welfare. Using data from the Cumulative American National Election Study from 1992 to 2012, we find ample evidence of the influence of immigration attitudes on both individuals' attitudes toward welfare recipients and their attitudes toward increased welfare spending. These immigration effects persist even in the face of statistical controls for attitudes toward African Americans and attitudes toward the poor; indeed, in our models, the magnitude of the effects of immigration attitudes surpasses the magnitude of effects of attitudes toward blacks. Further, our findings of immigration effects withstand a range of robustness tests. Our results point to the possible 'immigrationalization' of Americans' welfare attitudes and provide strong evidence that how Americans think about immigration and immigrants is a major factor in how they think about welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the U.S. government workforce, across all levels of government in the U.S., women use information technology (IT) more than men. Two different theoretical perspectives are used to investigate this finding, namely 1) the human capital perspective and 2) the sociological perspective. This paper finds that differences in IT-usage among the genders persist even after controlling for human capital factors. Thus the human capital theoretical perspective may not provide sufficient explanation for the differences observed. Further analysis reveals significant differences among the genders in the kinds of occupational roles filled by them. This new finding suggests that the sociological theoretical perspective may be more appropriate in accounting for the differences in IT-usage among the genders. This paper concludes that higher usage of IT by women is not necessarily evidence of progress for women, and instead may point to deeper, underlying, problematic issues such as the persistence of stereotypical occupational gender roles in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic terrorism accounts for a vast majority of all attacks, yet it is far less studied than its transnational counterpart. As a result, the literature on domestic terrorism remains theoretically and empirically underdeveloped. One of the reasons for this is the dearth of comprehensive crossnational domestic terrorism datasets. This article seeks to address the problem by proposing a method for refining original Global Terrorism Database (GTD) data into a constructively valid, crossnational domestic terrorism dataset. The analysis begins with the definition of terrorism and further develops it by conceptually distinguishing its domestic and transnational forms. Because the GTD includes nonterrorist events and conflates transnational and domestic incidents, its raw form is unsuited for domestic research. Therefore, the article examines common definitional attributes from terrorism and domestic terrorism literature. It concludes by specifying steps for assembling a dataset and examining descriptive statistics of the resulting population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]