Winning Iran's Election Is Just The Beginning Of Rouhani's Political Struggles

Iran's president may have been re‐elected, but he'll need to win the supreme leader's support and get foreign powers to engage with Tehran to be successful.     

前进途中多挑战 中东和平路漫漫——齐皮·利夫尼当选前进党主席后的以色列政局

以色列执政党前进党举行的党主席选举吸引了很多人的目光，不仅仅因为这是年轻的前进党自2005年11月成立以来举行的第一次主席选举，更在于它发生在地处中东风暴中心的以色列，而且当选者极有可能取代党主席埃胡德·奥尔默特成为以色列新一任总理。     

The Political Regimes Project

The Political Regimes Project is a comprehensive effort to study the determinants and comparative performance of political regimes. The main goal of the project is to assemble and analyze a large cross-national dataset containing indicators of the three basic political regime types (democracy, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism) and a variety of politcal regime subtypes (e.g., parliamentary democracy, bureaucratic authoritarianism). This dataset will contain yearly measures of political regime type and subtype for 117 major countries from 1946 (or a country's first full year of independence) through 1988. The author plans to use this dataset as the basis for a comprehensive study of the determinants and performance of political regimes, and will eventually make the dataset available to other researchers. The comprehensive scope of the Political Regimes Database, its time series properties, and the elaborate typology of regimes that it is based upon will enable researchers to examine political regimes in novel ways that may yield valuable new insights. Mark J. Gasiorowski is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. He has published recent articles inComparative Political Studies International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, and other journals, and is the author of a forthcoming book on U.S. foreign policy toward Iran.     

阿拉法特:依然举足轻重

他有过辉煌的往事风流,他为民族解放作出了不屈探索,他也为和平呕心沥血。虽然目前他被不断孤立和边缘化,但他的影响力仍无人能够忽视。     

Local Political Leadership: The Art of Circulating Political Capital

In this article, local political leadership is modelled as circulation of political capital. Based on intensive case studies of the political leadership performance of four mayors in Denmark, this article asks why the concept of political capital, introduced to local government studies in 1961 by Banfield, has in many ways sunk into oblivion. This article resuscitates the concept of political capital, using it to generate a general theory of local political leadership. In this framework, the crucial component of effective leadership is the mayor's ability, within a given institutional framework, to circulate (earn and spend) political capital. Effective leadership occurs when the leader continuously invests his or her political capital in ways which yield the greatest return. Clarence N. Stone's distinction between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ is central to the model. Mayors performing what James H. Svara has labelled ‘facilitative leadership’ can in some cases accumulate substantial amounts of political capital.     

The Future Is Upon Us

T he race is on between environmental destruction on a global scale and sustainable solutions . T he finish line, in J ared D iamond's alarmed estimation, is only 50 years away . F or B ruce M au, sustainable solutions, already at hand, will win out . D iamond, too, hopes our civilization will learn from those in history who rose to their challenges and prospered, not suffer the fate of others who dithered and collapsed .