Book reviews

Ash Amin and John Tomaney (eds), Behind the Myth of European Union: Prospects for Cohesion (Routledge, London, 1995), 334 pp., ISBN 0–415–13078–6 (pb)

Stephen Gundle and Simon Parker (eds), The New Italian Republic: Front the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi (Routledge, London, 1996), 334 pp., ISBN 0–415–12161–2 (hb), 0–415–12162 (pb)

Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (I. B. Tauris, London, 1996), 965 pp., ISBN 1–85043–879‐X

Geoff Mulgan, Connexity: How to Live in a Connected World (Chatto & Windus, London, 1997), 280 pp., ISBN 0–7011–6396–8     

Freedom,Hate, and Violence on the American Right

Most studies on Middle East security focus on traditional threats such as military aggression and terrorism. This draft report examines the scope and dimensions of a broadened regional security agenda. It focuses on three specific issues: the opium trade in Central and Southwest Asia; unregulated population movements from the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and North Africa; and maritime piracy around the Horn of Africa and Arabian Peninsula. Although Washington is not directly affected by any of these "soft" or "grey area" challenges, they are relevant for the United States in at least five respects. First, they represent a subset of the transnational problems that both the Clinton and Bush administrations have emphasized as a growing threat to national and international stability (such as international organized crime, corruption and generalized non-state violence and chaos). Second, they have, in varying degrees, undermined and distorted institutional state capacity, trade and (legitimate) economic growth in a region that is of geostrategic importance to Washington. Third, all carry significant implications for the lives, welfare and safety of ordinary citizens, including Americans. Fourth, in certain instances they have interacted with other sources of political tension to act as an additional catalyst for inter-state hostility and rivalry. Finally, because these challenges cannot be readily deterred by established mechanisms of border security, they necessarily require innovative and novel countermeasures--something that the United States is well placed to facilitate, both by virtue of its resources and global leadership role.     

Power/Faith: Governmentality, Religion, and Post-Secular Societies

Foucault’s concept of governmentality, and its attending modalities of biopower and disciplinary technologies, provides a useful conceptual schema for the analysis of the role of religious and quasi-religious institutions in contemporary society. This is particularly important in the study of those neoliberal democratic states where religious organizations constitute an important presence in the civil society. As religion is thoroughly involved in the reproduction of social structure in most societies, an appraisal of the social and political importance of religious institutions is needed to understand the articulation and exercise of governmentality. This is not just limited to partnerships between state agencies and faith-based organizations in providing for social services, but also in rituals and other religious group activities of these organizations that play a vital role in shaping and molding the social and political subjectivities of the adherents. We argue that synergy between the scholarship on governmentality, and sociology of religion would allow for a more nuanced understanding of the politics and culture of post-secular societies.     

Institutions and intellectual property: The influence of institutional forces on university patenting

Over the past 20 years, the number of patents assigned to universities has increased dramatically. This increase coincided with several policy initiatives, such as the Bayh‐Dole Act of 1980, designed to foster technology transfer between universities and the private sector. This paper examines the effect of such policies using an institutional framework, designed to illustrate how factors both from inside and outside of academia influence the decision to patent university research. We find passage of the Bayh‐Dole Act spurred university patenting, but did not induce additional applied research funding. Thus, Bayh‐Dole fostered technology transfer, but did not result in more applied research at universities. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Campaigns and the prediction of election outcomes: Can historical and campaign-period prediction models be combined?

There are two approaches to predicting election outcomes: (1) a historical approach, which uses past election results alongside macroeconomic and political variables to forecast election results up to a year in advance, and (2) a campaign-oriented approach, which uses current campaign trends to forecast vote shares at the end of the campaign. They are in some way at odds—one approach says the campaign doesn't matter, the other focuses entirely on the campaign. This article considers whether the two approaches might be usefully combined; it considers whether the prediction errors in historical models may be related to trends during the campaign. That possibility is tested here using 17 elections in the US, UK and Canada, combining historical predictions and automated content analyses of campaign-period media content. Results suggest that campaigns do not account for errors in the historical predictions; but there may be other ways in which campaigns matter in conjunction with historical models.