Marijke Breuning

Words and Deeds: Foreign Assistance Rhetoric and Policy Behavior in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom

Alternative hypotheses involving self-interested versus benevolent motives have played an important role in the study of foreign assistance policy behavior. Most often, such studies infer motives from data regarding the foreign assistance expenditures of a donor state. This study moves beyond such inferences. First, donor self-interest can take different forms that are likely to be expressed in different policies. Second, inferences about motivation derived from aid expenditure data infer motives from the observation of actions only. This study seeks to address both points. First, it proposes a typology of aid motivation. Second, it proposes separate indicators of motivation and behavior. The proposed national role conception framework hypothesizes that certain motivations, as expressed in rhetoric, and certain behaviors, as expressed in the foreign assistance expenditures, co-vary. The study focuses on the foreign assistance debate in and policy behavior of the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. It finds that there is a congruence between the rhetoric and policy behavior of the foreign assistance decision makers of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, but that the Belgian data lack such congruence.

Gender and Journal Authorship in Eight Prestigious Political Science Journals

How well are women authors represented in the most-recognized journals in political science? To what degree does the presence of women authors mirror womens presence in the discipline? Although a few studies have sought to provide data on the presence of women authors in political science journals (Young 1995 ; Kelly et al. 1994 ), more recent work on the visibility of women in the discipline has focused on gender and authorship of edited volumes (Mathews and Andersen 2001 ), on the participation of women in the APSA annual meetings (e.g., Gruberg 2006 ; 2004 ), and on the status of women in the discipline (Sarkees and McGlen 1992 ; 1999 ; Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession 2001 ). All are useful endeavors. This paper analyzes the presence of women authors in six volume years (1999–2004) of eight prestigious political science journals— American Political Science Review ( APSR ), American Journal of Political Science ( AJPS ), Journal of Politics ( JOP ), World Politics ( WP ), International Organization ( IO ), Comparative Politics ( CP ), Comparative Political Studies ( CPS ), and International Studies Quarterly ( ISQ ).

The Last Laugh: Skill Building through a Liberal Arts Political Science Curriculum

Quite often, people make jokes at the expense of political science majors. These jokes suggest that political science majors—and especially those graduating from liberal arts colleges and universities—have not acquired the necessary practical skills to make a living, let alone to acquire a lucrative career.

A Century of Continuity and (Little) Change in the Undergraduate Political Science Curriculum

Although in recent years there has emerged a renewed interest in teaching and learning issues in the APSA, relatively little attention has been paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. In this article we conduct a broad survey of articles that appeared in the APSR from 1906 to 1990 and find that (1) in the past the association paid much attention to the undergraduate political science curriculum; (2) over time attention shifted from a conception of the major as promoting substantive knowledge to a conception that emphasized skills; and (3) current concerns regarding skills, sequencing, and capstone experiences were all discussed several decades before the appearance of the “Wahlke Report” in 1991. We offer an explanation for the ebb and flow of the attention curricular issues received historically in the APSA, and suggest what the future may hold for current efforts to reexamine the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum.

The Role of Analogies and Abstract Reasoning in Decision-Making: Evidence from the Debate over Truman's Proposal for Development Assistance

Analogical, or case-based reasoning has received quite a bit of attention in the literature on foreign policy decision-making. There has been little attention paid to whether analogical reasoning does indeed predominate or to what degree abstract reasoning plays a role in the decision-making process. If decision-makers do not primarily reason by analogy (an empirical question), then the focus on such reasoning runs the risk of ignoring important aspects of problem formulation and the scope of possible solutions considered. Hence, this article investigates the degree to which decision-makers employ analogical and abstract reasoning. The empirical data are from the Senate hearing regarding the first American program for development aid. This case permits an empirical assessment of the consensus in the foreign aid literature that the Marshall Plan was the central analogy for this aid. In addition, it has been argued that in public discourse, decision-makers should be expected to use analogies as justifications for their preferences. The study finds a preference for explanation-based reasoning and discusses some of the implications of these findings.

Women's representation and development assistance: A cross-national study

Does women’s representation affect the state’s emphasis on development assistance? Earlier studies have found gender differences in foreign policy preferences. This study builds on that literature and advances two hypotheses regarding the impact of women’s presence in national legislatures on the state’s development assistance policy: (1) The women’s values thesis builds on a literature that argues that women emphasize peace and social justice; (2) The social equity thesis suggests that a societal value favoring equity, as expressed in social democracies, may in fact explain both women’s representation and devel-

Reviewer Fatigue? Why Scholars Decline to Review their Peers’ Work

As new academic journals have emerged in political science and existing journals experience increasing submission rates, editors are concerned that scholars experience “reviewer fatigue.” Editors often assume that an overload of requests to review makes scholars less willing to perform the anonymous yet time-consuming tasks associated with reviewing manuscripts. To date, there has not been a systematic investigation of the reasons why scholars decline to review. We empirically investigated the rate at which scholars accept or decline to review, as well as the reasons they gave for declining. We found that reviewer fatigue is only one of several reasons why scholars decline to review. The evidence suggests that scholars are willing to review but that they also lead busy professional and personal lives.

Women's Representation and Development Assistance

Abstract Does womens representation affect the states emphasis on development assistance? Earlier studies have found gender differences in foreign policy preferences. This study builds on that literature and advances two hypotheses regarding the impact of womens presence in national legislatures on the states development assistance policy: (1) The womens values thesis builds on a literature that argues that women emphasize peace and social justice; (2) The social equity thesis suggests that a societal value favoring equity, as expressed in social democracies, may in fact explain both womens representation and development assistance. The empirical evidence includes data for three electoral cycles in seventeen donor states and demonstrates that womens representation and development assistance are indeed related. Although the evidence suggests a direct impact, some caveats are discussed.

The Politics of Intercountry Adoption: Explaining Variation in the Legal Requirements of Sub-Saharan African Countries

What determines whether a country has more or less restrictive policies regarding intercountry adoption? Despite the growing importance of intercountry adoption as a political issue, and as an explicitly human face of globalization, there is virtually no systematic empirical work on intercountry adoption. We introduce a measure of the restrictiveness of the adoption laws in Sub-Saharan African countries and test possible explanations for the variations in legal restrictions on intercountry adoption among these countries.

What’s in a name? Ethnic party identity and democratic development in post-communist politics

There has been surprisingly little literature differentiating between different kinds of ethnic parties. Most works tend to treat all ethnic parties as if they are basically the same. Although, to be sure, there have been some notable works attempting to differentiate types of ethnic parties, they tend to emphasize the territorial or political demands made by ethnic parties to distinguish the different types rather than the parties’ organizational identity. In this article, rather than examine what they demand, we distinguish them by their organizational identities, or how they present themselves to an electorate — in particular via the names they adopt. We argue that parties portraying themselves as representative of a particular group and including that group in the party’s name are different from parties that portray themselves in non-ethnic ways (by not including the group in its name). In particular, the latter not only attract different kinds of supporters, but are more likely to bring their supporters into greater acceptance of democracy, and hence more likely to promote democratic consolidation than parties that portray themselves more exclusively.