Japan and the new world order

We present and consider five alternative scenarios of development — past, present and future — for Southeast Asia. Longitudinal data on foreign direct investment, trade, and currency valuation provide our basis for understanding the relations among the countries in this region as well as their relations with major external powers, especially the United States, Japan, and China. Our analysis suggests regional diversity rather than uniformity, with considerable flux and heterogeneity in the external economic ties of the countries resident in this area. Moreover, we argue that it would be overly simplistic to view changes in these ties only in bilateral terms of US or Japanese gains or losses. Instead, the Southeast Asian themselves, the other newly‐industrializing countries, and the constituent parts of Greater China are all increasingly making their presence felt.     

Warriors in the “new world order”

He writes regularly on matters of strategy. His publications include The Strategic Dimension of Military Manpower;and Paradoxes of Power: The Military Establishment in the Eighties.     

Economic discourse and the capitalist order

This paper uses the concepts of business model and financial ecosystem to analyse the relation between the US capital market and corporate business. Under a capital market double standard, from 1995 to 2000, new companies with digital prospects could recover their costs from the capital market; but, after the tech stock crash in 2000, all companies were required to generate profits from the product market. This encourages a blurring of old and new firm identities, because sectoral power is increasingly necessary to secure cost recovery. But this does not imply any return to business as usual when the financial ecosystem for new technology survives the crash and large-scale venture capital investment continues. From this point of view,the new economy illustrated, concretely, the determining role of finance in the broader processes of financialization.     

On studying world order: A plea for systematic inquiry

Conclusion The creation of improved systems of world order requires great care. Alternative configurations may or may not prove more suitable, and each must be painstakingly examined on its own merits. For those of us who are actively concerned with studying about world order, this means the application of a far more rigorous conception of inquiry to our subject. So long as we cannot accept the Leibnizian claim that this is certainly the best of all possible worlds, our search for better ones must certainly be the best of all possible searches. This means that models of world order must be derived from appropriate hypotheses and subjected to the strictures of systematic analysis. World order studies must be treated in accordance with the strict canons of inquiry outlined in this essay. Only then can they begin to develop the highly generalized system of theory that characterizes any science.     

Political information processing: Question order and context effects

Data from two independent field experiments indicate that changes in question order and context may well account for an apparently precipitous decline of interest in politics at the time of the CPS 1978 American National Election Study. Evidence from a question order experiment with the SRC/CPS feeling thermometers also suggests that such contextual artifacts may not be atypical. Indeed, because of the many changes in the content and organization of the election studies over the years, context effects represent plausible rival hypotheses for a number of inexplicable shifts and trends in the time-series. In testing these hypotheses the authors derive and validate an information-processing model of how respondents infer their political states of mind from observations of their own question-answering behavior in the survey interview. In addition, the authors illustrate the wide applicability of the model tosubstantive problems in the discipline and its implications for the survey-based paradigm in political behavior research.     

Strategies in a volatile world

Globalization and localization are usually considered to be two very opposite theoretical frames for studying today's political economy. Rather than accepting this theoretical dualism, this article argues that the combination of the two worlds is dependent on strategies. By analysing the action of a business unit of a multinational corporation, it is shown how it is possible for local actors to combine their strategies into a coherent whole by which a locality takes advantage of its channels to the corporate markets of the multinational corporation. This case-study then questions our usual theortical observations concerning internationalization and sketches out an alternative way of thinking, combining globalization and localization.     

Economic effects on the vote in Norway

A body of accumulating evidence appears to support the finding that collectivist economic concerns and assessments of government economic performance directly influence voting behavior independent of other predispositions and cleavages. This seems reasonable and is well documented across both cultures and time periods. What remains more inconclusive is how to explain fluctuations in the electoral impact of personal economic worries. Our comparison of Norwegian and U.S. data has suggested that cognitive, social and political factors may all influence this association. The political information and cues for connecting the two spheres may be absent for most elections and for most people. Nevertheless, in some elections and under certain conditions individual economic worries can have a significant, independent impact on election outcomes. A major goal of future political-economy research, therefore, should be to specify more completely those factors that facilitate the linkage of personal and collectivist economic concerns.     

The world as a moral community

He is the author and co-author of numerous books, among them The Sociology of the Future; The Democratic Revolution in the West Indies; Decisions of Nationhood; Jamaican Leaders; Ethnicity, and Nation Building; Public Leadership;and Social Area Analysis.He is currently working on a book titled Foundations of the Futures Field.     

Constitutional order in a federal republic

A review article on Vincent Ostrom, The political theory of a compound republic: Designing the American experiment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). xxx + 240 pages. 22.50 cloth;22.50 cloth; 8.95 paper.     

Direct presidential elections: a world summary

This paper first examines the frequency of direct presidential elections among the 170 countries of the world with a working, directly elected parliament. We find that there is a directly elected president in more than half of the countries and in about two-thirds of the republics. Former British colonies are less likely to hold direct presidential elections, which are otherwise very popular in North and South America and Africa. We then examine the kind of electoral formula that is used for the election of presidents. Most elections are held under the majority rule, most of the time under the majority runoff procedure. The majority rule is clearly predominant in Europe and Africa, and is unpopular in North America. Finally, no relationship is observed between the level of economic development or of democracy and the use of direct presidential elections or the choice of an electoral formula.