How Can Japan Improve Relations with South Korea?

This article explores how the Abe administration might go about improving Japan's relationship with the South Korean government of President Park Geun-hye. Although bilateral ties are strained by disagreements over history, territory, and the “comfort women” issue, as well as mutual mistrust and “fatigue,” the paper argues that the two sides actually share substantial interests in common and urges Japanese leaders not to lose hope but to continue working hard to improve relations. It lays out a menu of policy “options” across political-diplomatic; security; economic; educational and socio-cultural; and environmental and scientific domains, and describes a strategy for how to build a better relationship over the next several years.     

Gender Stereotypes and the Policy Priorities of Women in Congress

Political Behavior - Scholars find that women who run for Congress are just as likely to win as men are, yet women face considerable challenges related to their sex on the campaign trail. Women are...     

Is the Department of Homeland Security an Intelligence Agency?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) applies a variation of the intelligence cycle – the process of planning, collecting, processing, analysis, and dissemination of information characteristic of intelligence agencies – to mitigate the risk of terrorist attack and respond to national security breaches. The intelligence cycle helps DHS encourage voluntary security measures, serve its customers, and avoid economic disruption, but the Department's program setbacks and failures illustrate the difficulty of applying the intelligence model to the needs of homeland security. The Department's particular means of producing intelligence and information challenge the conventional conception and definitions of the intelligence cycle.     

Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa: from segregation to apartheid 1

Conventionally, Apartheid is regarded as no more than an intensification of the earlier policy of Segregation and is ascribed simplistically to the particular racial ideology of the ruling Nationalist Party.

In this article substantial differences between Apartheid and Segregation are identified and explained by reference to the changing relations of capitalist and African pre-capitalist modes of production. The supply of African migrant labour-power, at a wage below its cost of reproduction, is a function of the existence of the pre-capitalist mode. The dominant capitalist mode of production tends to dissolve the pre-capitalist mode thus threatening the conditions of reproduction of cheap migrant labour-power and thereby generating intense conflict against the system of Segregation. In these conditions Segregation gives way to Apartheid which provides the specific mechanism for maintaining labour-power cheap through the elaboration of the entire system of domination and control and the transformation of the function of the pre-capitalist societies.     

Terrorism and the political process

In conventional terms, politics is defined according to the common usages in the context under discussion. In functional terms, politics is defined to serve the need of specialists for a common frame of reference for comparative purposes. Functionally, politics is the process of receiving and giving support in making important decisions in the social process. “Important decisions” are enforceable if challenged by the most severe sanctions available to a group (territorial, pluralistic). Terrorism as a problem is discussed in terms of policy goals, trends, conditions, and alternatives. We are particularly interested in sanctioning objectives and strategies: deterrence, withdrawal, rehabilitation, correction, prevention, and reconstruction. In a terror process we distinguish the terrorist, the proximate victim, and impact targets. Terrorists are participants in the political process who strive for political results by arousing acute anxieties. Terrorist strategy proceeds by the symbolic enhancement of instruments of procedures of destruction. Some selected systematic studies of terror are reviewed, especially as a phase of rebellion and as a system. Recurring seizures by a sense of weakness are likely to precipitate periodic revivals of terror as a strategy of territorial or pluralistic elements in the world social process.     

Valence politics and economic crisis: Electoral choice in Canada 2008

This paper investigates factors affecting voting behavior in Canada’s October 2008 federal election. The election was held in the context of a rapidly worsening financial crisis that threatened to become a global economic meltdown. National survey data gathered in the 2008 Political Support in Canada Study reveal that the deteriorating economy trumped the opposition Liberal Party’s Green Shift Program as the major campaign issue by a huge margin. Damage done to the governing Conservatives by the economic crisis was limited by perceptions of their leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Analyses of a mixed logit model of electoral choice shows that although the Conservatives had a relatively small share of party identifiers and Harper was widely disliked, his image as “safe pair on hands” helped his party weather the political storm generated by the flood of bad economic news.     

我国公民意识缺失的表现、原因分析及对策

社会主义现代化的实现需要每一个社会成员具有强烈的公民意识。当前我国公民意识存在着很多问题,如公民的权利义务意识和法律意识比较淡薄,公德意识差,主体意识缺失等。现阶段公民意识缺失既有政治因素、经济因素,也与我国公民意识教育不力有关。提高我国社会的公民意识,需要大力推进和深化政治体制改革,增强政治民主化;完善社会主义市场经济体制,夯筑公民意识培育的坚实基础;大力发展教育事业,为公民意识的培养提供智力支持。