Welcome to the Geo‐Information Age

Welcome to the geo‐information age. Along with cyberprobes and computer worms like Stuxnet, which at least temporarily disabled Iran's centrifuges without a missile being fired or a bomb dropped, Wikileaks is redefining national security as we've known it.     

The Value of Majority Status: The Effect of Jeffords's Switch on Asset Prices of Republican and Democratic Firms

Using the change in party control of the Senate that resulted from Jim Jeffords's 2001 change in party affiliation, we compare competing partisan and partyless legislative theories. We offer a reconceptualization of agenda control that provides a new and promising basis for studying parties and policymaking in the Senate. Also, we present a novel methodology—an “event study”—to test partisan and partyless hypotheses. Our results show that, when Jeffords switched, the stock prices of Republican‐supported energy firms dropped and prices for Democrat‐supported firms rose, supporting the hypothesis that the majority party influences Senate decisions.     

The Third Wave's Third Way

The profound consequences of the cultural revolution of the 1960s are still catching up with us decades later. Breaking free of the soft shackles of deadening bureaucratic institutions and the strangling confines of tradition has ended up leaving the liberated individual standing alone in the world, fodder for the flexible labor markets of the new economy and an easy target for the pervasive assaults of the consumer marketing machine.     

China: From Democracy Wall to the Shopping Mall and Back

Who would have thought that tainted pet food and toys would threaten to unravel the authoritarian export model of Chinese growth that the brutal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 was meant to secure?