CIAO DATE: 02/2014
Volume: 128, Issue: 4
Winter 2013-2014
Conceptualizing Containment: The Iranian Threat and the Future of Gulf Security
Zachary K. Goldman, Mira Rapp-Hooper
ZACHARY K. GOLDMAN and MIRA RAPP-HOOPER discuss American security interests in the Persian Gulf region and the prospects for effective cooperation among Gulf states to contain Iran. They find that it is unlikely that the United States will be able to establish a containment regime that relies upon the Gulf Cooperation Council and that informal, bilateral ties to states in the region are a preferable policy recourse. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19163#sthash.yMWmTk6Q.dpuf
Philosophical Pragmatism and the Constitutional Watershed of 1912
Trygve Throntveit
TRYGVE THRONTVEIT argues that intellectuals and activists indebted to the pragmatist tradition of American philosophy decisively shaped the debate between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson during the election of 1912. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19164#sthash.lspgECHu.dpuf
Did Bush Democratize the Middle East? The Effects of External–Internal Linkages
Bruce Gilley
BRUCE GILLEY examines how the so-called Freedom Agenda of President George W. Bush affected politics in the Middle East. He concludes that this agenda generally exerted positive effects on democratic change in the region, although often working in unintended ways and usually interacting with domestic factors. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19165#sthash.BVzmnkw7.dpuf
International Influence, Domestic Activism, and Gay Rights in Argentina (PDF)
Omar G. Encarnacion
OMAR G. ENCARNACIÓN explores the development of gay rights in Argentina. He focuses on the role of gay rights activists as internal filters of international gay rights trends and on their capacity for molding their strategies to the domestic environment. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19166#sthash.Frk1YD5N.dpuf
The India Lobby and the Nuclear Agreement with India
Dinshaw Mistry
DINSHAW MISTRY discusses the campaign of Indian-American lobbying for a civilian nuclear agreement with India. He argues that Indian Americans were part of a broader “India lobby” which helped advance legislation on the civilian nuclear agreement through Congress. - See more at: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19167#sthash.M88rbr7G.dpuf
The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–2010, Crawford Young (PDF)
Gretchen Bauer
The historical analysis presented in this book is multi‐dimensional. The historical account examines the choices and personalities of individual presi- dents in the context of changing ideas, technology, and social forces. Through this approach, Genovese subtly challenges the idea that the presidency can be reduced to great men and great leadership, while simultaneously highlighting the role of decision making within the conditions that presidents inherit. Each chapter also examines currents of thought and scholarship about presidential power, which helps the reader engage with the book’s central question about the proper scope and use of such power. This condensed intellectual history culminates with a very useful chart in chapter 5 that summarizes a range of perspectives on presidential power.
Robert Y. Shapiro
Income inequality was a major issue in the 2012 presidential election. While the Occupy Wall Street movement may fade into history, the substantial media coverage it received drew national attention to the unequal distribution of income between the top 1 percent versus the bottom 99 percent of Americans after years of increasing inequality. This and the Republican nomination of Mitt Romney, the poster child for the top 1 percent (even before the videotape of him claiming that 47 percent of Barack Obama’s base of support were people who paid no taxes and believed that the government should take care of them), enabled Obama to use inequality—and redistribution—as a major campaign issue. He used it along with an array of other domestic issues that divided the parties in an election in which the Democrats focused on mobilizing their ideological partisan base, abandoning a centrist campaign. In the context of existing public opinion and other research, the resonance of the income in- equality issue was in fact surprising—a puzzle. Although completed and draw- ing on data well before the 2012 election, The Undeserving Rich—and with its title—provides an explanation.
Chris Den Hartog
When the House of Representatives elects its Speaker—one of the most‐ powerful positions in government—each party nominates a candidate. Most representatives vote for their Pparty’s nominee, and the majority Party candi- date always wins. Similarly, the majority controls committee chairs and other positions. It was not always so—early Speakers had limited power, and there was no such “organizational cartel” to guarantee majority control of key posi- tions. Jeffrey Jenkins and Charles Stewart tell the story of the cartel’s emergence. The story begins with House members figuring out early on that committee appointments and procedural decisions made the speakership influential; this led to loosely organized efforts by groups of legislators to shape speakership elections. Along the way, members realized that two other House‐elected officers, the Clerk and the Printer, also controlled valuable resources and (in the Clerk’s case) procedural influence.
Global Health and International Relations, Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee (PDF)
Christopher H. Foreman, Jr.
I began exploring public health policy and politics 25 years ago in a world quite different from the one thoughtfully assessed in this analytically penetrating volume. Back then “health” uttered by a political scientist or economist nearly always meant “health care” construed as domestic public and private arrange- ments that delivered or financed the delivery of defined categories of services bydoctors and hospitals. Questions of cost and access loomed large, as now, but primarily as concerns of individual national governments and with “public health” considered, if at all, as a decidedly secondary domain, especially in nations developed enough to have middle classes that took matters like im- munizations and basic sanitation largely for granted. Analysts barely spoke of “global” anything, much less “global health,” and international relations had only recently begun to blossom beyond its traditional terrain of state‐centered security and diplomacy. As Colin McInnes and Kelley Lee recall, “Orthodox International Relations... created little space for the consideration of health issues. In particular, health appeared to International Relations scholars as a domestic concern largely unrelated to matters of international security” (p. 26).