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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

States Of Discontent, Samuel Handlin Jan 2021

States Of Discontent, Samuel Handlin

Political Science Faculty Works

Latin America’s recent inclusionary turn centers on changing relationships between the popular sectors and the state. Yet the new inclusion unfolds in a region in which most states are weak and prone to severe pathologies, such as corruption, inefficiency, and particularism. The first part of the chapter outlines an argument, developed at more length elsewhere, regarding how “state crises” helped drive the consolidation of three distinct party system trajectories among the eight South American countries where the Left would eventually win power. The second part of the chapter argues that these trajectories differed in three ways that likely conditioned how …


Mirroring Opposition Threats, Samuel Handlin Jan 2020

Mirroring Opposition Threats, Samuel Handlin

Political Science Faculty Works

Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Movement came to power in 1999 promising to refound the Venezuelan state and restructure the polity in ways that would build “popular power” through the promotion of grassroots participation, organization, and mobilization. Once in office, the Bolivarian forces launched a series of initiatives to sponsor organization and mobilization among supporters, which ranged widely in their functions and strategic purpose. State-mobilized organizations can be seen as operating in three different arenas of politics: the local governance arena; the electoral arena; and the protest arena. From an ideological standpoint, the Bolivarian Movement was oriented toward sponsoring organizations …


The Supreme Court Hears Arguments On The Meaning Of “Sex Discrimination”, Carol Nackenoff Oct 2019

The Supreme Court Hears Arguments On The Meaning Of “Sex Discrimination”, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


Close Cousins In Protection: The Evolution Of Two Norms, Emily Paddon Rhoads, J. Welsh May 2019

Close Cousins In Protection: The Evolution Of Two Norms, Emily Paddon Rhoads, J. Welsh

Political Science Faculty Works

The Protection of Civilians (PoC) in peacekeeping and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) populations from atrocity crimes are two norms that emerged at the turn of the new millennium with the aim of protecting vulnerable peoples from mass violence and/or systematic and widespread violations of human rights. To date, most scholars have analysed the discourses over the status, strength and robustness of both norms separately. And yet, the distinction between the two has at times been exceptionally fine. In this article, we analyse the constitutive relationship between PoC and R2P, and the impact of discursive and behavioural contestation on their …


Bad World: The Negativity Bias In International Politics, D. D. P. Johnson, Dominic Tierney Jan 2019

Bad World: The Negativity Bias In International Politics, D. D. P. Johnson, Dominic Tierney

Political Science Faculty Works

A major puzzle in international relations is why states privilege negative over positive information. States tend to inflate threats, exhibit loss aversion, and learn more from failures than from successes. Rationalist accounts fail to explain this phenomenon, because systematically overweighting bad over good may in fact undermine state interests. New research in psychology, however, offers an explanation. The “negativity bias” has emerged as a fundamental principle of the human mind, in which people's response to positive and negative information is asymmetric. Negative factors have greater effects than positive factors across a wide range of psychological phenomena, including cognition, motivation, emotion, …


Putting Human Rights Up Front: Implications For Impartiality And The Politics Of Un Peacekeeping, Emily Paddon Rhoads Jan 2019

Putting Human Rights Up Front: Implications For Impartiality And The Politics Of Un Peacekeeping, Emily Paddon Rhoads

Political Science Faculty Works

This article traces the origins, development and implications of Human Rights Up Front (HRuF), a bold and visionary initiative launched by former Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in 2013. While HRuF is part of a broader continuum of human rights-related reforms, its scope and focus is distinctive. HRuF puts the imperative to protect people from serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law at the core of the UN’s strategy and operational activities, and obliges staff to speak out about abuses and looming crises. Using the case study of South Sudan and drawing on over 150 interviews conducted in-country, this article …


Policy Case Study: Population Policy, Tyrene White Jan 2019

Policy Case Study: Population Policy, Tyrene White

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


Not In My Graveyard: Citizenship, Memory, And Identity In The Wake Of The Boston Marathon Bombing, Osman Balkan Jan 2019

Not In My Graveyard: Citizenship, Memory, And Identity In The Wake Of The Boston Marathon Bombing, Osman Balkan

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


Reasonableness Without Reasons: Yascha Mounk’S “The People Vs. Democracy”, Jonny Thakkar Jun 2018

Reasonableness Without Reasons: Yascha Mounk’S “The People Vs. Democracy”, Jonny Thakkar

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


Avoiding Nation-Building: From Nixon To Trump, Dominic Tierney Apr 2018

Avoiding Nation-Building: From Nixon To Trump, Dominic Tierney

Political Science Faculty Works

This article explores how the aversion to nationbuilding, a consistent theme in post-Vietnam foreign policy doctrine, has shaped military operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.


How About Erecting Monuments To The Heroes Of Reconstruction?, Richard M. Valelly , '75 Aug 2017

How About Erecting Monuments To The Heroes Of Reconstruction?, Richard M. Valelly , '75

Political Science Faculty Works

Americans should build this pivotal post–Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.


The Ethics Of Unwinnable War, Dominic Tierney Jan 2017

The Ethics Of Unwinnable War, Dominic Tierney

Political Science Faculty Works

According to just war theory, military campaigns should only be fought as a last resort, with the goal of correcting a grave evil, and where there is a high probability of success. But what happens when a military campaign unravels and becomes unwinnable? How can a leader reconcile just war theory with the need to extricate the country from a quagmire? In recent decades, US presidents have repeatedly faced such moral dilemmas, as campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq all became unwinnable. When victory is no longer achievable, leaders should dial down the goals of the war, resist the …


Civic Membership, Family Status, And The Chinese In America, 1870s–1920s, J. Novkov, Carol Nackenoff Apr 2016

Civic Membership, Family Status, And The Chinese In America, 1870s–1920s, J. Novkov, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

Chinese women and children, or their advocates, brought many legal challenges to decrees denying them entry into the United States or seeking to deport them. Relying on more than 150 reported habeas corpus cases decided in West Coast federal courts between 1875 and 1924, we examine how courts helped to structure the rise of the administrative state through controversies involving the boundaries of citizenship, legal residency, and familial status. Cases involving those particularly vulnerable individuals whose statuses were conditioned upon their familial bonds helped to shape the meaning and scope of civic membership. Amid political conflict within institutions of the …


Gender And The American State, E. Mcdonagh, Carol Nackenoff Jan 2016

Gender And The American State, E. Mcdonagh, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

The study of gender in American political development (APD) challenges the efficacy for advancing women’s political inclusion of a liberal tradition valorizing principles of individual equality and positing a separation of the family and the state. Masked are ways in which gender roles and the family are integral to governance and state-building. Gender is both a dependent and an independent variable in APD. Shaped by institutions and policies of the state, it also shapes institutions and policies that promote women’s political citizenship and expand the state’s capacity for social provision—by asserting not only liberal claims of women’s equality with men, …


Toward A More Inclusive Community: The Legacy Of Female Reformers In The Progressive State, Carol Nackenoff Jan 2016

Toward A More Inclusive Community: The Legacy Of Female Reformers In The Progressive State, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


Taking Sides In Peacekeeping: Impartiality And The Future Of The United Nations, Emily Paddon Rhoads Jan 2016

Taking Sides In Peacekeeping: Impartiality And The Future Of The United Nations, Emily Paddon Rhoads

Political Science Faculty Works

United Nations peacekeeping has undergone radical transformation in the new millennium. 'Taking Sides in Peacekeeping' explores this transformation and its implications, in what is the first conceptual and empirical study of impartiality in UN peacekeeping. The book challenges dominant scholarly approaches that conceive of norms as linear and static, conceptualizing impartiality as a 'composite' norm, one that is not free-standing but an aggregate of other principles-each of which can change and is open to contestation. Drawing on a large body of primary evidence, it uses the composite norm to trace the evolution of impartiality, and to illuminate the macro-level politics …


Oxford Handbook Of American Political Development, Richard M. Valelly , '75, S. Mettler, R. Lieberman Jan 2016

Oxford Handbook Of American Political Development, Richard M. Valelly , '75, S. Mettler, R. Lieberman

Political Science Faculty Works

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics – and thus they question stylized facts about America’s political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution …


China's Population Policy In Historical Context, Tyrene White Jan 2016

China's Population Policy In Historical Context, Tyrene White

Political Science Faculty Works

The year 2014 marked the de facto end to China’s “one-child policy,” the most extreme example of state intrusion into the realm of reproduction. Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 initiative built on earlier, short-lived “birth planning” campaigns. The 1979 policy set an absolute population limit of 1.2 billion and tied this number to the goal of achieving modernization by 2000. A 1980 “Open Letter” defined the “one-child policy” as an absolute priority, and the government’s strict reinforcement of the policy in the early 1990s finally reduced rates of reproduction. This chapter chronicles the stages of policy implementation between 1979 and 2014 and …


Making A Rainbow Military: Parliamentary Skill And The Repeal Of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", Richard M. Valelly , '75 Jan 2016

Making A Rainbow Military: Parliamentary Skill And The Repeal Of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", Richard M. Valelly , '75

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


How Suffrage Politics Made—And Makes—America, Richard M. Valelly , '75 Jan 2016

How Suffrage Politics Made—And Makes—America, Richard M. Valelly , '75

Political Science Faculty Works

Most Americans believe that the franchise has steadily and gradually expanded since the Founding. In fact “suffrage politics” has been far more complex and disjointed. This contribution develops a party-centered approach that identifies several types of enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, as well as suffrage regimes–that is, bundles of institutions and election law that are meant to buttress allocations of voting rights. This party-centered approach allows one to grasp that America’s struggles over the right to vote are, in cross-national perspective, not just unusual but highly unusual, and have been a central force in American political development.


A History Of Inherent Contradictions: The Origins And End Of American Conservatism, James Kurth Jan 2016

A History Of Inherent Contradictions: The Origins And End Of American Conservatism, James Kurth

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


A Dream In Crisis, Ben Berger Jul 2015

A Dream In Crisis, Ben Berger

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


News Attention To Voter Fraud In The 2008 And 2012 Us Elections, David Kimball, Brian Fogarty, Jessica Curtis, Patricia Gouzien, Eric Vorst May 2015

News Attention To Voter Fraud In The 2008 And 2012 Us Elections, David Kimball, Brian Fogarty, Jessica Curtis, Patricia Gouzien, Eric Vorst

Political Science Faculty Works

The nature and frequency of voter fraud figure prominently in many ongoing policy debates about election laws in the United States. Policy makers frequently cite allegations of voter fraud reported in the press during these debates. While recent studies find that voter fraud is a rare event, a substantial segment of the public believes that voter fraud is a rampant problem in the United States. It stands to reason that public beliefs are shaped by news coverage of voter fraud. However, there is very little extant academic research on how the news media, at any level, covers allegations or documented …


Privacy, Police Power, And The Growth Of Public Power In The Early Twentieth Century: A Not So Unlikely Coexistence, Carol Nackenoff Jan 2015

Privacy, Police Power, And The Growth Of Public Power In The Early Twentieth Century: A Not So Unlikely Coexistence, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


What Were They Thinking? The Federal Reserve In The Run-Up To The 2008 Financial Crisis, Stephen S. Golub, Ayse Kaya, M. Reay Jan 2015

What Were They Thinking? The Federal Reserve In The Run-Up To The 2008 Financial Crisis, Stephen S. Golub, Ayse Kaya, M. Reay

Political Science Faculty Works

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is responsible for monitoring, analyzing and ultimately stabilizing US financial markets. It also has unrivalled access to economic data, high-level connections to financial institutions, and a large staff of professionally trained economists. Why then was it apparently unconcerned by the financial developments that are now widely recognized to have caused the 2008 financial crisis? Using a wide range of Fed documents from the pre-crisis period, particularly the transcripts of meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), this paper shows that Fed policymakers and staff were aware of relevant developments in financial markets, but paid …


Power And Global Economic Institutions, Ayse Kaya Jan 2015

Power And Global Economic Institutions, Ayse Kaya

Political Science Faculty Works

What is the relationship between states' economic power and their formal political power in multilateral economic institutions? Why do we see variation in states' formal political power across economic institutions of the same era? In this book, Ayse Kaya examines these crucial under-explored questions, drawing on multiple theoretical traditions within international relations to advance a new approach of 'adjusted power'. She explains how the economic shifts of our time, marked by the rise of Brazil, Russia, India, China and other emerging economies, have affected and will impact key multilateral economic institutions. Through detailed contemporary and historical analyses of the International …


Mastering The Endgame Of War, Dominic Tierney Oct 2014

Mastering The Endgame Of War, Dominic Tierney

Political Science Faculty Works

No abstract provided.


The Private Roots Of American Political Development: The Immigrants' Protective League's “Friendly And Sympathetic Touch,” 1908–1924, Carol Nackenoff Oct 2014

The Private Roots Of American Political Development: The Immigrants' Protective League's “Friendly And Sympathetic Touch,” 1908–1924, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

This article aims to illuminate how non-state actors participate in forging public institutions and in establishing public agendas. It also sets out to identify novel mechanisms of state building. It does so by examining the historical experience of the Immigrants' Protective League (IPL) from its founding in 1908 through 1924. The history of the IPL highlights the role of organized, networked women in generating new boundary stories and doing boundary work; in conducting research and enhancing legibility; in incubating new policy experiments; and in moving the national, state, and local governments to take up new tasks in the progressive era. …


Why Liberal Arts Colleges Can Often Do Political Science Better Than Big Research Institutions: A Reflection From An Americanist, Carol Nackenoff Jan 2014

Why Liberal Arts Colleges Can Often Do Political Science Better Than Big Research Institutions: A Reflection From An Americanist, Carol Nackenoff

Political Science Faculty Works

By supporting new course development and by encouraging cross-disciplinary conversations and collaborations, liberal arts colleges can often help political scientists expand their capacities beyond narrow disciplinary "silos," with benefits for faculty and students alike. At the same time, it is important to teach political science students what our own discipline has to offer, to help students understand our discipline's strengths, and to borrow when confronted with moments when explanatory frameworks of the discipline fail. Liberal arts departments begin the training of many future Ph.D.s; however, our job is not only to equip students to do further work within the discipline …


Two Political Sciences Or One? Liberal Arts Political Science As A Disciplinary Partner, Richard M. Valelly , '75 Jan 2014

Two Political Sciences Or One? Liberal Arts Political Science As A Disciplinary Partner, Richard M. Valelly , '75

Political Science Faculty Works

This essay sketches the ways that the practices of political science at top R1 institutions and at leading liberal arts colleges differ. But one also can see the two practices as partners in a common enterprise of making political science rigorous, relevant, and clear. This article outlines such a collaboration.