Arab countries face major challenges, including foreign occupations, deficient liberties, poor governance, squandering of resources, economic regression, inequities, and illiteracy. Arab reformists have advocated political, economic, and social change since the late 19th century. However, despite decades of local pressure for change, reforms remain elusive. We consider how action on health can ...

Research has documented a link between political violence and the functioning of individuals and communities. Yet, despite the hardships that political violence creates, evidence suggests remarkable fortitude and resilience within both individuals and communities. Individual characteristics that appear to build resilience against political violence include demographic factors such as gender and...

The year 2016 could turn out to be a turning point for global health, new political realities and global insecurities will test governance and financing mechanisms in relation to both people and planet. But most importantly political factors such as the global power shift and “the rise of the rest” will define the future of global health. A new mix of health inequity and security challenges has...

The recent perspective article “How Neoliberalism Is Shaping the Supply of Unhealthy Commodities and What This Means for NCD Prevention,” by Lencucha and Throw, interrogates how the dominant neoliberal paradigm restricts meaningful policy action to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs). It contributes an NCD perspective to the existing literature on neoliberalism and...

Prior scholarship overlooks the capacity of other actors to raise the political costs of unilateral action by turning public opinion against the president. Through a series of five experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we demonstrate Congress’s ability to erode support for unilateral actions by raising both constitutional and policy-based objections to the exercise of unila...

Article history: Received 7 August 2014 Received in revised form 20 June 2015 Accepted 29 June 2015 Available online 9 July 2015 This study investigates whether a firm with strong corporate governance (CG) requires political connections (PCs), that is, we examine whether CG and PC substitute for or complement each other. Using 71,069 individual bank loan contracts from Taiwan, we examine how lo...

Political power and its exertion by the various agencies of politics (i.e. politicians, civil servants, political institutions) can be described as a kind of symbolic action (cf. Edelmann 1964, 1971). Social and political reality, its perception or constitution by the participants of politics (politicians and citizens), is shaped and determined by communication and its means. That is, it is sha...

The idea that political institutions can be deliberately shaped or “engineered” in order to achieve desired political outcomes is hardly new-the authors of the Constitution of the United States, for example, vigorously debated various configurations of rules, constraints, and incentives that might simultaneously disperse political power over a wide range of actors, while at the same time provid...