Jeffrey A. Hart

Three approaches to the measurement of power in international relations

There are three main approaches to the observation and measurement of power: 1) control over resources, 2) control over actors, and 3) control over events and outcomes. The control over events and outcomes approach emerges as the best approach to the measurement of power in contemporary international politics because: 1) it is the only approach which takes into account the possibility of interdependence and collective action, 2) it is more general than the other two approaches, and 3) it produces a type of analysis which has both descriptive and normative advantages. I will discuss each of these approaches at length and criticize them. I will argue that the third approach is superior to the other two for the measurement of power in contemporary international politics because it is better suited to situations in which interdependence and collective action can be derived from the third.

Cognitive Maps of Three Latin American Policy Makers

Cognitive maps are representations of the causal beliefs or assertions of a specific individual. Maps of three Latin American policy makers (Carlos Andres Perez, Roberto de Oliveira Campos, and Aurelio de Lyra Tavares) suggest new hypotheses and ways of comparing maps across individuals: (i) individuals with broader political responsibility may have more complicated maps with respect to numbers of goals and policies, but less complicated maps with respect to linkages between policies and goals, than individuals with narrower responsibility; (2) maps of different individuals can and should be compared with respect to the degree to which they make (or fail to make) distinctions among related concepts; and (3) maps can be used to predict the future policies of individuals, and should be used in this way to test the theoretical potential of the approach.

The Relationship between Defense Spending and Inflation

The relationship between defense spending and inflation has been of interest to scholars and policymakers throughout much of the post-World War II era. Yet there is no agreement as to the exact nature of the relationship. We attempt to shed some light on this matter by identifying the alternative conceptualizations of the relationship between defense spending and inflation that appear in the literature and subjecting them to empirical examination using data for the 1956-1979 era from four major Western powers. No significant relationship between defense spending and inflation is discovered in the cases of the United States and the United Kingdom, whereas defense spending and inflation are found to be mutually related in the cases of France and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Flying Geese as Moving Targets: Are Korea and Taiwan Catching up with Japan in Advanced Displays?

Are flying geese moving targets or sitting ducks? This paper examines strategies that Korean and Taiwanese firms and governments adopted to build globally competitive advanced display manufacturing capabilities in the face of Japans manufacturing advantages. We examine case evidence from two perspectives: Asia skepticism and network globalization. We observe that the lead goose appears vulnerable.

The Building of the Internet: Implications for the Future of Broadband Networks

The Internet, a system of interconnected computer networks primarily in the USA, can be seen as an experiment in the development, deployment and use of high-speed networks, and as such can provide guidance for the shaping of the future national telecommunications infrastructure. Internets significance lies not only in the technologies it helps develop, but more importantly in the new usage dynamics it helps uncover, the new network management mechanisms it tests and the new policy strategies it explores.

Symmetry and Polarization in the European International System, 1870 - 1879

During my work with Richard Rosecrance on the Situational Analysis Project, a project designed to use diplomatic histories as a source of event-interaction data, I helped to devise and test a method of scaling event-interactions on the degree of cooperation or conflict they represented. The result of this was the Corkeley Scale, so named because it was a joint product of work at Cornell and Berkeley. The scale is displayed in Table I. It consists of a set of categories or types of actions with a number following each type of action. The numbers were obtained by having a number of experts familiar with nineteenth and twentieth century international politics estimate the degree of cooperation or conflict of each type of act. The instructions given to the experts were adapted from those used in psychophysics to obtain ratio or internal levels of

The Net Neutrality Debate in the United States

ABSTRACT In 2006, a major telecommunications bill was held up because it did not include guarantees for something called “net neutrality.” Republicans strongly opposed these guarantees, while Democrats strongly favored them. The debate over net neutrality continued during the long campaign leading up to the 2008 presidential election. When the Obama Administration took office in 2009, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski revived the idea of codifying net neutrality rules. In April 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate Internet service providers under its own interpretation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The FCC adopted a new strategy because of the Courts action. It opted not to undertake a major revision of the Telecommunications Act, but instead to attempt to regulate Internet service provision under modified “common carriage” rules, just as basic telephone services had been previously. An attempt will be made here to explain these choices.

Strategic Trade and Investment Policies: Implications for the Study of International Political Economy

B USINESS gurus point out that successful firms often carefully strategise about what to sell, where to sell, how to sell, and how and where to manufacture their goods and services. Suppose a country, drawing inspiration from such firms, were to formulate a set of economic policies to become globally competitive in leading economic sectors. How specific or encompassing would such policies be and what might be the justifications for them? Even though the theory and practicality of such policies — the strategic trade and industrial policies (STIPs) — is contested, they retain their appeal for politicians and policymakers. In this paper we discuss how and why STIPs have created a new agenda for the study of international political economy. State intervention to directly guide industrial activity is called industrial policy and to guide foreign trade is called trade policy. Industrial policies differ from macroeconomic policies in that they target only a subset of the economy. Whereas macroeconomic policies (such as tax rates, level of deficit spending and interest-rate policies) generally do not discriminate among types of firms or industries, industrial policies (such as R&D subsidies, tax subsidies, preferential loans and credit allocations) are targeted at specific firms or industries.

Structures of influence and cooperation‐conflict

This paper outlines a structural approach to the analysis of patterns of influence and amity‐enmity in international politics. Structure is defined as a set of relations between pairs of social units, which justifies the use of graph theory to represent structures. Graph theoretical models of international structure are explored—one for each of the two types of relations. The author devises some typologies and observes changing structures. A tendency toward hierarchy in influence structures and toward bipolarization in cooperation‐conflict structures is discussed. It is hypothesized that high degrees of hierarchy and polarization are inimical to international peace. The graph theoretical studies yield intuitively reasonable results and the models appear to be useful in making several concepts of international relations theory more precise.

The teletel/minitel system in France

Abstract The French videotex service, Teletel/Minitel, has been very successful from the start. The French system is provided through a public packet-switched network called TRANSPAC accessible via the public telephone lines. The French government agency in charge of telecommunications, the Direction Generale de Telecommunications (DGT), controls TRANSPAC and the main computers used to provide the Electronic Directory Service (an on-line phone book which also lists occupations) through the Teletel/Minitel system and has the right to approve or disapprove private information services made available through a subsystem of TRANSPAC called Kiosque . The DGT decided to make the Minitel terminals widely available to homes and businesses by subsidizing the cost of the terminals.