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Comparative Politics (comparative + politics)
Selected AbstractsThink Locally, Act Globally: Toward a Transnational Comparative Politics,INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2010Terrence Lyons Political dynamics and outcomes around the globe have been transformed by globalization, new patterns of human mobility, and the development of innovative transnational social networks. These new political processes are rooted in communities and networks that are not restricted by geographic location. Although politics has been delinked from territory in this way with regard to processes and actors, this does not mean that transnational politics focuses exclusively on universal issues or global approaches to social justice. Rather much of the new transnational politics is intensely focused on specific locations, identities, and issues (for example, "globalized" neighborhood associations, ethnicities, patrimonialism). Transnational politics also includes new conceptions and practices of citizenship and accountability (for example, legislative seats reserved for expatriate labor migrants) as the body politic becomes increasing mobile, political affinities delinked from geographic proximity, and critical constituencies reside outside of the territory of the state. This article outlines a new approach to investigating the actors and processes at the heart of contemporary transnational politics, with a particular focus on the ways in which diasporas are strategically constructed and mobilized to advance political goals through the use of salient symbols, identity frames, and social networks. [source] Negotiating Russian Federalism: A Simulation for Comparative PoliticsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 4 2002Christopher Marsh While the use of simulations in the international relations classroom has proliferated over the past decade, this pedagogical tool has been largely neglected in the comparative politics classroom. Simulations in comparative politics can be a useful component in teaching students about the diversity within foreign countries and the dynamic of domestic policymaking. We describe here an informative and easy,to,run simulation on Russian federalism which can be integrated into courses on Russian politics or easily adapted for use in other courses, especially those focusing on countries in which center,regional relations are an important dimension. The simulation is based on the Russian Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Federal Assembly, and is a great way to illustrate through experiential learning the quid pro quo of Russian federalism. We provide detailed information on English,language sources that both instructors and students can use during the simulation, along with an Appendix and a Website that provides everything instructors need to run the simulation in their own classes. [source] Reintegrating the Subdisciplines of International and Comparative PoliticsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 4 2003Bruce Russett First page of article [source] Differentiating the democratic performance of the WestEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2003JOE FOWERAKER It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the ,rest'. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy. [source] Government partisanship in Western democracies, 1945,1998EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2002Heemin Kim In this article, we put forward a continuous measure of government partisanship, which allows meaningful comparisons across countries and across time, for 17 Western democracies for the period of 1945 through 1998. Our measure is predicated upon a manifesto-based measure of party ideology recently developed by Kim and Fording (1998), along with yearly cabinet post data. After discussing the validity of our measure, we replicate one of the most cited works in comparative political economy over the last ten years , Alvarez, Garrett and Lange's (1991) analysis of economic performance , by utilizing our own measure of government partisanship. We conclude that comparativists need to exercise greater caution in interpreting and evaluating the past findings of a large number of multivariate studies in comparative politics. [source] Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Challenging the Property Rights Paradigm in BotswanaGOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2003Amy R. Poteete Recent work in international studies and comparative politics scrutinizes the relative importance of ideas, interests, and institutions as sources of policy change. A growing body of scholarship identifies ideas as the main causal factors, influencing perceived interests as well as perceived policy options. Others contend that policies can best be understood as products of institutions. Neither explanation can account for both policy choice by politicians and the implementation strategies of administrators. In Botswana, the use of professional criteria for hiring and advancement encourages adherence to international professional norms within the bureaucracy, but electoral competition gives politicians more reason to be attentive to local political concerns. The institutions that define relations of authority among actors with different motivations shape the outcomes of policy choice and implementation. Institutions influence the attentiveness of policy-makers to ideas when making decisions, the degree of attention particular policy-makers give to ideas from particular sources, and the degree of acceptance that ideas must achieve to affect policy. Better evaluations of political development can be achieved through attentiveness to the mix of actors involved in policy decisions, the diversity of institutions and ideas that affect their policy preferences, and the relations of authority that shape their relative influence over policy choice and implementation. [source] Negotiating Russian Federalism: A Simulation for Comparative PoliticsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 4 2002Christopher Marsh While the use of simulations in the international relations classroom has proliferated over the past decade, this pedagogical tool has been largely neglected in the comparative politics classroom. Simulations in comparative politics can be a useful component in teaching students about the diversity within foreign countries and the dynamic of domestic policymaking. We describe here an informative and easy,to,run simulation on Russian federalism which can be integrated into courses on Russian politics or easily adapted for use in other courses, especially those focusing on countries in which center,regional relations are an important dimension. The simulation is based on the Russian Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Federal Assembly, and is a great way to illustrate through experiential learning the quid pro quo of Russian federalism. We provide detailed information on English,language sources that both instructors and students can use during the simulation, along with an Appendix and a Website that provides everything instructors need to run the simulation in their own classes. [source] Unipolarity, Globalization, and the War on Terror: Why Security Studies Should Refocus on Comparative Defense,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2007Damon Coletta Changes in the international environment such as the shift toward unipolarity, the rise of globalization, and the expansion of terrorist networks have redefined the sorts of problems confronted by policymakers and military practitioners in the arena of national security. With most of its fundamental concepts and frameworks rooted in the study of international relations (IR), the field of security studies has failed to keep up. Highly educated soldiers and diplomats sent to help rebuild failed or fragmented states are still poorly equipped to identify major obstacles or formulate solutions for accomplishing their missions. The safety of states and societies today depends less exclusively on blocking the military, economic, and ideological initiatives of a foreign power and more on supporting the integrity of members that can participate in an international system regulated by generally agreed-upon rules and conventions. The need to help various types of states under a variety of cultural and economic conditions build legitimate, durable political institutions and functioning societies should push security studies toward a broader examination of comparative politics. Beyond the balance of power and modalities of interstate competition, the new security studies should embrace fundamentals found outside of IR to make more robust intellectual contributions to the examination of comparative defense. [source] Domestic and Transnational Perspectives on DemocratizationINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2004Hans Peter Schmitz The disciplinary separation between comparative politics and international relations is regularly challenged but persists as a result of institutional inertia and hiring practices. This essay uses the issue of democratization in an attempt to go beyond rhetoric and to develop a framework that integrates the role of transnational activism into the analysis of domestic regime change. Comparative research on democratization confirms that underlying socioeconomic conditions affect the long-term sustainability of democratic reforms. The initiation of such reforms, as well as the process they take, can best be understood using an agency-based framework that links domestic and transnational forces. Outside interventions are a potent factor in challenging authoritarian practices, but they do not simply displace existing domestic practices and conditions. Although transnational activists and scholars often celebrate the empowering role of networking and mobilization, the long-term effects of such interventions are still poorly understood. Transnational ties may distract domestic activists from building effective coalitions at home or undermine their legitimacy overall. Transnational scholars and activists can learn from comparative research how different domestic groups use outside interventions to promote their interests at home. [source] Norm Collision: Explaining the Effects of International Human Rights Pressure on State BehaviorINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2004Sonia Cardenas Scholars have offered several types of explanations regarding how international human rights pressure can shape state behavior. Some of these explanations are rationalist-materialist in orientation, emphasizing realist notions of power or neoinstitutionalist concerns with self-interest. Others have drawn on ideational-constructivist accounts to emphasize the role of norms, identity, and social actors. Additionally, scholars have paid attention to how international and domestic factors, sometimes in interaction, mediate human rights change. This essay surveys this literature, noting a trend toward theoretical synthesis; it also draws on insights from quantitative research and comparative politics to account for persistence in human rights violations and, more specifically, the timing of policy successes and failures. [source] Nationalism in Ukraine: Towards A New FrameworkPOLITICS, Issue 2 2000Taras Kuzio Nationalism is the most abused term in contemporary Ukrainian studies. The majority of scholars have failed to place its use within either a theoretical or comparative framework due to the dominance of area studies and the Russo-centricity of Sovietology and post-Sovietology. Instead of defining it within political science parameters, ,nationalism' has been used in a subjective and negative manner by equating it solely in an ethno-cultural sense with Ukrainophones. As a result, scholars tend to place Ukrainophones on the right of the political spectrum. This article argues that this is fundamentally at odds with theory and comparative politics on two counts. First, ,nationalism' is a thin ideology and can function through all manner of ideologies ranging from communism to fascism. Second, all liberal democracies are composed of ethno-cultural and civic features and are therefore permeated by state (civic) nationalism. The article proposes an alternative three-fold framework for understanding ,nationalism' in Ukraine. [source] Constructing Political Culture Theory: The Political Science of Ronald InglehartPOLITICS & POLICY, Issue 4 2002Saul Newman In the last two decades Ronald Inglehart has developed, tested, and attempted to falsify a series of hypotheses explaining some of the most important political changes occurring around the globe and has also sought to resolve some of the most intractable challenges to the development of a paradigmatic comparative politics. This article examines the writings of Ronald Inglehart and demonstrates how his writings have enriched many important theoretical and empirical debates in comparative politics. At the same time it critically examines these writings to reveal some of the larger difficulties in creating a predictive political culture theory. [source] What to Do about Missing Values in Time-Series Cross-Section DataAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2010James Honaker Applications of modern methods for analyzing data with missing values, based primarily on multiple imputation, have in the last half-decade become common in American politics and political behavior. Scholars in this subset of political science have thus increasingly avoided the biases and inefficiencies caused by ad hoc methods like listwise deletion and best guess imputation. However, researchers in much of comparative politics and international relations, and others with similar data, have been unable to do the same because the best available imputation methods work poorly with the time-series cross-section data structures common in these fields. We attempt to rectify this situation with three related developments. First, we build a multiple imputation model that allows smooth time trends, shifts across cross-sectional units, and correlations over time and space, resulting in far more accurate imputations. Second, we enable analysts to incorporate knowledge from area studies experts via priors on individual missing cell values, rather than on difficult-to-interpret model parameters. Third, because these tasks could not be accomplished within existing imputation algorithms, in that they cannot handle as many variables as needed even in the simpler cross-sectional data for which they were designed, we also develop a new algorithm that substantially expands the range of computationally feasible data types and sizes for which multiple imputation can be used. These developments also make it possible to implement the methods introduced here in freely available open source software that is considerably more reliable than existing algorithms. [source] International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still Ex Post Inefficient?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2004Giacomo Chiozza Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift toward leaders as the theoretical unit of analysis. In most of the new theoretical models a core assumption is that leaders act to stay in power. There exists, however, remarkably little systematic empirical knowledge about the factors that affect the tenure of leaders. To provide a baseline of empirical results we explore how a broad range of domestic and international factors affects the tenure of leaders. We focus in particular on the effect of conflict and its outcome. We find that political institutions fundamentally mediate the costs and benefits of international conflict and that war is not necessarilyex postinefficient for leaders. This suggests that the assumption that war isex postinefficient for unitary rational actors can not be simply extended to leaders. Therefore, a focus on leaders may yield important new rationalist explanations for war. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||