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3081. 9th Annual Bradley Lecture Series

Author:
Harvey C. Mansfield, Robert S. Royal, Hadley Arkes, Charles Taylor, Charles Murray, Richard Epstein, Samuel P. Huntington, and Charles R. Kesler
Publication Date:
06-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
For American conservatives, this is a strange period of anticlimax and indecision. Crime rates are down, welfare rolls are shrinking, the federal budget is in surplus, and there are fewer Democratic senators, congressmen, governors, and state legislators than in decades. Even more miraculously, the Soviet Union lies in history's dustbin. Yet despite these glad tidings, conservatives are not rejoicing or even gloating. Nor are they aggressively following up their successes, pressing liberalism on all fronts and striving for a decisive political breakthrough. Like General McClellan outside Richmond, conservatives are proud to have come so far — but, uncertain of the kind of victory they seek and feeling an infinite need for reinforcements, they are afraid to risk going much farther.
Topic:
International Relations, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States and Soviet Union

3082. Digital Broadcasting and the Public Interest

Author:
Amy Korzick Garmer, Anthony Corrado, Angela Campbell, Henry Geller, Tracy Westen, Charles Firestone, Robert Corn-Revere, Monroe E. Price, Forrest P. Chisman, Andrew Graham, Steven S. Wildman, D. Karen Frazer, and Andrew L. Shapiro
Publication Date:
12-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
In January, 1998, the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society Program convened the first in a series of meetings to examine the public interest in the United States' communications system. With funding provided by the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, the Program hosted the initial session of the Aspen Institute Working Group on Digital Broadcasting and the Public Interest on January 25–27, 1998, at the Institute's Wye River Conference Center. The conference brought together twenty-three legal scholars, lawyers, economists, and policy advocates, representing a variety of experiences and perspectives, to consider two issues: (1) the theoretical and legal bases for the imposition of public interest obligations on those using the electromagnetic spectrum for broadcasting purposes, and (2) other public interest implications of the move to digital broadcasting. It is the hope of the Working Group that the ideas generated at this and subsequent meetings will add to the ongoing public dialogue on broadcasting and the public interest, and will prove useful to the ongoing debate over the public interest responsibilities that should accompany broadcasters' receipt of new digital television licenses.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and Science and Technology
Political Geography:
United States

3083. Utility Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe

Author:
Aspen Institute and Klaus Brendow
Publication Date:
01-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Aspen Institute
Abstract:
The paper reviews market–oriented reforms of the electric power industries in central and eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), related utility cooperation and business strategies, and conditions of integrating CEE/CIS electricity systems into the emerging European electricity markets.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and Industrial Policy
Political Geography:
Europe and Eastern Europe

3084. International Capital Mobility and Monetary Politics in the U.S. Congress, 1960–1997

Author:
J. Lawrence Broz
Publication Date:
10-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
Prevailing approaches to the politics of monetary policy in the United States are based on closed economy assumptions, which is appropriate for analyzing the period before about 1980. However, the opening of U.S. and foreign financial markets since the early 1980s has had a profound effect on domestic monetary policy and domestic monetary politics. The major policy effect is that the transmission channels of monetary policy now include the exchange rate. The major political effect is that the exchange rate has become a focus of concern for well-organized industries in the traded goods sector and, by extension, for Congress. This paper presents statistical evidence showing that the forces driving congressional activity on monetary policy have changed dramatically with the international financial integration of the U.S. economy. Exchange rates, as opposed to interest rates, now largely determine congressional attentiveness to monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States

3085. The State in a Changing World: A Critique of the 1997 World Development Report

Author:
Devesh Kapur
Publication Date:
02-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
In recent years, the World Bank has been at the vanguard in pressing for a circumscribed role for the State in developing countries. It therefore comes as somewhat of a surprise that the 1997 World Development Report (WDR - the World Bank's annual flagship publication), The State in a Changing World, underscores the continuing significance of the State in LDCs.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Emerging Markets, Government, International Organization, and Third World

3086. Right Makes Might: Freedom and Power in the Information Age

Author:
David C. Gompert
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
China's emergence begs a fresh look at power in world affairs—more precisely, at how the spread of freedom and the integration of the global economy, due to the information revolution, are affecting the nature, concentration, and purpose of power. Perhaps such a look could improve the odds of responding wisely to China's rise.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Government, and International Law
Political Geography:
United States, China, and Soviet Union

3087. CSD Bulletin, A Delicate Balance

Author:
Chantal Mouffe, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Bert A. Rockman, Doreen Massey, Tony McGrew, Kimberly Hutchings, and Niels Jacob Harbitz
Publication Date:
09-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster
Abstract:
Ideological disputes about the respective domains of the state and the market have convulsed much of the twentieth century. Yet recent research and experience suggest that the interaction between politics and economics, between the state and the market, is complex and systemic. An understanding of these systemic properties is crucial for effective democratic reconstruction. This is especially so in countries with a legacy of communism - such as the transition states of the former Soviet Union and East-Central Europe - where not only the market but the state, and indeed society, may have to be reconstructed, if not reinvented.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Globalization, and Government
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and Central Europe

3088. CSD Bulletin, The Media and Democracy

Author:
Chantal Mouffe, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Bert A. Rockman, Doreen Massey, Tony McGrew, Kimberly Hutchings, and Niels Jacob Harbitz
Publication Date:
09-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster
Abstract:
Does the power of the media threaten democracy (understood as the participation of the people in political debate and decision- making)? In answering this question we need to distinguish between three kinds of power: political, economic, and intellectual.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Globalization, and Government
Political Geography:
United Kingdom

3089. Global Banking

Author:
Tom Barry, Martha Honey, and Christian Weller
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Foreign Policy In Focus
Abstract:
International banking activities frequently result in financial instability and serious economic downturns as financial markets become more open and deregulated. Competition from multinational banks has reduced the availability of credit to small- and medium-sized enterprises, to low- and middle-income consumers, and to farmers. While economies experience financial instabilities and declining credit, governments are losing the means to protect their domestic markets.
Topic:
Economics, Government, International Organization, and International Trade and Finance

3090. Ideas, Culture and Political Analysis Workshop

Author:
Thomas Risse, Sarah Mendelson, Neil Fligstein, Jan Kubik, Jeffrey T. Checkel, Consuelo Cruz, Kathleen McNamara, Sheri Berman, Frank Dobbin, Mark Blyth, Ken Pollack, George Steinmetz, Daniel Philpott, Gideon Rose, Martha Finnemore, Kathryn Skikkink, Marie Gottschalk, John Kurt Jacobsen, and Anna Seleny
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Social Science Research Council
Abstract:
The last decade or so has witnessed a resurgence in scholarship employing ideational and cultural factors in the analysis of political life. This scholarship has addressed political phenomena across a variety of national and international settings, with studies of European politics being particularly well represented. For example, the work of scholars like Peter Hall (1993), Peter Katzenstein (1996), Ronald Inglehart (1997), Robert Putnam (1994) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1995) has improved our understandings of European polities, societies and economies. Yet despite a recent rise in interest, ideational and cultural explanations still meet with skepticism in many quarters of the discipline. Some scholars doubt whether non-material factors like ideas or culture have independent causal effects, and others, who accept that such factors might matter, despair of devising viable ways of analyzing their impact on political life.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Security, Democratization, Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Cooperation, Nationalism, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, France, and Latin America