Stephen Noakes discusses the relationship between political scientists and the state in China. He argues that political scientists do more to strengthen the rule of the Chinese Communist Party than they do to undermine it, and are therefore complicit in preserving the authoritarian status quo.
Sophia J. Wallace examines the factors that influence the introduction of SB 1070–type bills in state legislatures. She finds that Republican control of state legislatures and a rising unemployment rate greatly increase the likelihood of introducing this type of restrictive immigration bill. She asserts that Latino population changes and the percentage of Latino state legislators do not have an impact.
Ramazan Kilinç argues that at critical junctures, structural factors weaken and actors are enabled to gain strength for future political trajectories. He applies this argument to democratic consolidation in Turkey. He finds that the 1997 military intervention unintentionally led to the eventual outcome of democratic consolidation. In the absence of this catalyst, it might have taken several more years for structural factors to generate democratization.
Robert Jervis reviews Robert Gates's recently published memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. The reviewer argues that the memoir is very revealing, but inadvertently so insofar as it shows for example Gates's failure to focus on the key issues involved in the decisions to send more troops to Afghanistan and his inability to bridge the gap between the perspectives of the generals and of the White House.
On substantive grounds, Jesse H. Rhodes's An Education in Politics is yet another detailed account of the history and politics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the watershed federal legislation adopted in 2001 that sought to bring accountability to the nation's schools. Rhodes's approach, however, is explicitly theoretical—a very good thing—and his aim is to contribute to the "institutional theory of change." Claiming that other scholars of political institutions have tended to focus either on the "agency of political entrepreneurs" or the "institutional constraints" that limit them, he argues for a unified approach that brings the two together into proper balance. His solution is a theory of "institutionally bounded entrepreneurship," which he formulates early in the book and then employs to structure the historical analysis that follows.
The number of publications arguing that the United States is not post-racial despite twice electing Barack Obama to the presidency is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of publications claiming that the United States is post-racial. In fact, it is difficult to find anyone asserting post-raciality beyond one New York Times Magazine article and a few Fox News commentators around the 2008 election. Nevertheless, attacks on the purportedly common assumption continue.
The conventional wisdom, as understood by campaign strategists and the media, is that being a woman is a liability in electoral politics. Female candidates face an impossible task—they must convey the toughness, competence, and confidence of a politician, while simultaneously conveying the warmth and modesty of a lady. Consequently, it is much more difficult for women to successfully navigate a political campaign. Anecdotal evidence supporting this conventional wisdom is easy to find. However, systematic evidence is scarce. Is it possible that the conventional wisdom is just plain wrong? Deborah Jordan Brooks contends that it is.
If anyone has earned the right to say "I told you so," it is Barnett Rubin. One of the foremost authorities on Afghanistan, Rubin saw earlier than most the dangers emerging from that blighted land. In his work–as author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, an adviser to the United Nations for several years after 2001, a professor at New York University, and an adviser to the U.S. State Department's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 200–Rubin worked to warn against, prevent, and mitigate the perennial crises afflicting Afghanistan and South Asia.
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Afghanistan, United States, and South Asia
The Federal Reserve Act was passed on December 23, 1913. It was designed to provide an elastic currency that would respond to the needs of trade. There was nothing in the Act about price stability, interest rates, or full employment. The expectation was that the United States would continue to define the dollar in terms of gold, and that the operation of the international gold standard would ensure long-run price stability.
Douglass C. North, co-winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics, argued that institutions were deliberately devised to constrain interactions among parties—both public and private (North 1991). In the spirit of North's work, one theme of this article will be that the institutional structure of the central bank matters. The central bank's goals and objectives, its framework for implementing policy, and its governance structure all affect its performance.