Difference unveiled: Bulgarian national imperatives and the re‐dressing of Muslim women, 1878–1989

Monique Armand and Marguerite Aymard, eds. European Bibliography of Soviet, East European and Slavonic Studies. Vol. IV — 1978. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1983. Pp. 523.

Mary M. Kritz, ed. U.S. Immigration and Refugee Policy: Global and Domestic Issues. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1983. Pp. xxi, 415.

János M. Bak and Béla K. Király, eds. From Hunyadi to Rákóczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary. New York: Brooklyn College Social Science Monographs, 1982. Pp. xiv,545.     

“The past,present, and the perhaps’ is Germany a “normal” power?

Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

John S. Duffield, World Power Forsaken. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Christian Hacke, Die Aussenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Weltmacht wider Willen? 3rd ed. (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997).

Peter Katzenstein, ed., Tamed Power: Germany in Europe. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Elizabeth Pond, The Rebirth of Europe. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1999).

James Sperling, “Neither Hegemony nor Dominance: Reconsidering German Power in Post‐Cold War Europe,” British Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).     

Information systems and organizational development: Meeting the demands of information resource management in the twenty-first century

The central thesis of this article is that organizations in the twenty-first century will pursue the full benefits of information system technology by moving beyond a narrow focus on the technological dimensions to consider attendant managerial and policy issues. The challenges to establishing and implementing a coherent philosophy to guide information resource management are novel and difficult, but not unyielding. The application of organizational development techniques holds great potential to surmount these obstacles and may provide organizations with significant advantages from developments in computing technology in the twenty-first century. Evidence suggests that leading edge organizations are turning toward an integrated approach to Information Resource Management.

The benefits that advances in computer and information system technology offer to organizations in the twenty-first century seem indisputable, but whether organizations will actually achieve them, however, seems very much in question. The thesis of this article is that if organizations of the future are to garner full benefits from dramatic improvements in computing technology, they must develop a coherent philosophy for Information Resource Management (IRM). While the foundation for this philosophy rests on a strategy for integrating useful changes in computing technology into organizations, IRM must also encompass managerial and policy components. Yet, the field has been dominated by technological concerns, with only limited attention devoted to the other key dimensions.

In this article we propose a tripartite approach to information system adoption and implementation focusing on the technical, managerial, and policy dimensions. For Information System (IS) advantages to be fully realized, organizations must find ways to balance the demands of each of these components. Though these challenges should not be minimized, the article concludes that proven techniques from the field of organizational development can be brought to bear to deal with them constructively. Organizations that do so will very likely be rewarded with the substantial benefits that changes in computing and information system technology promise for the twenty-first century.     

Parties,Recruitment and Modernisation: Evidence from Local Election Candidates

Using pooled data from four separate nationwide surveys of local election candidates conducted from 2006–09 the paper assesses the role and importance of parties in the recruitment and selection of candidates. In many respects candidates are similar to councillors with men outnumbering women in a two to one ratio, with very few non-white candidates coming forward for selection and an age bias towards older rather than younger people. Candidates are found generally to have higher educational qualifications and to be employed in professional and managerial populations than in the public at large. Although a majority of candidates are resident in the ward that they contest a large fraction live elsewhere, suggesting that local parties cast the net widely during the recruitment process. The data suggest that the recruitment networks used by parties are relatively closed with many candidates reporting prior experience as local party officer holders or as members of charitable organisations and local public bodies. For two-thirds of candidates the initial decision to stand follows from a request by someone else, often a fellow party member. Women are more likely to be asked than men. Although candidates are aware of the current under-representation of some social and ethnic groups they are generally against using affirmative action measures to redress any imbalance. Although local parties are sometimes seen as contributing towards the problem of under-representation of some groups on council benches the data suggest than an increase in independent candidates would be unlikely to improve the situation and could perhaps cause it to deteriorate still further.     

International terrorism

In this article, it is argued that the U.S. ICBM force has no strategic value and should be dismantled. The article outlines a post‐cold war U.S. strategic nuclear force and proposes how this dyad force fits a strategy rather than offering a strategy to fit within the force. Deterrence theory anchors the analysis here. Second, this article asserts that U.S. security will be enhanced in the next century with Russian‐American cooperation on nuclear issues. Moving to a dyad now is step one in that direction, which in turn changes the perception of U.S. strategic weapons.

As weapons proliferate, deterrence against renegade nations and groups must become the cornerstone of U.S. doctrine. A dyad force and Russian‐American cooperation, both steps that restructure U.S. doctrine, will begin a process that deters these nations or groups.

This article depicts how each leg of the U.S. triad that remains following the START II treaty is a continuation of START I logic and planning. In other words, the article attempts to show how the rationale for a START II treaty force does not mirror a changed world. The purpose of this evidence is not to be dogmatic or critical but to strengthen the argument that U.S. nuclear strategy is still reflective of a bygone era.     

Measuring the Media Agenda

Measuring media attention to politically relevant topics is of interest to a broad array of political science and communications scholars. We provide a practical guide for the construction, validation, and evaluation of time series measures of media attention. We review the extant literature on the coherence of the media agenda, which provides evidence in support of and evidence against the emergence of a single, national news agenda. Drawing expectations from this literature, we show the conditions under which a single national news agenda is likely to be present and where it is likely to be absent. We create 90 different keyword searches covering a wide range of topics and gather counts of stories per month from 12 national and regional media sources with data going back to 1980 where possible. We show using factor analysis wide variance in the strength of the first factor. We then estimate a regression model to predict this value. The results show the conditions under which any national source will produce time series results consistent with any other. Key independent variables are the average number of stories, the variance in stories per month, and the presence of any “spike” in the data series. Our large-scale empirical assessment should provide guidance to scholars assessing the quality of time series data on media coverage of issues.     

Assessing Children’s Risk for Homicide in the Context of Domestic Violence

Increasing evidence indicates that children are at risk of homicide in the context of domestic violence. Using a retrospective case analysis of 84 domestic homicide cases, this study sought to identify the unique factors that place a child at risk of homicide. Three groups of domestic homicide cases in which there were no children in the home (No Child in the Home, n?=?44), a child was targeted (Child Target, n?=?13), and a child was present, but not targeted (No Child Target, n?=?27) were compared. Overall, there were no significant differences amongst cases involving children (targeted or not) on major factors except for the higher number of agencies involved with couples with children. Few cases had risk assessment or safety plans completed. Despite the study limitations, the findings speak to the need for professionals to assess child risk and include children in safety planning in all cases of domestic violence.