Acknowledgement of the importance of identity to politics and widespread concern about responding adequately to marginalized groups have made otherness a salient concept in contemporary political thought. Yet, there has not appeared in the literature any attempt to clarify the distinctive forms...

Alexis de Tocqueville's examination of the political and social climate over the issue of slavery in the textual culmination of his travels throughout the U.S. in 1830s, Democracy in America, casts a shadow over the sustainability of a single American nation-state. Although Tocqueville's...

Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Recently, political scientists have marshaled an impressive methodological discussion of political ethnography. However, this discussion has yielded little debate about the potential for an activist turn in political ethnography. In order to promote such a turn, this paper takes on four tasks....

Tocqueville's discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries...

Though we often think in terms of 'big names' who write 'big books,' political theory has always appeared in many guises. The philosophical treatise stands alongside the political oration, the prison letter, the petition, the novel, the satirical send-up, the drama: all of these different prose...

Eight years ago, the philosophical notebooks of one of the most widely-read political theorists of our time were published. Spanning twenty-three years, from 1950 to 1973, and containing more than eight hundred pages of annotations, Arendt's Denktagebuch is a unique testimony to the life of the...

What accounts for changes in public policies affecting science, technology, and the environment? This should be a central question for political observers and policy analysts. Policies, after all, are the main outcomes of political systems. Scholars study political institutions and behavior...

In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....