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Volume 114 No. 3 (Fall 1999)
Abstracts
Ronald F. King examines the connection between welfare policy and budget policy, analyzing block grants as a complex form of fiscal constraint. He shows why the food stamp program ultimately was not transformed into a block grant as part of the 1996 welfare reform, and he argues that the tension between entitlement protection and spending control has not yet been resolved.
Walt Vanderbush and Patrick J. Haney examine the dynamics of making U.S.policy toward Cuba during the first Clinton administration. They argue that, rather than being dominated by the executive and a powerful ethnic interest group, in this period Cuba policy became enmeshed in electoral politics and a struggle for foreign policy power between the Congress and the president.
Gil Merom challenges the Israeli belief in national security exceptionalism. He compares strategic and moral dimensions of Israeli security with those of other states and concludes that the notion of Israel’s national security exceptionalism is unfounded.
Peter Juviler and Sherrill Stroschein reintroduce the recently neglected concept of the political community as a model in the comparative analysis of state formation, adaptation, and failure. They argue that regime stability and democratic consolidation depend upon the inclusiveness of community boundaries of shared allegiance and identity, rights, and commitments in the face of class, ethnic, and transnational differences.
Dororthy J. Solinger compares the migration regimes in China, Germany, and Japan, all of which have shared a xenophobic basis toward “foreign workers” (in China’s case, including its own peasants) along with a drive to develop economically at almost any cost. She identifies common factors that have limited the application of rights for these people, and, through comparison, uncovers conditions that may make for improvements over the longer haul.
Margaret Hanson and James J. Hentz examine the negotiations over the ownership of neoliberal economic policy ideas diffused by international financial institutions in Zambia and South Africa. Domestic policy dialogues prove to be an important mechanism through which political coalitions identify with new policies and are a more effective mechanism for domestic policy change than is external financial coercion.
Book Reviews