Universal Citizenship Through the Discourse and Policy of Rafael Correa

This article investigates political opportunities and constraints associated with incorporating the concept of universal citizenship into migration debates. Analyzing the speeches of Ecuador's president Rafael Correa over eight years, the article argues that Correa strategically crafted a narrative of universal citizenship to undergird politically beneficial policies. Political constraints from constituents and rivals, and the populist nature of his governing style, hollowed out progressive migration policy innovations to the point that universal citizenship became a rhetorical device more than a substantive policy agenda. Through this empirical case, the article develops a more nuanced critical understanding of universal citizenship discourses as sites for negotiating the relationship between states and migrants.     

Legislative Transparency and Credit Risk

Open governance requirements are designed to improve accountability, which implies that transparent governments are more trustworthy stewards of their publicly invested power. However, transparency may also reduce institutional effectiveness and inhibit political compromise, diminishing the capacity to manage resources responsibly. We assess empirical support for these competing perspectives in the context of American state legislatures, many of which have become exempt from state sunshine laws in recent decades. We leverage variation in the timing of these legislative exemptions to identify the effect of removing transparency in a crucial governing institution on investors’ risk perceptions of states’ general obligation bonds. Our analysis of these data during the period 1995–2010 suggests that removing legislative transparency reduces state credit risk. We conclude that while openness in government may be normatively desirable, shielding legislative proceedings from public view may actually be better for states’ debt repayment capacity, improving their overall fiscal health.     

Trajectories of Perceived Parental Psychological Control across Adolescence and Implications for the Development of Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Theory and research indicate considerable changes in parental control across adolescence (e.g., declining behavioral control), but the developmental course and...     

Is the U.S. Congress an Insurmountable Obstacle to Any “Far‐Sighted Conception of Budgeting”?

In recent years, Congress has recurrently failed to meet its minimum responsibilities in federal budgeting. This article analyzes whether it is possible to repair this problem, using concepts popularized by Allen Schick in his influential article “The Road to PPB.” His article compared the PPB reform effort to the history of budget process reforms that started with the design of the executive budget. It publicized a logical sequence of budget process improvements that started with control and then advanced through management and planning. The article did not substantially address the role of Congress, but eight years after it was published, Congress reasserted its constitutional role in the budget process. Its record of performance since then has ranged from mixed to dysfunctional. The Congress has been criticized for budgetary delays, micromanagement, myopia, procrastination, indiscipline, and an inability to prioritize intelligently. If these faults are set in stone, then an integrated system of budgeting, as described in “The Road to PPB” and related work, is unattainable. On the other hand, if reform of Congressional budgeting is politically feasible, improvements to that system can utilize the unique contributions that a legislature can make to a good system of budgeting.     

Missing revolution: the American intelligence failure in Iraq, 1958

Why were American officials caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution in Iraq on 14 July 1958? Drawing on American intelligence and diplomatic records as well as multilingual sources, this article argues that the US intelligence failure is the product of two factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence in Iraq’s ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments. It revisits America’s intelligence failure in Iraq and suggests important lessons for the study of intelligence.     

'Gold and Bracelet,Water and Wave': Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson

Writing under the male pseudonym'Laurence Hope', Adela Cory Nicolson published three collections of poetic verses set in colonial India between 1901 and 1905, namely The Garden of Kama, Stars of the Desert and Indian Love. In the late 1880s, dressed as a young male Afghan groom, Nicolson routinely followed her husband to the military camps that the British colonial authorities had set up in Afghanistan. This experience of gender and cultural cross-dressing finds a special place in many of Nicolson's love poems. Although Leslie Blanch has claimed that the'mainspring of Laurence Hope's verses still elude us', it is clear that Nicolson relied heavily on appropriating the poetic languages of Hindu'bhakti' and Islamic'sufi' traditions, thereby transforming the erotic conventions of the late Victorian fin de sicle. Her use of poetic signature is central to the formation of such a poetics. Long ignored on grounds that it was merely part of the enormous left-over corpus of colonial exotica produced and consumed with unprecedented eagerness in the age of empire, Nicolson's poetry therefore invites a reappraisal on the grounds that it constituted a significant act of translation: a practice aimed at reconceptualizing notions of national poetic legacy under colonialism and at reworking gender and identity in relation to poetic voice.