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Two weeks into the first session of Parliament following last October's federal election, with the minority Conservative government facing imminent defeat over an ill-advised financial statement and a possible Liberal-NDP [...]

When in 2006 California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asked a panel of education experts to recommend an overhaul of the state's troubled public schools, observers hoped the celebrity chief executive was [...]

ABSTRACTOne of the key recommendations of the Winter Commission was the empowerment of governors over the executive branch. However, key institutions have not evolved in this direction; the long ballot still exists in most states, and the formal powers of governors have strengthened to their probable capacity. The authors suggest that a quasi-formal power-the gubernatorial use of executive orders-may be a significant tool for empowering the governor in the state administrative realm. Analyzing all executive orders in 49 states for 2004 and 2005, they find variation in the aggregate use of and functions performed through these orders. Many executive orders do allow the government more direction and control of state bureaucracy. Finally, the authors suggest that the study of executive orders may be necessary to understand gubernatorial power in the executive arena and beyond.

Byline: Zach C. Cohen Former Rep. Bart Stupak (D) said 'a number of Democrats have asked him to run for governor and for the first time, he confesses he has [...]

Arnold Schwarzenegger's celebrity status allowed him to project a symbolic masculine persona that was effective in gaining political power as California governor. The well-known violent tough-guy persona that Schwarzenegger developed in the mid-1980s contributed to a post-Vietnam era cultural remasculinization of the American man. But this narrow hyper-masculinity was often caricatured in popular culture and delegitimized. In the 1990s and 2000s, Schwarzenegger forged a credible masculine imagery by introducing characters who were humorously self-mocking and focused on care and protection of children. Schwarzenegger's resultant hybrid masculinity, the 'Kindergarten Commando,' represents an ascendant hegemonic masculinity always foregrounding muscle, toughness, and the threat of violence and following with situationally appropriate symbolic displays of compassion. The equation of toughness plus compassion composing the Kindergarten Commando is asymmetrical with toughness eclipsing compassion; this has implications for the kinds of policies that U.S. elected leaders advocate. Republicans utilize this masculine imagery in national politics to gain voters' trust in times of fear and insecurity and continue to employ a strategy that projects a devalued feminized stigma onto more liberal candidates. Keywords: masculinity; electoral politics; Arnold Schwarzenegger; gender and film

Abstract This contribution analyzes the political and legal changes implemented after 'Russia's 9/11'. President Putin used Beslan as eyewash to further increase his powers and to suppress or co-opt all [...]

Given the institutional bias against minor parties in the U.S., why do minor party candidates run for office? In this article, we seek to answer this question by developing a model of the choice to participate in gubernatorial elections by minor party candidates that takes into account both the political opportunities potential candidates have to participate and the legal hurdles they must overcome to do so. We test our theory using an event count model of the number of minor party candidates in gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2000. We find that state electoral rules, such as ballot access restrictions, and the level of competition between the two major parties within the state matter the most. In other words, the decision to run as a third party gubernatorial candidate may be an individual one but it is structured in important ways by the institutional environment within which those decisions are made.