Political Science Commons^™

Democratic Consolidation In Eastern Europe, Michael Rudy

Masters Theses

This thesis examines democratic consolidation in five Eastern European countries. The Baltic States have consolidated their democratic regimes but Romania and Bulgaria have struggled to do so. I attempt to explain why this has happened. In chapter one, I introduce the topic and provide an overview for the next six chapters.

In the second chapter, I examine the literature that pertains to this topic. The literature focuses on several aspects of democratic consolidation. I examine how economic growth, privatization, foreign direct investment, modes of transition, violence, initial post-communist political contest winner, electoral laws, and the citizenship law all play an …

Political Leadership And The Quest For Unity And Development In Africa, Thierno Thiam

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Eu In The Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons: The Way To Thessaloniki And Beyond, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Over the past few years the EU has begun taking some steps against the spread of nuclear weapons within its Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). At the Thessaloniki Summit June 2003, the European Council adopted its first draft Strategy against the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In order to assess the significance of the Strategy, this paper will first present and evaluate the Union’s record in the field, then review the newly released Strategy, and finally make suggestions as to how it can be improved.

The EU is not an unitary actor in the nuclear non-proliferation domain, …

The Concept Of A Middle Power In International Relations: Distinguishing Between Emerging And Traditional Middle Powers, Eduard Jordaan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article seeks to develop a distinction between emerging and traditional middle powers as a means to giving the concept of a middle power greater analytical clarity. All middle powers display foreign policy behaviour that stabilises and legitimises the global order, typically through multilateral and cooperative initiatives. However, emerging and traditional middle powers can be distinguished in terms of their mutually-influencing constitutive and behavioural differences. Constitutively, traditional middle powers are wealthy, stable, egalitarian, social democratic and not regionally influential. Behaviourally, they exhibit a weak and ambivalent regional orientation, constructing identities distinct from powerful states in their regions and offer appeasing …

Estimating Irish Party Policy Positions Using Computer Wordscoring: The 2002 Election: A Research Note, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Laver

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Developments in the computerised analysis of political texts now make itmuch easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text inorder to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous contentanalyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand codingof texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge, 1992; Klingeman et al.,1994; Budge et al., 2001), or on dictionary-based computer codingtechniques (Laver and Garry, 2000; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001;Garry, 2001; de Vries et al., 2001; Bara, 2001). Such analyses, even thosebased on computer coding dictionaries, require heavy human involvement or intervention, creating both a huge resource cost …

Dignity: The New Frontier Of State Sovereignty, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

In Federal Maritime Commission v. South Carolina State Ports Authority, the Supreme Court strongly articulated a new “dignity” rationale for state sovereign immunity. The article critiques this rationale and argues that it dissociates sovereign immunity from any constitutional grounding. However, in doing so, the rationale frees the Court to develop a more coherent theory of state sovereign immunity. The article explores how the dignity rationale might be used to develop such coherence.

Singapore: The Feel Good Factor - A Vital Element In The Meticulous Preparations For Leadership Change, Eugene Kheng Boon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Ethnic Federalism: Its Promise And Pitfalls For Africa, Alemante G. Selassie

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Campaign Spending In The Local Government Elections Of 1999, Kenneth Benoit, Michael Marsh

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 34 councils, we identify both partisan and geographic spending patterns, and examine how well these can be explained as a function of political and demographic variables. Second, we model and estimate the effects of expenditure on individual electoral outcomes. The findings clearly indicate that even at …

Islam, Democracy And Civil Society, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What is the relationship between Islam, democracy, and civil society? This is thequestion which supplies the topic of this essay, Its purpose, more particularly, is to explore theplace of Islam in the modern world-a world which contemporary writers increasingly try tounderstand by invoking the notions of democracy and civil society. But the occasion for thisexploitation has a more precise origin still. The issue of the place of Islam in the modernworld is raised, more often than not, by writers and commentators for whom Islam is, aboveall, a danger, in geo-political terms, it is a danger to the West; in world-historical …

The Cultural Contradictions Of Socialism, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

While no one has yet announced the death of capitalism, reports of its imminent demise have been as numerous as they have been exaggerated. Such reports have usually been bolstered by thoughtful analyses of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, which was expected to come sliding—if not crashing—down under the weight of its own inconsistencies. Leaving aside Karl Marx's own predictions, twentieth-century analysts as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter, Daniel Bell, and Jurgen Habermas have asserted that the contradictions of capitalism could only mean that its days were numbered. Alas, all that has been established by these analyses is that predictive failure …

Conflict Resolution In Africa: A Comparative Analysis Of The Demilitarization Process In Burundi And Rwanda (1993-2003), Victoria Chipoka

Masters Theses

The civil wars that have occurred in Africa have had destabilizing effects on the political and social structure of African countries. The massacres and genocide of 1993 and 1994 in Rwanda and Burundi shocked the whole world into experiencing the horror of the news that more than one million people had been slaughtered in cold blood. The causes of the conflict in Rwanda and Burundi are many and complex. In this paper, my major focus will be on the role the armed forces have played in the conflict and how demilitarization should be the alternative solution in bringing permanent peace …

Nuclearization Of Pakistan: Motivations And Intentions, Rabia Akhtar

Masters Theses

Pakistan conducted six thermonuclear tests in response to five Indian nuclear tests in 1998. There existed an interplay of various actors at the external and the internal level which enabled Pakistan to reach the decision to detonate. This thesis examines the motivations and intentions that acted as a driving force for Pakistan to make the decision to go nuclear. In order to identify these intentions, this thesis applies the national decision making model presented by Graham Allison. The arguments presented will demonstrate whether Allison's model explains the complexity of Pakistan's decision to go nuclear and which part of the model …

Personality In Political Psychology, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This chapter outlines the history of personality inquiry in political psychology, examines the current state of personality assessment in politics, and charts a course for the study of personality in politics in the post-cognitive revolution era, informed by contextually adjacent scientific fields such as behavioral neuroscience and evolutionary ecology.

The chapter offers a comprehensive, generative, theoretically coherent framework for studying personality in politics, consonant with established principles in the adjacent sciences and integrative with respect to accommodating a diversity of politically relevant personal characteristics. The proposed framework attempts to bridge conceptual and methodological gaps between current formulations in the source …

A Quantitative And Qualitative Evaluation Of The National Endowment For Democracy, Eric T. Hale

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Billions of dollars have been spent to promote democracy and economic freedom through U.S. foreign aid, but little is known about its impact. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is the leading U.S. organization that promotes democracy and economic freedom throughout the world. Since its founding, NED has been the subject of immense discussion and controversy. The goal of this dissertation is to provide insight into the promotion of democracy and economic freedom through an analysis of NED’s activities during the 1990s. The analysis does not find evidence that NED was successful at promoting democracy and economic freedom during the …

The Institutional Determinants Of Property Regime Change In New Democracies: The Russian Federation, Hungary, And Czechoslovakia, R. Vanessa Krasner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Is there a relationship between the design of democratic institutions and optimal collective decisions? Optimum decisions are defined as achieving goals important to the transition such as deep and equitable property reforms. Democratic institutions refer to first-order institutions of governance and the electoral rules for choosing leaders. Overseeing both are the written or "parchment" constitutions. Constitutions are designed to distribute power among actors, generate efficiency, and govern the interactions among actors. My findings showed that constitutional designs intentionally and sometimes with unanticipated consequences can result in highly cooperative, competitive, or conflictual struggles by political actors over high-stakes distributive issues such …

Globalism, Human Rights And The Problem Of Individualism, Richard Mcintyre

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Global Economy, Global Justice: Theoretical Objections and Policy Alternatives to Neoliberalism by George F.DeMartino. New York: Routledge, 2000. 296pp.

Questioning The Universality Of Human Rights, Paul J. Magnarella

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Universal Human Rights? edited by Robert G. Patman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 244pp.

and

Dealing with Human Rights: Asian and Western Views on the Value of Human Rights edited by Martha Meijer. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001. 183pp.

and

The Philosophy of Human Rights by Patrick Hayden. St. Paul: Paragon House, 2001. 686pp.

Politics, Pragmatism, And Human Rights, Todd Landman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World by Richard A. Falk. New York: Routledge, 2000. 288pp.

and

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry by Michael Ignatieff (edited by Amy Guttman). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 187pp.

Beyond The Black Heart: The United States And Human Rights, Daniel J. Whelan

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

The United States and Human Rights: Looking Inward and Outward edited by David P. Forsythe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 404pp.

In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All by William F. Shultz. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. 235pp.

In the National Interest, 2001: Human Rights Policies for the Bush Administration by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. New York: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 2001. 157pp.

Affirming Universal Human Rights, Richard Falk

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Second Edition) by Jack Donnelly. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 290 pp.

Waging War For Human Rights: Toward A Moral-Legal Theory Of Humanitarian Intervention, Eric A. Heinze

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention edited by Jonathan Moore. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 322pp.

Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas edited by J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 350pp.

Protest And Reform In Asylum Policy: Citizen Initiatives Versus Asylum Seekers In German Municipalities, 1989-1994, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Political (Science) Context Of Judging, Lee Epstein, Jack Knight, Andrew D. Martin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Illusion And Reality In The Compensation Of Victims Of International Terrorism, W. Michael Reisman, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

One of the many curious revelations in the increasingly bizarre saga of the presidential pardon of Marc Rich in the twilight hours of the Clinton administration is especially fascinating to the student of international human rights law. Former President Clinton, in justifying the pardon, explained that Mr. Rich was an unheralded human rights activist. Among his apparently numerous, but unacknowledged, good deeds, one stands out for its carefully crafted hypocrisy. Mossad, the Israeli covert action agency, arranged for Mr. Rich secretly to transfer $400,000 to the Egyptian government, which then established a fund to compensate the families of Israeli victims …

From Gunboats To Transgenic Seed: The Western Quest For Tools Of Enforced Global Dependency, Geoffrey Kain

Publications

“Historian Daniel Headrick has pointed out that ‘among the many important events of the nineteenth century, two were of momentous consequence for the entire world. One was the progress and power of industrial technology; the other was the domination and exploitation of Africa and much of Asia by Europeans’…”

United States Diplomacy In The Age Of The Internet, Allison S. Greene

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The dynamics of international relations are constantly changing, and the origin of an extraordinary amount of that change can be traced to what has been coined the ‘Information Revolution.’ It is a revolution as profound and as significant as Gutenberg's invention of moveable metal type, and may result in social and political consequences of comparable magnitude. One of the most significant and far-reaching implications of this phenomenon is the emergence of the Internet. Since its inception, there have been many claims and assertions about existing and potential repercussions of the Internet within the diplomatic realm.

The purpose of this work …