Beverly LaHaye Defies Feminism

In 1979, Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America (CWA), which would quickly become the nation’s largest lobbying group for conservative women. With chapters across the country, CWA has been responsible for mobilizing hundreds of thousands of conservative women to become active for conservative causes at the local, state, and federal levels. LaHaye began her career as a megachurch pastor’s wife and the author of marital and spiritual advice for evangelical women. When she turned her attention to politics, she used the language and networks of evangelical women’s culture to mobilize others. Her story demonstrates how even women who took on definitive political leadership roles had to negotiate persistent ambivalence within conservative evangelical communities, both about politics in general and about women’s roles within it. LaHaye’s relationship with Catholic activist Phyllis Schlafly also highlights the limits of ecumenical cooperation within the New Christian Right, even as that movement was defined by new alliances between conservative Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 November 2018–15 February 2019) include the induction of the first Palestinian woman, Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), into U.S. congress; the steep public censure of a second Muslim congresswoman, Ilahn Omar (D-MN), for her criticism of the influence the pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affiars Committee (AIPAC) has over U.S. politics; and the firing of professor/activist Marc Lamont Hill for his pro-Palestinian speech at UN headquarters. Trending hastags this quarter are #TweetYourThobe, #StandWithIlhan, and #IStandWithMLH.

Environmental Impact Communication: Cape Wind EIS, 2001–2015

“Cape Wind” is a proposed wind-energy project off the Massachusetts coast. Its environmental effects are detailed in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Writers of an EIS must address rhetorical challenges posed by the complexity of how the “environment” is characterized by many statutes and regulations. These requirements include guidance on the document’s style, and because the text is hundreds of pages long, they also include rules on its arrangement (its genre), and its online delivery. Partly as a result, the writer’s stance is that of an impersonal, corporate author. The EIS is required to address multiple audiences that include decision makers and elected officials; public participation in the process is encouraged. Evidence about the actual audience shows that the public finds out about the project through media reports, web sites, and press releases, rather than studying the EIS. Finally, sustained opposition by a fossil-fuel lobbying group has led to the project’s apparent demise.

Geometric vulnerability of democratic institutions against lobbying: A sociophysics approach

An alternative voting scheme is proposed to fill the democratic gap between a pre-sident elected democratically via universal suffrage (deterministic outcome, the actual majority decides), and a president elected by one person randomly selected from the population (probabilistic outcome depending on respective supports). Indeed, moving from one voting agent to a group of [Formula: see text] randomly selected voting agents reduces the probabilistic character of the outcome. Accordingly, building [Formula: see text] such groups, each one electing its president (elementary bricks), to constitute a group of the groups with the [Formula: see text] local presidents electing a higher-level president, does reduce further the outcome probabilistic aspect. The process is then repeated [Formula: see text] times to reach a bottom-up pyramidal structure with [Formula: see text] levels, [Formula: see text] elementary bricks at the bottom and a president at the top. Agents at the bottom are randomly selected but higher-level presidents are all designated according to the respective local majorities within the groups which elect them. At the top of the hierarchy the president is still elected with a probability but the distance from a deterministic outcome reduces quickly with increasing [Formula: see text]. At a critical value [Formula: see text] the outcome turns deterministic recovering the same result a universal suffrage would yield. This alternative hierarchical scheme introduces several social advantages like the distribution of local power to the competing minority, which thus makes the structure more resilient, yet preserving the presidency allocation to the actual majority. It also produces an area around 50% for which the president is elected with an almost-equiprobability slightly biased in favor of the actual majority. However, our results reveal the existence of a severe geometric vulnerability to lobbying. It is shown that a tiny lobbying group is able to kill the democratic balance by seizing the presidency democratically. It is sufficient to complete a correlated distribution of a few agents at the hierarchy bottom. Moreover, at the present stage, identifying an actual killing distribution is not feasible, which sheds a disturbing light on the devastating effect geometric lobbying can have on democratic hierarchical institutions.

Joel Barkan and Kenya

Joel Barkan’s interest in Kenya as a high school student inspired a lifetime’s commitment to the country and wider East African region, reflected in his three edited volumes comparing political, economic, and policy developments in Kenya and Tanzania, his work as USAID’s Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor in the early 1990s, and his continuing engagement with the country’s political development through his work at CSIS and his role as founder and chair of the Kenya Working Group, the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying group.

The Introduction of Real Estate Investment Trusts [REITs] in Germany

The German Real Estate Investment Trust – or, G-REIT – is in the centre of interest in Germany these days and expected to be introduced in Germany in the beginning of 2007. After a preparation phase initiated in 2003 by a lobbying group (“IFD”) under the former German government, the new government has most recently drafted a bill with respect to the introduction of G-REITs (“bill”). This bill remains to be subject to parliamentary discussion and is likely to be partially modified before its final adoption: in addition to its passage in the Bundestag (Federal Parliament), it requires the approval of the Bundesrat (German Federal Council). Following its first reading it will be committed to the Financial Committee, which will conduct hearings. However, the legislator intends to pass the bill in the first quarter of 2007 to take retroactive effect as of 1 January 2007. This essay intends to outline fundamental corporate, capital market, and tax related G-REIT parameters provided for by the G-REIT Act in its present form.

B3. President George W. Bush, Remarks to the Annual AIPAC Conference, Washington, D.C., 18 May 2004 (excerpts).

President Bush's forty-minute address to a crowd of some five thousand delegates at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was interrupted by twenty-four standing ovations. Particularly noteworthy is the president's frequently drawn parallel between Israel and Iraq. Bush is the third sitting president ever to address the lobbying group. The speech is carried on the organization's Web site at www.aipac.org