Polity articles from July 2008

Polity archives from July 2008

Gay marriage as a religious right: reframing the legal debate over gay marriage in the United States *.
July 1, 2008... The definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman has origins in sectarian religious views of marriage. Nevertheless, proponents of gay marriage have not yet fully explored the religious discrimination inherent in public policies...

Spectacular resistance: the billionaires for Bush and the art of political culture jamming *.
July 1, 2008... Political theorists and pundits often attribute the malaise that they argue hangs over U.S. politics to the omnipresence of political spectacle, where participants are reduced to spectator-voters rather than engaged as active citizens in the...

Introduction *.(POLITY FORUM: Politics, History, and The State of the State)
July 1, 2008... Forty years ago, J.P. Nettl exhorted scholars to rescue the concept of the state from its "skeletal, ghostly existence" and to reintegrate it into the concerns and methods of social science. (1) Much effort has since been expended upon...

Appointing federal judges: law, politics, and democracy.
July 1, 2008... Michael Comiskey, Seeking Justices: The Judging of Supreme Court Nominees. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Richard Davis, Electing Justice: Fixing the Supreme Court Nomination Process. New York: Oxford University...

Valor and Valkyries: why the state needs Valhalla *.(POLITY FORUM: Politics, History, and The State of the State)
July 1, 2008... Whenever and wherever Vikings fought, they believed that the Valkyries would come. With sparks shooting from their spears and their corselets spattered with blood, the Valkyries would fly over the fighting and select the most valiant of those...

Rethinking the early American state.
July 1, 2008... Three themes dominate recent historical writing by historians on the American state in the period before 1900. The first is the agency of specific governmental institutions such as the army, the patent office, and the courts. The second is the...

Finding the American state: transcending the "statelessness" account.
July 1, 2008... Few scholars working in American political development now fail to accept that the apparent "statelessness" of the United States, once a commonplace among students of American government and politics, is an illusion. (1) Recent scholarship on...

The old institutionalism and the new.
July 1, 2008... When scholars of the United States talk about "the state as a conceptual variable," or "bringing the state back in," it is not always clear what is being prescribed, or even what the object of study is. To some extent, this dissonance is the...

A state of legislatures.(POLITY FORUM: Politics, History, and The State of the State)
July 1, 2008... The history of the early American state has long been dominated by two overarching assumptions. The first is that prior to the revolution in governance precipitated by the Civil War, the early American state was exceptionally "weak,"...

The state in a blue uniform *.
July 1, 2008... Introduction In reconsidering the early national state, no institution seems more in need of a broad reassessment than the United States Army. Despite a widespread fear of standing armies, the military became the largest part of the new...

American political development, state-building, and the "security state": reviving a research agenda.
July 1, 2008... Wars make states, as Charles Tilly has famously remarked, and states make wars. (1) If true, the United States' current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global "war on terror" should be causing a further building of the American state--and...

Government, the state, and governance *.(POLITY FORUM: Politics, History, and The State of the State)
July 1, 2008... In 1968, J.P. Nettl exhorted us to rescue the concept of the state, and to make it more relevant in our scholarship. (1) Forty years later, we are still struggling with that enterprise. (2) How can we better define the state, and more clearly...