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Global population is increasing at an alarming rate, posing a threat on the supplies of basic needs and services. However, population increase does not seem to be a common agendum of the global scientists and political leaders. People in the developed countries are more concerned about new technologies and their products. Pseudo‐threats related to the uncertainties of genetic engineering of crops and their outputs present on consumers are more audible and controversial than the real difficulties the world is experiencing at the moment and in the future. This review presents brief summaries of the real reasons to worry about and the uncertainties about genetically modified organisms. This article also presents the real uncertainties shared by consumers and scientists with respect to the past, present, and future of genetically engineered organisms. Developments in the field of precision genetics in the recent years and the implications on regulatory, breeding, and socio‐cultural dimensions of the global settings are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1952, Waldemar Gurian, founding editor of The Review of Politics, commissioned Eric Voegelin, then a professor of political science at Louisiana State University, to review Hannah Arendt's recently published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She was given the right to reply; Voegelin would furnish a concluding note. Preceding this dialogue, Voegelin wrote a letter to Arendt anticipating aspects of his review; she responded in kind. Arendt's letter to Voegelin on totalitarianism, written in German, has never appeared in print before. She wrote two drafts of it, the first and longest being the more interesting. It contained an early reference to her thinking about the relationship among plurality, politics, and philosophy. It also invoked her notion of the compelling 'logic' of totalitarian ideology. But this was not the letter Voegelin received. Because of this, he misunderstood significant parts of her argument. Below, the two versions of Arendt's letter are translated. They are prefaced by a translation of Voegelin's initial message to Arendt. An introduction compares Arendt's letters, offers context, and provides a snapshot of Arendt's and Voegelin's perceptions of each other. Their views of political religion and human nature are also highlighted. Keyed to Arendt and Voegelin's letters are pertinent aspects of the debate in The Review of Politics that followed their epistolary exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Russian politologist Aleksandr Dugin and his International Eurasian Movement. The authors examine the significance of Integral Traditionalism for Dugin's ideological constructs. The foundations of Integral Traditionalism as a systematic religious teaching are detailed. The classification of Dugin as a traditionalist and traditionalist concepts in his ideas are explained. The authors detail the influence on Dugin by Italian mystic Baron Julius Evola. Subjects of the article also include racist theories of Evola and the concept of "actual idealism."

In recent years, political scientists have shifted the focus of explaining political phenomena from the purely cognitive perspective to an integrated emotion-cognition one. Yet most studies which examine antecedents of political intolerance ignore the potential role played by “gut feelings” or group-based negative emotions in endorsing those attitudes. Moreover, even the few studies that deal with emotions and intolerance concentrate exclusively on the role of groups of emotions (positive vs. negative, dispositional vs. surveillance) or on basic emotions (anger or fear) and ignore the potential influence of more complex discrete emotions like hatred on political intolerance. Hence, the main goal of this study was to create a deeper understanding regarding the role of discrete negative emotions in increasing political intolerance among different groups of individuals in different contexts. In order to do so, the relations between political intolerance and three group-based negative emotions (hatred, anger, and fear) were tested by means of four large-scale nationwide surveys. Within the surveys, various intolerance measurement methods were used in various contexts (wartime vs. no-war/routine periods) and among individuals with different levels of political sophistication. Results, obtained via multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling, show that: (1) Group-based hatred is the most important antecedent of political intolerance even when controlling for important intolerance inducers such as perceived threat. (2) Other group-based negative emotions like anger or fear influence political intolerance wholly through the mediation of hatred or perceived threat. (3) The role of group-based hatred in inducing political intolerance is more substantial in the face of heightened existential threat and among unsophisticated individuals than among sophisticated ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. The article examines the factors that influence the frequency whereby scholarly articles published by Canadian political scientists are cited. Method. We collected data on 1,860 journal articles published between 1985 and 2005 by 758 Canadian political scientists and listed in the Social Science Citation Index. Using these data, we performed OLS and tobit estimations to identify factors influencing citation frequency. Results. The regressions show that the reputation of the journal in which the article is published, though important, does not explain everything. The gender of the author(s), the number of authors, the geographical focus of the article, the field, and the methodology also matter. Conclusion. An article is more likely to be widely cited if it is published in a prestigious journal, if it is written by several authors, if it applies quantitative methods, if it compares countries, and if it deals with administration and public policy or elections and political parties. Faculty members who belong to larger departments and those who are women are more cited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a discussion on the Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania and their path towards democratization. It is noted that based from the late 1987 assessment of political scientists on the prospect countries for democratization in the Arab world, Tunisia turned out to be the frontrunner, the spark of the region's first democratic transition. Twenty years later, the country, together with Morocco and Mauritania, underwent a democratization differential which was surprisingly and dramatically divergent from the previous forecasts.

Theories involving coattails, surge and decline, presidential popularity, and the economy ascribe little importance to presidential efforts to influence congressional elections. Since such efforts do occur, we ask: What happens when a president campaigns for fellow partisans? We examined President George W. Bush's decisions to campaign for certain House candidates in 2002, and we assessed the effect of his visits on Republicans' electoral successes. Both the competitiveness of a race and the president's electoral self-interest increased the likelihood of a visit on behalf of a candidate. Neither party loyalty nor presidential support in Congress had an effect. We conclude that presidential campaign visits significantly enhance candidates' electoral prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses some issues related to government formation. In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Legislatures are, by and large, majoritarian institutions. A majority is necessary to make law, and, in parliamentary systems, a majority of members must at least tolerate the formation and survival of a particular government. Over the last 40 years, political scientists have produced an impressive body of theoretical and empirical work designed to predict which coalitions will form and, relatedly, how long they will survive. Any theory that purports to explain government-formation decisions must be able to explain which potential governments would not form as well. Otherwise, one runs the risk of introducing bias into the analysis by selecting on values of the dependent variable, that is, the probability that a particular coalition will form.

Israeli academic Ilan Pappé first came to prominence in the 1980s as a member of Israel's “New Historian” movement, which chronicled the war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Dr. Pappe teaches political science at Haifa University and is the academic director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. He is currently writing a second edition of his most recent book, A History of Modern Palestine, One Land, Two Peoples (2004). The following interview was conducted by Don Atapattu, a free-lance writer in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion of presidential mandates is as certain as a presidential election itself. Journalists inevitably discuss whether the president-elect has a popular mandate. Because they see elections as too complex to allow the public to send a unitary signal, political scientists are more skeptical of mandates. Mandates, however, have received new attention by scholars asking whether perceptions of mandate arise and lead representatives to actvoters sent a policy directive. Two explanations have emerged to account for why elected officials might react to such perceptions. One focuses on the president's strategic decision to declare a mandate, the second on how members of Congress read signals of changing preferences in the electorate from their own election results. We test these competing views to see which more accurately explains how members of Congress act in support of a perceived mandate. The results indicate that members respond more to messages about changing preferences than to the president's mandate declaration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Mancur Olson's(1965), it is impossible for political scientists to conceive of political participation without reference to his powerful argument linking numbers of participants, public goods, and participatory outcomes. What is puzzling is the poor empirical support for this argument in the domain where it should work best, namely explaining business political activity. Olson thought his arguments principally applicable to economic groups, and for the empirical development of his arguments Olson drew heavily on business interests, the most active segment of the interest group community. We explore these arguments with business political activities data by examining the statistical performance of various measures of market structure in determining business political activity, and find little empirical support. We do offer an alternative basis for business behavior lodged in both private and collective goods that preserves business rationality and also helps explain not only the amount of business political participation but the modes of business participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of congressional approval have, in both theory and specification, often imitated models of presidential approval. Through their modeling decisions, researchers have implicitly assumed that the economic determinants of presidential and congressional approval are identical. Such assumptions have discouraged other researchers from testing competing hypotheses about the economic determinants of congressional approval. Using aggregate-level time-series analysis, this article investigates the question of whether or not the economic determinants of approval vary by the target of political judgment. The author finds that presidential approval is driven largely by sociotropic prospections, a result consistent with previous research.

Examines the modeling multilevel data structures use by political scientists in the U.S. Association of statistical modeling with the analysis of multilevel data; Discussion on the educational statistics and sociology for multilevel analysis;Importance of statistical motivation for explicit accounting for multilevel data structures.

Initiates an exploration of John Dewey's perspectives on political science and the political scientist reception of the perspectives. Claims about pragmatism and `Deweyism' in political science; John Dewey's critique of propaganda; Political scientist's disregard of John Dewey; Questions on John Dewey; Historiography; Debates.

Comments on political theorist's interpretation of John Dewey's work. Concept of postpositivism; Democracy as a way of organizing thought and thinking; Repercussions of inquiry and discovery on democracy; Paradox of Dewey's thoughts; Distinct version of democracy arising from the concept of discovery.

Analyzes the deontological liberalism theories of Alasdair McIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer and Benjamin Barberand their arguments against communitarian critique. Rejection by communitarians of a mistaken form of individualism which is sociological liberalism; Need for communitarians to incorporate conceptions of moral individualism and human rights into their reformulations of shared understanding.

The article reflects on the study of sociology and examines the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. While some have considered the works of Alexis de Tocqueville as neglected classics, the article argues that famous sociologist remains an important figure and that his written works are routinely assigned in American colleges and universities. Scholars label Tocqueville as a political scientist, yet he is actually one of the European forefathers of American sociology. The article also mentions several essays that incorporate the spirit of Tocqueville's theories.

The article presents information on the various aspects of the journal "Symbolic Interaction." It also mentions the appointment of Simon Gottschalk as the new editor of Symbolic Meetings. He starts with very little experience in politics and throughout the entire movie, organizes his unlikely campaign to be elected president. The social worlds both internal and external re-present, and sometimes change are examined by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, political scientists, and scholars working in women's studies, communication studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, film studies, ethnic studies, and others. They are polymorphous and polyvocal emerging out of face-to-face interaction. This journal addresses these issues directly and critically. Simon Gottschalk concludes that he intends to maintain "Symbolic Interaction" as one of the best journal of this discipline. Ultimately, however, the excellence of the journal depends on the quality of the manuscripts submitted and the usefulness of reviews that are provided to each other.