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Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates goods ? such as admission into universities, jobs, promotions, public contracts, business loans, and rights to buy and sell land ? on the basis of membership in a designated group, for the purpose of increasing the proportion of members of that group in the relevant labor force, entrepreneurial class, or university student population, where they are currently underrepresented as a result of past or present discrimination. The programs involved vary substantially across countries, regarding the identification of their intended beneficiaries (ethnic, national, or racial groups held to be economically or socially disadvantaged, aboriginal peoples, women, people with disabilities, war veterans?), the form of the programs involved (quota/non-quota), the level of the legal norms from which they derive (constitutional, legislative, administrative), and their domain of implementation (whether restricted to the public sector or not). Drawing from previous research on the United States (« Judicial Uses of Subterfuge: Affirmative Action Reconsidered », Political Science Quarterly, 18 (3), 2003, p. 411-436) and France (« Affirmative Action at Sciences Po », French Politics, Culture, and Society, 20 (3), 2002, p. 52-64), the paper will compare affirmative action programs in the United States, India, Malaysia and South Africa, considering each of these four parameters and the relations between them. It will focus both on the intended results and on the different side effects of the policies and of the justifications advanced on their behalf. In particular, I shall argue that in India and Malaysia, reducing the inequality in the distribution of social goods between the different groups involved is not conceived as partaking of the more utopian project of reducing the saliency of group boundaries within the nation-state. Giving communities their proportional share of social benefits is not supposed to lead to the blurring of the lines that keep them separate from each other in private, non-allocative spheres. In the United States and in South Africa, on the other hand, the connection between affirmative action policies equalizing patterns of economic distribution among various ascriptive groups and the ideal of societal integration is a much stronger one. This is reflected in the definition of the social outcome whose attainment would justify the eventual termination of affirmative action programs. In India and Malaysia, the proportionality criterion provides an obvious « focal point » in this respect, generally acknowledged as such. In the United States ? and, to a lesser extent, in South Africa ?, proportional representation is emphatically rejected as a distributive principle, even though it arguably operates covertly at the policymaking level, by providing the benchmark against which « discrepancies » and « deficiencies » will be identified and compensated for. Last but not least, the paper will distinguish among affirmative action regimes according to their degree of internal differentiation, attempting to account for the highly specific configuration found in India, where members of the group generally considered as the most disadvantaged ? the Untouchables ? are being granted some kind of preferential treatment also in relation to the policy?s other beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores recent U.S. initiatives to conclude arms control agreements as well as confidence-building measures (CBMs) between India and Pakistan and assesses the prospects for progress in these areas. After U.S.-led negotiations in the wake of the 1998 India-Pakistan nuclear tests, India and Pakistan expressed renewed interest in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). In contrast, U.S. efforts to convince India and Pakistan to adopt the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and to disarm have failed. Since January 2001, the Bush administration has continued to promote CBMs and Nuclear Risk Reduction Measures (NRRMs) between the two countries. Since 2002, the administration considered offering missile-defenses to Pakistan and India, which might improve conditions for arms control and reduction. Indian officials have expressed interest in missile defense and noted the links with arms reduction. However, Pakistan and its ally, China, suspect that U.S. and Indian missile defenses are intended to neutralize their deterrents, which could open the door to an accelerated arms race and even preemptive action. A contradiction explored in the paper is that, while the United States tries to negotiate arms control agreements in South Asia, it has moved away from the ABM treaty, the CTBT, and other arms control measures. Another issue is what the United States can achieve as a mediator through arms control and CBMs, such as cooperative aerial monitoring, a more rigorous ‘hot line,’ and a cooperative threat reduction (CTR) program. A related issue that is explored is the connection between arms control and missile defenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we suggest new measures that gauge how district level party systems can be aggregated to the national level within a country. These can be used as measures of party linkage across districts. The degree of party linkage, which is the extent to which parties are uniformly successful in wining votes across districts, is an important but neglected issue to understand the nature of national level party system formation. We build on the party system inflation index introduced by Cox (1999), which measures the inflation from the district level to the national level party system size that occurs in the process of party system aggregation. We show that the Cox measure has undesirable properties and offer alternative measures. We first examine the concept of party linkage, followed by the discussion of Cox’s inflation index and its limitations. We then introduce our suggested inflation measures, and compare them with the Cox index by numerical simulation. We then apply our measures to the cases of Germany, India, Italy and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how domestic politics influenced the July 2005 agreement between India and the United States for civilian nuclear technology transfers to India. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today everyone knows that in the coming century India, like the Medici, has the intention and potential to enhance its wealth, prestige, and power.In this context, observers of world politics are wondering: How will India pursue those intentions? What will it do to realize its potential and assure its security? In the last year and half since the proposed Indo-US nuclear deal was announced, numerous experts have tried to induce answers to these questions from what is still a small universe of cases including India's attitude toward Iranian nuclear policy and energy (particularly pipeline) policy, toward US missile defense initiatives, toward the enlargement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, toward Chinese activity in South Asia (particularly vis-à-vis Pakistan and Nepal). But, above all, observers have focused on a proposed deal between the US and India on nuclear cooperation.The dimensions and general features of the arena in which India will act are clear. It is a triangular space with China, India, and the US at the corners. The view that a rising India will be the fulcrum of balance in Asia is now increasingly common. A 2004 editorial in the Chinese People's Daily is a good example. "Steadily warming India-US relations have resulted in widespread attention to the geopolitics of Asia. It is difficult to predict whether or not India will become a strategic ally of the US or of China, but the sudden attractiveness of India will sooner or later alter the regional balance of power between the three countries" (Joseph, 2004). The 2005 Indo-US deal was interpreted by many observers to be an obvious American effort to draw India onto the US bandwagon.In the real world, of course, actors are motivated and constrained by power, wealth, and prestige. Syncretic approaches such as the currently fashionable "analytic eclecticism" draw selectively on all three international relations traditions in rendering "explanatory sketches" of important international security questions such as the durability of US-South Korean alliance, the possible revisionist aspiration of a rising China, or whether it is international institutions rather than balance of power dynamics that are shaping strategy in South East Asia. Explaining the future direction of Indian strategy within the China-India-US triangle is as analytically demanding a problem as one is likely to find in contemporary international relations.The conclusion I draw from what follows is that India is very unlikely to balance or to get on the bandwagon. Equipoise is the policy dictated by India's geography, power capabilities, identity, and potential to be a robust actor in global and regional politics. Like the old and now discredited Indian grand strategy of nonalignment, equipoise shuns formal alliances. The term draws on the realist balance of power idiom to identify an alternative stance - neither balancing nor bandwagoning - that is in dynamic equilibrium. That equilibrium is struck between domestic and international dynamics; balancing contradictory domestic cultural and political forces (such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, anti-Americanism/pro-Americanism, self-sufficiency/trade-optimism) and international appeals and threats (such as American democratic/technological/commercial affinity, American unilateral neo-Imperialism, Chinese commercial appeal, and Chinese threatening intrusion/pressure). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]