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AbstractAt least partly due to data limitations, academic analyses of public opinion rarely acknowledge lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities. Our models of political attitudes almost always overlook respondents' sexual orientation and gender identities, and targeted research on the views of LGBT people is uncommon. This omission has obscured both the distinctiveness of LGBT Americans and the diversity within the group. Using recent large-N surveys, this article shows that LGBT Americans are distinctively liberal compared to otherwise similar straight and cisgender respondents—in their general political predispositions, electoral choices, and attitudes on a wide range of policy matters. At the same time, there is substantial diversity within the community—bisexual and transgender respondents are frequently less liberal than lesbians and gay men. Analysis of intersecting identities reveals substantial differences between bisexual men and bisexual women, but little evidence of diversity based on gender within lesbian/gay and transgender subgroups. Given these findings, public opinion scholars should routinely incorporate measures of LGBT identities in their analyses, alongside race, gender, class, and other politically salient respondent characteristics.

AbstractIn most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state‐building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity. However, many countries that have suffered external conflicts do not experience increased unity. Instead, they face factional politics that often lead to destructive civil wars. This paper develops a theory of the impact of interstate conflicts on fiscal capacity in which fighting an external threat is not always a common‐interest public good, and in which interstate conflicts can lead to civil wars. The theory identifies conditions under which an increased risk of external conflict decreases the chance of civil war, which in turn results in a government with a longer political life and with more incentives to invest in fiscal capacity. These conditions depend on the cohesiveness of institutions, but in a non‐trivial and novel way: A higher risk of an external conflict that results in lower political turnover, but that also makes a foreign invasion more likely, contributes to state‐building only if institutions are sufficiently incohesive.

"Public Art within a Changing Political Environment" looks at how Austria's changing political landscape impacts funding for public memory projects. As an Austrian citizen and granddaughter of Holocaust victims, I am pursuing a reiteration of The Vienna Project's "Naming Memorial," that was installed in the courtyard of Austria's National Library at the Hofburg Palace in 2014. Using scroll slides, I projected the names of 91,780 persecuted victims groups of National Socialism, representing 7 different groups, onto the walls of the buildings surrounding Josefplatz. The paper evaluates support for a sequel project at Austria's War Memorial in Vienna's first district. The project proposal addresses lapses in Austria's public art program and asks the question: "What happens when we forget to remember?" Methodologies include interviews, archival research, collaborations with designers, metal fabricators, laser engineers, and augmented reality technologists. I hope to create a new generation of naming memorials that includes a spectrum of new technologies, bringing context and story-telling to an otherwise stark listing of names. Audiences will include Austrian officials, family members, students, artists, historians, community members and tourists.

Unlike traditional, text-based theater, "devised" theater can be an alternative form of theater that emphasizes democracy within groups, movement-based techniques, and sometimes encourages politically driven works of live performance. Actors can become a part of generating material for the final product instead of portraying a prewritten role. Their voices, impulses, physicality, and sometimes their life experiences influence the show in a personal and reflective way. I use The Odyssey, directed by Professor Kimberly Jannarone at UCSC, as a case study of what the devising process can look like. I use my experience to highlight the ways a devised production has the flexibility to change in response to current events. Our devising process allowed the utilization of each actor to the best of their potential; letting individual talents dictate roles and contributions to the play (rather than immediate casting for specific roles). Devising's open and democratic model helped us make political art in an encouraging rehearsal atmosphere where our diverse voices felt heard, in a time where political art is important and needed in America.

In the wake of the Bi-Partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 and subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court, American political parties face greater regulation than interest groups in terms of their ability to finance federal elections. While parties continue to be constrained by contribution limits, nearly all interest groups can now raise and spend money in unlimited amounts to influence elections. Further, many new groups formed to take advantage of these legal changes. Few studies address the ramifications of these developments for political parties' fundraising capabilities. To see whether these disadvantages hamper party fundraising, I examine parties' direct fundraising costs overtime and I use structural equation analysis to investigate the giving habits of party donors overtime. I find the fundraising cost of each dollar raised has risen and habitual party donors provide significant support to Super PACs. Habitual party donors have also become less consistent givers in the Democratic Party. I discuss the relationship of these findings to changes in party fundraising tactics and their implications for future efforts by the parties to maintain their revenue streams.

This article begins by relating the 2010 presidential election to preceding presidential elections in Ukraine. It demonstrates that this is the first time in Ukraine's two decades of national independence that strong continuity has been present across successive elections in the territorially aggregated basis of support for the same leading candidate, or between such a candidate and a political mentor. From this perspective, the 2010 election is the country's first aligning election. The article investigates the social and economic correlates of regional voting patterns in 2010, finding that identity-based variables based on section (macro-region) and language are the strongest predictors, although economics is also of some relevance. It goes on to compare the 2010 contest in this respect with the elections of 1994, 1999, and 2004, showing that identity politics lost in salience as of the late 1990s and then resurged. The reasons for this reversal have to do with the elite's habit of relying on identity messages to compete for high office and the penetration of the Ukrainian political space by international actors, Russia in particular.

This thesis is a critical analysis of current debates over "political correctness" and pedagogical reform. Employing a theoretical framework informed by critical pedagogy, this document outlines the historical, political, economic, social and cultural context in which these recent debates have emerged. Beginning with the assumption that the educational and cultural domains are contested terrains mediated by class, race and gender configurations, it is argued that the discourse of critical pedagogy provides a puissant challenge to both conservative and liberal approaches to education. The current debates within the realm of social theory are also taken up by addressing the various trajectories (resistant postmodernism, post-colonialism, feminism, cultural studies, critical theory, Marxism) which have influenced the development of critical pedagogy. A criticalist perspective therefore undergirds the subsequent analysis of recent debates over canon revision, curriculum changes and the mainstream media's coverage of these events.Dept. of Communication Studies. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1994 .S32. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 34-02, page: 0491. Adviser: James P. Winter. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1994.

For many years 'there has been a widespread sense of expectancy' in Zaïre, a premonition of 'fin de reégime'. Yet as Crawford Young went on to explain as early as 1979, although a 'dissolution of the current fabric of power is an ever-present possibility… the surprising survival capacity of the régime makes risky any assertion of the inevitability of such a change.'1 During the last two decades there have been repeated reports that the political life of Zaïre' authoritatrian and absolute Head of State has been in grave danger for a whole variety of reasons, including the alleged loss of support from some powerful army general or 'baron', or the ruined credibility of his régime among international financial organisations, etcetera. The fact that Mobutu Sese Seko continues to remain in power as President means that we need to question our understanding of the situation in Zaïre. Before addressing ourselves to the issue of political succession and of possible scenarios in the future, I shall try to explain the main reasons for the 'survival capacity' of the power structure.

THE CONVERSATION (AS MICHAEL OAKESHOTT WOULD CALL IT) THAT is political theory finds itself these days starved for interlocutors. There are talkers aplenty, but they do little listening and pursue their several idioms not for the pleasure of language but in order to urge positions and promote interests. Philosophers like Rawls and Nozick join the conversation in order to demonstrate, thanks to the irrefutable logical foundations they presume to discover for justice, how most effectively to conclude it. Liberal sce tics like Karl Popper trust talk no more than philosophy, and opt for straightforward problem-solving. For Marxists, conversation can only obscure or reveal action – and action is where (as Marxism's American roponents might put it) the action is. In each of these modes of discourse, the goal is advocacy, certainty, justification – a resolution of, not a conversation about political issues. Moreover, as if the ranks of conversationalists were not already decimated, death has, in the last year or two, silenced the voices of three giants: John Plamenatz, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Latin America between Two Eras -- 1. Analytical Orientations and the Latin American Problématique -- Ten Orientations for Sociopolitical Analysis -- The New Latin American Problématique -- Political Democratization -- Social Democratization -- The Model of Development -- The Model of Modernity -- The Change in the Sociopolitical Matrix -- Consequences for Social and Political Analysis -- Notes -- 2. Social Change and the Reconstruction of Politics -- Ambiguities of Globalization -- Democratization and Expansion of the Political System -- Structural Changes and Weakening of the Polis -- Denormativized Society and Abstract Politics -- Expansion and Weakening of Citizenship -- The New Forms of Exclusion -- Latin America at the Turn of the Century -- The Reconstruction of Political Society -- Notes -- 3. Democracy and Democratization: Concepts and Processes -- Democracy and Latin American Social Thought -- The Redefinition and Revalorization of Democracy -- Political Democratizations -- The Ethical Problem with Democratizations: Reconciliation -- The Current Problems of Democracy -- The Future of Democracy in Latin America -- Notes -- 4. The Transformation of the State and Social Policies -- Ideologies Surrounding State Reform -- A New Prospect for the Transformation of the State -- The Practical Principles of State Transformation -- Notes -- 5. Social Policies and Equality -- The Meaning of Social Policies -- Equality and Equity: What Is behind the Words? -- The Multidimensionality of Social Inequality -- Social Policies and the Fight against Inequality -- Conclusion -- Notes -- 6. Political Parties and the Crisis of Representation -- The Current Historical Context of Political Representation -- New Problems of Party Representation -- Political Parties and Historical Projects -- Notes.

How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative 'principles' in political life be responsive to social 'facts'? In this article, I answer this question by sketching a contextualist methodology for identifying and justifying principles for guiding international institutional action, which is based on an original account of the regulative role and conceptual structure of principles of political legitimacy. I develop my argument for this approach in three steps. First, I argue that a special non-utopian category of normative political principles has the regulatory role of helping solve collective action problems that emerge in practice among actors engaged in shared institutional projects. Next, I argue that analysis of such normative political principles can be helpfully framed by what I call a collective agency conception of political legitimacy. Finally, I draw out the implications of these claims to show how the content and justification of normative political principles should vary across institutional contexts, in response to a particular set of motivational and empirical social facts. This contextualist methodology has useful applications to international politics insofar it can help to account for the widespread intuition that standards of political legitimacy for institutions may vary both across domestic and international levels and among international institutions operating in different functional domains.

"Hybrid democracy" and its consequences / Shaun Bowler and Amihai Glazer -- Was Rove right? Ohio's gay marriage ban and the 2004 presidential election / Daniel A. Smith -- Electoral supply and demand: direct democracy campaigns, political interest, and participation / Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Bowen -- Direct democracy and the public agenda: ballot initiatives and public beliefs about important problems / Stephen P. Nicholson -- Direct democracy's effects on political parties / Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan -- The initiative process and interest group attention to legislative activity / Frederick J. Boehmke -- Direct democracy and the executive branch / John G. Matsusaka -- Direct democracy and the stability of state policy / Amihai Glazer and Anthony McGann -- Direct democracy and good governance: does it matter? / Russell J. Dalton

Why do authoritarian dominant parties, once established, continue to win elections or lose power? Employing a time-series cross-national analysis of election outcomes and two country case studies, the author shows that dominant parties endure despite poor economic performance, voter demand for new parties, and sufficiently permissive electoral institutions. Instead, the author demonstrates that dominant parties continue to win when they can politicize public resources, and they fail when privatizations put the state's fiscal power out of their reach. The argument has implications for the fate of dominant parties, transitions to democracy in competitive authoritarian regimes, and the study of incumbency advantages and electoral fairness in comparative politics. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Behavior and human action must be understood as an expression of the needs and desires of man that apply in social, economic. Law, as an instrument of human life, cannot be separated from various aspects around it, both economic, political, social and cultural beings. This study attempts to analyse socio-political and economic aspects of law making and change. The results of this study reveal that there are various realities in legal change, such as social reality at macro-objective level, social reality at macro-subjective level, social reality at micro-objective level, and social reality at micro-subjective level. These four levels of reality will be the focus of observation on various shifting issues in the legal policy aspect. ; peer-reviewed

In this article, the authors use the concept of negative social capital to address the contextual impact of micro mechanisms explaining political legitimacy. They first illustrate the effect of social capital with regard to its negative consequences. Then they select four countries, each one a case study of a different welfare regime, and measure the distribution of "time given helping others." The helping behavior is interpreted as a credit slip in social capital vocabulary, and its effect on the confidence in democracy in different welfare regimes is measured. The research findings suggest that helping behavior in weaker welfare regimes has detrimental consequences for political legitimacy. The results are consistent both in a cross-country and in a within-country comparison.