Voter Disenfranchisement and Policy toward Election Reforms

How did poverty, race, population density, and other demographic characteristics affect disenfranchisement in the 2004 presidential election? I argue that there are two types of disenfranchisement: partisan disenfranchisement, which targets Democrats, and structural disenfranchisement, which targets members of low‐status groups. Drawing demographic data from the United States census in 2000, and voting data from the secretaries of state websites, I use a negative binomial regression to correlate these variables with the incidence of voter disenfranchisement as collected by the Election Incident Reporting System, for the three “swing” states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with the “safe” states of California and Texas as controls. The results of this analysis indicate that disenfranchisement increases with population density, Black population, Democratic loyalty, and as the margin of victory decreases. Income and education also correlate with an increase in reported incidents of disenfranchisement, but that likely reflects the failings of self‐report data.     

Fracas in Caracas: Latin American Diplomatic Resistance to United States Intervention in Guatemala in 1954

The Eisenhower Administration claimed a diplomatic triumph—and a mandate to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala—after the Tenth Inter-American Conference held in Caracas, Venezuela, in March 1954, when 17 nations voted for an American resolution condemning international Communism. This article disputes the official story and some recent scholarly depictions of the conference. Caracas was the scene of intense Latin American opposition to the American agenda. Vote-buying was rampant as Washington made hundreds of millions of dollars worth of concessions to individual countries. Nonetheless, amendments pushed through by Latin American diplomats transformed the interventionist American resolution into a strong statement against intervention. The American “triumph” was actually a fiasco that called into sharp relief the difference between United States and Latin American understandings of the inter-American system, demonstrating Latin American diplomatic resistance to intervention and the limits of diplomacy's potential to constrain the actions of the most powerful American state.     

The mioritic nation – an alternative approach to Moldovan national identity

Moldova has been widely argued to be a failed nation-building project, with two national identity discourses coexisting within Moldovan society and amongst Moldovan elites: Romanianism and Moldovanism. Challenging the dominance of these discourses in the literature, this article argues that in spite of its absence from the nationalism debate in Moldova, the ballad Miori?a is a key element for the Moldovan articulation of national identity. The analysis employs a discursive approach focused on language as a constituting phenomenon and draws from Miori?a's appeal to the grass roots level, its banality in day-to-day life, and, more importantly, its promotion by Moldovan cultural elites. This latter part focuses specifically on the writings of novelist Ion Dru??. Dru?? places Miori?a at the very center of his construction of Moldovan national identity. He highlights its links with Moldovan history, culture, religious thinking, and geographical space, both reproducing a structure similar to the two national identity discourses, Romanianism and Moldovanism, and building on their similarities. But more importantly, Dru??'s representation of national identity sheds light on the possibility of an all-encompassing Moldovan identity, overcoming the existing cleavage, and a series of mechanisms that can be employed to achieve this.