Transnational Histories of Southern Africa’s Liberation Movements offers new perspectives on southern Africa’s wars of national liberation, drawing on extensive oral historical and archival research.
How do electoral politics affect presidential decisionmaking in war? As both commander in chief and elected officeholder, presidents must inevitably balance competing objectives of the national interest and political survival when assessing alternative military strategies in war. Yet, how and when electoral pressures influence decisionmaking during an ongoing conflict remains unclear. Drawn from the logic of democratic accountability, two mechanisms of constraint may be inferred. First, presidents may delay making decisions that are perceived to carry excessive electoral risk.
How do parties target intimidation and vote-buying during elections? Parties prefer the use of carrots over sticks because they are in the business of getting voters to like them and expect higher legitimacy costs if observers expose intimidation. However, their brokers sometimes choose intimidation because it is cheaper and possibly more effective than vote-buying.
The Orontes River Basin is among the least researched transboundary water basins in the Middle East. The few studies on the Orontes have two main theoretical and empirical shortcomings. First, there is a lack of critical hydropolitics studies on this river. Second, those studies focus on either the Turkish–Syrian or Lebanese–Syria relations rather than analysing the case in a holistic way.
A fine boxer in his youth; an active duty officer in the US Marine Corps who spent the 1962 missile crisis at sea, 20 miles off the Cuban coast, in readiness to invade the island; a Marine officer in Vietnam; a special correspondent of The Economist who predicted the Brazilian military coup of March 1964; a Chicago native urged by the city’s machine politicians to take over the seat of a retiring Democratic Congressman (with hints of a Senate opening to come); a professor who had a six-hour meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana (and a box of Cuban cigars from the revolutionary leader); the ho
Why do some people support redistributive policies such as a generous welfare state, social policy or protections for the poor, and others do not? The (often implicit) model behind much of comparative politics and political economy starts with redistribution preferences. These affect how individuals behave politically and their behavior in turn affects the strategies of political parties and the policies of governments. This book challenges some influential interpretations of the political consequences of inequality.
Existing approaches to campaign ethics fail to adequately account for the “arms races” incited by competitive incentives in the absence of effective sanctions for destructive behaviors. By recommending scrupulous devotion to unenforceable norms of honesty, these approaches require ethical candidates either to quit or lose. To better understand the complex dilemmas faced by candidates, therefore, we turn first to the tradition of “adversarial ethics,” which aims to enable ethical participants to compete while preventing the most destructive excesses of competition.
We examine the individual-level determinants of tax morale in low-capacity states, specifically Latin American countries, where the social contract is often perceived as fractured. We argue that individuals in such states perceive the social contract as an agreement to which they can opt in or opt out. Those who choose to opt out prefer to substitute state-provided goods for private providers, rather than pay for public goods through taxes or free ride to receive those goods.
Why did Plato conclude the Republic, arguably his most celebrated work of political theory, with the Myth of Er, an obscure story of indeterminate political-theoretical significance? This paper advances a novel reading of the Myth of Er that attends to the common plot that it shares with two earlier narrative interludes in the Republic.
