ABSTRACT Although ethnographic methods have yielded important insights into the inner workings of many political institutions, their use in study institutions engaged national security policy making and practice has been more limited. Common features raise methodological ethical concerns for participant observers: they are hard to access, handle classified information, proximity violence create...

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s successor states have not made the smooth transition to liberal democracy that many in Europe and the United States had once expected. The Baltic states and most eastern European countries have transitioned to the status of “sustainable democracies,” but the rest of the Soviet Union’s successor states sit more along a continuum of auto...

There is considerable irony in the current search for the causes of the rapid political changes sweeping the communist world after 1988. In retrospect, it is not hard to single out a number of macrosocietal trends that led eventually to regime change: economic stagnation and consumer deprivation, deeply eroded commitment to official ideology and the growth of widespread cynicism, the corruption...

This book discusses the dynamics of relationship between Islam as a religious and political teaching with democracy in context effects Arab Spring subsequent events after it. The authors, who are considered to be “titans” field Islam, started by saying “Many western observers were shocked when Arabs began open rebellions against their governments December 2010” this seem point out not only unpr...

Since the United States presidential election of 2000, political campaigns have deployed volunteer lawyers to provide real-time information and assistance to poll observers. To assist with the routing of these rapid response attorneys (RRAs) among polling locations, we formulate two optimization models to equitably and efficiently allocate volunteer resources. We propose heuristic solution proc...

The events of December 2001 seemed to transform Argentina’s international status from poster child to basket case. Throughout the 1990s, Argentina had been widely hailed as a case of successful market reform under democratic government. The radical economic transformation undertaken by the government of Carlos Saúl Menem had ended hyperinflation and restored economic growth, while the country e...

The last two centuries have produced, transformed and destroyed a myriad of political symbols of a linguistic, visual and ritual form. Between, say 1790 and 1990 the political sphere witnessed both an explosion in the generation of symbols and a radical decline of symbols. This calls for explanations. Mary Douglas and Serge Moscovici have provided insightful reflections on the theory and histor...

Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...