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1. Voter Characteristics and Leader Effects in a Post-Communist Context: The Case of the 2012 Legislative Elections in Romania

Author:
Andrei Gheorghiță
Publication Date:
06-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In the contemporary political environment, the added value brought by leaders to the electoral performance of the parties appears to be significant and growing. However, the impact of leader evaluations on the vote choice is likely to vary from one voter to another. This article explores the influence of voter characteristics on the magnitude of leader effects in the context of the 2012 legislative elections in Romania. Five such characteristics are considered: objective political knowledge, subjective political information, party identification, political engagement, and time of voting decision. For this purpose, the paper employs data from the 2012 Romanian Election Studies (RES) three-wave panel survey. The analyses prove a significant influence of political knowledge and party identification and negligible effects of the other three voter characteristics considered. Thus, political knowledge appears to stimulate the manifestation of leader effects. Similarly, voters holding partisan ties appear to experience higher levels of personalization. The implications of these findings are discussed extensively.
Topic:
Security, Human Welfare, Politics, Governance, and Elections
Political Geography:
Romania

2. Thomas Piketty's Capital and the Developing World

Author:
Nancy Birdsall
Publication Date:
02-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a tour de force—a compelling and accessible read that presents an eloquent and convincing warning about the future of capitalism.* Capitalism, Piketty argues, suffers from an inherent tendency to generate an explosive spiral of increasing inequality of wealth and income. This inegalitarian dynamic of capitalism is not due to textbook failures of capitalist markets (for example, natural monopolies) or failures of economic institutions (such as the failure to regulate these monopolies), but to the way capitalism fundamentally works. Unless the spiral is controlled by far more progressive taxation than is now the norm, the political fallout could undermine the viability of the successful “social state” (p. 471) in the advanced economies, putting the democratic state itself at risk.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, and France

3. On Complicity and Compromise

Author:
Hugo Slim
Publication Date:
02-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Chiara Lepora, an Italian doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, and Robert Goodin, an American philosopher based at the Australian National University in Canberra, have joined forces to produce an elegant and exceptional book. With humanitarian ethics as its starting point, On Complicity and Compromise elaborates a sophisticated and practical approach to complicity that will be profoundly useful to a much wider audience than humanitarians alone. The rigor and simplicity of this book will be of real value to anyone grappling with difficult ethical choices in politics, business, diplomacy, policing, or social services.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
America, Australia, and Italy

4. The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves by Richard Ned Lebow

Author:
Alan Wolfe
Publication Date:
04-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves, Richard Ned Lebow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 431 pp., $103 cloth, $34.99 paper. The Politics and Ethics of Identity dazzles the reader with its ambition and erudition. Its theme is grand: nearly all the claims made by social theorists emphasizing the importance of identity are wrong because human beings and the associations they create, including nation-states, can do without it. Its breadth is startling, and includes brilliant textual analyses of, among other things, Greek epic poetry, the operas of Mozart, Germany's search for a classical past, the contemporary conservative Christian book series Left Behind, and science fiction. If all this is not enough, it also contains important theoretical discussions of the nature of narrative and the question of whether modernity implies a sharp break with the past.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Germany and Cuba

5. Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations

Author:
Andrew A.G. Ross
Publication Date:
04-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations, K. M. Fierke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 281 pp., $95 cloth. What could we learn from examining suicide bombing, self-immolation, or hunger strikes not through the lens of state security but from the position of those individuals who use such acts to achieve normative change? In addressing this question, Political Self-Sacrifice brings what seem like senseless acts of desperation into focus as strategically intelligible and culturally meaningful techniques of resistance. By disentangling the logic of “political self-sacrifice,” K. M. Fierke offers an important and timely account of the political strategies, cultural meanings, and normative aspirations associated with those participants in international affairs who, as she puts it, “play with a weak hand” (p. 8).
Topic:
International Relations, Politics, and Regime Change
Political Geography:
New York

6. "The Vulnerable in International Society" by Ian Clark

Author:
Kalevi Holsti
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In 1977 the Australian international relations scholar Hedley Bull published a seminal work, The Anarchical Society, an exploration of the sources of international order. While acknowledging that international politics are characterized by Hobbesian, liberal, and Kantian elements simultaneously, he argued that underlying them are elements of order, by which he meant a pattern of activity that sustains the elementary or primary goals of the society of states, or international society. The goals are the preservation of the system of states, the preservation of the independence of its members, and that members of the international society see peace as the normal rather than exceptional condition of their mutual relations.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Australia

7. "Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World" by Philip Pettit

Author:
James Bohman
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In Just Freedom, Philip Pettit undertakes significant revisions of some of his republican commitments. The book has many new and innovative ideas, but most of all this work sharpens Pettit's thinking on the role of democracy in republicanism, and on the often positive interaction between the two. Above all, it seems to me that Pettit's own account of basic freedoms has become broader and wider, and now includes a cosmopolitan conception of what we owe other human beings, whoever they are.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

8. Toward a Global Ethic

Author:
David Rodin
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization-the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology-have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics-the success or failure of that project-will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, and Politics

9. "The Honor Code" by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Author:
Sharon Krause
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The language of honor is apt to strike the modern reader as quaint, even obsolete, if not downright pernicious. It calls to mind the hierarchies of the ancien régime and the absurdities of the duel, not to mention the horrible "honor killings" that perpetuate the domination of women in some traditionalist societies today. If honor is out of favor, one might think so much the better.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
China

10. "Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference"

Author:
Eva Hausteiner
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Recent books on empires—and there have been many—often have quite straightforward titles. Famous examples include Michael Doyle's Empires(1986), Niall Ferguson's Empire (2003), Herfried Münkler's Empires (2008), and Timothy Parsons'sThe Rule of Empires (2010). Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empires in World History is no exception. One reason for this might be that the concept of empire is still not fully established in the scholarly vocabulary when it comes to describing the present. Speaking of empires in the past is widely accepted, but imperial structures as recurring and even contemporary political phenomena are still highly debated. The endeavor of bringing empire back in as a transhistorical concept of heuristic value, complementing existing notions of political order, such as the nation-state, and going beyond the analysis of imperialism, is far from concluded.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Africa, China, and Eurasia