Search Results

Explores the generic foundations of political theory in the twentieth century. It sorts and analyses the overarching perceptions of the political theory, at a broad level of generality, during the bulk of the century. The five positions outlined are normative political theory, institutional theory, historical political theory, empirical political theory, and ideological theory.

This chapter focuses on how the history of political ideas has been approached in the context of British political science. This has the consequence that the discussion ranges over commentators who are explicitly not historians. It claims that the current British approaches to the study of past political thought have domestic origins in the development of the study of politics in British Universities, especially Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The first section accounts for different approaches to the study of political ideas in British political science by examining conceptions of the history of political thought. It shows how institutional history is connected to the development of a genre, and how this history has not been dependent on the direct import of Continental or American intellectual fashions or personalities. The second section delineates the three main British approaches to the study of the history of political ideas in the post-war period.

The nationalization of crime policy issues is a relatively new phenomenon in American history, but has foundations that extend back to the Civil War. This chapter develops a political history of crime's place on the national agenda that lays the groundwork for understanding the appeal of crime as a national political issue and the transformation of the interest group environment from local to national arenas. The chapter highlights the shifting jurisdictional terrain between state and national governments in the 19th and 20th centuries and the opportunities these shifts provided for expanding national attention to crime and violence. In particular, the chapter focuses on the historic use of the crime issue as a symbolic political lever that served to bolster narrow interest groups, policy entrepreneurs, racial hierarchies, and federal law enforcement bureaucracies, simplifying problem definitions and narrowing policy options in the process.

This chapter considers the contributions that the new political history can make to the field of political science. It first examines how political historians have revitalized their field in recent years before discussing three particular aspects of the literature that are essential for beginning an interdisciplinary dialogue between political history and political science: research on the motivations behind the rise of American conservatism, the discovery of the nineteenth-century state, and arguments about the particularities of public policy. The chapter also explores some key issues that need to addressed so that historians can connect with political scientists, such as the history of political economy or the history of liberalism.

This is the second of three chapters that set out the differing contexts through which the dilemma in the laws of war over the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants can be viewed: political and diplomatic (Chapter 1), social (this chapter) and intellectual (Chapter 3). It explores the social history of army occupation and resistance to it in nineteenth century Europe – from the Napoleonic period to the Franco-Prussian war– and places these diplomatic failures in their broader social and political context. In particular it examines the range of army practices under occupation, and the effect that they had on civilian life. The different sections of the chapter discuss: pillaging, looting, requisitions and billeting; reprisals; hostage-taking; types of civilian behaviour –obedience to the occupier, political and armed acts of resistance, organized acts of resistance –guerrillas and franc-tireurs; levee en masse and other assorted insurrections; ideologies of resistance; religion as a source of resistance; and the influence of nationalism and patriotism.

This chapter attempts to rethink how we categorize and periodize political time by focusing on liberal presidential synthesis, a framework that is centered on the rise and fall of the presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. It first considers the basic narrative of the liberal presidential synthesis and argues that the works of the last generation of postwar political historians, while providing a much richer understanding of each individual, have downplayed institutional questions about the evolution of the office over time. It then reviews the literature on individual presidencies before discussing presidential power from the perspective of political science. It also examines a number of possibilities for reordering political time and concludes by reflecting on how political history may be revitalized and reconceptualized.

This chapter focuses on the reconvergence of history and political science and explains how historians and political scientists can work together towards reconstructing political history. It argues that political historians who want to truly reconceptualize the study of politics must draw on scholarship in political science to think of fresh approaches and frameworks that move beyond the liberal presidential synthesis. It discusses various areas in political science, some well established and others just emerging, that historians would find extremely useful; these include civic participation, the relationship between race and politics, and international political economy. The chapter also examines what contributions historians can offer to political science beyond providing them with more data and concludes by highlighting disciplinary diffrences that historians and political scientists must respect and should not abandon.

This book offers fresh narratives about U.S. political history by focusing on policy, political institutions, and electoral politics. It argues that the field of American political history, once marginalized, has been remade in vibrant fashion and now provides rich and original approaches and interpretations about America's political past. The book is divided into four thematic sections. Part I deals with the historiography of political history, and especially the intellectual underpinnings of the field and the multiple analytic foundations upon which it is built. Part II examines the challenges imposed by fiscal constraint in American politics, showing how policymakers were able to use innovative fiscal strategies such as Social Security and Medicare to build programs within such constraints. Part III considers the impact of the political process as it occurred in Congress, whereas Part IV explores how policy and politics intersected in the case of national security.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the purpose of the book, which is to provide a full account of politics in Wales between the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832 and the Third Reform Act in 1844-45. During this period, a recognizably modern and democratic system of government was established in Britain. It explains why the literature on Welsh political history has developed so distinctively, and the different set of questions that must be asked if the Welsh experience is to be integrated with the wider history of electoral politics in Britain. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Outlines the aim of the book, and briefly describes the contents of each chapter. The book seeks to evaluate (1) why so many countries with such diverse political histories have chosen to adopt mixed‐member electoral systems, and (2) what the consequences have been of implementing such a system. Part I sets the stage for the 10 country chapters presented in Part II, which presents 10 stories of why the countries concerned adopted a mixed‐member system. Part II then covers the same countries but investigates the consequences of adopting a mixed‐member system, and Part IV looks at the prospects for further reform in two further countries (Britain and Canada), and provides a conclusion, which summarizes what has been learned from the country chapters.

This chapter considers what drives differences in political and legal institutions across countries, narrowing the focus to the evolution of legislatures and courts in the American states. The American states have relatively diverse geographic and colonial initial conditions, well-documented historical experiences, and rich data on politics and courts going back to the 1860s, making it ideal for the study methods this chapter introduces. Hence, to document how and why geography and other historical factors have had a persistent influence on political and legal institutions, this chapter plots out the structure of an argument to be used in the remainder of this volume, and argues that initial conditions played early and enduring roles in shaping political and legal institutions in the American states.

This chapter draws attention to the vital role of interdisciplinary perspectives in law, history, sociology, and political science in redirecting our understanding of the origins, development, and nature of the American state. It highlights the particularly formative role of an emerging theoretical literature concerning the character of statecraft in modern democratic regimes. The paper begins with an acknowledgment of the difficulty of the state concept as articulated in the diverse contributions of American history, political sociology, and American Political Development. It goes on to question the predominance of the essentially bureaucratic and Weberian model of the state that has governed thinking about and controlled discussion of the American state for the last two generations. It concludes by using the interdisciplinary perspectives that have recently emerged in socio-legal studies in the United States to generate an alternative approach to American state development that takes account of the nature of democratic rule as well as the fungibility of the state/society boundary.

This chapter discusses creation and consolidation of the Iraqi state from 1921 to 1936. The period of gestation for the Iraqi state, from conception to birth, was just under eleven months. While debates and policy conflicts within British policy-making circles over the future of Mesopotamia had raged for much longer, the arrival in October 1920 of Sir Percy Cox as the new High Commissioner of Iraq, tasked with ending direct British military rule and establishing an indigenous government, signaled British determined intent to create a state in the land of Mesopotamia. The form of the political system, namely a constitutional monarchy, took shape at the Cairo Conference in the spring of 1921, and the process was finally crowned with the enthronement of King Faysal on August 23, 1921. However, the effort to accumulate power, as well as to deny it to the other, caused significant tension between the King and the British High Commissioner.

The focal geographical points of the ancient Indian dynasties, together with the geographical orbits within which they tried to expand their political power and interacted with the other contemporary dynasties, are intertwined with the historical-geographical configurations of the political history of ancient India. This book is not only about whether only a limited number of areas were the foci of major power centres throughout the course of ancient Indian history. It also explores how many geographical orbits can be traced and how they have defined the geographical parameters of interaction between different geographical areas and kingdoms. It also considers whether such orbits are fixed entities in our geographical understanding of Indian archaeology and history, or whether they should be interpreted merely as useful concepts that can help elucidate the geography of the flow of historical events in ancient India.