Revolutionary challenges to the anarchical society of states

David Armstrong, Revolution and World Order: The Revolutionary State in International Society (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993), ix + 328 pp. Index. £37.50.     

Robert Strausz-Hupé: His Life and Times

The author assesses the long life of Robert Strausz-Hupé and the many roles he played: immigrant, professor, author, diplomat and think tank founder.     

Mapping the Ideological Marketplace

I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a data set of over 100 million contribution records from state and federal elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors who give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Congress, the president and executive branch, state legislators, governors, and other state officials, as well as the interest groups and individuals who make political donations. Since candidates fundraise regardless of incumbency status, the method estimates ideal points for both incumbents and nonincumbents. After establishing measure validity and addressing issues concerning strategic behavior, I present results for a variety of political actors and discuss several promising avenues of research made possible by the new measures.     

Yitzhak Rabin: An Appreciation

The author wrote that “the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in his seventy-third year ended the life of another ‘son of the founders’ of the state of Israel. He belonged to the generation of 1948—the young men whose military prowess gave Israel a fighting start. Unlike some of his early mentors, such as Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, Rabin was to achieve supreme power twice. And more than any other of his generation he will be recalled as the general who waged both war and peace.”     

Divided We Stand? Democracy as a Method of Processing Conflicts1

Conflicts, liberty and peace do not coexist easily. Through most of history, civil peace was maintained by the threat of force. Contemporary ideologues of authoritarian regimes maintain that political conflicts inevitably result in violence, and the founders of modern representative institutions in the West have shared this view. Yet we now know that political institutions can cope with conflicts, that conflicts can be structured, regulated and contained, and that purely procedural rules can be effective in processing conflicts. Most importantly, we have come to realise that choosing governments through competitive elections is the only way to foster political freedom in divided societies. Competitive elections support social peace by enabling political forces to think in inter‐temporal terms. In turn, civil peace is maintained between elections when when opposition groups expect to be reasonably successful within the halls of representative institutions.     

Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War

Aerial bombardment has been an important component of counterinsurgency practice since shortly after it became a viable military technology in the early twentieth century. Due to the nature of insurgency, bombing frequently occurs in and around settled areas, and consequently it tends to generate many civilian casualties. However, the effectiveness of bombing civilian areas as a military tactic remains disputed. Using data disaggregated to the level of the smallest population unit and measured at multiple points in time, this article examines the effect of aerial bombardment on the pattern of local control in the Vietnam War. A variety of estimation methods, including instrumental variables and genetic matching, show that bombing civilians systematically shifted control in favor of the Viet Cong insurgents.     

Puppet Dictator in the Banana Republic? Re-examining Honduran–American Relations in the Era of Tiburcio Carías Andino, 1933–1938

Most scholarship depicts the Honduran president, Tiburcio Carías Andino, as little more than an obedient puppet of the United States and the United Fruit Company, the classic client dictator running the archetypal “banana republic.” Using both Honduran and American sources, this article challenges the validity of Carías’ supposedly unquestioned compliance with American demands, arguing that Carías was an independent actor capable of using, manipulating, and defying the United States in pursuit of his own disparate goals.