Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ...ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870–1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.
This comprehensive new study gives a full account of the formulation of British economic policy in the twentieth century, drawing on the most recent research based on documents made available under ...the thirty-year rule to give detailed insight into policy-making in the 1950s and bringing the narrative right up to the end of the 1980s. The book offers both a lucid narrative description of the evolution of policy from the turn of the century through the First World War, recovery, the Depression, the Second War and its aftermath, the `Keynesian Revolution', and the shifts and about-turns of more recent decades, and a coherent analysis of these processes. Covering both macro and micro issues, the text is structured in such a way as to give due weight to all the various influences at work: institutional aspects, such as the changing role of policy-making ministries, as well as political debate and economic theory.
As France begins to confront the new challenges of the post-Cold War era, the time has come to examine how French security policy has evolved since Charles de Gaulle set it on an independent course ...in the 1960s. Philip Gordon shows that the Gaullist model, contrary to widely held beliefs, has lived on--but that its inherent inconsistencies have grown more acute with increasing European unification, the diminishing American military role in Europe, and related strains on French military budgets. The question today is whether the Gaullist legacy will enable a strong and confident France to play a full role in Europe's new security arrangements or whether France, because of its will to independence, is destined to play an isolated, national role.
Gordon analyzes military doctrines, strategies, and budgets from the 1960s to the 1990s, and also the evolution of French policy from the early debates about NATO and the European Community to the Persian Gulf War. He reveals how and why Gaullist ideas have for so long influenced French security policy and examines possible new directions for France in an increasingly united but potentially unstable Europe.
As most political scientists know, the outcome of the American presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months ...before the election. Thus, the general campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people's opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate while reaching a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–92 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, ‘rational’. In contrast, voters decide, based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification, which candidate to support eventually. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of presidential elections – not through misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates' positions on important issues.
El presente volumen recoje la crónica de viaje producida por seis estudiantes, cada uno de los cuales se hizo cargo de diferentes trayectos; una memoria de viaje literaria que, quiza refleje mejor el ...estado de ánimo, las virtudes y los defectos del programa del viaje de estudios; un ensayo sobre la amplia experiencia de 'estadía en hogar' y el informe final bilingüe (español y japonés) que resume y evalua el viaje de estudios; trabajos de estudiantes presentados en Japón incluyendo algunos en japonés. Algunos textos están en inglés.
