Political participation in a modern, federal state is a complex business for an average educated citizen. These circumstances support political abstinence: Statistical studies prove the fact that as far as votes and elections are concerned, which are the most easy way to participate, the participation in votes and elections declined 20% respectively about 40%. Since 1900. Therefore it is necess...

Neurosurgeons and psychiatrists who favor psychosurgery sometimes show dismay that anyone would accuse them of harboring political aims, and it is true that the average psychosurgeon has little or no interest in the application of his technology to overtly political problems. But it is equally true that several of the nation's leading psychosurgeons have persistently linked their work to the co...

If you ask political scientists whether a major goal of their empirical research is to test causal relationships, I suspect that most of them answer “yes.” In contrast, many statisticians would say that their methods may improve predictions but have little to do with causal inference. As a result, even as an increasing number of social scientists use statistical methods to infer causal effects ...

We propose a new approach to the study of comparative public policy that examines how the agenda-setting attributes of an issue combine with problems to drive political attention. Whereas existing comparative policy studies tend to focus on how institutional or programmatic differences affect policy and politics, we begin by asking how the issue itself affects politics across nations. We illust...

The conventional wisdom on China's domestic political situation is one of tension and turmoil. China's leaders seem beset with a host of problems for which they have no ready answer. They face a growing number of popular protests in the cities and the countryside. Corruption seems to be endemic, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lacks the means or the will to crackdown on corrupt officials,...

■ Abstract Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standin...

Successful achievement of public policies requires satisfaction of conditions affecting political feasibility for policy adoption and maintenance as well as economic viability of the desired activity or enterprise. Fulfilling these joint requirements when pursuing deregulatory policies for public utility industries in the U.S. is particularly difficult given the legacy of the common law doctrin...

We consider mass surveillance from a computer-science perspective. After presenting some objections to the behavior of the US National Security Agency and its counterparts in allied nations (emphasizing technical problems associated with such behavior, rather than political, legal, and social problems), we propose a grass-roots, technological response: decentralized cloud services, facilitated ...