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The article "Constitutional Crises and Regionalism" by Vito Breda explores the challenges faced by states in managing majority-minority relations in diverse societies. Breda analyzes nine cases from different continents, examining the constitutional and legal frameworks of state and sub-state territories. The book emphasizes the importance of identity in influencing relations between minority and majority communities and highlights the clash of perceptions regarding the legitimacy of public institutions. The author uses a methodology called "future studies" to identify factors that could affect the future development of constitutional systems. The book provides detailed contextual analysis of each case, focusing on the drivers of change and the conflicts between minority and majority groups. It also discusses the role of hybrid institutions and the importance of inclusive environments in managing constitutional crises. While the book lacks a detailed discussion of the methodology and comparative insights between cases, it offers valuable insights into constitutional crises and regionalism. It is recommended for those interested in comparative law, conflict resolution, nationalism, minority politics, and territorial politics. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the role of the United Nations (UN) in shaping the current political map of the world. It explores the idea that if the UN were to disappear, the geopolitical status quo could change. The author highlights the incomplete history of the UN and introduces a book called "Building States" by Eva-Maria Muschik, which examines the work of the UN Secretariat in creating the contemporary nation-state system. The book argues that the Secretariat played a crucial role in legitimizing independent statehood and international oversight as solutions to political unrest after World War II. It also explores themes of autonomy and development within the UN. The article suggests that understanding the history of the UN is important for comprehending the current global challenges. [Extracted from the article]

Today it is rare to find a political scientist who rejects that "ideas matter"—at least in the abstract. But if ideationally inclined theorists have gained seats at the disciplinary table, their approaches still occupy disadvantaged positions. Ideational theories typically must confront nonideational alternatives to achieve salient publication, but nonideational theorists routinely design and publish research without considering ideational alternatives. This is even true on topics where all scholars seem to agree a priori on the importance of ideas. Erratic attention to ideas appears to be justified by widespread views that even if ideas plausibly "matter," they are too intractable to address in concrete research: too difficult to measure empirically, to relate in explanatory ways to action, or to connect to goals of theoretical generalization. This article first highlights major problems with these views in the abstract, and then illustrates them in the example of early Latin American constitutional design. On this terrain, there are good reasons to think that an ideational account connects in more concrete ways to available evidence than leading nonideational hypotheses about constitutional choice. Political science should move toward better balanced debates between plausible explanations, upgrading the rigor of the discipline overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-twentieth century, scholarship in English has devoted more attention to Egypt than any other country in the Middle East and North Africa, possibly excepting Israel/Palestine. It was a "populist authoritarian-modernizing state" (p. 52) in which the officer corps and "state bourgeoisie", staffed heavily by serving and retired officers, became the ruling elite. This is a convenient marker for books concerned with state-building, state capacity, and the relationship between the state and its subjects/citizens. [Extracted from the article]

B 93rd Annual Southern Political Science Association Conference b I January 11-14, 2023 i I St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA i The Southern Political Science Association is pleased to invite political scientists from across the United States and around the world to participate in its 2023 Annual Meeting. The conference brings together scholars, researchers, and decision makers in the political science community to exchange information and address the latest scholarship in political science. B 10th Annual International Conference on Humanities and Arts in a Global World b I January 3-6 i I Athens, Greece i The Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) invites participants to its 10 SP th sp Annual International Conference on Humanities and Arts in a Global World. [Extracted from the article]

December is typically a month of fevered agitation in Nigeria. Their answer is that although many factors contributed to the People's Democratic Party's (PDP) downfall, not least the well-documented shortcomings of President Goodluck Jonathan, the chief reason why Buhari prevailed was the PDP's failure to "manage a stable elite consensus".[56] Their otherwise optimistic analysis ends with a caveat, one that should have been heeded by those now dispirited by the Buhari presidency. The statement later released by his aides titled: 'It's the real me, President Buhari responds to cloning allegation' merely added a touch of farce to a bizarre episode.[3] As I argue in one of the articles in this virtual collection, macabre humour (whether intended or unintended), such as the foregoing encounter involving President Buhari and his implacable troll, is never just comic, but always sociologically telling.[4] As a constant in the moral economy between state and civil society, humour metaphorizes power's often perverse ways and is always evocative of resources and capacities never fully captured within formal sites of engagement. Nevertheless, to single out Buhari, or any occupant of the country's highest office for that matter, is to misjudge both the cultural character of civil society and the structural forces impinging on governance in the country. [Extracted from the article]

Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC 8 Williams Robert F. 2009. The U.S. Constitution is highly venerated by citizens of the U.S. Scholars from multiple academic fields have spent countless hours studying its origins as well as its impact on the well-being of citizens and the governing of the U.S. Bluntly, we know quite a bit about the history, evolution, and impact of the U.S. Constitution. [Extracted from the article]

I Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism i is a comprehensive study of religion and politics in three countries over a century. Second, comparing Turkey with the Southeastern cases of India and Pakistan within the context of transition from empire to nation-state is a novel attempt. Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. [Extracted from the article]

How does migration affect global patterns of political violence and protest? While political scientists have examined the links between trade and conflict, less attention has been paid to the links between migration and conflict. In this paper, we show that greater emigration reduces domestic political violence by providing exit opportunities for aggrieved citizens and economic benefits to those who remain. Emigration also reduces non-violent forms of political contestation, including protests and strikes, implying that high emigration rates can produce relatively quiescent populations. However, larger flows of emigrants to democracies can increase non-violent protest in autocracies, as exposure to freer countries spreads democratic norms and the tools of peaceful opposition. We use instrumental variables analysis to account for the endogeneity of migration flows and find robust results for a range of indicators of civil violence and protest from 1960 to 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, the literature on the Reagan era has grown steadily. What really was Reagan's agenda and what eventually proved to be his personal role in the processes of ending the Cold War?. [Extracted from the article]

Scholars of Middle East politics have been reluctant to explore how the long nineteenth century has shaped the region's political development. The reason for this neglect, I argue, is a common understanding of Ottoman decline and failed modernization, which suggests that the story of modern politics in the Middle East commences with colonial partition after the First World War. But what if political scientists are getting the story wrong? In this article, I argue that our background assumptions about the political development of the Middle East reflect outdated understandings that historians themselves have long left behind. Drawing on this revisionist Ottoman historiography, I show that key dynamics in Middle East politics today—such as state-building and sectarian identities—originate not in the era ushered in by the Sykes–Picot Accord, but in the transformations of the long nineteenth century. By overlooking the evolution of late Ottoman politics and their historical legacies, political scientists risk misdiagnosing key dynamics in the region's political development. 'Bringing the Ottomans back in' highlights to policy-makers the importance of the extra-institutional dimensions of statebuilding in the Middle East, and opens up new vistas for research in comparative–historical political science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspiration is an essential component of politics. It articulates goals, affirms identities and values, and structures action at all levels of social life. Yet political scientists have spent little time theorizing aspiration—what it is, how it relates to other concepts, and the kinds of effects it creates. In this article, we develop the concept theoretically and argue that aspiration creates a distinct "aspirational politics" that differs from our international relations models of both norm-driven social activism and interest-driven rational choice. We identify three core features of aspiration that undergird its theoretical utility: lofty goals, change over time, and transformation through imagination. In the hands of skilled political actors, aspiration does essential work in both facilitating agreement and mobilizing social action that create change in the world. However, aspiration also has a dark side and can be manipulated to dodge accountability, postpone action, and serve private, rather than public, goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although vignettes featuring hypothetical politicians are popular in survey experiments, political scientists rarely explore the tradeoffs between realism and experimental control. In this manuscript, I argue for greater use of "mirror experiments" in political science, or controlled survey experiments that use real politicians and mimic real world situations. This article demonstrates that cognitive burden, brought on by the lack of familiarity with a hypothetical politician, can bias experimental results. Without prior knowledge of a politician, attitudes toward political actors are artificially malleable in laboratory settings, exaggerating treatment effects on traditional approval questions. This article concludes with two empirical demonstrations of these issues, and provides a set of criteria for judging when realistic or hypothetical survey vignettes should be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a fundamental link between political anthropology and Hedley Bull's classical study of international order, which has been persistently neglected by contemporary students of international society. While traditional assessments of Bull's work normally focus on the influences of political philosophy, international law, and history, a discussion of Bull's reliance on anthropological studies of anarchical societies is also essential for a more comprehensive understanding of his conceptualization of order and the sources, number, and functions of the "fundamental institutions" of international society. After showing how exactly political anthropology has underpinned Bull's work, the article explores its relevance for contemporary English school theorization. In particular, it offers a critique of the new institutionalists' claims on the issue of sources, numbers, and functions of Bull's fundamental institutions. An updating of Bull's original "anthropological investigations" suggests a reconsideration of "Trade" as a sixth fundamental institution, a closer attention to "binding" and "dividing" forces in international society, as well as a reframing of the domestic analogy in IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines writing as the last link in the epistemology-theory-methodology alignment. Although political scientists dedicate a great deal of their time to writing, conversations on this topic remain scarce within international relations and political science overall. Notably absent are analyses of the actual writing choices scholars make and what these mean for the knowledge they produce. This article uses the tools of literary analysis to take a closer look at the mechanics of three published academic articles in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. It focuses on how qualitative interviews are written, demonstrates how authors can conceal or reveal the dialogical dimension, and examines how they deal with the conundrum of the representation of research participants. This kind of reflexive analysis reveals the epistemological foundations of a given research article and can be used to identify instances of misrepresentation and misalignment. As such, it is an important tool for the improvement of academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the longest‐running election forecasting models used by the political scientists, and discusses the lead‐time, or the days before the election each model is used to predict the election outcome. It discusses the "trial‐heat forecasting model" first introduced by James Campbell and Kenneth Wink. It makes reference to the book "How to Predict Elections" by Louis Bean. It cites an idea that states that because of increasing partisanship in recent years, even weaker candidates will show well because even their tepid supporters will support the party candidate in a time of increased partisan division.

In his new book, I Alien Citizens: The State and Religious Minorities in Turkey and France i , political scientist Ramazan Kilinç argues that international context shapes government policies toward religious minorities. Rather than an outcome of a desecularization process or increased Catholic influence, Kilinç demonstrates that the official restrictions reflect the effect of a far-right political movement that adopted xenophobic discourse and corresponding policies. Between 2000 and 2010, Turkey implemented relatively liberal policies toward Christians, while France enacted restrictive policies toward Muslims. [Extracted from the article]

In this monograph, Michael J. Walsh provides an account of nation-state formation, with a primary focus on the People's Republic of China (PRC). Stating the Sacred: Religion, China, and the Formation of the Nation-State. Chapter 2 explores the theme of sacred texts - primarily state constitutions - as one of the pieces of nation-state infrastructure and through which nation-states establish the inviolate. [Extracted from the article]

Given Cormac's enthusiasm for these subjects and his ability to narrate good stories, the book will likely motivate non-expert readers to pursue further studies in intelligence. Intensifying rivalries between the United States, Russia and China have replaced the "war on terror" and its accompanying focus on non-state actors like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria with great power tensions. In the end, the usefulness of Cormac's book will vary depending on the audience. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the French wars of religion and mentions horrifying massacres and assassinations associated with wars. Topics discussed include the religious violence Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the wars conducted as state and its revenue-raising apparatus were too weak to repress heresy effectively, political scientists observing war as a form of negotiation or bargaining, and the importance of political science literature to understand conceptual clarity of wars of religion.

They argue that there is a 'three-way relationship between energy, international, and domestic politics' (p. 7) and introduce a new framework to help social scientists engage in global energy politics. Energy, environment and global health 579 International Affairs 97: 2, 2021 Energy, environment and global health Global energy politics. By analysing global energy governance and energy transition to renewables, the authors show that global energy governance lacks a strong international organization to settle rules and hold countries accountable. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the reactions of several lawyers, historians, and political scientists to the authors' book "The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law" as of February 2014, focusing on a workshop which was held in Berlin, Germany to address the authors' legal treatise. It states that several people who have reviewed the book have been critical of the authors' contentions about the global history of international law. Eurocentrism and the United Nations' Charter are examined.

Developing political forecasting models not only increases the ability of political scientists to inform public policy decisions, but is also relevant for scientific advancement. This article argues for and demonstrates the utility of creating forecasting models for predicting political conflicts in a diverse range of country settings. Apart from the benefit of making actual predictions, we argue that predictive heuristics are one gold standard of model development in the field of conflict studies. As such, they shed light on an array of important components of the political science literature on conflict dynamics. We develop and present conflict predictions that have been highly accurate for past and subsequent events, exhibiting few false-negative and false-positive categorizations. Our predictions are made at the monthly level for 6-month periods into the future, taking into account the social-spatial context of each individual country. The model has a high degree of accuracy in reproducing historical data measured monthly over the past 10 years and has approximately equal accuracy in making forecasts. Thus, forecasting in political science is increasingly accurate. At the same time, by providing a gold standard that separates model construction from model evaluation, we can defeat observational research designs and use true prediction as a way to evaluate theories. We suggest that progress in the modeling of conflict research depends on the use of prediction as a gold standard of heuristic evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the paucity of representation of African Americans in the discipline and the relative absence of research on racial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the United Nations Commission on Human Rights served as the primary forum in which governments publicly named and shamed others for abusing their citizens, the practices of the commission have been largely ignored by political scientists. To address that deficiency, this study analyzes the actions of the commission and its members' voting records in the 1977–2001 period. It establishes that targeting and punishment by the commission decreasingly fit the predictions of a realist perspective, in which naming and shaming is an inherently political exercise, and increasingly fit the predictions of a liberal “reputation” perspective, in which governments hold others to their promises, and a constructivist “social conformity” perspective, in which governments distribute and respond to social rewards and punishments. With the end of the Cold War, the commission's targeting and punishment of countries was based less on partisan ties, power politics, and the privileges of membership, and more on those countries' actual human rights violations, treaty commitments, and active participation in cooperative endeavors such as peacekeeping operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have devoted considerable, well-justified attention to changes in macropartisanship at the national level but have generally ignored movement in aggregate party identification at the American state level. The case of California is especially interesting for a number of reasons, most notably because of the potential impact of rapid ethnic change on aggregate political attitudes. In this article we assess macropartisanship in the Golden State from 1980 through 2001, drawing on Field Polls of California adults. We find that essentially there have been two eras in recent state history: a period of increasing Republican identification up to 1991 and an era of increasing Democratic identification thereafter. Some of this apparent movement to the Democrats among Californians as a whole is attributable to the increasing Latino share of the Field Poll samples and the decision to offer the survey in Spanish. However, there has also been movement toward the Democratic Party within ethnic and racial subgroups. This movement can be found to some degree in all major groups (except for African Americans, who were already overwhelmingly identified with the Democratic Party), but it has been especially pronounced among Latinos and Asian Americans. We consider possible reasons and discuss potential implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion pollsters, political scientists, and democratic theorists have long been concerned with the normative and methodological implications of nonattitudes (Converse 1964). Of the proposed remedies to the weak and labile attitudinal responses proffered by an uninformed and disinterested public, perhaps the most ambitious to date has been Fishkin's concept of the deliberative poll (Fishkin 1991, 1995, 1997). Combining probability sampling with information intervention and increased deliberation affords a unique insight into what might be considered the true "voice of the people." Yet, while deliberative polling draws heavily on the general notion of political sophistication (Luskin 1987), empirical analyses have tended to focus almost entirely on how the process of deliberation impacts on marginal totals of attitude items at both the individual and aggregate level (Fishkin 1997; Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell 2002; Sturgis 2003). Little attention, in contrast, has been paid to outcomes that relate to other dimensions of opinion quality, such as attitude constraint. Constraint refers to the level of consistency between attitudes within an individual belief system that arises from a combination of logical, social, and psychological factors (Converse 1964). In this article we analyze data from five deliberative polls conducted in the United Kingdom in the 1990s in order to investigate the impact of political information and deliberation on attitude constraint. Across a broad range of issue areas we evaluate the extent to which the deliberative process impacts on statistical associations among attitude items between the first and subsequent waves of the polls. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for the validity and reliability of survey measures of the attitude and the broader utility of the deliberative polling method as a tool of social scientific inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers using qualitative methods, including case studies and comparative case studies, are becoming more self–conscious in enhancing the rigor of their research designs so as to maximize their explanatory leverage with a small number of cases. One aspect of qualitative research that has not received as much attention is the use of primary and secondary source material as data or evidence. This essay explores the potential problems encountered by political scientists as they conduct archival research or rely on secondary source material produced by historians. The essay also suggests guidelines for researchers to minimize the main problems associated with qualitative historical research, namely, investigator bias and unwarranted selectivity in the use of historical source materials. These guidelines should enable advanced undergraduates and graduate students to enhance the quality of their historically minded political science scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a German panel study on the longitudinal relationships between attentiveness to political news and an individual's sense of internal political efficacy. Most agree that there are two dimensions to political efficacy, one is internal and the other is external. Internal efficacy has been measured using statements about an individual's self-perceived ability to understand what is going on in the political system, or to have some say or influence on the political system. Internal efficacy does not refer to actual attempts at influencing government but rather to the feeling that one can have some impact if one wants. External efficacy has been measured using statements about elected officials' or politicians' willingness to listen or to care about the general public, and this is sometimes referred to as regime or system responsiveness. These two dimensions have often been taken together to assess the overall health of a democracy. Political scientists have also generally assumed political efficacy, in both its internal and external forms, to be a long-term underlying orientation to the political system largely immune to short-term influences such as current political developments.

Studies the reconstruction of the interwar discourse of international relations among American political scientists, while challenging the orthodox view, that the scholarship of this period was essentially idealist in nature. Reference to a compilation of literature devoted to examining the institutional history of international relations.

Despite high expectations, students of the 1960 and 1976 presidential debates were unable to find much evidence that these events significantly affected voters' candidate preferences. As a result, scholars have turned increasingly to cognitive consistency theories to explain viewers' reactions (or nonreactions) to debates. This article argues that one key mediating variable determining whether or not voters are influenced by debates is their level of political knowledge. Looking at the largely ignored 1980 Carter-Reagan debate, we find that voters with generally low levels of knowledge are particularly affected by the debate, and significant shifts in candidate preferences do occur among this group. The evidence suggests that the debate was an important factor in Ronald Reagan's bid to unseat his Democratic opponent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brief biographical profiles are presented for the contributors to the September 2013 issue, including Barry Buzan, Nicholas Charron, and Christopher Chase-Dunn.

The “computation” symposium presents the reflections of thinkers from many sectors of computing on the fundamental question in the background of everything we do as computing professionals. While many of us have too many immediate tasks to allow us time for our own deep reflection, we do appreciate when others have done this for us. Peter Freeman points out, by analogy, that as citizens of democracies we do not spend a lot of time reflecting on the question, “What is a democracy.” But from time to time we find it helpful to see what philosophers and political scientists are saying about the context in which we act as citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A list of contributors to the issue along with their academic credentials, including Vinod K. Aggarwal, Christine Arnold, Xun Cao, and others.

The article offers brief profiles of Laia Balcells, Vicki Birchfield, and Michelle L. Dion, who contributed to the writing of the journal.

An obituary for political scientist Aristide Zolberg is presented.

Pays tribute to social scientist Warren E. Miller who died in 1999.