An analytical history of terrorism, 1945–2000

This paper traces the history of modern terrorism from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It divides that history into three stylized waves: terrorism in the service of national liberation and ethnic separatism, left-wing terrorism, and Islamist terrorism. Adopting a constitutional political economy perspective, the paper argues that terrorism is rooted in the artificial nation-states created during the interwar period and suggests solutions grounded in liberal federalist constitutions and, perhaps, new political maps for the Middle East, Central Asia and other contemporary terrorist homelands.     

Value Choices and American Public Opinion

Individual preferences among core values are widely believed to be an important determinant of political attitudes. However, several theoretical perspectives suggest that people experience difficulties making choices among values. This article uses data from the 1994 Multi-Investigator Study to test for hierarchical structure in citizens' value preferences. The empirical results show that most people make transitive choices among values and that their value preferences have an impact on subsequent issue attitudes. To the extent that citizens exhibit intransitive value choices and/or apparent difficulties in the "translation process" from value preferences to issue attitudes, it is due more to low levels of political sophistication than to the existence of value conflict.     

The Professional Researcher as Change Agent in the Government–Performance Movement

Although academic and professional publications give the impression that performance measurement is a growing government practice, in actuality the use of this technology is not as deep or as widespread as it may appear. Even when performance measures are used, governments rarely integrate them into planning, budget, personnel, and other management processes. Most professional researchers located primarily in academic institutions, but also in research and government organizations, approach performance measurement as though governmental officials, elected or otherwise, are already sold on its usefulness. Instead, they need to function as "change agents," using a variety of strategies to gain acceptance and understanding of the strengths and limitations of performance measurement. This article draws on the authors' experiences with the Community Benchmarks Program of the Maxwell School in Onondaga County and a review of the current literature. It suggests guidelines for professional researchers who want to increase the use of performance measures by governments at all levels.     

Organizing the War on Terrorism

The network of public agencies, private firms, nonprofit organizations, ad hoc groups, and individual volunteers that deals with natural and technological hazards and disasters did a remarkable job of responding to and helping us recover from the September 11th attacks. That national emergency management network, along with the national security and law enforcement networks, provides a foundation for our war on terrorism, helps us mitigate the hazard of terrorism, and improves our preparedness for future violence. However, coordinating the efforts of the networks will be a real challenge for the director of homeland security and his or her state and local counterparts. Coordination will necessitate using legal authority to assure compliance, economic and other incentives to encourage compliance, formal partnerships to encourage collaboration, informal understandings to encourage cooperation, and personal encouragement to influence appropriate action. A top–down, command–and–control approach to the war on terrorism, such as the proposed Department of Homeland Security is intended to provide, may be counterproductive.     

Learning and re-learning regime support: The dynamics of post-communist regimes

Abstract. The political support of citizens of new democracies reflects two sets of experiences. Initially, people are socialized into an undemocratic regime; then, they must re-learn political support in relation to a new regime. In an established democracy, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of early socialization and current performance because both refer to the same regime. However, this is both possible and necessary in countries where there has been a change in regime. Critical questions then arise: When, whether and how do citizens determine their support for their new regime? At the start of a new regime past socialization should be more important but, after a few years, current performance should become more important. We draw on 47 Barometer surveys between 1991 and 1998 in ten more or less democratic post-communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to test the relative importance of early socialization influences, the legacy of the communist past, and the political and economic performance of new regimes. We find that economic and political performance explains the most variance in support and, secondarily, the communist legacy. Early socialization is insignificant. However, contrary to economic theories of voting, the impact of political performance is greater than the impact of economic performance in post-communist countries – and its impact is increasing.     

Australian Antecedents of the Third Way

New Labour theorists have been prone to identify American New Progressivism as the proximate source of 'third way' ideas. In this article we argue that, if the focus is on the governing practice rather than on the naming of a governing orientation, a case can be made for seeing Australian Labor in government from 1983 to 1996 as a progenitor of third way thinking and as a specific source of New Labour policy development in a number of areas. Taking Stuart White's account of the main dimensions of third way programmatic realignment as our guide, we discuss the success of the Hawke/Keating Labor governments in reducing the direct provider role of state, developing new forms of collective provision, reforming the tax system, making social policy more employment-friendly and creating the institutions of an asset-based egalitarianism. We conclude by pointing out that, whilst there are many common themes in Australian Labor practice and New Labor rhetoric, and some evidence of specific policy transfer from one to the other, a plausible case can also be made for seeing many of the policy initiatives of the Hawke/Keating era as a reworking of an older Australian Labor tradition of regulatory state activism.     

An integrated perspective on the three potential sources of partisan bias: Malapportionment, turnout differences, and the geographic distribution of party vote shares

Partisan bias refers to an asymmetry in the way party vote share is translated into seats, i.e., a situation where some parties are able to win a given share of seats with a lesser (share of the) vote than is true for other parties. Any districted system is potentially subject to partisan biases. We show that there are three potential sources of partisan bias: (1) differences in the nature of the vote shares of the winning candidates of different parties that give rise to differences in the proportion of each party's votes that come to be ‘wasted’—differences which arise because of the nature of the geographic distribution of partisan support; (2) turnout rate differences across districts that are linked to the partisan vote shares in those districts, such that certain parties are more likely to have ‘cheap seats’ vis-à-vis turnout; and (3) malapportionment. In the context of two-party competition over single-member districts we provide a simple formulation to calculate the independent effect of each of these three factors. We illustrate our analysis with a calculation of the magnitude and direction of effects of the three determinants of partisan bias in elections to the US House and the US Senate in 1984, 1986 and 1988; then we consider how to extend the approach to a system with a mix of single- and multi-member districts or to a weighted voting system such as the US electoral college. We then apply the method to calculate the nature and sources of partisan bias in the 1984 and 1988 US presidential elections.