DENNIS F. THOMPSON analyzes the capacity of presidential primaries to provide a test of the constitutional character of candidates. He argues that the primary process should be judged to be more or less democratic on the basis of the effective opportunities it gives voters to assess the democratic commitments of the candidates.
HEATHER K. GERKEN and DOUGLAS B. RAND propose creating citizen assemblies to vet presidential hopefuls in order to give low-information voters a useful heuristic for casting their votes. Their conceptual claim is that citizen assemblies should be of interest to the vast swaths of political science preoccupied with making representative democracy work. By shearing away the deliberative baggage that has long accompanied proposals like this one, the authors highlight the role that citizen assemblies can play in helping low-information voters make sensible choices.
PAUL G. BUCHANAN looks at the evolution of New Zealand's foreign policy after the Cold War. He argues that New Zealand's ability to "punch above its weight" in contemporary international affairs was as much a product of fortuna as it was of policymaking virtu. It was only toward the end of the 1990s that a heterodox approach mixing realist, idealist, and constructivist ideas was confirmed as the basis for New Zealand's engagement with the world.
SCOTT HELFSTEIN examines the efficacy of economic sanctions as a tool to counter nuclear proliferation. He argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, international cooperation is not a key determinant in sanction success. Instead, empirical evidence shows that sanctions have been effective at altering nuclear policies only when the sanction sender and target have had friendly relations.
Joel Andreas has written a very fine analysis of the emergence of China's current ruling group, which to a remarkable extent consists of engineers. Eight out of nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee fall into this category. Andreas traces the convoluted, protracted, and conflictual process that resulted in this outcome. He compares the Chinese to the Soviet case, showing that there, too, Soviet leaders also came to be composed largely of engineers, as exemplified, for instance, by the ruling group of the Leonid Brezhnev period. But in the Soviet case, the process, while also difficult, did not give rise to similar degrees of conflict.
What are the causes and consequences of, and possible solutions to, the problem of intelligence failure? Richard Betts, one of the most important and thoughtful analysts of intelligence and national security, addresses these questions in this collection of previously published essays and new material.
What do we know about inequality in the United States? There is a lot of it, more so than in other advanced countries. Inequality has also increased sharply since the early 1970s, again more so than in most other advanced countries. Underlying this rise in inequality is a host of structural changes, including globalization, immigration, skill-based technological change, and industry shifts.
ERIC S. EINHORN and JOHN LOGUE argue that the European social model can be reformed without sacrificing its gains and that the Scandinavian states have already adapted their welfare state models to meet demographic, social, and economic challenges. They sketch the characteristics of the Scandinavian model, including its underpinnings in encompassing organizations of the less well off, the role of democratic corporatism in policymaking, and the importance of empiricism, social trust, and solidarity in the development of public policy.
GARY C. JACOBSON analyzes four surveys designed to investigate partisan polarization on the Iraq war. He finds that modes of motivated reasoning, including motivated skepticism and selective perception, selective memory, and selective exposure, contributed strongly to the emergence of the unusually wide differences of opinion on the war.
In his speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992, Patrick Buchanan seized the pulpit to proclaim that Americans were fighting an intense culture war. This was a struggle “for the soul of America," Buchanan declared, "as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." Just a year earlier, sociologist James Davison Hunter had written of a culture war waged between those with orthodox and progressive worldviews. With one side believing in a fixed and transcendent authority, and the other invoking human reason as the guide to morality, conflict invariably engulfed a range of political issues. Considering the context of incendiary debates over public funding for the arts, the legality of abortion, civil rights for gays and lesbians, and teaching evolution in public school classrooms, Hunterʼs analysis seemed an accurate description of American politics in the 1980s and 1990s.