Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil

Scholars believe that mass partisanship in Brazil is comparatively weak. Using evidence from a 2002 national survey, however, this study finds that the aggregate level of party identification actually falls only slightly below the world average and exceeds levels found in many newer democracies. Yet this finding is misleading, because the distribution of partisanship is skewed toward only one party, the PT. This trend results from a combination of party organization and recruitment efforts and individual motivation to acquire knowledge and become involved in politicized social networks. Partisanship for other parties, however, derives substantially from personalistic attachments to party leaders. This finding has implications for current debates about the status of parties in Brazil. Also important is the impact of the 2005 corruption scandal implicating the PT and President Lula da Silva's administration.     

Sources of EU Support: The Case of Germany

The determinants of support for European integration and the European Union have been analysed by previous research from a comparative perspective: factors that help to explain the differences between the levels of support of the EU member states are considered to be the factors that drive EU support in general. This article takes a different approach using a cross-time perspective to identify the sources of EU support and to investigate the causal structure of the effects. We analyse German support for European integration which is very volatile over time and test potential explanations for these fluctuations. Three bundles of factors are considered: the economy, the increasing scope of EU policies, and the domestic political process. It appears that all three are associated with fluctuations of German support for European integration. However, domestic politics seems to be mightier than often understood. The empirical evidence that is presented in support of these claims is taken from the Mannheim Eurobarometer Trendfile and recent Eurobarometer surveys, from the Comparative Political Data Set, and from the official handbook of the Bundestag.     

Sources of Reform in Britain: A Review Article

Books reviewed in this article:
Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson, History of Suffrage
Gregory Claeys (Ed), The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850     

Sources and Transitions of Chinese Foreign Policy: An Introduction

Chinese foreign policy has multiple sources, and the incentives that are driving its behaviour have grown from the domestic/international, as well as from regional, economic, normative, multilateral, and cultural levels. Foreign policy-making in China is becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated. This special issue is drawn from some edited papers presented in the joint workshop between Fudan and Durham Universities on Chinese foreign policy on 29–30 March 2010. By assessing the economic, domestic, regional, global and cultural sources of Chinese foreign policy, we aim to illustrate the various sources and to locate possible ways to consolidate the transitional process, and to spur future endeavour facing China’s foreign policy.     

Kant's Perpetual Peace and Its Hidden Sources: A Textual Approach

The problem of Kantâ‐?s sources in Perpetual Peace has never before been dealt with in a systematic fashion. As some commentators have already noticed, Kant seldom quotes his sources in Perpetual Peace and in quite a number of other works. The purpose of the present research note is to analyze the Kantian text and to find philological traces of the various authors that we believe have been important to Kantâ‐?s work in the field of political philosophy. With this in mind, a methodology has been elaborated which includes three aspects: a textual and comparative analysis, a consistency analysis and a contextual analysis. These three approaches combined should allow us to systematically shed light on the key role played by Emer de Vattelâ‐?s famous book The Law of Nations (1758) and, more unexpectedly, by the Federalist Papers, in particular articles No. 10, 14 and 51 written by Madison.     

The Personal Sources of Responsiveness. Introduction to a Special Section

Responsiveness is a core value in democratic politics. Individual legislators are important mechanisms for implementing this concern in real‐world settings and thus facilitating responsive government. This introduction to the special section on this topic starts out by highlighting the special relevance of individual legislators in this regard and by sketching important theoretical considerations that emerge from the political science literature on this issue. In its main part, it summarizes the key findings of the contributions in relation to its main theme, namely the personal sources of responsiveness. We end with a short conclusion that reflects on possible tensions between responsiveness and the personalization of representative systems.     

The North Pacific triangle: Sources of economic and political transforation

This article explores the changing economic and security relationships among the United States, Japan, and South Korea, with particular attention to the implications of post-1985 exchange-rate shifts for political and economic stability in these three nations. The author argues that the stability and cohesion of this strategically important North Pacific triangle, the only point outside Europe where the economic and military superpowers all adjoin one American to the Japanese market as the locus of regional growth, due to disproportionate and destabilizing adjustment costs being imposed on South Korea. Expanded American, and especially Japanese support initiatives are the principal alternatives to intensified Korean reliance on continental Asia, the article maintains.     

The Domestic Sources of Israel's Decision to Launch the 1956 Sinai Campaign

This article examines Israel's decision to launch the 1956 campaign against Egypt. While the current literature tends to argue that, in 1956, the campaign was a response by Israel to security threats, it is suggested here that, if so, these threats certainly did not predetermine any specific response. Israel could, for example, have responded by adopting a defensive posture. In reality, domestic factors were just as influential as external ones. The most important of these was the severe economic crisis caused by mass immigration to Israel during 1948–1951. This crisis in turn led to the creation in 1953–1956 of a war coalition whose three components—David Ben-Gurion (Prime Minister and Minister of Defence), MAPAI's party bosses and the army—had different interests but shared the idea of a war against Israel's Arab neighbours as a way in which each could advance its preferred aims.     

Assessing the Sources of Classical Arabic Compilations: The Issue of Categories and Methodologies

The complex nature of medieval Arabic compilations, with their evidence of manifold pieces and layers of diverse (older) text material, has been puzzling to many scholars of Islam. It has even caused some researchers to question the authenticity and credibility of information contained in these texts—and their value as historical sources—altogether.

An inquiry into the theoretical controversies at issue here constitutes the starting point of this article. Additionally, we will look at the categories and terms more frequently used in Western studies of the sources of Arabic compilations from about the eighth to the eleventh century Common Era (CE). The second part of the article offers an extensively annotated catalogue of categories and terms. This terminology, it is hoped, will help advance the assessment of classical Arabic compilations, for it takes the actual circumstances of the transmission of knowledge and the working techniques of compilers in medieval Islam into proper consideration. In conclusion, the paper illustrates how the proposed categories and terms are to be applied. It will become clear that the application of this kind of refined source-critical examination of individual classical Arabic texts is instrumental to a better understanding of medieval Muslim scholarship in general.     

Malaysia's US Policy Under Najib: Structural and Domestic Sources of a Small State's Strategy

Abstract

This article explains Malaysia's US policy under Prime Minister Najib. It argues that to the extent that there is a “shift” in Malaysia's policy, its substance has been shaped by structural and domestic considerations. Structurally, in the face of a fast rising China, Malaysia is compelled to keep a more balanced relationship with all the major powers. This structural push, reinforced by Obama's “pivot,” has been nonetheless limited by a concern about the risks of entrapment, abandonment, and antagonism. Domestically, there are economic and political motivations to develop closer ties with Washington. These, however, have been counteracted by a calculation of not wanting to align too closely with America. These structural and domestic determinants together explain the smaller state's strategy towards the superpower at a time of systemic change.     

Decomposing the Vote: Individual,Communal, and Cantonal Sources of Voting Behavior in Switzerland

This article considers individual, communal, and cantonal sources of voting behavior in the 2007 National Council elections in Switzerland. Using hierarchical linear models, it is shown how the vote propensity for the five main parties (CVP, FDP, Greens, SP, and SVP) varies across individuals, communes, and cantons. Key explanatory factors at each of these levels are explored, as well as cross‐party differences in the effects of these factors.     

Civil-Military Affairs and Security Institutions in the Southern Cone: The Sources of Argentine-Brazilian Nuclear Cooperation

This paper analyzes the conditions in which the governments of Argentina and Brazil founded security institutions in the early 1990s, while they were democratizing. It advances the hypothesis that international cooperation in the security field is often linked to the evolution of civil-military relations. Civilian leaders in both countries established institutions and sought international participation deliberately to achieve civilian control and gain leverage over the military establishment, which they sorely distrusted. The need to stabilize civil-military relations at home was therefore the prime motivating force behind the emergence of security institutions in the Southern Cone. Three mechanisms were at work: omnibalancing, policy handling, and managing uncertainty. These mechanisms are derived from three different schools of thought: realism, organizational-bureaucratic models, and theories of domestic political institutions. Besides explaining the sources of nuclear bilateral cooperation, this argument also serves as a critique of two prominent theories in international relations that attempt to explain cooperation and peaceful relations among democracies: neoliberal insti-tutionalism and democratic peace theory.     

The Sources of Authoritarian Control after the Cold War: East Africa and the Former Soviet Union

Why have some post-Cold War autocrats consistently been able to sideline opposition and avoid debilitating elite defections while others have faced repeated challenges? Drawing on interviews, the media, and the academic literature, this article focuses on two sets of factors affecting the extent of incumbent control over opposition: the degree of state economic control and the extent of divisions in national identity. Two sets of most similar cases are compared: Belarus and Ukraine, and Kenya and Tanzania. These comparisons are used to highlight the importance of distinguishing between the causes of democracy and those of authoritarian breakdown.     

Russian Archival Sources for the Study of the Iranian Communist Party: The Pre-Tudeh Years, 1917-1942

In recent decades, the field of history of Communism in Iran has been enriched by a number of studies that deal with different aspects of the subject. Still some core aspects, such as the role of the Comintern in the Iranian Communist movement, remain largely understudied. This could be partly explained by the inaccessibility of archival documents during the Soviet era. Yet, despite the opening of many former Soviet archives after 1991, access to certain archives still presents great difficulties. In the framework of a research conducted in Russian archives, an inventory has been located in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no-Politicheskoi Istorii / RGASPI) in Moscow. The inventory originates from the Comintern’s archive and consists of a large number of files and documents in various languages (primarily Russian, but also Persian and Azerbaijani) relevant to Communist activities in Iran. Given the importance of this inventory to the study of Communism in Iran, Iran-USSR relations and the extent of Soviet involvement in Iran in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods, we decided to translate and annotate it and to provide an introductory discussion of the highlights of Communist activity in Iran between the years 1917 and 1942.