This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced the allocation of public expenditures in OECD countries. I analyze two datasets that report different expenditure categories and cover the time periods 1970-1997 and 1990-2006, respectively. The results suggest that government ideology has had a rather weak influence on the composition of governments’ budgets. Leftist governments, h...

Political theorists likeAlexis deTocqueville have long recognized the importance of citizen associations for the practice of democracy. Through participation in associations, citizens both receive an education in public affairs and create centers of political power independent of the state. Essential to participation in an association is participation in a forum, a communication space that allo...

Recently, the call to combine land change science (LCS) and political ecology (PE) in the study of human-environment interactions has been widely discussed by scientists from both subfields of geography. In this paper, we use a hybrid ecology framework to examine the effects of conservation policies on the environment and the livelihood of the people of the Korup National Park (KNP). Using tech...

From 1999 to 2010, the number of Veterans of the United States military receiving compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for serviceconnected PTSD increased 222% to 386,882. This dramatic and rapid increase in the rate of diagnosed service-connected PTSD has intensified longstanding concerns that the VA’s disability policies, procedures, and treatment programs promote compens...

In this article I examine whether turnout in the 2000 presidential election was influenced by closeness and candidate expenditures. Evidence that closeness affects turnout supports the theory that voters assign more weight to their votes in close elections. Evidence that expenditures increase turnout provides support for the argument that greater mobilization efforts increase turnout in close e...

The concept of sovereignty currently dominates Indigenous affairs in the United States. The advancement and defense of sovereignty is quite arguably tribal nations' number one agenda, and sovereignty is a persistent focus of tribes' political, economic, legal, and social action. Sovereignty undergirds tribal gaming, natural resource management, and a wide variety of jurisdictional and political...

Seven mathematicians and one political scientist met at the Cambridge Apportionment Meeting in January 2011. They agreed a unanimous recommendation to the European Parliament for its future apportionments between the EUMember States. This is a short factual account of the reasons that led to the Meeting, of its debates and report, and of some of the ensuing Parliamentary debate. 1. Background a...

This paper describes a semantic portal on the domain of International Affairs. This application is an integration of several technologies in the field of the Semantic Web in a complex project. We describe an approach, tools and techniques that allow building a semantic portal, where access is based on the meaning of concepts and relations of the International Affairs domain. The approach compri...

The Global Affairs Institute (GAI) of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs was created in 1993 to integrate and focus the School’s research, training, and service activities in areas of international studies. GAI builds upon the Maxwell School tradition of producing a community of citizens, broadly schooled and skilled, whose signature is civility and civic-mindedness on a globa...

In emerging economies, political institutions (i.e., government and its agencies), act as a major force in defining and mobilizing resources. IT entrepreneurial firms endeavor to obtain resources from political institutions, named as political institutional resources (PIRs), to overcome insurmountable handicap of resource deficiency. However, how PIRs matter remains unclear. Acknowledging this ...