Showing papers on "Politics published in 1996"

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Abstract: Based on the author's seminal article in "Foreign Affairs", Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" is a provocative and prescient analysis of the state of world politics after the fall of communism. In this incisive work, the renowned political scientist explains how "civilizations" have replaced nations and ideologies as the driving force in global politics today and offers a brilliant analysis of the current climate and future possibilities of our world's volatile political culture.

Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms

Abstract: The ‘new institutionalism’ is a term that now appears with growing frequency in political science. However, there is considerable confusion about just what the ‘new institutionalism’ is, how it differs from other approaches, and what sort of promise or problems it displays. The object of this essay is to provide some preliminary answers to these questions by reviewing recent work in a burgeoning literature. Some of the ambiguities surrounding the new institutionalism can be dispelled if we recognize that it does not constitute a unified body of thought. Instead, at least three different analytical approaches, each of which calls itself a ‘new institutionalism’, have appeared over the past fifteen years. We label these three schools of thought: historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism.’ All of these approaches developed in reaction to the behavioural perspectives that were influential during the 1960s and 1970s and all seek to elucidate the role that institutions play in the determination of social and political outcomes. However, they paint quite different pictures of the political world. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief account of the genesis of each school and characterize what is distinctive about its approach to social and political problems. We then compare their analytical strengths and weaknesses, * An earlier version of this paper WLS presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at a Conference on ‘What is Institutionalism Now? at the

What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters

Abstract: This book is the most comprehensive analysis ever written about the American public's factual knowledge of politics. Drawing on extensive survey data, including much that is original, two experts in public opinion and political behavior find that many citizens are remarkably well informed about the details of politics, while equally large numbers are nearly ignorant of political facts. And despite dramatic changes in American society and politics, citizens appear no more or less informed today than half a century ago. Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter demonstrate that informed persons are more likely to participate, better able to discern their own interests, and more likely to advocate those interests through political actions. Who, then, is politically informed? The authors provide compelling evidence that whites, men, and older, financially secure citizens have substantially more knowledge about national politics than do blacks, women, young adults, and financially less-well-off citizens. Thus citizens who are most disadvantaged socially and economically are least able to redress their grievances politically. Yet the authors believe that a broader and more equitably informed populace is possible. The challenge to America, they conclude, lies in providing an environment in which the benefits of being informed are clearer, the tools for gaining information more accessible, and the opportunities to learn about politics more frequent, timely, and equitable.

Comparative perspectives on social movements : political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings

Abstract: Introduction: opportunities mobilizing structures and framing processes Doug McAdam Part I. Political Opportunities: 1. Clarifying the concept of political opportunities Doug McAdam 2. States and opportunities: the political structuring of social movements Sidney Tarrow 3. Social movements and the state: thoughts on the policing of protest Donatella della Porta 4. Opportunities and framing in the East European revolts of 1989 Anthony Oberschall 5. Opportunities and Framing in the Political Cycle of Perestroika Elena Zdravomyslova Part II. Mobilizing Structures: 6. Mobilizing structures: constraints and opportunities in adopting, adapting and inventing John D. McCarthy 7. The organizational structure of new social movements in relation to their political context Hanspeter Kriesi 8. The impact of national contexts on social movement structures: a cross-movement and cross-national comparison Dieter Rucht 9. Organizational form as frame: collective identity and political strategy in the American Labor Movement 1880-1920 Elisabeth S. Clemens 10. The collapse of a social movement: the interplay of mobilizing structures, framing, and political opportunities in the Knights of Labor Kim Voss Part III. Framing Processes: 11. Culture ideology and strategic framing Mayer N. Zald 12. Accessing public media electoral and governmental agendas John D. McCarthy, Jackie Smith, and Mayer N. Zald 13. Media discourse, movement publicity, and the generation of collective action frames: theoretical and empirical exercises in meaning construction Bert Klandermans and Sjoerd Goslinga 14. Framing political opportunity William A. Gamson and David S. Meyer 15. The framing function of movement tactics: strategic dramaturgy in the American civil rights movement Doug McAdam.

The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy

Abstract: In April 1970, Susan Strange published an article in the Chatham House review which challenged the mutual exclusivity of international economics and international politics.(f.1) The consequence was a rebirth of the concept of political economy in international studies. She has continued consistently her liberation struggle from academic self-enclosure, disciplinary defensiveness, and turf wars. She insisted that the new international political economy be a broad church open to historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and the whole range of humanistic studies, as well as economists and political scientists. In this, she echoed Fernand Braudel's appeal in 1958 for the integration of the human sciences in his famous essay on the longue duree. Her work never stood still. She moves forward in responding to her critics and, above all, by her acute perceptions of change in reality. She is not alone in perceiving that the field of international relations study (IR) is beset by an identity crisis.(f.2) The problem now is not just the need for a more ecumenical use of methods and approaches but also for a new ontology -- an updated view of the basic entities and relationships that constitute reality. This is what The Retreat of the State is all about. Susan Strange is a realist in the literal sense that she asks: Where does the power lie? What is the nature of the power? Who benefits? Who suffers? Conventional IR has said a priori that power lies with states. Susan Strange challenges the exclusivity of that assumption. Her enquiry into power and its workings contributes to a 'new realism' quite different from the 'neorealism' of established IR. It has, she writes, led her to a 'final parting of the ways from the discipline of international relations' (p xv). As a realist, Strange cuts through such currently fashionable euphemisms as 'regimes,'(f.3) 'interdependence,' 'globalization,' and 'global governance,' to demonstrate that these terms can act as ideological screens to obscure relations of dominance and subordination. Although she has been associated with the proposition that power is shifting from political authorities to markets,(f.4) in this book the classical notion of 'market' is also implicitly questioned. A market is no longer that abstractly defined infinity of buyers and sellers whose interactions are guided to a beneficent outcome by a providential unseen hand. There are many different markets, and they all need to be analysed as power systems. She illustrates with a few cases: telecoms, insurance, the big accountancy firms, and cartels. In all of these cases, the power systems work to strengthen big corporate translational business. On cartels, she asks why the subject of private protectionism seems to be taboo among liberal economists and concludes that 'while the rhetoric of free enterprise and open competition is necessary to a full integration of a world economy operating on a market principle, the rhetoric is often, in reality, empty of meaning' (p 60). The ontology of Strange's new realism includes a decline in the authority of states, an increase in the authority of big translational firms, a parcelling of authority downwards from states to smaller territorial entities, along with a general erosion of power based on territory and a rise in non-territorial power in economy, technology, and communications. Others have noted these tendencies; they give substance to Hedley Bull's vision of a new medievalism of overlapping authorities and loyalties.(f.5) While accepting this vision as foreshadowing present reality, Strange takes the next step and asks who governs in such circumstances. This must be the first question in reflecting upon the condition of the world and its future; and, of course, there is no clear answer to it. A conspiracy theory will not do. There is no effective conclave of big corporations with United States government power, though these forces do seem to be the predominate actors. A key word in this book is 'symbiosis. …

The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government

Abstract: The social, as a plane of thought and action, has been central to political thought and political programmes since the mid-nineteenth century. This paper argues that, while themes of society and concerns with social cohesion and social justice are still significant in political argument, the social is no longer a key zone, traget and objective of strategies of government. The rise of the language of globalization indicates that economic relations are no longer easily understood as organized across a single bounded national economy. Community has become a new spatialization of government: heterogeneous, plural, linking individuals, families and others into contesting cultrual assemblies of identities and allegiances. Divisions among the subjects of government are coded in new ways; neither included nor excluded are governed as social citizens. Non-political strategies are deployed for the management of expert authority. Anti-political motifs such as associationism and communitarianism which do not seek to ...

Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model

Abstract: I What conditions make democracy possible and what conditions make it thrive? Thinkers from Locke to Tocqueville and A. D. Lindsay have given many answers. Democracy, we are told, is rooted in man's innate capacity for self-government or in the Christian ethical or the Teutonic legal tradition. Its birthplace was the field at Putney where Cromwell's angry young privates debated their officers, or the more sedate House at Westminster, or the rock at Plymouth, or the forest cantons above Lake Lucerne, or the fevered brain of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Its natural champions are sturdy yeomen, or industrious merchants, or a prosperous middle class. It must be combined with strong local government, with a twoparty system, with a vigorous tradition of civil rights, or with a multitude of private associations. Recent writings of American sociologists and political scientists favor three types of explanation. One of these, proposed by Seymour Martin Lipset, Philips Cutright, and others, connects stable democracy with certain economic and social background conditions, such as high per capita income, widespread literacy, and prevalent urban residence. A second type of explanation dwells on the need for certain beliefs or psychological attitudes among the citizens. A long line of authors from Walter Bagehot to Ernest Barker has stressed the need for consensus as the basis of democracy-either in the form of a common belief in certain fundamentals or of procedural consensus on the rules of the game, which Barker calls "the Agreement to Differ." Among civic attitudes

Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Abstract: Tables and Figures Preface 1. Introduction I. POLITICS AND THE PUBLIC 2. The Nature of Mass Beliefs 3. How We Participate 4. Who Participates? II. POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS 5. Values in Change 6. Issues and Ideological Orientations III. THE ELECTORAL CONNECTION 7. Elections and Political Parties 8. The Social Bases of Party Support 9. Partisanship and Voting 10. Attitudes and Voting Choice 11. Political Representation IV. DEMOCRACY AND THE FUTURE 12. Citizens and the Democratic Process Appendix A: Statistical Primer Appendix B: Major Data Sources Appendix C: World Values Survey Codebook References Index

The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics

Abstract: We examine what determines whether an interest group will receive favors in pork-barrel politics, using a model of majority voting with two competing parties. Each group's membership is heterogeneous in its ideological affinity for the parties. Individuals face a trade-off between party affinity and their own transfer receipts. The model is general enough to yield two often-discussed but competing theories as special cases. If the parties are equally effective in delivering transfers to any group, then the outcome of the process conforms to the "swing voter" theory: both parties woo the groups that are politically central, and most willing to switch their votes in response to economic favors. If groups have party affinities, and each party is more effective in delivering favors to its own support group, then we can get the "machine politics" outcome, where each party favors its core support group. We derive these results theoretically, and illustrate their operation in particular examples.

Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

Abstract: In "Immigrant Acts", Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialised economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the 'foreigner-within'. In "Immigrant Acts", she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant - at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation - displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a 'failed' integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, "Immigrant Acts" will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and trans-nationalism.

A Theory of Privatisation

Abstract: Public enterprises around the world have proved to be highly inefficient, primarily because they pursue strategies, such as excess employment, that satisfy the political objectives of politicians who control them. Privatization of public enterprises can raise the cost to politicians of influencing them, since subsidies to private firms necessary to force them to remain inefficient are politically harder to sustain than wasted profits of the state firms. In this way, privatization leads to efficient restructuring of firms. Moreover, privatization is more effective when combined with a tight monetary policy and when the new owners of firms are profit maximizing investors, rather than their employees or even managers. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.

Democracy and difference : contesting the boundaries of the political

Abstract: Introduction: The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference3Pt. 1Democratic Theory: Foundations and Perspectives191Three Normative Models of Democracy212Fugitive Democracy313Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity464Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy675Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy956Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy120Pt. 2Equality, Difference, and Public Representation1377Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas, or a Politics of Presence?1398Three Forms of Group-Differentiated Citizenship in Canada1539Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences17110Democracy, Difference, and the Right of Privacy18711Gender Equity and the Welfare State: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment218Pt. 3Culture, Identity, and Democracy24312Democracy, Power, and the "Political"24513Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home25714Democracy and Multiculturalism27815The Performance of Citizenship: Democracy, Gender, and Difference in the French Revolution29516Peripheral Peoples and Narrative Identities: Arendtian Reflections on Late Modernity314Pt. 4Does Democracy Need Foundations?33117Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices33318Democratic Theory and Democratic Experience33619Democracy, Philosophy, and Justification34020Foundationalism and Democracy348List of Contributors361Index365

Writings on cities

Abstract: The work of Henri Lefebvre - the only major French intellectual of the post-war period to give extensive consideration to the city and urban life - received considerable attention among both academics and practitioners of the built environment following the publication in English of The Production of Space. This new collection brings together, for the first time in English, Lefebvre's reflections on the city and urban life written over a span of some twenty years.The selection of writings is contextualized by an introduction - itself a significant contribution to the interpretation of Henri Lefebvre's work - which places the material within the context of Lefebvre's intellectual and political life and times and raises pertinent issues as to their relevance for contemporary debates over such questions as the nature of urban reality, the production of space and modernity.

Unequal Participation: Democracy's Unresolved Dilemma

Abstract: Low voter turnout is a serious democratic problem for five reasons: (1) It means unequal turnout that is systematically biased against less well-to-do citizens. (2) Unequal turnout spells unequal political influence. (3) U.S. voter turnout is especially low, but, measured as percent of voting-age population, it is also relatively low in most other countries. (4) Turnout in midterm, regional, local, and supranational elections -- less salient but by no means unimportant elections -- tends to be especially poor. (5) Turnout appears to be declining everywhere. The inequality problem can be solved by institutional mechanisms that maximize turnout. One option is the combination of voter-friendly registration rules, proportional representation, infrequent elections, weekend voting, and holding less salient elections concurrently with the most important national elections. The other option, which can maximize turnout by itself, is compulsory voting. Its advantages far outweigh the normative and practical objections to it. This article has been removed from the eRepository website since it is now published: American Political Science Review vol. 91 (March 1997): 1-14.

Notes on the State of Virginia

Abstract: This American classic is the only full-length book written and published by Thomas Jefferson during his lifetime. Written in 1781, Notes on the State of Virginia was begun by Jefferson as a commentary on the resources and institutions of his home state, but the work's lasting value lies in its delineation of Jefferson's major philosophical, political, scientific, and ethical beliefs. Along with his accounts of such factual matters as North American flora and fauna, Jefferson expounds his views on slavery, education, religious freedom, representative government, and the separation of church and state. The book is the best single statement of Jefferson's principles and the best reflection of his wide-ranging tastes and talents. This edition, meticulously edited by William Peden, was originally published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1955. |The first edition of this compendium of place names in North Carolina appeared to wide acclaim in 1968 and has remained an essential reference for anyone with a serious interest in the Tar Heel State, from historians to journalists, from creative writers to urban planners, from backpackers to armchair travelers. This revised and expanded edition adds approximately 1,200 new entries, bringing to nearly 21,000 the number of North Carolina cities, towns, crossroads, waterways, mountains, and other places identified here.

The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract: The rise of new political competitors on the radical right is a central feature of many contemporary European party systems. The first study of its kind based on a wide array of comparative survey data, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis provides a unifying framework to explain why rightist parties are electorally powerful in some countries but not in others. The book argues that changes in social structure and the economy do not by themselves adequately explain the success of extremist parties. Instead we must look to the competitive struggles among parties, their internal organizational patterns, and their long-term ideological traditions to understand the principles governing their success. Radical right authoritarian parties tend to emerge when moderate parties converge toward the median voter. But the success of these parties depends on the strategy employed by the right-wing political actors. Herbert Kitschelt's in-depth analysis, based on the experiences of rightist parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Britain, reveals that the broadest appeal is enjoyed by parties that couple a fierce commitment to free markets with authoritarian, ethnocentric—or even racist—messages. The author also shows how a country's particular political constituency or its intellectual and organizational legacies may allow right-wing parties to diverge from these norms and still find electoral success. The book concludes by exploring the interaction between the development of the welfare state, cultural pluralization through immigrants, and the growth of the extreme right.

Making and breaking governments : cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary democracies

Abstract: Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Part I. The Context: 1. Theory, institutions, and government formation 2. The social context of government formation 3. The government formation process Part II. The Model: 4. Government equilibrium 5. Strong parties Part III. Empirical Investigations: 6. Two cases: Germany, 1987 Ireland, 1992-3 7. Theoretical implications, data, and operationalization 8. Exploring the model: a comparative perspective 9. A multivariate investigation of portfolio allocation Part IV. Applications, Extensions, and Conclusions: 10. Party systems and cabinet stability 11. Making the model more realistic 12. Party politics and administrative reform 13. Governments and parliaments Bibliography.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Framing political opportunity

Abstract: The concept of political opportunity structure is in trouble, in danger of becoming a sponge that soaks up virtually every aspect of the social movement environment – political institutions and culture, crises of various sorts, political alliances, and policy shifts. As Tarrow notes (1988: 430), “Political opportunity may be discerned along so many directions and in so many ways that it is less a variable than a cluster of variables – some more readily observable than others.” It threatens to become an all-encompassing fudge factor for all the conditions and circumstances that form the context for collective action. Used to explain so much, it may ultimately explain nothing at all. Part of the problem is that analysts use political opportunity structure to serve a wide variety of functions, and define it accordingly. Scholars who want to explain the emergence and influence of a movement over time use it as a set of independent variables , to describe dynamic aspects of the political environment that change to allow or encourage the emergence of challengers (e.g., Jenkins and Perrow 1977; McAdam 1982; Meyer 1990, 1993a). Others who want to compare the development of similar movements in different nations, states, or cities use political opportunity structure as a holder for intervening variables such as institutional structures or rules of representation (e.g., Amenta and Zylan 1991; Eisinger 1973; Kitschelt 1986; Tilly 1978).

Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

Abstract: In this classic text, the first full-scale application of cognitive science to politics, George Lakoff analyzes the unconscious and rhetorical worldviews of liberals and conservatives, discovering radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. For this new edition, Lakoff adds a preface and an afterword extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book's original publication, from the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the 2000 presidential election and its aftermath.

Autonomy and Independence in Language Learning

Abstract: Contributors General Editor's Preface 1. Introduction: autonomy and independence in language learning, Phil Benson and Peter Voller Part I: Philosophy and practice 2. The philosophy and politics of learner autonomy, Phil Benson 3. Cultural alternatives and autonomy, Alastair Pennycook 4. An exploration of the relationship between self-access and independent learning, Susan Sheerin 5. Teaching and language learning in self-access centres: changing roles?, Gill Sturtridge 6. Self-access: why do we want t and what can it do?, William Littlewood Part II: Roles and relationships 7. Does the teacher have a role in autonomous leanguage learning?, Peter Voller 8. The guru and the conjurer: aspects of counselling for self-access, Philip Riley 9. Shooting arrows at the sun: perspectives on a pedagogy for autonomy, Michael P. Breen and Sarah J. Mann 10. Confidence building for classroom teachers, Felicity O'Dell 11. Learner training for autonomous language learning, Edith M. Esch Part III: Methods and materials 12. Self-access work and curriculum ideologies, Andrew Littlejohn 13. Designing and adapting materials to encourage learner autonomy, David Nunan 14. Involving learners in developing learning methods: exploiting text corpora in self-access, Guy Aston 15. Preparing learners for independence: resources beyond the classroom, Stephen M. Ryan 16. Responding authentically to authentic texts: a problem for self-access language learning?, David Little 17. Providing computerized self-access opportunities for the development of writing skills, John Milton References. Index.

What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

Abstract: Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations.Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.

Norms, culture, and world politics: insights from sociology's institutionalism

Abstract: International relations scholars have become increasingly interested in norms of behavior, intersubjective understandings, culture, identity, and other social features of political life. However, our investigations largely have been carried out in disciplinary isolation. We tend to treat our arguments that these things "matter" as discoveries and research into social phenomena as forays into uncharted territory. However, scholars within the fields of international law, history, anthropology, and sociology have always known that social realities influence behavior, and each field has incorporated these social constructions in different ways into research programs. Sociologists working in organization theory have developed a particularly powerful set of arguments about the roles of norms and culture in international life that pose direct challenges to realist and liberal theories in political science. Their arguments locate causal force in an expanding and deepening Western world culture that emphasizes Weberian rationality as the means to both

Contagious Currency Crises: First Tests*

Abstract: We address the fact that the incidence of speculative attacks tends to be temporally correlated; that is, currency crises appear to pass "contagiously" from one country to another. The paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature. We also provide empirical evidence consistent with the contagious nature of currency crises. We estimate that the existence of a currency crisis elsewhere in the world (whether successful or not) raises the probability of an attack on the domestic currency by 8 percent, even after taking account of a variety of domestic political and economic factors.

American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword

Abstract: "American values are quite complex," writes Seymour Martin Lipset, "particularly because of paradoxes within our culture that permit pernicious and beneficial social phenomena to arise simultaneously from the same basic beliefs." Born out of revolution, the United States has always considered itself an exceptional country of citizens unified by an allegiance to a common set of ideals, individualism, anti-statism, populism, and egalitarianism. This ideology, Professor Lipset observes, defines the limits of political debate in the United States and shapes our society. American Exceptionalism explains why socialism has never taken hold in the United States, why Americans are resistant to absolute quotas as a way to integrate blacks and other minorities, and why American religion and foreign policy have a moralistic, crusading streak.

Democracy and development in Africa

Abstract: Despite three decades of preoccupation with development in Africa, the economies of most African nations are still stagnating or regressing. For most Africans, incomes are lower than they were two decades ago, health prospects are poorer, malnourishment is widespread, and infrastructures and social institutions are breaking down.An array of factors have been offered to explain the apparent failure of development in Africa, including the colonial legacy, social pluralism, corruption, poor planning and incompetent management, limited in-flow of foreign capital, and low levels of saving and investment. Alone or in combination, these factors are serious impediments to development, but Claude Ake contends that the problem is not that development has failed, but that it was never really on the agenda. He maintains that political conditions in Africa are the greatest impediment to development.In this book, Ake traces the evolution and failure of development policies, including the IMF stabilization programs that have dominated international efforts. He identifies the root causes of the problem in the authoritarian political structure of the African states derived from the previous colonial entities. Ake sketches the alternatives that are struggling to emerge from calamitous failure--economic development based on traditional agriculture, political development based on the decentralization of power, and reliance on indigenous communities that have been providing some measure of refuge from the coercive power of the central state. Ake's argument may become a new paradigm for development in Africa.

Classifying political regimes

Abstract: This study presents a classification of political regimes as democracies and dictatorships for a set of 141 countries between 1950 or the year of independence and 1990. It improves existing classifications by a better grounding in political theory, an exclusive reliance on observables rather than on subjective judgements, an explicit distinction between systematic and random errors, and a more extensive coverage.

When parties matter: A review of the possibilities and limits of partisan influence on public policy

Abstract: This essay explores the possibilities and limits of partisan influence on public policy in democratic nations. It will be pointed out, that differences in party composition of govern- ment, in general, matter in public policy in constitutional democracy. However, the extent to which parties influence public policy is to a significant extent contingent upon the type of democracy and countermajoritarian institutional constraints of central state government. Large partisan effects typify majoritarian democracies and states, in which the legislature and the executive are 'sovereign'. More complex and more difficult to identify is the partisan influence on public policy in consensus democracies and in states, in which the political-institutional circumstances allow for co-governance of the opposition party. Narrowly circumscribed is the room to manoeuvre available to incumbent parties above all in political systems which have been marked by countermajoritarian institutional pluralism or institutional 'semi-sovereignty'. The article suggests, that it would be valuable if direct effects and interaction effects of the party composition of government and state structures featured more prominently in future research on comparative public policy.

Internationalization and domestic politics

Abstract: Part I. Theoretical Framework: 1. Internationalization and domestic politics: an introduction Helen V. Milner and Robert O. Keohane 2. The impact of the international economy on national policies Jeffrey A. Friedan and Ronald Rogowski 3. Internationalization, institutions, and political change Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange Part II. The Industrialized Democracies: 4. Capital mobility, trade and the domestic politics of economic policy Geoffrey Garrett 5. Economic integration and the politics of monetary policy in the United States Jeffrey A. Friedan 6. Internationalization and electoral politics in Japan Frances McCall Rosenbluth Part III. Internationalization and Socialism: 7. Stalin's revenge: institutional barriers to internationalization in the Soviet Union Matthew Evangelista 8. Internationalization and China's economic reforms Susan Shirk Part IV. International Economic Crisis and Developing Countries: 9. The political economy of financial internationalization in the developing world Stephan Haggard and Sylvia Maxfield Part V. Conclusion: 10. Internationalization and domestic politics: a conclusion Helen V. Milner and Robert O. Keohane.

National diversity and global capitalism

Abstract: How does globalization change national economies and politics? Are rising levels of trade, capital flows, new communication technologies, and deregulation forcing all societies to converge toward the same structures of production and distribution? Suzanne Berger and Ronald Dore have brought together a distinguished group of experts to consider how the international economy shapes and transforms domestic structures. Drawing from experience in the United States, Europe, and Asia, the contributors ask whether competition, imitation, diffusion of best practice, trade, and financial flows are reducing national diversities. The authors seek to understand whether the sources of national political autonomy are undermined by changes in the international system. Can distinctive varieties of capitalism that incorporate unique and valued institutions for achieving social welfare survive in a global economy? The contributions to the volume present a challenge to conventional views on the extent and scope of globalization as well as to predictions of the imminent disappearance of the nation-state’s leverage over the economy.

Choosing Europe?: The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union

Abstract: This is a book about elections to the European Parliament, their failure to legitimate and control the exercise of power in the European Union, and the consequences of this failure for domestic politics in EU member states. It also sheds new light on why voters behave the way they do. The authors examine the 1989 Europe-wide elections with the aid of large-scale surveys fielded in all twelve member countries of the (then) European Community--placing European citizens within their institutional, political, economic, and social contexts. In particular, because three countries held national elections concurrently with the 1989 European elections, the study controls for the presence or absence of a national election context--permitting the authors to investigate electoral behavior in general, not just at European elections. Looking at such behavior while taking account of the strategic contexts within which elections are held has yielded new insights about turnout and party choice, while clarifying the crisis of legitimacy that faces the European Union. The more recent Europe-wide elections of 1994 are used to validate the findings. This book will be of interest to political scientists interested in elections, the European Union, comparative politics, and political development.