scholarly journals Political Science and American Political Thought

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (03) ◽  
pp. 784-788
Author(s):  
Justin Buckley Dyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Discipline

ABSTRACT Written as a short personal reflection, this article explores the development of political science as an organized professional discipline in the United States. At its inception, political science in the United States was principally concerned with political thought and constitutionalism, and it was taught with the public-spirited purpose of educating for citizenship in a constitutional democracy. Twentieth-century methodological trends at one time threatened to remove political thought and constitutionalism from the curriculum of political science, but recent disciplinary trends suggest that American political thought does have a place in twenty-first-century political science.

The Risks of Scholarly Militarization: A Feminist Analysis

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1107-1111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Enloe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Military

Michael Mosser's thoughtful essay calls on us as political scientists to engage more closely with the contemporary US military. To weigh the implications of such a proposal, we need to consider, I think, not just the military but the wider, deeper processes of militarization. As a multi-layered economic, political, and cultural process, militarization can be blatant and off-putting; but just as often it can be subtle and seductive. All of us trying to craft the best practices of political science here in the United States in the early decades of the twenty-first century are making those scholarly efforts at a time when militarization is a potent process in American public life. Awareness of its potency breeds scholarly caution.

scholarly journals Little Founders on the Small Screen: Interpreting a Multicultural American Revolution for Children's Television

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW M. SCHOCKET
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Children's Television ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Television ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Broadcasting Service ◽  
Whoopi Goldberg ◽  
Broadcasting Service

From 2002 to 2004, the children's animated series Liberty's Kids aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the United States' public television network. It runs over forty half-hour episodes and features a stellar cast, including such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Michael Douglas, Yolanda King, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Neeson, and Annette Bening. Television critics generally loved it, and there are now college students who can trace their interest in the American Revolution to having watched this series when they were children. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is the most extended and in-depth encounter with the American Revolution that most young people in the United States are likely to have encountered, and is appropriately patriotic and questioning, celebratory and chastening. Although children certainly learn a great deal about multiculturalism from popular culture, the tropes and limitations of depicting history on television trend toward personification, toward reduced complexity and, for children, toward resisting examining the darker sides of human experience. As this essay suggests, the genre's limits match the limits of a multicultural history in its attempt to show diversity and agency during a time when “liberty and justice for all” proved to be more apt as an aspiration at best and an empty slogan at worst than as an accurate depiction of the society that proclaimed it. This essay is not an effort to be, as Robert Sklar put it, a “historian cop,” policing the accuracy of the series by patrolling for inaccuracies. Rather, it is a consideration of the inherent difficulties of trying to apply a multicultural sensibility to a portrayal of the American Revolution.

Defending Government: Why Big Government Works. By Max Neiman. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 260p. $27.00 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-218
Author(s):  
John C. Pierce
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Goal Achievement ◽  
Graduate Courses ◽  
The Public

Max Neiman provides a concise, well-written, and compre- hensive critical analysis of "the conservative attack on the public sector, especially its explanation for and evaluation of the size and growth of the public sector in the United States" (p. viii). In doing so, however, he only partially fulfills what is promised in the subtitle, namely, explaining why big govern- ment works. Rather than explicitly assess the reasons for goal achievement in a variety of policy areas, as the title implied to me, Neiman focuses on why we have big government and on the various critiques of that size. To be sure, the book is appropriate for upper division and graduate courses in political science, public policy, or public administration.

Latinx Folklore and Folklife

2019 ◽  
pp. 755-776
Author(s):  
Norma E. Cantú
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Folklore Studies ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Traditional Cultural Expressions ◽  
Future Work

This article, which focuses on the traditional cultural expressions of the Latinx community in the United States, first traces the history and development of Chicanx and Latinx folklore studies. Second, it presents the ways that the study and engagement with these expressions serve as tools for addressing social justice issues faced by Latinxs in the United States in the twenty-first century. To guide future work in the field, it concludes with an assessment of Latinx folklore studies and its role in reconfiguring and reimagining folklore and folklife studies in general. Within this discussion, the essay presents two key aspects of Latinx folklore and folklife that have defined the field—the academic study of folklore and the public-sector engagement by community scholars. Both have affected the ways that Latinx folkloristics have changed the field during the last hundred years and are shaping it as we leave behind outmoded and limited ways of seeing the cultural production of the second-largest ethnic minority in the United States.

Political Thought in Xenophon: Straussian Readings of the Anabasis

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leo Strauss

The main aim of this paper is to discuss some influential approaches to political thought in Xenophon’s Anabasis within the field of Political Science, especially within the United States, where the influence of Leo Strauss’ writings on Xenophon has been powerful. It starts by discussing a number of features shared by these discussions, notably a strong idealisation of Xenophon’s wisdom and accuracy; a lack of interest in the conditions under which Xenophon wrote; a pro-Hellenic perspective; and a tendency to innovative (and often allegorical) literary explication. It then discusses the two most important themes treated by Strauss and his followers, Xenophon’s piety and philosophy and politics. It argues that Straussian exegesis introduces anachronistic conceptions while neglecting the narrative dynamics of the text. The final section sets out briefly some ways of exploring Xenophon’s relationship to other currents in Greek political thought.

Government Corporations; a Focus of Policy and Administration, I

1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 899-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall E. Dimock
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Corporation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
Government Corporations

The government corporation has become a familiar device of public administration all over the world; and yet in some countries, and especially in the United States, uncertainty as to its distinctive purpose and underlying principles seems to grow, rather than to diminish, as the public corporation becomes older and more extensively used. Lack of interest and research cannot be blamed, because in recent years the degree of concentration in this area has probably been relatively as great as in any other sphere of political science. The basic explanation is that administrative formulas and management principles are rarely, if ever, capable of immunization against group pressures and public policy controls, which bend administration to their own designs, sometimes in conformity with what the impartial experts consider sound principle and practice, but just as often in knowing disregard of such considerations and in a determined effort to support their own interests and economic viewpoints.

Counter-framing: Implications for public relations

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
William B. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Framing Effects ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Original Frame

This article seeks to introduce the concept of counter-framing (i.e. a frame that contradicts the original frame and is introduced at a later date than the original) to the public relations literature so that scholars might more accurately examine the democratic environment where competitive debate is expected and meaning is negotiated. The article begins with a summary of how public relations scholars have studied framing before highlighting research from political science researchers on counter-framing. A case study of the battle for gun control legislation in the United States is then used to examine and contextualize the framing/counter-framing dynamic. This study adds the duration of time between messages as a possible factor that might influence framing effects.

What is Liberalism?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Subsequent Transformation ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Anglo American

This chapter attempts to reframe the way in which the liberal tradition is understood. It opens with a critique of some existing interpretive protocols used to delimit political traditions. It then introduces a new way of conceptualizing liberalism, suggesting that it can be seen as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space. The second half of the chapter analyzes the emergence and subsequent transformation of the category of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950. It traces the evolution of the language of liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain, and explores how the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the century, chiefly in the United States, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. It argues that this broad understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences.

Public Opinion on Refugee Policy in the United States, 1938-2019: Increasing Support for Refugees and the Sympathy Effect

2020 ◽  
pp. 019791832095412
Author(s):  
Mariano Sana
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
The Public ◽  
Response Choice ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Refugee Policies ◽  
Opinion Polls

Eight decades of opinion polls (1938–2019) on US refugee policies show that most Americans have historically opposed admitting refugees but this trend has been reversed in the twenty-first century. An examination of the questions pollsters asked reveals that when respondents were offered a middle response choice (e.g. “the number of refugees is about right”), their opposition often morphed into approval of the admissions status quo. Findings also show some evidence of a fait-accompli effect: The public tended to be more supportive of refugees when welcoming policies were enacted and when refugees were already on US soil. Furthermore, the United States public reported more supportive attitudes toward refugees when asked about any type of policy — welcoming or restrictive — and when asked questions concerning the context of reception of admitted refugees. I label this pattern a “sympathy effect,” whereby respondents revealed more support for refugees when answering contextualized rather than abstract questions. This finding implies that pro-refugee policies might have more popular support than often assumed and that the extremely restrictive policies toward refugee admissions of the current US government are out-of-sync with both historical trends and current American public opinion.

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