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Across the transatlantic area and, indeed, across the democratic world, democracy is under strain from domestic and external factors, while throughout the world, authoritarian and totalitarian forces continue to quash people's desire for freedom and human dignity. In this context, this article takes stock of the ongoing challenges, and argues for a renewed transatlantic agenda that returns to the spirit of President Ronald Reagan's 1982 Westminster Speech. It should achieve this by developing an ambitious programme that defends democracy within the transatlantic area and supports people's desire for freedom globally, while avoiding the dogmatic approaches and ossification that have characterised democracy promotion over the past two decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the tragedies of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse was subject to searching criticism by a host of liberal intellectuals including Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon. Looking to history and political philosophy, these thinkers impugned utopianism for so frequently destroying the freedoms it appeared to pursue. Defined by its theoretical contradictions, the utopian project, rooted in the politics of the Enlightenment, bore some responsibility for the totalitarianism and genocide that had shaped their lives. As this critique became liberal orthodoxy, a heretic group of anarchist thinkers challenged these conclusions. While travelling some distance with the liberal critics, for Paul Goodman, Marie Louise Berneri, and Herbert Read, the twentieth century, rather than invalidating the utopian urge made its boldness and experimentalism all the more vital. Their act of heresy was defending utopianism as a central component of their anarchist critique of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do Republican and Democratic presidents vary in their geographic allocations of federal spending? Recent scholarship suggests that US presidents provide more federal outlays to districts represented by their co-partisans, but leave the issue of partisan affiliation unanswered. We explore that question using an updated database that covers federal spending programs over the 1984–2014 period. We show that the alignment effect found in previous studies cannot be observed for Republican presidents. We argue that Republican presidents may not use pork as much as Democratic presidents because their core constituency is fiscally conservative. One implication of the results reported herein is that the electoral benefits of distributive politics depend on the fiscal preferences of the electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late Cold War, the United States and Western European countries offshored migration control to less powerful nations by converting them into buffer zones. Buffer zones had long been used to provide nations with military protection; now they were imagined as protecting nations from migrants by obstructing their movement. This practice had human rights implications. Beginning in the 1970s, the idea flourished that the defense of individual human rights was a transnational mandate that extended beyond the protections granted by particular nation-states. Ironically, the transnational practice of extending migration controls beyond individual nation-states that developed in the 1980s opened the door to increased human rights violations. This essay explores these dynamics by focusing on how, during the 1980s, U.S. officials pressured Mexican authorities to enter into a Faustian bargain that limited Mexico's sovereign right to determine its immigration practices. U.S. policymakers insisted that they would turn a blind eye to Mexican migration if Mexican officials suppressed Central American migration into and through Mexico. In turn, Mexico's leaders instituted measures to stop Central Americans from reaching the United States. These measures did not curtail transmigration, but they did lead to widespread violence and human rights abuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971–2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy area has a positive conditioning effect on the link between public priorities and attention for the president's State of the Union Address. However, our results do not find a positive effect for voluntary associations at later stages of the policy cycle, which experience a higher degree of institutional friction. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different stages of policymaking when considering the impact of voluntary associations on dynamic agenda responsiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on two confidential reports, this article demonstrates the significant political agency exercised in the 1980s by Irish and Irish American politicians supported by an unusually robust form of ethnicity. Embodied in hundreds of cultural and fraternal associations, this vigorous Irish American ethnicity was animated by political passion arising out of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The first report, by the Irish Embassy in Washington in 1980, provided first-hand accounts of the widespread activities of Irish American associations, with a view to enlisting their support in resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland. The embassy and Irish American political leaders formed a powerful "Irish lobby" in Washington seeking a solution based on nonviolence and equality between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists, strengthening the hand of the Irish government in its negotiations with the British government. The second report, compiled in 1988 by Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, sought to bring the Irish American republican movement into line with Sinn Féin's recent decision to seek a political solution to the conflict. As Sinn Féin moved gradually away from violence, it exerted control over Noraid, the most important of the hardline Irish American organizations. Both the Irish government and Sinn Féin mobilized an Irish American ethnicity that, far from being merely "symbolic," was rooted in tangible social and political processes in which Irish immigrants and their descendants played the leading role. Whether that ethnicity can retain its vitality in the absence of continued immigration and an animating political cause is an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of policy regime changes on real interest rates has important implications for financial and economic theory. However, there is little current evidence that such changes have any impact on the level of real interest rates. In this paper, we estimate both the number and location of structural breaks in the three-month U.S. real interest rate using a global optimization technique developed by Bai and Perron (1998). We compare the timing of large political changes to the dating of these structural breaks. We find that changes in party control of either a branch of Congress or the presidency are largely consistent with the timing of real rate shifts, while changes in the Federal Reserve chair are generally inconsistent with real rate regime shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of women seeking congressional office in the United States has dramatically increased since 1980. Previous research on women candidates explores why women run, but new research on candidate emergence shows that women face different challenges and advantages based on their race and ethnicity. We investigate these differences by disaggregating data on women's candidate emergence by race and ethnicity to examine how these theories work when explicitly considering race and ethnicity. We focus our examination on women running in House primaries between 1980 and 2012. We argue that theories of candidate emergence are conditional to the racial and/or ethnic identification of the candidate. We employ a cross-sectional time series analysis with the intuition that examining congressional elections over time will allow us to make general comments about the participation of women in congressional elections. We find that many of the conditions thought necessary for women's emergence as candidates are contextual and temporally specific. Moreover, conditions that encourage women to run do not necessarily apply to women of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very few NATO decisions may have entailed for the Alliance as much a laborious political and diplomatic process as that taken in December 1979. After its adoption, under Carter, the dual-track decision had to be implemented over the early years of the Reagan administration, when the US President's abhorrence of détente was so deep and vocal to jeopardise the arms control progress upon which the fulfilment of the negotiating track of that NATO decision depended. The analysis carried out in this article focuses on the US government's deliberations and choices. Its aim is to discuss how and to what extent the US Cold War security priorities did need to be complemented with those singled out by European NATO allies, especially when those allies were able to convey to Washington the message that arms control remained a political necessity for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the impact of the presidency of Ronald Wilson Reagan on the American West. Details of the Sagebrush Rebellion during the Reagan administration; Reagan's contributions to the West; Western or frontier myth in the Reagan years; Reagan as an actor; His performance as President; Reagan's legacy to the West.

Argues that the U.S. strategy of low-intensity conflict sends the message that it opposes economic development. The U.S. strategy of low-intensity conflict means destroying roads, hospitals, schools--and sends the message that the United States opposes economic development. Inside the Pentagon, the planners and practitioners of low-intensity conflict are winning the internecine bureaucratic battles, getting a bigger share of the declining military budget, and achieving reputations as the strategists with answers to the security dilemmas of the post-Cold War era. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States used its military power or paramilitary power on the average of once every 18 months, either to prevent a government deemed undesirable from coming to power or to overthrow a revolutionary or reformist government considered inimical to U.S. interests. U.S. public opinion consistently opposed a military operation of the size and duration needed to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, but Americans acquiesced to a large-scale war of harassment that continued up to the eve of national elections in February 1990. Today, leading military officers in the United States argue that the major challenges to U.S. military forces are revolutionary strife, random violence, nuclear terrorism, and drug-running--all of them primarily in the Third World, I which has been the only actual theater of combat over the last 40 years.

Discusses that today the people of the US have less political freedom--less power to discharge their responsibilities as citizens--than they had on the day Ronald Reagan became president. Governmental control on the flow of information increased during President Ronald Reagan's administration.

Report that the tough talk coming from Washington made Mikhail Gorbachev look good to Europeans. Reagan backed down but left the Atlantic ties weakened. NATO; Unilateralists and Asia-firsters; Rolling back Reaganism.

Report that domestic US politics are best for understanding the Reagan administration's security policies in the Third World. Use of force; Symbolism; Administration's strategy.

Report that the contradictory legacy of the Reagan era is nowhere more evident than in the administration's dealings with the Soviet Union. Reagan revolution; Gorbachev revolution; New agenda.

Report that during his eight years as president, Ronald Reagan has presided over the most dramatic improvement in US-Soviet relations--and the most solid progress in arms control--since the Cold War. A look at the administration he headed and at the arms control process itself; Characteristics of Reagan's leadership; Deficiencies in the Reagan strategy.

The article discusses the need for cooperation among U.S. corporations in the global marketplace. The increased level of competition is leading to a re-evaluation of U.S. policies, ideologies, and institutions. This has led to a concern for interfirm agreements. A balance between cooperation and competition is being pushed for, with strong implications for corporate strategy and public policy. The drive towards cooperative arrangements can be attributed to the fragmentation of industries like electronics coupled with steady escalation in the costs of innovation. Experts say these developments may cause a re-examination of the U.S.' antitrust laws.

Record numbers of executives are enrolling in political education seminars as corporations strive to gain more influence in the public policy process. Four key changes in the political environment over the last twenty-five years--growth in the volume of government activity, the reorganization of Congress, the rise of interest groups, and the decline in voter participation--emphasize the need for effective programs in corporate political involvement. The consistent message from legislators, lobbyists, and political experts is "develop your grassroots capabilities." This article explores the opportunities and obstacles in grassroots programs, examines ways to evaluate them, and emphasizes the importance of communication with constituents in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent legislation provides the legal basis for the development of American export trading companies, the law leaves decisions regarding operating characteristics and export services to the private sector. To provide guidance for those developing trading companies, this article analyzes the relationship between basic operating characteristics and the mix of export services provided by export management companies, the closest existing American institution to trading companies. The findings suggest that the operating decisions regarding both the type of product exported and the supplier represented have fundamental implications for the export services that American trading companies must be able to provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Supreme Court seemed sharply divided in its 1981-82 and 1982-83 terms, its decisions continue to be important to marketers. Not only did the Court render decisions that were important in determining pricing and advertising practices, particularly in the professions, it also made significant decisions impacting on marketing organization. Finally, in what appear to be its most important holdings in these two terms, the Court decided procedural questions that may alter the actions of both the judiciary and the regulatory agencies. A Court with a new composition may soon be forthcoming, and the resulting judicial regulation of marketing could change significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews current advertising case law and its implications for advocacy communication, as well as relevant image/issue advertising regulatory decisions by the FTC, FCC, and IRS. In an effort to minimize the chilling effect of this regulation, the authors offer guidelines aimed at assisting communication managers charged with designing effective campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using recently declassified government documents, this essay explores the Ronald Reagan administration's economic war on the Soviet Union in 1982. The evidence shows the administration attempted to coerce West European cooperation with policies intended to undermine the Soviet economy. But U.S. allies forced the administration to retreat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relation of the Supplementary Security Income (SSI) welfare program in the U.S. to HIV infection in the U.S. during the administration of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Topics include the treatment of people with AIDS (PWA) in relation to Medicaid and healthcare access, the social impact of the definition of AIDS by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the definition of disability by the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). Social conditions of poor people, LGBT people, and minorities are noted.