CIAO DATE: 10/2014
Volume: 129, Issue: 3
Fall 2014
Political Engagement by Wealthy Americans
Fay Lomax Cook, Benjamin I. Page, Rachel L. Moskowitz
FAY LOMAX COOK, BENJAMIN I. PAGE, and RACHEL L. MOSKOWITZ examine the political behavior of wealthy Americans—those with income or wealth in the top 1 percent. They find that the top 1 percent are exceptionally active in politics and discuss the implications of such high rates of participation for democratic policy making.
Authoritarianism and Democracy in Muslim Countries: Rentier States and Regional Diffusion
Ahmet T. Kuru
AHMET T. KURU analyses why most of the 49 Muslim-majority countries are authoritarian. He challenges explanations that point to Islam, the absence of secularism, patriarchy, and Arab exceptionalism as causes.
L. Sandy Maisel, Walter Stone
L. SANDY MAISEL and WALTER STONE identify the sources of political ambition of potential congressional candidates. They find that potential candidates are influenced by their perceived prospects for success, by their ambition for a congressional career, and by the costs associated with running for congress.
China and Taiwan: Balance of Rivalry with Weapons of Mass Democratization
Andrew Scobell
ANDREW SCOBELL discusses the ongoing rivalry between China and Taiwan. He explains why Beijing continues to view Taipei as a serious rival despite the growing hard power imbalance in China's favor. He argues that Beijing's concern appears focused on the potency of Taipei's soft power-Taiwan's emergence as a vibrant participatory democracy.
Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Taiwan's Relations with China and Japan, 1895-2012
Yinan He
YINAN HE explores how identity narratives have shaped Taiwan's foreign policy toward China and Japan. The author argues that the political discourse of the two "others" defining Taiwan's national identity has been frequently employed by political elites battling over whom the Taiwanese are and where their future lies. She claims that Taiwan's neutrality depends upon Beijing maintaining a moderate approach toward Taiwan and upon stable Sino-Japanese relations.
Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy, Rahul Sagar
Geoffrey R. Stone
Talk about good timing. In his new book, Rahul Sagar examines all of the issues now roiling the nation in the Edward Snowden controversy. Sagar explores the fundamental question: is there any way we can know that claims of state secrecy are in fact being used to protect the national security rather than to conceal the abuse of authority? As Sagar notes, that challenge has been with us from the Founding, but it is more acute now than ever because of the changing nature of the threats our nation faces and because of the complex nature of the sources and methods we need to employ if we are to respond effectively to those threats in the modern world.
Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics, Graham G. Dodds
William P. Marshall
The unilateral actions of President George W. Bush in seeking to combat the war on terror, followed by President Barack Obama’s efforts in attempting to overcome Congressional inaction by pursuing major policy initiatives through executive order, have again brought into focus the question of whether presidential power has expanded to the point where, in Arthur Schlesinger’s famous coinage, the United States now has an Imperial Presidency. To hear some tell the story, Presidents Bush and Obama have taken presidential power to new heights, thereby endangering constitutional limits on separation of powers. To hear others, the actions of these presidents have been fully consonant with those of their predecessors and present no new threat to the constitutional system of checks and balances.
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, Peter Baker
Michael Nelson
Quick: how much older is Richard B. Cheney than George W. Bush?
If your first instinct is to say anything greater than five years you will be wrong. The mistake would be forgivable. When Bush ran for president in 2000, his entire experience in government consisted of six years as governor of Texas. When he picked Cheney as his vice presidential running mate, he chose someone who had served as White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and minority whip in the House of Representatives. "Green" was a word often used to describe Bush. Cheney, on the other hand, was "seasoned."
The Language of Contention: Revolutions in Words, 1688-2012, Sidney Tarrow
John Krinsky
In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Valentin Volosinov (1973) posits that the generic conventions of reporting others' speech vary over time and place, and that these variations, if tracked, can reveal a great deal about changes in the ordering of social hierarchies. Sidney Tarrow's The Language of Contention, following Volosinov and his better‐known collaborator and mentor, Mikhail Bakhtin, argues that language-and in particular, keywords of social protest-are also indices of social change. Tarrow explicitly argues that "the symbols, mentalities, and narratives that actors employ can track real‐world changes in contentious politics" and "as new words for contention diffuse across social and territorial boundaries to new actors, such words can tell us how meanings change as the same words are used by different actors" (p. 5). Thus, Tarrow takes on Volosinov and Bakhtin's historical and "dialogical" view of language, seeing it as situated, multivocal, and changing, pulled variously by "centripetal" and "centrifugal" forces of structured social interaction. Tarrow sees language as being variously stable and volatile, according to whether given words "symbolically resonate" with other words and meanings, and whether they are...
American Umpire, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman
Meena Bose
Studies of American foreign policy wrestle with identifying grand themes that illustrate patterns in choices and policymaking, while also recognizing differences that may be unique to an event or result from specific circumstances that often are not replicated. Cast very broadly, the contrast reveals an underlying difference in conceptual approach by political scientists versus historians. As Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman writes, historians “emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated … Few principles apply all the time” (p. 5). Her monumental work, American Umpire, does both: It argues persuasively that history shows the United States acting as an “umpire” rather than an “empire” in world affairs, and then applies this concept to American foreign policy from the eighteenth century to the present.
Terry M. Moe Free
Jeffrey Henig's new book is about the changing governance of the public schools and why it matters. Henig's central theme is that local, single‐purpose governance-a hallmark that has made education "exceptional" by comparison to other realms of public policy-has been giving way to general‐purpose governance, sometimes through mayoral control, but mainly through a shift to state and national decision arenas. With this ongoing shift in governance, he argues, education is being plunged into the same governance mix with other public policies, and this change has consequences for power, politics, and reform.
The Adversary First Amendment: Free Expression and the Foundation of American Democracy, Martin H. Redish
Mark A. Graber
Grand theories of the First Amendment suffer from problems of exclusion and inclusion. The broad principles that justify excluding some human activity from constitutional protection inevitably bleed in ways that support excluding activity that virtually all people think is covered by the First Amendment. The broad principles that justify granting First Amendment protection to activities inevitably bleed in ways that support granting protection to human activities that hardly anyone thinks merit special constitutional protection. The Adversary First Amendment: Free Expression and the Foundations of American Democracy effectively highlights how many standard justifications for excluding commercial advertising from constitutional protection threaten to undermine constitutional protection for consensual core speech rights. Martin Redish less successfully demonstrates that his adversarial theory of democracy would not entail constitutional protection for a wide variety of activity that government may consensually regulate.
Robert Y. Shapiro
This is a study of "media effects" on American public opinion. It begins with a clear‐headed review of the debate about the "hypodermic model" of strong persuasive effects versus "minimal effects," of the shift of interest to agenda setting, priming, and framing effects. What it misses, however, is what we know from regular media reports of survey results and the history, for example, in Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro's The Rational Public (1992), that aggregate public opinion changes for understandable reasons, even in cases of short‐term fluctuations, in a manner related to new information typically found in the news media. John Zaller emphasizes in The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) that this news impact is most likely to occur when it reflects elite‐level agreement, in contrast to ideological or partisan disagreement that would lead the opinions of Democrats and Republicans in the mass public to diverge. Though originating from leaders, these are media effects that have changed in recent years in the sense that there has been increasing partisan divergence among the public across a full array of policy issues. This divergence has followed ideological polarization at the elite level since the 1970s, and it is the motivation for Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson's excellent book.
Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union: Leadership Style from Polk to Lincoln, Fred I. Greenstein
Matthew J. Dickinson
In his study of the leadership style exhibited by six presidents, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln, Fred Greenstein applies the analytic scheme he first unveiled in The Presidential Difference to explain how the decisions that these men made in the critical period 1846–1861 led to the Civil War. Greenstein argues that their actions, beginning with Polk’s ill‐fated decision to provoke a war with Mexico, formed a funnel of causality that increasingly limited the options of their successors when dealing with the slavery issue, so that when Lincoln took office, it was impossible to keep the Union together short of military conflict. In addition to addressing a significant period in American history, Greenstein’s choice of topic has the added virtue of shining a spotlight on a group of presidents who, with the exception of Lincoln, tend to be overlooked in the history books. To be sure, this is not a revisionist study; Greenstein’s analysis is unlikely to change anyone’s assessment of these six presidents in terms of their historical rankings (although I admit to coming away with a slightly greater appreciation for Millard Fillmore’s presidency). Greenstein’s contribution instead is to show how the six...