Taking Threat Seriously: Prejudice,Principle, and Attitudes Toward Racial Policies

Drawing from group theories of race-related attitudes and electoral politics, we develop and test how anxiety influences the relative weight of prejudice as a determinant of individuals’ support for racial policies. We hypothesize that prejudice will more strongly influence the racial policy preferences of people who are feeling anxious than it will for people who are not. Using an experimental design we manipulate subjects’ levels of threat and find significant treatment effects, as hypothesized. We find that individuals’ racial policy attitudes are partially conditional on their affective states: individuals who feel anxious report less support for racial policies than those individuals who do not feel anxious, even when this threat is stimulated by non-racial content. More broadly, we conclude that affect is central to a better understanding of individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors.     

Taking Nonprofit Intermediaries Seriously: A Middle‐Range Theory for Implementation Research

The federal government often works through nonprofit intermediaries to reach and empower communities in the United States. One increasingly popular policy strategy is to offer grant funding to intermediary organizations in an effort to strengthen communities. Funded intermediaries are tasked with building the capacity of faith‐based and community organizations at the local level, but the policy theory that informs these programs does not specify how these capacity‐building efforts will lead to stronger communities. Missing is a middle‐range implementation theory that links inputs to community‐level changes through the actions of an intermediary. Derived from empirical case study evidence using process‐tracing analysis, the theory of the community‐integrated intermediary posited in this article helps fill that gap.     

Taking ‘Big Government Conservatism’ Seriously? The Bush Presidency Reconsidered

This article reflects on the ongoing debate about the ideological direction of the Bush presidency and what it means for the future of US conservatism in domestic policy. The paper considers the dual nature of US conservatism and then goes on to explore the 'conservative promise' of the 2000 presidential election and the debate over what critiques of the Bush administration have come to call 'big government conservatism'. Finally, the article studies two examples of how this alleged 'big government conservatism' has been manifested. First, the article contemplates the administration's fiscal policy. Second it looks at the 2003 reform of the Medicare system. We argue that, although these two cases provide some ground to the idea of 'big government conservatism', in the end this phenomenon does not add up to a coherent policy vision. Overall, beyond tax cuts, the Bush administration has failed to implement a bold conservative agenda.     

Taking 'WA Inc' Seriously: An Analysis of the Idea and its Application to West Australian Politics

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term WA Inc (or WA Incorporated) became a by-word in the West Australian community for the failings, especially in their commercial activities, of the West Australian Labor governments of that period. Despite popular and academic interest in the notion of 'WA Inc', it is arguable that the conceptual linkage between 'business' and government, once central to popular interpretations of the term, remains under-analysed. This article has two main purposes: to illuminate usage of 'WA Inc' by identifying several basic referents of the term and relating these to popular criticisms of the West Australian government in the 1980s and to determine the importance of those criticisms, thereby contributing to the larger debate about capacity of government to emulate private sector business.     

Taking Wrongs Seriously: Acknowledgment, Reconciliation, and the Politics of Sustainable Peace, Trudy Govier

Calls for truth commissions and similar public processes topromote social reconciliation after national conflicts oftenreflect admirable aspirations but muddy thinking. This subtleand careful analysis of the processes of political reconciliationafter periods of mass violence opens for analysis the spectrumof potential meanings associated with ‘reconciliation,’ranging from social unity and harmony to the cessation of physicalviolence. Informed by philosophic analysis, social psychological studiesand historical case studies, Taking Wrongs Seriously     

Taking Intervention Politics Seriously: Media Debates and the Contestation of African Regional Interventions ‘from Below’

ABSTRACT

Scholars increasingly investigate how the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) is contested and negotiated in practice. Yet little knowledge exists on the politics African regional interventions provoke in the societies affected by such interventions. Based on an analysis of media reports from Burkina Faso and The Gambia, we show that regional interventions are indeed contested locally, irrespective of the means of intervention applied. Our analysis demonstrates how local elites use regional norms and policies in order to claim power and define what is going (wr)on(g). With this, we provide evidence for the (contested) local effects of APSA and for the relevance of media for researching such effects.     

Taking adoption seriously

He is the former Assistant Executive Director of both the Child Welfare League of America and the Day Care and Child Development Council of America. He has published widely on the issue of adoption. Among other works, he served as the chief editor of the Adoption Fact Bookand co-authored the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Adoption.     

Taking disability rights seriously

Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001, xxix +278 pp. Ruth O'Brien, Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, xiv +288 pp. Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003, ix +278 pp. Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and the Case against Disability Rights, Louisville: Avocado Press, 2003, xvii +296 pp. Old political science is characterized by exclusion: exclusion of people who “don't matter,” sometimes on account of where they live, on account of gender, on account of ethnicity, and sometimes on account of other factors. One such factor, disability, has too often been neglected by political scientists and our students.