The political process and the use of debt financing by state governments

Empirical evidence offered in this study suggests that decisions by state government officials to effect debt-financed spending depend in part on the state's gubernatorial election cycle. More specifically, the results reveal relative increases in state debt issues in anticipation of elections, and furthermore, they reveal that such increases are more significant for states characterized by high interparty political competition. While theoretical limitations preclude a definitive explanation for these results, the evidence is consistent with a view of state political markets where incumbent parties manipulate public policy so as to enhance the probability of success in pending elections. This insight is significant in that it suggests a relationship between public policy decisions and election cycles in a context heretofore unexplored.     

IMPACT ASSESSMENT AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

The advent of impact assessment as a tool of policy is the latest chapter in our understanding of the relationship between science and politics. As such, it presents at least two challenges to democratic politics. Given its emphasis on appropriate procedural character of conteniporary democratic systems. And by raising the value of technical and scientific information in environmental disputes, impact assessment poses a challenge to existing concepts of popular sovereignty, based as they are on interest and preference rather than knowledge. These challenges, however, do not rep- resent irreconcilable differences. Although there may be an inherent ten- sion between impact assessment and democratic politics, there are also areas of affinity between the two. And we are destined to accept and adapt to this tension because, in fact, understanding is one of our principal defenses against tyranny.     

Beyond compare? Free market Islamism as ideology

This article explores the ideological relationship between free market capitalism and Islamism. While existing studies have attended to Islam’s engagement with capitalism, less attention has been given to the ideological intimacy of this relationship and, in particular, the increasing presence of radical free market thought in global Islamist politics, or what I have termed ‘libertarian Islamism’. The dominant narrative of Islamism, thus, constricts our understanding of the wider ideological ecology at play in the global political mobilization of Islam. While political Islam is often regarded as being rooted in a broadly leftist intellectual milieu, it has rather encapsulated variant conceptions of liberty, both left and right, and is currently undergoing what one might term a ‘free-market turn’. Within this milieu, a distinctly radical, anti-statist libertarian ideology has also emerged with an intimate relationship to conservative libertarian activists in the West. The presence of libertarian Islamism serves to recalibrate dominant understandings of ‘radical’ Islam and its purportedly fractious ideological relationship with the West.     

Modernization theory and the Cold War

In this article the structural, political and intellectual context in which a specific discourse of development emerged is examined. In the context of the Cold War, the prolonged effort of American intellectuals in advising and attempting to redirect the process of development in India and its consequences for a particular version of modernization theory is analyzed. A general sociology of knowledge approach is deployed to examine the complex configuration of events that contributed to a specific discoursed that owes its intellectual lineage to the Comtean vision of social science.     

The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens,Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge

In this article, the multifaceted relationship between colonial power and scientific knowledge is analysed. The specific focus is on untangling the contested and symbiotic connections between colonialism and the emergence and consolidation of aspects of botanical science. Colonial imperatives and the social consequences of colonial rule in India constituted the context for the idea and project of botanical gardens that facilitated the global transfer of a variety of plants to India. It was in the process of dealing with the problems of the transfer of plants across very diverse ecological and social contexts that natural history was eventually transformed into formal botanical science both in India and in Europe. Particular forms of scientific knowledge and institutions were indispensable for the consolidation of empire even as they facilitated new imperial concerns and projects that constituted the structural context for the development of new forms of scientific knowledge, practices, institutions and power. Without reducing science to nothing more than an appendage of colonial power and imperatives, the significance of empire in the rise of botany as a formal science is analysed in this article.     

The Macroeconomic Consequences of Democratic Transition: Learning Processes in the Third and Fourth Waves of Democratization

This study examines trends in macroeconomic conditions during democratic transition, focusing especially on how these trends changed between the third and fourth waves of democratization. We first develop hypotheses postulating that the macroeconomic consequences of democratic transition changed diachronically in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of learning processes. We then test these hypotheses using multiple interrupted time series analysis in a panel of democratizing countries. Our findings support the learning-process hypotheses. Like other recent studies, these findings raise doubts about the value of universalistic theories of democratization. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A25BB114 00003