Commitment and Consequences: Reneging on Cosponsorship Pledges in the U.S. House

We argue that bill cosponsorship in Congress represents an institutional arrangement that provides credibility to commitments of support. We predict that if cosponsorship fosters legislative deals, MCs will only rarely back out on their pledges to support a bill if it comes up for a floor vote, and when they do, these choices will reflect strategic calculations. Further, legislators who violate their cosponsorship agreements will face punishment from colleagues, compromising their ability to gain support for their own bills. We explore the causes and effects of MCs' choices to renege on a pledge by voting no on a bill for which they were a cosponsor, focusing on all cosponsorship decisions in the 101st–108th Houses. The results reveal that patterns of reneging and its consequences are consistent with the idea that cosponsorship functions as a commitment mechanism.     

A picturesque travelogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's “letters written during a short residence in Sweden,Norway, and Denmark”, 1796

The article presents a reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's “Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark”, dated 1796, in which the concept of the Picturesque is used as an analytical framework. The Picturesque is a contemporary British aesthetics concerned with how we look at landscape, and with the aestheticism of viewing. It is suggested that the Picturesque offers a new way of understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's position in‐between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Revolution and Restoration, authorship and journalism.     

Beyond Semi‐sovereignty: The new Germany in the new Europe

Semi‐sovereignty was identified by Peter Katzenstein as an external condition of West German Politics. Semi‐sovereignty persists as an internal condition of the new German state, but externally Germany is less semi‐sovereign as a result of the disappearance of external restrictions and its increasing economic and political power which is now allied to its greater freedom of manoeuvre in the security area. While less semi‐sovereign in objective terms than before unity, it is argued that the political elite in Germany will continue to be multilateralists and to eschew the adoption of a national interest discourse.