Why did We Get the End of the Cold War Wrong?

In many important ways the history of modern international relations (IR) begins at the point when the international order collapses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, the withering of communism in Central and Eastern Europe followed by the break–up of the USSR two years later, posed what many in the field saw then (and continue to regard now) as a series of problems to which the hitherto dominant paradigm in IR—realism—had no ready or easy answers. This article neither seeks to defend nor criticize realism. Rather it shifts the debate about the end of the cold war—and why most experts failed to anticipate it—away from the field of IR to the more specific study undertaken in the West of the Soviet system. It goes on to argue that the source of so much academic embarrassment may be better explained not through a rehearsal of realism's supposed flaws as an international theory, but rather through a detailed examination of the different ways that different writers understood, or more precisely failed to understand, the operation of the Soviet system itself. The conclusion reached is that few analysts could have predicted what happened between 1989 and 1991. In fact, as the article seeks to show, their often complicated and diverse theories about the USSR as the living alternative to market capitalism led most of them (with one or two notable exceptions) to the conclusion that whatever problems faced the Soviet Union as a power in the 1980s, the system as such was likely to endure.     

The Present Challenges to ASPA as an Association That Promotes Public Professionalism

What is ASPA's place among core public professional organizations as well as public official associations? All public organizations are affected by tough competition for membership. Relatively few members of other public associations join ASPA, and vice versa. Only a minority of faculty members who teach in public affairs programs belong to ASPA, and at top schools, the proportion is even lower. When comparing ASPA to other public official associations, it is smaller in size and broader in scope, yet it remains a uniquely pan‐generalist organization. Its pan‐generalist character puts it at a disadvantage, but also offers distinct advantages. Like all public associations and nonprofits, ASPA faces stiff competition from increasingly specialized associations for membership. Its key future challenge, the authors suggest, will be to match its membership benefits effectively to the rapidly shifting expectations and needs of current and prospective members.     

Reducing Poverty Intensity: What Alternative Poverty Measures Reveal About the Impact of Brazil's Bolsa Família

Brazil's conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) has gained a worldwide reputation as an effective antipoverty program. However, studies applying the dominant headcount poverty measure, which counts the percentage of households falling below a given poverty line, only credit the program with a first‐order reduction in poverty (and extreme poverty) of 0.15 to 1.88 percentage points. This raises the puzzle of how such a modest impact could lead to Bolsa Família's political popularity. This article argues that Bolsa Família does dramatically reduce poverty, but measuring this impact requires thinking of poverty as how far a household is from meeting its basic human needs; choosing a continuous variable; and using income gap, intensity, and ordinal measures that reflect this conceptualization. The more substantial reduction of poverty intensity helps explain the program's reputation.     

Extension of the portfolio allocation model to surplus majority governments: a fuzzy approach

Scholars have long studied the conditions under which the cabinet making process will result in minority, surplus majority, or minimum-winning governing coalitions in parliamentary systems. Since Riker, a good number of these attempts have been based on rational choice assumptions. Among formal approaches in this vein, Laver and Shepsle’s (Making and breaking governments: Cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary governments, 1996) portfolio allocation model argues that parties centrally located in policy space have a greater potential for being part of any governing coalition and that parties located at the issue-by-issue median have a high likelihood of forming a minority government. However, the model predicts that surplus majority coalitions will only form when the number of salient policy dimensions in the political system is greater than two. We incorporate fuzzy set theory in the portfolio allocation model, permitting us to model ambiguity in parties’ policy preferences. The reformulated model accounts for the formation of surplus majority coalitions in two-dimensional policy space. We illustrate the model’s conclusions with a case study of the 1996 surplus majority coalition in the Lithuanian Seimas.     

The Fulfillment of Parties’ Election Pledges: A Comparative Study on the Impact of Power Sharing

Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first large‐scale comparative analysis of pledge fulfillment with common definitions. We study the fulfillment of over 20,000 pledges made in 57 election campaigns in 12 countries, and our findings challenge the common view of parties as promise breakers. Many parties that enter government executives are highly likely to fulfill their pledges, and significantly more so than parties that do not enter government executives. We explain variation in the fulfillment of governing parties’ pledges by the extent to which parties share power in government. Parties in single‐party executives, both with and without legislative majorities, have the highest fulfillment rates. Within coalition governments, the likelihood of pledge fulfillment is highest when the party receives the chief executive post and when another governing party made a similar pledge.     

A National Picture of Prison Downsizing Strategies

Abstract

Many states faced fiscal pressures on their corrections budgets as the country entered a deep recession in 2008. A 2011 survey by the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) asked corrections officials in all 50 states about changes in correctional facilities, focusing on closures, new facilities, and altering existing facilities as a response to budget pressures. States employed a combination of these strategies. Between fiscal year (FY) 2007–2008 and FY 2011–2012, 148 facilities were closed, 29 new facilities were opened, and 23 states added 22,740 beds to existing facilities, resulting in about a 19,000 net bed reduction overall. Closures did not necessarily appear to be related to fiscal pressures or always related to reductions in the prison population. Despite the Great Recession, correctional funding is still a large part of state expenses and many states’ correctional populations continue to grow.