'I'm Proud of the British Empire': Why Tony Blair Backs George W. Bush

This article considers the three main reasons behind Tony Blair's support for the post-9/11 foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, especially the war on Iraq: first, Blair is on a neo-imperial mission, with deep roots in his personal development, to re-order the world to better suit British interests; secondly, Bush and Blair independently agree that the post-1989 period represents wasted time, years of drift that could have been used to press home Anglo-American dominance; and thirdly, an agreement that 9/11 opened the space for a radical restructuring of international relations and the setting of a more interventionist global agenda.     

Confirmation Politics and The Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court: Institutional Loyalty, Positivity Bias, and the Alito Nomination

Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence (2003a, 2003b, 2005) expound the theory of positivity bias in their analysis of the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore. This theory asserts that preexisting institutional loyalty shapes perceptions of and judgments about court decisions and events. In this article, we use the theory of positivity bias to investigate the preferences of Americans regarding the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. More specifically, from the theory of positivity bias, we derive the hypothesis that preferences on the Alito confirmation are shaped by anterior commitments to the Supreme Court. Based on an analysis of a national panel survey, we find that those who have a high level of loyalty toward the Supreme Court rely much more heavily on what we term judiciousness—in contrast to ideology, policy, and partisanship—in forming their opinions on whether to confirm Alito. Thus, institutional loyalty provides a decisive frame through which Americans view the activity of their Supreme Court.