American Political Science Review articles from December 1995

American Political Science Review archives from December 1995

A model of muddling through. (incrementalism in political science)
December 1, 1995... Old theories in political science rarely die; they usually just fade away. This has been incrementalism's fate. Even in hindsight, this was a curious end to incrementalism's intellectual trajectory. The basic ideas of "muddling through" were...

War and the survival of political leaders: a comparative study of regime types and political accountability.
December 1, 1995... On 6 April 1982, six days after the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, the New York Times correspondent in Buenos Aires gave this evaluation of the position of Argentine president Leopoldo Galtieri: "Political leaders here . . . agree he...

Redistributive politics and economic efficiency.
December 1, 1995... Technical progress and international trade bring economic benefits to the nation as a whole, but both processes create some losers, namely those workers and owners of other factors whose incomes are tied to the industries or sectors that do not...

The politics of property rights.
December 1, 1995... Development scholars typically frame the de bate over land tenure in polemic terms. Neoclassical economists insist that customary forms of land tenure impede economic growth in Africa (Dorner 1972; Harrison 1987; World Bank 1974), while a second...

Economic crisis and political regime change: an event history analysis.
December 1, 1995... One of the most prominent subjects in comparative politics during the past few decades has been the relationship between economic crisis and domestic political regime change. Beginning with the pathbreaking work of Guillermo O'Donnell (1973),...

Nature or nurture? Sources of firm preference for national health reform.
December 1, 1995... Business influence over public policy in general and social policy in particular is hotly contested among political scientists. Yet the opposing camps in both debates are in fundamental agreement about the source of corporate preferences. In the...

Domestic institutions and international bargaining: the role of agent veto in two-level games.
December 1, 1995... According to Putnam (1988), two-level games characterize situations in which a negotiator finds herself simultaneously engaging in both domestic and international bargaining. Domestic bargaining is necessary because an international agreement is...

Fully proportional representation.
December 1, 1995... Duncan Black (1958) defines proportional representation as an attempt to select a political assembly that is a "reflexion" of the "shades of political opinion" in society as a whole. Most electoral systems in use today for national elections...

Theorizing difference: voices from the margins. (political theory)
December 1, 1995... The footprint in the sand that so worried Crusoe's nights, that compelled him to build a fortress, and then another to protect his new world order, disappears from his nightmares once Friday embraces, then internalizes, his master's voice and can...

Richard Rorty, liberalism and the politics of redescription.
December 1, 1995... In the essay "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope," Richard Rorty (1983) contends that perhaps the most important challenge facing social scientists today is that of reinvigorating the long dormant Deweyan ideal of social science. This ideal,...

Winning the local vote: the effectiveness of constituency campaign spending in Great Britain, 1983-1992.
December 1, 1995... Electoral campaigning is a major part of any political party's activities. Campaigning fulfils a multiplicity of functions. Ideally, it should inform the electorate about a party's policy, program, and ideology. Furthermore, campaigning can serve...

Beyond Tocqueville, please! (comment on Rogers Smith, American Political Science Review, vol. 87, p. 549)(includes response)
December 1, 1995... COMMENT Rogers Smith's "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America" (1993) both speaks to and embodies several deficiencies in the explication of American political thought. The most troublesome problems are the...

Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought.
December 1, 1995... Terence Bali's new book collects a dozen essays (five previously unpublished) that tackle issues large and small involved in the study of the history of political theory. A companion volume to Ball's Transforming Political Discourse, (1988) and...

Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange.
December 1, 1995... This volume is the most lively and penetrating introduction I know to the debate on postmodernism in feminist theory. Its bite is interactive, as four contending theorists directly address one another's positions, then return to the fray after...

Interactions: Some Contacts Between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences.
December 1, 1995... From Aristotle's biological analogies to recent work in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, social and political thought has kept close connections with the natural sciences. Many of these encounters have been fruitful, but some are merely...

From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political Conceptions.
December 1, 1995... Postmodern artists, symbiotically nurtured by their partners in academia and criticism, are nothing if not politically relevant. More effort is invested in the explanatory concordances of exhibited work than in the work itself. And the artwork...

The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt.
December 1, 1995... In the 20 years since Hannah Arendt's death, debates over the meaning and significance of her work have come to figure prominently in a broad array of academic journals in the United States and, increasingly, in France and Germany. It is likely...

One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict.
December 1, 1995... The newspapers for (27 May 1995) report more than 40 villagers shot and hacked to death by the Tamil Tigers in Eastern Sri Lanka, while in the refugee-packed Bosnian city of Tuzla an air-burst rocket fired by Serb forces killed over 70 children,...

Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.
December 1, 1995... David Hollinger argues that multiculturalism has understandably risen in response to the gap between the promise of equality to all Americans regardless of color, and the reality of inequality that has persisted for some racial and ethnic groups....

Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy.
December 1, 1995... Holmes rides again. This time, Stephen Holmes is after libertarians for obscuring the richness of liberal theories of human nature, left-wing critics for alleging that liberal theory has an antiwelfare bias, and both for misunderstanding how...

The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes.
December 1, 1995... We misinterpret both Rousseau and the whole movement of the Enlightenment for want of understanding the relationship between the two. Previous scholars have either made Rousseau a member of the Enlightenment and ignored his critique of it or...

Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era.
December 1, 1995... Locke in America is an ambitious work that takes on many significant historical and interpretative questions. It is more like two books of roughly equal length in one volume: one that tries to rescue Locke from the mistakes of various scholars...

Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge.
December 1, 1995... Chaos theory might prove an apposite simile for educational policy and practice in the contemporary United States. Despite the work of an "education president," thousands of state-level initiatives, and the fanfare of Goals 2000, we currently...

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought after World War II.
December 1, 1995... If I may generalize about diverse essays, this work addresses primarily the thought of Strauss (successfully) and Arendt (modestly) and contains little on American political thought. It chooses to focus on only two figures, leaving out others...

A Civil Tonque: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism.
December 1, 1995... A Civil Tongue is an intelligent and innovative contribution to the "dialogic turn" in contemporary theories of justice. Like others working in this area, Mark Kingwell sees dialogue and the mutual or civic understanding that can be engendered...

Critique of Modernity.
December 1, 1995... One of the peculiar attributes of the modern and contemporary understanding of modernity is that it is no longer contrasted with antiquity. It has come to be viewed as an independent autonomous topic. The great advantage of this...

Law in Civil Society.
December 1, 1995... Law in Civil Society is a difficult book to read, but it may be well worth the effort. Richard Dien Winfield provides a modern restatement of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, though one with important modifications. Those unfamiliar with the...

Natural Rights and the New Republicanism.
December 1, 1995... The point of departure for this painstaking and exhaustive account of the origin and development of Whig political philosophy is a comparison of the English Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence. The comparison...

Expecting Trouble: Surrogacy, Fetal Abuse and New Reproductive Technologies.
December 1, 1995... The maternal-fetal relationship continues to be reshaped by the changing technological context of prenatal medicine and by our expanding knowledge of fetal development. Moreover, a legal system based on adversarial relationships and assignment of...

Politics and the Class Divide: Working People and the Middle Class Left.
December 1, 1995... David Croteau's Politics and the Class Divide is a fine attempt to explain the middle-class base of left and left-liberal social movements. Croteau explores the reasons behind white working-class nonparticipation in movements that are working for...

Presidential Lightning Rods: The Politics of Blame Avoidance.
December 1, 1995... This book resurrects, and builds on, Pendleton Herring's more-than-50-year-old argument about the limits of presidential responsibility. Herring believed that presidents ought not to carry the full burden of accumulated grievances that follow...

The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900.
December 1, 1995... At the March 1995 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, more than two hundred historians of the United States gathered to discuss the revival of political history. The advent of social history, labor history, women's history, black...

The Fiscal Crisis of the States: Lessons for the Future.
December 1, 1995... Now that the libertarian wing of the Republican party controls the national political agenda, it is a good time to read a book about the states. This is because the easiest way to reduce the size of the federal government is to shift unwanted...

Challengers, Competition, and Reelection: Comparing Senate and House Elections.
December 1, 1995... Although Senate elections have been more competitive than House races for over two decades, scholars are still uncertain about the underlying causes of this phenomenon. Some students of congressional elections have argued that senators are more...

With Reverence and Contempt: How Americans Think About Their President.
December 1, 1995... The era of the heroic presidency in political science may finally be over. The kind of veneration for the presidency that propelled the writings of a Clinton Rossiter or a Richard E. Neustadt is seldom found among the current generation of...

Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment.
December 1, 1995... Few subjects of constitutional inquiry are more important than constitutional change. The reason, however, is not because of the intrinsic merits of change but because change is the natural way we moderns conceptualize responding to...

The End of the Republican Era.
December 1, 1995... All of us who know Ted Lowi know that he is never timid or boring. His latest work, The End of the Republican Era, is cleanly and forcefully argued and filled with vivid conclusions. It is also a pessimistic book - full of concerns and even...

Presidential Campaigns and American Self Images.
December 1, 1995... It is rare to find a book that provides a truly fresh perspective on the well-covered territory of American electoral campaigns. Most studies proceed theoretically from the traditional descriptive, social-psychological, or rational actor...

Reversals of Fortune: Public Policy and Private Interests.
December 1, 1995... What made tax reform possible in the mid-1980s? What accounts for the decline of anticompetitive regulation since the late 1970s? Why haven't various industries seeking greater trade protection during the 1980s been more successful? How have...

The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse.
December 1, 1995... Carol Nackenoff has written an engaging, wide-ranging, and sympathetic study of Horatio Alger's contributions to American political discourse in the late nineteenth century. Disputing the conventional wisdom, which simply dismisses Alger as an...

The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture.
December 1, 1995... A fascinating moment in cultural, social, and political history is here evoked in this highly readable book by a professor of Philosophy and Social Policy at Monmouth College. Oakes states his thesis with admirable clarity. He would analyze "the...

City-Building in America.
December 1, 1995... Anthony Orum employs the method of comparative case analysis to build a general argument concerning the developmental trajectory of American cities. He devotes more than half his book to the history of Milwaukee since its inception in 1818. Then...

Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management.
December 1, 1995... A spate of recent books on the First Amendment free speech clause has appeared, inspired largely by debates about regulating pornography and hate speech. They range from advocacy to systematic constitutional interpretation, and occupy every point...

The Politics of Problem Definition: Shaping the Policy Agenda.
December 1, 1995... David Rochefort and Roger Cobb are well known to scholars interested in policy development and the policy process - Cobb for his truly groundbreaking work with Charles Elder on agenda setting in Participation in American Politics (1983) and...

Public Entrepreneurs: Agents for Change in American Government.
December 1, 1995... What is public entrepreneurship? It is, first of all, an alertness to opportunities for personal gain in the public sector - power, celebrity, personal achievement, perhaps more than financial gain. It is the ability to discover unfulfilled needs...

Abortion Politics in American States.
December 1, 1995... In recent years, a number of books have addressed the volatile area of American abortion politics. Therefore, it is important to ask what another volume contributes to this literature. According to the editors, there were two major goals for this...

Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking: The U.S. House of Representatives in the Postreform Era.
December 1, 1995... In a major - and more important - complement to her 1983 book, Majority Leadership in the U.S. House, Barbara Sinclair has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the conditions under which activist party leadership occurs in...

The Case Against School Choice: Politics, Markets, and Fools.
December 1, 1995... Americans have a long tradition of treating schools as if they should be - and for the most part are - outside the messy realm of politics. Political scientists know better, but they have succumbed in at least one respect. The bland and...

Wilsonian Idealism in America.
December 1, 1995... As the century draws to a close, political thought in Western democracies is in turmoil. Fascism, communism, and socialism - the great "isms" that defined much of twentieth-century political life - are in disrepute. Liberalism stands triumphant...

The Rebirth of Federalism: Slouching toward Washington.
December 1, 1995... The Rebirth of Federalism is a follow-on and update of David Walker's 1981 book, Toward a Functioning Federalism. Walker concludes in his new book that the American federal system is still not functioning properly. The system is somewhat less...

Black Politics and Black Political Behavior: A Linkage Analysis.
December 1, 1995... Black Politics and Black Political Behavior is one of the most ambitious and theoretically driven volumes of collected works about African Americans that has recently appeared in the social sciences. Editor Hanes Walton, Jr., is to be commended...

Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic.
December 1, 1995... This book is an analytic narrative a la Foucault of the ideological redirection, confirmation, and consolidation of the Chinese Communist party brought about by Mao Zedong in Yan'an from 1937-45. The flavor of the book is best conveyed in its own...

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times.
December 1, 1995... The world system research program is now about 20 years old. In that time, several different perspectives have emerged and undergone elaboration and (in some respects) cross-fertilization; that is to say, the theories have become richer, more...

Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping.
December 1, 1995... Chinese politics often seem irrational if not inscrutable. Much of the work of specialists on Chinese domestic politics seeks to uncover principles that will clarify the seeming disorder of Chinese political life. Trained in American social...

African Capitalists in African Development.
December 1, 1995... In the search for causes of the economic crisis in Africa, much has been written about the shortcomings of capitalist classes. The literature on modern entrepreneurship portrayed African business elites as having low achievement motivation and...

Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective.
December 1, 1995... In recent years, immigration has become a central issue of politics and public policy in the advanced industrialized states. The last decade has been characterized by accelerated migration movements, a widening of the range of nationalities and...

Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro.
December 1, 1995... This book about the accomplishments and current crisis of the celebrated Cuban model of development comes very timely now that the demise of the final remains of communism and centrally planned systems seems to be a matter of time only. What are...

Local Elites in Western Democracies: A Comparative Analysis of Urban Political Leaders in the United States, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
December 1, 1995... In Local Elites in Western Democracies, three distinguished political scientists provide a valuable and extremely well executed comparative study of local political elites in the United States, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Representing distinct...

Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution.
December 1, 1995... From its unorthodox title to the bold conceptual innovations, Fish's book rejects many established views concerning the end of Sovietism and the rise of the new Russian state. Unlike (for instance) Moshe Lewin in The Gorbachev Phenomenon (1990),...

Marxism, China, and Development: Reflections on Theory and Reality.
December 1, 1995... This book consists of two parts that are counterposed to each other. The first part deals with deviations from a theory, Marxism, and their disastrous consequences in the form of economic and political failures in the former Soviet Union and...

Civil Society and the State of Africa.
December 1, 1995... John Harbeson and his colleagues have put together a useful and comprehensive collection on a subject that has attracted wide attention from students of African politics. In 13 essays, 12 of which were culled from more than two dozen presented at...

The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations.
December 1, 1995... How do the wealthy few maintain their dominance in capitalist democracies over the working classes, despite obvious and enormous inequalities? How do men maintain their privileged status over women, or whites over racial minorities? The stability...

The Transformation of European Social Democracy.
December 1, 1995... No simple patterns characterize the recent electoral fortunes of European socialist parties. There have been some rather obvious losers - the British Labour party (although this may be changing) and German socialists; and there have been some...

How Political Parties Work: Perpectives from Within.
December 1, 1995... Once again, Kay Lawson has edited a book on comparative political parties with a punchy title and pithy contents. In her earlier and often-cited When Parties Fail (1988, with Peter Merkl), Lawson assembled a series of case studies describing...

Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America.
December 1, 1995... The study of Latin American political parties can be dated largely from a handful of pioneering works appearing in the 1960s. With the subsequent wave of authoritarian regimes and the powerful if impermanent theorizing that accompanied the demise...

Unruly Order: Violence, Power, and Cultural Identity in the High Provinces of Southern Peru.
December 1, 1995... The spectacular rise of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas in Peru sparked great interest among scholars not only in political science but also in other disciplines, including anthropology. Anthropologist Deborah Poole emphasizes in...

Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives.
December 1, 1995... The 13 essays in this book, written mostly by historians with a sprinkling of journalism and literature professors, explore the role played by mass media in the unfolding of revolutionary situations. The inquiry spans nearly 350 years - evidence...

Organizing Societies for War: The Process and Consequences of Societal Militarization.
December 1, 1995... Regan argues in Organizing Societies for War that societal militarization is a complex political and sociological phenomenon and analyzes the potentially self-amplifying feedback relationship between societal militarization and violent foreign...

Inheritance in Public Policy: Change Without Choice in Britain.
December 1, 1995... Rose and Davies have written a book that rests on substantial and careful research. Equally important, they have written a book based on an intriguing idea - yet another in the long series of intriguing ideas with which Richard Rose has been...

Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985.
December 1, 1995... For those interested in the political economy of development and underdevelopment, Brazil and South Africa have long provided fascinating cases for examining the complex and multidimensional features of "late industrialization." For those...

Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity.
December 1, 1995... This collection of essays is a useful introduction to the field of Russian and Soviet labor history. The 14 chapters range over the period from the 1870s to the 1930s and are written by the leading specialists in the field. Over the past 20...

Race and Culture: A World View.
December 1, 1995... The reexamination of the nature of apparent differences among racial and ethnic groups - and the implications of these differences for public policy - has recently attracted widespread attention. The intense public discussion (including a level...

National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia.
December 1, 1995... This collection of conference papers is the second in a series of 10 volumes planned by the Russian Littoral Project, sponsored jointly by the University of Maryland at College Park and by the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International...

Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal: Disciples and Citizens in Fatick.
December 1, 1995... In Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal, Leonardo Villalon makes an excellent contribution to what has become, in recent years, the dominant issue in African political studies - the relationship between state and society. While the book is...

The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship.
December 1, 1995... Abraham Ben-Zvi's The United States and Israel is the first major effort to create a theoretical and comparative approach to the relationship between the United States and Israel. Most of the previous literature has been written either by...

European Community Decision Making: Models, Applications, and Comparisons.
December 1, 1995... This book lies at the intersection of three research areas: applied modeling, political forecasting, and comparative politics. Its subject matter (or, more accurately, its laboratory), given its foundation in applied modeling, is decision making...

The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space.
December 1, 1995... In a characteristically thought-provoking essay, R. B. J. Walker asks, near the beginning of this book, "Who now really believes there is a theory of the state?" (p. 24). The very fact that this question can now be raised with an international...

Power Rules: The Evolution of NATO's Conventional Force Posture.
December 1, 1995... John Duffield has written a fine history of the evolution of NATO's conventional force posture from 1949 until the end of the Cold War in 1989. In contrast to the role of nuclear forces in NATO strategy, the role of conventional forces has long...

Israel's Nuclear Dilemma.
December 1, 1995... As Professor of political science and a fellow at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Yair Evron is perhaps Israel's top academic strategist. His writings include deterrence of nuclear war, conventional warfare, and...

Sunken Treasures Naval Arms Control between the Wars.
December 1, 1995... Emily Goldman has written a sound historical narrative exploring the interwar experience with naval arms control. She makes an important contribution by reminding us that conventional arms control was practiced by a number of states in...

Whose World Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War.
December 1, 1995... Several years have passed since the end of the Cold War. Despite expectations in some quarters that a "new world order" would soon emerge, political turmoil abounds. Although hostilities have not flared up between any of the great powers,...

International Institutions and the Political Economy of Integration.
December 1, 1995... The enormity of the literature on international organizations creates problems for an author seeking to synthesize that scholarship and draw out its policy implications. The approach taken by Miles Kahler in this slim volume (which comes packaged...

The Convention on the Rights of the Child: United Nations Lawmaking on Human Rights.
December 1, 1995... The Convention on the Rights of the Child is Lawrence LeBlanc's third major contribution to the human rights literature. The first, his 1977 book, The OAS and the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, was based on his doctoral dissertation....

The Great Powers and Global Struggle: 1490-1990.
December 1, 1995... The last decade-and-a-half of historical-structural studies (including those on long cycles) saw two insights established among the basics of world politics: the existence and the centrality (over the past half-millennium) of the role of global...