Polity articles from March 1998

Polity archives from March 1998

Why we give: testing economic and social psychological accounts of altruism. (donations to overseas charities, non-governmental organizations)
March 22, 1998... Altruistic behavior poses a challenge to prevailing models of individuals as rational self-interested actors. This examination of individual donations to overseas charities permits an evaluation of competing economic and social psychological...

Short-term political events and British government popularity: direct and indirect effects.
March 22, 1998... We investigate the effect of non-economic variables on public opinion in Great Britain. We find that such factors have a direct impact on the popularity of the British prime minister, but not on the popularity of the governing party. Rather, the...

The stories of citizens: Rousseau, Montesquieu, and de Stael challenge Enlightenment reason. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and Germaine de Stael)
March 22, 1998... Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and Germaine de Stael tell stories that warn against adopting the model of manly citizenship that emerged from the basic tenets of Enlightenment thought. This model includes idealization of the...

Policymakers and wordsmiths: writing for the president under Johnson and Nixon. (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon)
March 22, 1998... The writing of speeches for the President is inevitably connected to public policy. Speeches provide opportunities to articulate policy, and their preparation often forces the setting of agendas and the determination or clarification of policy...

Democracy in the balance: the role of statist, liberal, and Republican institutions in Tocqueville's theory of liberty. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
March 22, 1998... In recent years scholars have challenged the traditional interpretation of Tocqueville as an unproblematic liberal theorist and emphasized the "strange" and "elusive" qualities of his work. I extend this line of inquiry to Tocqueville's...

The spirit of Tocqueville's democracies. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
March 22, 1998... Democracy in America marks the beginning of Alexis de Tocqueville's critical engagement not only with democracy but also with the French Revolution. His analysis of the pre-constitutional formation of American democracy argues that the colonial...

Exploring the symbolic racism thesis: the German sense of responsibility for the Jews.
March 22, 1998... The "symbolic racism" thesis now prominent in discussions of American politics holds that racism is expressed through a combination of negative racial affect and traditional values This note provider a comparative perspective on these debates by...

Reconstructing America.
March 22, 1998... James W. Ceaser. New Haven. Yale University Press, 1997. The prospects for liberal democracy have Dever been simultaneously so bright and so grim. At the moment of its great victory ova its ideological foe, at a time when much of the world...

A Requiem for Modern Politics.
March 22, 1998... William Ophuls. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. The prospects for liberal democracy have Dever been simultaneously so bright and so grim. At the moment of its great victory ova its ideological foe, at a time when much of the world appears to...