Citizen response to regional integration in the Americas: The cases of Costa Rica and El Salvador

This study examines public opinion in Costa Rica and El Salvador regarding regional integration in Central America. Recent efforts at regional integration as well as the response of the governments of the above countries to those efforts are reviewed. Public opinion toward regional integration is significantly more positive but less structured in El Salvador than in Costa Rica. Differences in the international and domestic contexts help to explain the differential responses in these two countries. Likewise, contextual factors help to account for differences between Central American and European publics in attitudes toward regional integration. Charles L. Davis is associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are Latin American politics and comparative political behavior. Matthew J. Gabel is assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. His interests are European politics and the politics of regional integration. Kenneth M. Coleman is a former professor at the University of Kentucky, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of New Mexico. His interests are Latin American politics and public opinion.     

Inca, Sailor, Soldier, King: Gregor MacGregor and the Early Nineteenth‐Century Caribbean

This article examines the recruiting practices, political propositions and changing identities of the Scottish adventurer Gregor MacGregor in the early nineteenth‐century Caribbean. Based on original archival research and revision of the existing secondary literature, it seeks to understand why he has consistently been judged as a failure, and why neither Scotland nor any of the countries MacGregor worked in have wanted to claim him as their own hero. After an introduction providing biographical details and some historical context for the Caribbean in the period 1811–1830, the article looks in detail at what have been seen to be his successes and failures in the Caribbean region. It asks to what extent questions of ethnicity or masculinity have affected the way contemporaries and historians viewed MacGregor and his actions. In conclusion, it suggests that although he was a soldier and a sailor, and he was declared both an Inca and a King, his career was deemed a failure by both contemporaries and historians in Scotland, South America and the Caribbean. The main explanation for this negative assessment is that his ambitions continually fell foul of the interests of various Caribbean elites and of the distinctive historical circumstances of the region.¹     

Reproducing a Fit Citizenry: Dependency, Eugenics, and the Law of Marriage in the United States, 1860-1920

Between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, American state legislatures enacted a series of new laws that delineated a class of citizens who were deemed ineligible to participate in the institution of marriage. Scholars have characterized this development as evidence that lawmakers had lost faith in a laissez-faire approach to nuptial governance, and thus transformed marriage into an object of public regulation. This essay argues that behind the ostensible nuptial privatism of the mid-nineteenth century lay a self-conscious policy of judicial governance. Judges invoked the language of nuptial privacy and the common law of contract strategically to advance their vision of moral and economic discipline. The new marital prohibitions thus represented, the essay argues, not the expansion of the state's police power into the previously private realm of domestic relations, but rather a critical transformation in how nuptial reformers and lawmakers understood the relationship between marriage and the well-being of the polity.
Fueled by growing concerns about pauperism, the racial character of the urban proletariat, and the collapse of the economically independent single-male-breadwinner household, the changing form of nuptial governance signaled a thoroughgoing intellectual and strategic reorientation from an understanding of marriage as forming economically and morally viable households – the fundamental units of society – to an understanding of marriage as a largely procreative institution, as the literal source of the citizenry. This reconceptualization of marriage underwrote a strategy of nuptial governance that mobilized marriage as a strategy in the state's regulation of social reproduction.     

Operationalising bottom-up learning in international NGOs: Barriers and alternatives

This article proposes bottom-up learning as a normative framework for international NGOs. It explores the common but often unacknowledged disparity between organisational values and mission versus actual practice. The first section of the paper raises the question of organisational learning disorders followed by an exploration of learning organisations and bottom-up learning in particular. A section briefly summarising positive developments in the field is followed by discussions of organisational barriers and possible mitigation techniques. The paper closes with a challenge for international NGOs to take a closer look at their learning capabilities with a view to improving service to communities in need.     

Connecting models of the individual and policy change processes: a research agenda

Policy Sciences - This article proposes that closer attention to models of the individual provides substantial theoretical and empirical leverage to policy studies scholars. Capturing the nuances...     

Human Values and Sophistication Interaction Theory

Political Behavior - Political sophistication systematically affects the structure, crystallization, and use of political values, but it remains unclear if sophistication manifests similar effects...     

Containing Conflict or Instigating Unrest? A Test of the Effects of State Infrastructural Power on Civil Violence

Several scholars argue that state infrastructural power affects the likelihood of civil violence yet make competing claims. Some propose that states with high levels of infrastructural power instigate violence by reducing local autonomy, while others suggest infrastructural power endows states with the capacity to contain civil violence. We test these claims using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Through a pooled time-series analysis of 32 former British colonies, we find that infrastructural power is not significantly related to civil violence, suggesting either that infrastructural power has no effect or no net effect. Then, through case studies of Burma and Botswana, we investigate the impact of infrastructural power on civil violence, focusing on mechanisms and causal conditions. The case studies provide evidence that infrastructural power produces competing mechanisms that negate any net effect and that different conditions and policies affect whether a state’s level of infrastructural power contains conflict or instigates unrest.