State (polity)

About: State (polity) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 36954 publications have been published within this topic receiving 719822 citations. The topic is also known as: state (polity).

Setting the terms of relief: Explaining state policy choices in the devolution revolution

Abstract: The landmark welfare legislation of 1996 offers students of politics a unique opportunity to pinpoint the determinants of state-level policy choices-a case in which the fifty states responded virtually simultaneously to a single policy mandate. Taking advantage of this opportunity, we investigate the factors that led states to make restrictive policy choices after 1996 and use this analysis to evaluate general -theories of welfare politics. Specifically, we test six types of explanations for why some states responded by adopting 'get-tough" program rules: theories that identify welfare policy as a site of ideological conflict, as an outcome of electoral politics, as a domain of policy innovation, as an instrument of social control, as an outlet for racial resentments, and as an expression of moral values. The results of our ordered and binary logit models suggest that state policies have been shaped by a variety of social and political forces, but especially by the racial composition of families who rely on program benefits. n 1996, the federal government passed legislation that transformed public assistance provision in the United States. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) abolished the federal entitlement to aid that grew out of the Social Security Act of 1935 and reached fruition through legal victories in the 1960s (Mink 1998; Lurie 1997). In its place, the federal government created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a system of block grants that gives states more freedom to select among policy tools but also imposes a forceful mandate to promote work, reduce welfare usage, and change poor people's behaviors (Albelda and Tilly 1997). In this article, we present a political analysis of the ways states responded to this new policy environment. Specifically, we investigate the factors that shaped state-level policy choices after 1996 and use this analysis as a basis for evaluating general explanations for welfare policy outcomes. Our study builds on a long tradition of quantitative research that has attempted to illuminate state-level politics by asking why states adopt different welfare policies (Howard 1999; Rom 1999; Brace and Jewitt 1995; Peterson and Rom 1990; Plotnick and Winters 1985). The analysis presented here, however, departs from prior work in two important respects. First, most state-level research has sought to explain interstate differences in benefit levels and spending patterns (Howard 1999, 424-425;

Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Abstract: Critique and Crisis established Reinhart Koselleck's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences.Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics.Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite.The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of History at the University of Bielefeld and author of Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role

Abstract: Chapter One Introduction: What Makes a Great Power? 3 Chapter Two A Theory of Foreign Policy: Why Do States Expand? 13 Chapter Three Imperial Understretch: Power and Nonexpansion, 1865-1889 44> Chapter Four The Rise of the American State, 1877-1896: The Foundation for a New Foreign Policy 90 Chapter Five The New Diplomacy, 1889-1908: The Emergence of a Great Power 128 Chapter Six Conclusion: Strong Nation, Weak State 181 Index 193

Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia

Abstract: Preface to the New and Revised Edition Preface to the Paperback Reissue Introduction Chapter 1. Cultures of Nationalism: Political Cosmology and the Passions Part I: Evil and the State: Sinhalese Naitonalism, Violence, and the Power of Hierarchy Chapter 2. Ethnic Violence and the Force of History in Legend Chapter 3. Evil, Power, and the State Chapter 4. Ideological Practice, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Passions Part II: People Against the State: Australian Nationalism and Egalitarian Individualism Chapter 5. When the World Crumbles and the Heavens Fall In: War, Death, and the Creation of Nation Chapter 6. But the Band Played "Waltzing Maltilda": National Ceremonial and the Anatomy of Egalitarianism Chapter 7. Ethnicity and Intolerance: Egalitarian Nationalism and Its Political Practice Chapter 8. Nationalism, Tradition, and Political Culture Notes References