Terrorism and Terrorist Leaders: Insights from Developmental and Ecological Psychology

A recent increase in terrorist actions where the terrorist's death is planned and intentional has raised interest in the psychological functioning, motivation, and reasoning of those who engage in terrorism and those who support it. No consensus exists among Western ¹ 1. That is, American or European. psychologists regarding terrorists who plan to die in their attack, and no Western psychological perspective has thus far contributed substantively to explaining or predicting it. Although most agree that groups engaging in such actions typically have a wider network of support, the psychology of supporters is also unexplained. This article proposes a developmental psychological model of the conditions that favor focused terrorist actions that have publicly discernible goals ascribed to a political or religious cause. The article describes a common pattern of cognitive complexity among terrorist leaders, using Osama bin Laden as a model, where entrenched cognitive simplicity in one key ideological domain (religious or political) is coupled with behavior reflecting the capacity for far greater complexity in other domains (organizational skills, planning, problem-solving.) This pattern, in specifiable historical and ecological context, makes terrorist tactics, including those in which the attacker intentionally dies, more likely, and increases the challenges associated with attempts at diplomacy or negotiated peace.     

Rethinking Caretaker Conventions for Australian Governments

Australia has well‐established conventions for caretaker governments. These conventions regulate how a government should operate once an election is called, and have been documented for some decades. Yet the current conventions date from an era when elections usually produced clear and immediate results. Can our caretaker conventions cope with the emerging reality of indecisive elections and long delays before a new government is confirmed? This paper canvasses the state of Australia's caretaker conventions and offers suggestions for an expanded, contemporary code.     

EU-oriented bilateralism: evaluating the role of member state embassies in the European Union

The European Union (EU) constitutes an evolving diplomatic milieu characterized by high levels of interconnectedness among the politico-administrative apparatuses of member states. The article assesses whether the continued presence of member state bilateral embassies in the EU is residual and largely emptied of function, or whether they are adapting their role to new requirements in the EU policy environment. An analytical framework is developed conceptualizing diplomatic representation around three variables—function, access and presence—and two scenarios of change dynamics in the structures of bilateral diplomacy in the EU are proposed. These are then utilized to evaluate empirical evidence gathered in embassies of six member states in London and Vienna. The findings reveal a process of gradual ‘re-gearing’ of embassy functions towards EU matters, shifting patterns of communication and access, and ‘domestication’ of diplomatic presence in terms of personnel and agenda. Overall, this amounts to a shift towards EU-oriented bilateralism.     

Regionalism's multiple negotiations: ASEAN in East Asia

This article explains East Asian regionalism as the product of two sets of negotiations. The first negotiation is between East Asia on the one hand and global forces and structures on the other. The second negotiation is intra-regional and includes a critical negotiation between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-Southeast Asia and East/Northeast Asia, which also provides the primary focus of this article. This article details ASEAN's extensions into East Asian regionalism as part of interdependent efforts to adapt transitioning global and regional systems. Conceiving these regional negotiations to be not just economic and utilitarian but first and foremost normative, this article details the opportunities and dilemmas represented by ‘East Asia’ for ASEAN, ASEAN-Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia as a meaningful organizing principle. Dilemmas associated with the ASEAN Plus Three process, an East Asia free-trade area and the ASEAN Charter provide illustrations of East Asia's understood challenges for Southeast Asia in addition to the ways that Southeast Asian agencies have been shaping the form and content of recent East Asian efforts and also how regional-global and intra-ASEAN negotiations continue to provide key constraints.     

International Patent Strategies of Small and Large Firms: An Empirical Study of Nanotechnology

The aim of this article is to investigate to what extent small‐firm foreign patents differ from those of their larger counterparts. The research setting consists of the population of U.S.‐owned small and large businesses with patent applications at the World International Patent Organization during 1996–2006 in the emerging field of nanotechnology. Findings reveal a significant and growing contribution of small firms to the globalization of patents. The analysis also suggests that small‐firm patents tend to be more novel and embedded in domestic innovation networks than large‐firm patents. Policy implications are multiple, including putting international patenting on the policy agenda and helping highly innovative small companies to explore foreign commercial opportunities in new markets of capital and technology.     

Fiscal Exchange and Tax Compliance: Evidence From a Field Experiment

Behavioral interventions appealing to taxpayers’ reciprocity often leave tax compliance unaffected. We provide evidence that a “fiscal exchange nudge” increased tax compliance in a setting where one might not expect it: crisis-ridden Argentina. In a randomized controlled trial with over 20,000 taxpayers, a tax bill visually celebrating realized public works benefiting children increased payment rates of tax delinquents by about 20 percent, or almost 40 percent when the bills were delivered in person. Without the appeal, the new bill design generated significantly fewer payments. Changes in the design of the tax bill also increased arrears cancellation. We estimate the ratio of marginal revenues to costs for the fiscal exchange bill to be 18. The factors we associate with the unexpectedly positive impacts are consistent with strengthening an affective response. We find persistent effects of the experiment two years later. The results suggest that communities have more scope to increase tax revenues through non-threatening interventions.     

Access to Power Versus Exercise of Power Reconceptualizing the Quality of Democracy in Latin America

Research on comparative democratization has recently expanded its focus to issues of institutional quality: clientelism, corruption, abuse of executive decree authority, and weak checks and balances. However, problems of institutional quality are so different from those involved in regime transitions that it is unproductive to treat them as part of the same macro-process, democratization. Whereas regime transitions are changes in the form of access to power, problems of institutional quality involve the exercise of power. Abuses in the exercise of power affecting institutional quality are best characterized not as indicators of authoritarianism and deficiencies in democratization but as reflecting—in Weberian terms—patrimonialism and failures in bureaucratization. Moreover, struggles over the exercise of power involve causes, mechanisms, and actors that can be quite distinct from those at play in conflicts over access to power. The proposed analytical framework centered on the distinction between access and exercise enhances conceptual clarity and provides a stronger theoretical basis for tackling fundamental questions about politics in Latin America, including the failure of democratization to curb clientelism and foster other improvements of institutional quality, and the prospects of democratic stability under patrimonial administrations.     

The Europeanization of social movements in the Czech Republic: The EU and local women’s groups

The goal of this paper is to analyze the impact the EU has had on Czech women’s groups since the 1990s. Drawing on both Europeanization and social movement theories, the first section defines the theoretical framework of the paper. The second section is focused on the impact of changes in the funding of women’s groups which, since the end of the 1990s, have relied more than before on European funding. The third section analyzes the shift in the political context and the domestic political opportunity structure in the Czech Republic that has occurred in connection with the accession process. The fourth section analyzes transnational cooperation for which new opportunities have appeared with the EU’s eastward expansion. The paper concludes by summarizing its main findings.