Women and Lancashire Conservatism between the Wars

The activism of women Conservatives helped Tory democracy to adapt and survive in inter-war Lancashire at a time when it was under strain due to the arrival of Labour as a significant electoral force. This article utilises the surviving records of the party in Lancashire to examine the various ways that women entered, navigated, justified and expanded their membership and function in inter-war Conservatism. It acknowledges the limits on women's advancement and influence, but it also highlights how some women made significant progress in rising through the party structures, and how women's branches facilitated this political mobility. It challenges the assumption that women Conservatives were preoccupied with sociability and discussing domestic issues, and reveals their contribution to the electoral success of the party at local level, and interaction with Lancashire's distinct tradition of Conservatism.     

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Adopting Open Educational Resources in an Introductory American Government Course

In this article, we present findings from a grant-funded initiative to replace traditional, proprietary textbooks with an open content textbook under a Creative Commons license in the introductory American government course (POLS 1101) at Middle Georgia State University. We find that the use of an open content textbook led to somewhat negative effects on student learning outcomes and student course satisfaction, although the associated lower textbook cost increased textbook accessibility to students. We conclude with some suggestions to those adopting textbooks in this course and to the wider discipline regarding measures that may lead to more unequivocally positive outcomes than those experienced in this study.     

Book Reviews

Mauricio Font, The State and the Private Sector in Latin America: The Shift to Partnership. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Figure, bibliography, appendixes, index, 318 pp.; hardcover $100, ebook $79.99. Tracy Beck Fenwick, Avoiding Governors: Federalism, Democracy, and Poverty Alleviation in Brazil and Argentina. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. Tables, figures, acronyms, bibliography, index, 277 pp.; hardcover $75, paperback $29. Michael Reid, Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016 [2014]. Illustrations, 352 pp.; paperback $22. Ben Ross Schneider, ed., New Order and Progress: Development and Democracy in Brazil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Tables, figures, bibliography, index, 328 pp.; hardcover $99, paperback $31.95, ebook. Anthony P. Maingot, Race, Ideology, and the Decline of Caribbean Marxism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. Index, 368 pp.; hardcover $79.95. Sebastián Ureta, Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World‐Class Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015. Photographs, figures, abbreviations, bibliography, index, 224 pp.; hardcover $39, ebook $27. Carlos de la Torre, De Velasco a Correa: insurreciones, populismos y elecciones en Ecuador, 1944–2013. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2015. Tables, bibliography, 243 pp.; paperback. Sebastian E. Bitar, US Military Bases, Quasi‐Bases, and Domestic Politics in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Map, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 220 pp.; hardcover $110, ebook $79.99.     

Operational oceanography in Indonesia

In 2005 Indonesian and European institutes joined to start the first step for the implementation of an Ocean Operational System in the Indonesian archipelago. The system will support the decision making process for the sustainable use of marine resources, providing useful information and added value products as well as a service for an improved management of the sea with high business impact to targeted groups as public authorities and commercial operators (coastal managers, fishermen, shipping companies). In this paper the System is shortly described with its potential benefits and economic and social impacts.

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Comparing Putin’s and Brezhnev’s Policies toward the Middle East

This article compares Moscow’s and Washington’s foreign policies toward the Middle East in 1982 and 2008. In 1982, Moscow and Washington each had a distinct set of friends and foes. In 2008, Washington still has a distinct set of friends and foes, but Moscow has relatively good relations with all governments and most major opposition movements in the region—the only exceptions being Al Qaeda and its affiliates. It is argued that Putin’s policy toward the Middle East is not really aimed at displacing the U.S. in the region, but protecting Russia and Russian interests from Al Qaeda and its allies. Indeed, a continued American presence in the region serves to protect Russian interests in the region.

How Americans Think About Trade: Reconciling Conflicts Among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mentaal models—mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic—sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.     

Political Consequences of the New Inequality

This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities.