Political Science

American society may be hostile to the thought of ideologies, but it possesses a sophisticated but little understood ability to engage in deep conflicts over political ideas, while at the same time reducing adversarial positions to legitimate derivatives of American history and development. This book asks how this occurs; how the sources, traditions, and usages of core ideas and their derivative compounds animate political discourse and structure the basis of political conflict; and how it is possible to sustain a high incidence of competitive value-laden argument and principled political conflict within a stable political order. The fundamental aim of this book is to examine the traditions and usages of American political ideas within the arena of practical politics. By locating them in their respective contexts, it is possible to assess both their changing meanings and their shifting relationships to one another. In surveying America's core ideas, the book facilitates an informed awareness of their political and cultural leverage as forms of persuasion and sources of legitimacy. The book roots the examination of American political ideas firmly in the milieu of social drives, political movements, and contemporary issues within which the ideas themselves are embedded. This not only allows the study to investigate the interior properties and traditional priorities of America's key values, but permits the theoretical implications and practical consequences of these ideas to be traced and evaluated.

Democracy promotion has assumed greater importance since the end of the cold war, particularly in the US foreign policy. This book examines the American experience with the advancement of democracy worldwide. First, it explores to what extent classical political theory—particularly realism and liberalism—help us understand democracy promotion. Secondly, it looks at the strategic and political motivations behind this policy and how it relates to other key goals in US international relations. Finally, it considers the impact that American democracy promotion has had in different regions and countries. These issues are analysed from a wide range of theoretical perspectives sustained by 15 different contributors.

This book explores the legal and political issues that underlie the campaign for animal rights and the opposition to it. Addressing ethical questions about ownership, protection against unjustified suffering, and the ability of animals to make their own choices free from human control, its chapters offer numerous different perspectives on animal rights and animal welfare. They show that whatever one's ultimate conclusions, the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is being fundamentally rethought. The book offers a modern treatment of that rethinking.

Why has it been so long since an American president has effectively and consistently presented well-crafted, intellectually substantive arguments to the American public? Why have presidential utterances fallen from the rousing speeches of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR to a series of robotic repetitions of talking points and 60-second soundbites, largely designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate? This book draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents' ability to communicate with the public. The book argues that the ever-increasing pressure for presidents to manage public opinion and perception has created a “pathology of vacuous rhetoric and imagery” where gesture and appearance matter more than accomplishment and fact. The book tracks the campaign to simplify presidential discourse through presidential and speechwriting decisions made from the Truman to the present administration, explaining how and why presidents have embraced anti-intellectualism and vague platitudes as a public relations strategy. The book sees this anti-intellectual stance as a deliberate choice rather than a reflection of presidents' intellectual limitations. Only the smart, it suggests, know how to dumb down. The result, it shows, is a dangerous debasement of our political discourse and a quality of rhetoric which has been described, charitably, as “a linguistic struggle” and, perhaps more accurately, as “dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.”

Alexis de Tocqueville published his famous study of the United States at a time when modern democracy was still quite young. His study of democratic institutions in the United States, as well as his comparative reflections on political institutions in France, is based on detailed empirical evidence drawn from long and arduous fieldwork using a variety of textual and oral methods. Tocqueville also relied on theoretical work seeking to draw sustainable formulations belonging to a general comparative order while respecting the historical specificities of each institutional form. Using as its basis Alexis de Tocqueville’s landmark study Democracy in America, this book is a comparative study of democracy in India and the United States. It frames the comparison based on the distinct trajectories of the two countries: the United States moving ‘from equality’ at birth towards new forms of inequality over time, and India moving ‘towards equality’ from an inegalitarian social order at independence. The book discusses the experience of democracy in the two democracies, focusing on the effect of democratization on key elements of public life from religion to citizenship, capitalism, the struggle for equality, and the status of minorities (including the Jews) in the two countries.

This new and original study focuses on the growing politicization and radicalization of the Arab minority within Israel — excluding the Israeli-administered territories — from 1967 to the present day. The author has studied both written and oral sources to produce a scholarly analysis of the diverse political views and attitudes of Muslims, Christians, and Druzes in Israel. As well as analysing the views of intellectuals and politicians, he examines trends among the general Arab population in Israel, looking in particular at political behaviour and struggles, organizations, problems of identity, electoral trends, education, language, and literature. His wide-ranging examination draws out the strategies developed by Israeli Arabs to deal with the conflicting demands of the State of Israel and Arab nationalism. The aim of this book is to encourage an objective and balanced approach to the issues, and concludes with some far-reaching proposals to improve Jewish—Arab relations.

This book, comprising papers contributed to a conference entitled Constitutional Design 2000 and held at the University of Notre Dame in December 1999, brings together the views of the leading academic specialists on the theory of effective democratization, and of the institutional design tasks involved.

This book spans an entire epoch in the history of the contemporary Palestinian national movement, from the establishment of Israel in 1948, to the PLO-Israel accord of 1993. Contrary to the conventional view that national liberation movements proceed with state-building only after attaining independence, the case of the PLO shows that state-building may shape political institutionalization, even in the absence of an autonomous territorial, economic, and social base. This study traces the political, ideological, and organizational evolution of the PLO and its constituent of guerrilla groups. Taking the much-vaunted ‘armed struggle’ as its connecting there, it shows how conflict was used to mobilize the mass constituency, assert particular discourses of revolution and nationalism, construct statist institutions, and establish legitimacy of a new political class and bureaucratic elite. The book draws extensively on PLO archives, official publications, and internal documents of the various guerrilla groups, and over 400 interviews conducted by the author with the PLO rank-and-file.

Why does public management—the art of the state—so often go wrong, producing failure and fiasco instead of public service, and what are the different ways in which control or regulation can be applied to government? Why do we find contradictory recipes for the improvement of public services, and are the forces of modernity set to produce worldwide convergence in ways of organizing government? This study aims to explore such questions, which are central to debates over public management. It combines contemporary and historical experience, and employs grid/group cultural theory as an organizing frame and method of exploration. Using examples from different places and eras, the study seeks to identify the recurring variety of ideas about how to organize public services—and contrary to widespread claims that modernization will bring a new global uniformity, it argues that variety is unlikely to disappear from doctrine and practice in public management. The book has three parts. Part I, Introductory, has three chapters that discuss various aspects of public management. Part II, Classic and Recurring Ideas in Public Management, has four chapters that discuss various ways of doing public management. Part III, Rhetoric, Modernity, and Science in Public Management, has three chapters that discuss the rhetoric, and culture of public management, contemporary public management, and the state of the art of the state.