Department News

10-22-2009


Congratulations to Laura Sjoberg! Laura is editor of the new book, Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, which defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective.

From the publisher's website:

Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist Security Studies and Security Studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics.


09-10-2009


Staffan Lindberg is editor (and author of three chapters) of the new book Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition?

From the publisher's website:

Contested, multi-party elections are conventionally viewed either as an indicator of democracy's emergence or a measure of its quality. In practice, the role that elections play in the transition from authoritarian rule is much more significant. Focusing on one overall hypothesis and consciously referring back to Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter’s classic thesis from 1986, all authors of the volume interrogates the proposition that elections has become a mode of transition. Based on Robert Dahl’s original formulation of democratization as the outcome of increasing the costs of repression while decreasing the cost of toleration, this new volume asks if the repetition of elections can create such a process.

The book gathers a wide range of global, regional and comparative case studies using original data sets and present findings never published before, that in various ways evaluate this central question. It represents the first collective effort at expressing the causal properties of a theory of democratization by elections as a new mode of transition. Staffan I. Lindberg argues that in many nations the act of holding repeated elections—even when they are corrupt, single party, or barely contested—plays a causal role in fostering civic-mindedness among the polity, opening society, and ultimately advancing democracy.

The first section of the Democratization by Elections volume presents a debate on the democratizing power of elections finding support for the hypothesis through a series of global as well as regional large-N studies based on several new and unique data sets. The second section looks closely at specific electoral mechanisms and types of elections in Africa, postcommunist Europe and Euroasia, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, to uncover those that support the longterm institutionalization of democratic transition. The concluding section of the book develops a theory of democratization by elections in two chapters. Andreas Schedler presents a new model of the strategic dilemmas facing both rulers and opposition in less-than-democratic regimes. In the final chapter Lindberg provide a theory of elections as a mode of transition.Each chapter includes in-depth discussions of policy implications and a wealth of statistical information.

Featuring contributions by leading scholars of democracy, original research, and worldwide and country-specific data on elections and democracy, this collaborative exploration of elections represents the cutting edge of comparative democratization studies.


06-18-2009


Philip Williams has accepted the position of Director of the UF Center for Latin American Studies.

The Study of the United States Institute on U.S. Foreign Policy, directed by Professors Aida Hozic, Ido Oren, and Richard Nolan, was honored by the Gainesville City Commission through the proclamation establishing June 15, 2009 as The University of Florida Institute on United States Foreign Policy Day.  See the Proclamation here, and watch the Commission meeting video here.


05-09-2009


Patricia Woods has received a University of Florida Faculty Enhancement Opportunity Award for Summer and Fall 2009 in the amount of $37,509.  The award comes from the Office of the Provost and is supported by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  The award is a grant for preliminary research on a project entitled, "Measuring the Political: Small Forms of Resistance, the Women’s Movement, and Changing Public Discourse on Rape and Violence Against Women in Israel."  It will involve travel to Israel, additional methods training, as well as the visit of an external scholar to UF.


04-23-2009


Badredine Arfi won a Course Development Grant from the Center for European Studies to support the development of a new course titled “Islamic Civilization and the Making of European Politics.”

Ido Oren has been awarded a Fulbright lectureship in the People’s Republic of China for the Spring 2010 semester.

Ana Margheritis won a course development grant from the Latin American Studies Center to develop a course on transnational perspectives on international migration for the Spring 2010 semester.

The Department has won a renewal grant from the U.S. Department of State in the amount of $288,640 to host another "Study of the United States Institute on U.S. Foreign Policy." Eighteen international scholars will participate in the Institute from June 8 to July 17, 2009 (including four weeks of academic residency in Anderson Hall and two weeks of study tours of Miami, Chicago, and Washington, DC). The grant's Principal Investigators are Aida Hozic and Ido Oren, who will co-direct the program; Richard Nolan will serve as assistant director. The participants’ countries of origin are Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Cameroon, Libya, Israel (East Jerusalem), Turkey, China, Vietnam, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, India, Russia, Romania, Austria, and Holland.


03-26-2009


Laura Sjoberg (Ph.D., University of Southern California; JD, Boston College Law School) will be joining our faculty in August.

03-19-2009


Philip Williams is co-editor of a new book, A Place to Be, which is the first book to explore migration dynamics and community settlement among Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican immigrants in America's new South.

From the publisher's website:

Rutgers University Press is pleased to announce the publication of A Place to Be edited by Philip J. Williams, Timothy  J. Steigenga, and Manuel A Vásquez.

"A Place to Be is a must-read for everyone interested in religion and transnational communities. The book's innovative focus on lived religion and collective mobilization considerably advances theories of both international migration and religion.”

–Alex Stepick, Director, Immigration & Ethnicity Institute, Florida International University

A Place to Be is the first book to explore migration dynamics and community settlement among Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican immigrants in America's new South. The book adopts a fresh perspective to explore patterns of settlement in Florida, including the outlying areas of Miami and beyond. The stellar contributors from Latin America and the United States address the challenges faced by Latino immigrants, their cultural and religious practices, as well as the strategies used, as they move into areas experiencing recent large-scale immigration.

Philip J. Williams is a professor of political science at the University of Florida and coeditor of Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (Rutgers University Press).

Timothy J. Steigenga is an associate professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University and coeditor of Conversion of a Continent (Rutgers University Press).

Manuel A. Vásquez is an associate professor of religion at the University of Florida and coauthor of Globalizing the Sacred (Rutgers University Press).


02-05-2009


Kristin Goss, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies and Political Science at Duke University, will be visiting the department on Monday, March 2 from 3-4:30pm to give a talk entitled "Voice & Equality? Women's Rights and Interest Group Advocacy on Capitol Hill, 1878-2000."  The talk will be held in Anderson 216.

Summary:

Since the early 20th century, American women have enjoyed significant advances in gender equality: the Constitutional guarantee of female suffrage in 1920 and the myriad policy changes associated with the feminist movement of the 1960s-1980s. Underlying these advances is the assumption that more rights means more voice for women. Using an original dataset, I examine this assumption. The data chronicle the rise and fall of women's organizations' appearances before Congressional committees over the past century, as well as the narrowing of women's groups' issue interests in the modern, post-feminist era.


01-27-2009


The Graduate Program in Political Campaigning is hosting a workshop, "The Election Landscape '08-'10: Reflections and Projections," on Friday, January 30.

Michelle Smith (ABD, Cornell University) will be joining our faculty next August.

Grzegorz Ekiert of Harvard University will give a talk entitled "The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe Revisited."  This research looks at the development of civil society in four new democracies (Poland, Hungary, Taiwan, and South Korea) using an original dataset on a decade of protest activity in each.  The talk will take place on March 16 from 3-4:30 pm in Anderson 216.

Frank McNeil, a UF graduate and former Ambassador to Costa Rica, will be speaking in the conference room, AND 216, on February 13 from 11am-12pm.  McNeil was Ambassador to Costa Rica during the Reagan and Carter Administrations and was a diplomatic advisor to the Japanese Ambassador.  He has also written a book entitled War and Peace in Central America (1989, New York: Scribners).


01-16-2009


Congratulations to Larry Dodd! The ninth edition of Congress Reconsidered, co-edited with Bruce Oppenheimer and containing three co-authored essays by Larry, has just been published at CQ Press.

Editors: 
Lawrence C. Dodd, University of Florida
Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Vanderbilt University

Always a classic, Dodd and Oppenheimer’s Congress Reconsidered is the recognized source for in-depth, cutting-edge scholarship on Congress geared to undergraduates. Thoroughly updated—with ten brand new pieces and the others completely revised—this ninth edition includes cogent, timely analysis of the 2008 congressional elections, as well as coverage of: 

  • the 110th Democratic Congress,specifically its energy policy, its handling of the Iraq War, and its taxing and spending; 
  • the role of committees in Congress;
  • leadership by women and minorities in Congress;
  • the effects of campaign finance reform;
  • differences in legislative activity between the Republican and Democratic Congresses;
  • party coalition-building across the postwar era;
  • and perspective on campaigns, elections,and political careers from member of Congress Daniel Lipinsk


07-08-2008


Congratulations to Patricia J. Woods! Her new book, Judicial Power and National Politics Courts and Gender in the Religious-Secular Conflict in Israel, has just been published in the SUNY Series in Israel Studies.

Book Description (from the publisher's website):

Published July 3, 2008
SUNY Series in Israel Studies

Uses the case of Israel to examine the circumstances that lead national courts to engage heated political issues.

Reviews
"This well-written book makes an important contribution by pushing the analysis of the controversies surrounding judicial intervention/activism to take ideas seriously. It provides a very persuasive account of Israel's High Court of Justice's involvement in religious issues and the key role of the judicial community in precipitating that involvement. At the same time, Woods attends to the roles of institutional factors and social movements in facilitating the controversial rights actions/decisions of the HCJ. This book is a must read for scholars of law and politics." -- Austin Sarat, Amherst College

"The author's notion of an extended judicial community of judges, academic lawyers, and cause lawyers is a major move forward in the 'new institutionalism' in the study of law and courts." -- Martin Shapiro, Boalt Law School, University of California at Berkeley


01-15-2008


Congratulations to Dan Smith! His new book, co-authored with Todd Donovan and Chris Mooney, State and Local Politics: Institutions and Reform, has just been published.

Authors:
Todd Donovan, Western Washington University
Christopher Mooney, University of Illinois, Springfield
Daniel A. Smith, University of Florida

In State and Local Politics: Institutions and Reform , Todd Donovan, Chris Mooney, and Dan Smith intrigue students by going beyond the purely descriptive treatment usually found in state and local texts. This book offers an engaging comparative approach, showing students how politics and government differ between states and communities, as well as the causes and effects of those variations. Written by three young, high-profile specialists who have contributed significantly to the field in the last decade, State and Local Politics: Institutions and Reform incorporates into the course the most recent scholarship available, giving students access to perspectives that no other textbook on the market currently provides. In addition, the text goes beyond the purely descriptive, traditional approach by focusing on what social scientists know about the effects of rules and institutions on politics and policy. This comparative, institutional framework enables students to think more analytically about the impact of institutions on policy outcomes, asks them to evaluate the effectiveness of one institutional approach over another, and encourages them to consider more sophisticated solutions. State and Local Politics: Institutions and Reform is the only text of its kind to dedicate three full chapters to direct democracy, land use policy, and morality politics. Throughout the text are boxed features that elaborate on the themes of institutions, comparison, and reform. These feature sections provide thought-provoking, concrete examples of the issues at state and local levels so that students can understand how institutions and systems impact individuals in real-life situations. In addition, vivid tables, maps, graphs, and photographs provide the visual tools that students need to process detailed comparative data about the states.


11-09-2007


Congratulations to David Hedge! His new book, co-authored with Joseph Stewart and James Lester, Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach, has just been published.

Authors:
Joseph Stewart, Jr Clemson University Ph.D. University of Houston;
David M. Hedge, University of Florida Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee;
James P. Lester Late, University of Colorado

Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach, examines how the substance and process of public policy and our understanding of that have evolved in America. After providing the reader with an analytic, historic and contextual framework for viewing public policy in the U.S., the authors offer a comprehensive look at the various elements of the governing process including agenda setting and problem definition, policy formation, implementation, program evaluation, and policy change and termination. In doing that, the authors pay particular attention to the range of theories that have been offered to explain how, why, and with what effects governments act. The authors then look at three critical policy areas - environment, education, and welfare - to further illustrate how governing proceeds in the U.S. Throughout the text the authors draw extensively on actual policy examples including recent efforts to reform education and welfare and the war in Iraq.


08-02-2007


Congratulations to Ben Smith! His new book, Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia, has just been published by Cornell University Press.

Book Description (from the publisher's web site):

HARD TIMES IN THE LANDS OF PLENTY: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia
That natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the "resource curse" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically concentrated, thereby intensifying regional, ethnic, or other divisive tensions.

In Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty, Benjamin Smith deciphers the paradox of the resource curse and questions its inevitability through an innovative comparison of the experiences of Iran and Indonesia. These two populous, oil-rich countries saw profoundly different changes in their fortunes in the period 1960-1980. Focusing on the roles of state actors and organized opposition in using oil revenues, Smith finds that the effects of oil wealth on politics and on regime durability vary according to the circumstances under which oil exports became a major part of a country's economy. The presence of natural resources is, he argues, a political opportunity rather than simply a structural variable. Drawing on extensive primary research in Iran and Indonesia and quantitative research on nineteen other oil-rich developing countries, Smith challenges us to reconsider resource wealth in late-developing countries, not as a simple curse or blessing, but instead as a tremendously flexible source of both political resources and potential complications.

Reviews
"Benjamin Smith has raised the costs for anyone hoping to tell us something new and significant about the role of oil in political development. With Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty he has all but cornered the market." - Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania, author of America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier.

"Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty is thoughtful, provocative, and innovative. It is a richly textured exploration of political development in oil-exporting Iran and Indonesia. Employing a methodology that is both multilayered and eclectic, Ben Smith challenges the commonplace notion-and implicit suggestion of the 'rentier state' literature-that oil states are intrinsically unstable and prone to breakdown. He demonstrates that political outcomes are determined 'not by oil, but when oil' and highlights the challenges presented by different institutional landscapes at the inception of oil-based development. This book makes important contributions to several literatures: among them, the rentier state and resource curse, historical-institutionalism, transitions, the breakdown of authoritarian regimes, and comparative methodology." -Miriam R. Lowi, The College of New Jersey

"The fascinating Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty is characterized by bold ambition and real insight; Benjamin Smith admirably weaves together a variety of methods to produce a book that is truly comparative in scope. Smith highlights a key insight for those interested in the politics of oil, namely that timing matters." -Eva Bellin, Hunter College


08-02-2007


Congratulations to Daniel O'Neill! His new book, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy, has just been published by Penn State University Press.

Book Description (from the publisher's web site):

According to Daniel O'Neill, Burke is misconstrued if viewed as mainly providing a warning about the dangers of attempting to turn utopian visions into political reality, while Wollstonecraft is far more than just a proponent of extending the public sphere rights of man to include women. Rather, at the heart of their differences lies a dispute over democracy as a force tending toward savagery (Burke) or toward civilization (Wollstonecraft). Their debate over the meaning of the French Revolution is the place where these differences are elucidated, but the real key to understanding what this debate is about is its relation to the intellectual tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose language of politics provided the discursive framework within and against which Burke and Wollstonecraft developed their own unique ideas about what was involved in the civilizing process.

Reviews:
"Who would have thought there was much new and fascinating to say about Burke and Wollstonecraft? But O'Neill's argument, rooted in their response to the French Revolution and their relationship to Scottish Enlightenment ideas, is wonderfully fresh and illuminating, shedding new light on many a shadowy part of Burke's conservatism and Wollstonecraft's feminism." -Isaac Kramnick, Cornell University "This is an excellent contribution to the literatures on Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke and to the growing discussions of the significance of the Scottish Enlightenment." -Virginia Sapiro, University of Wisconsin, Madison.


07-09-2007


Michael Heaney and Lynn Leverty have received course development grants of $3,000 from the Graham Center for Public Service. Michael will use his award to create a new course in health policy and Lynn is developing a new undergraduate course on policy ethics. Beth Rosenson received a course enhancement grant of $1,500 to revise her course on ethics in American politics.

Three political science majors and their faculty mentors have received Graham Center Policy Scholars Awards of $2,500 to conduct original policy research during the 2007-2008 academic school year. Wilneeda Emannuel will work with Sharon Austin on the problems of Haitian immigrants in south Florida, Krysten Rosen will work with Michael Heaney on a study of the governance of the Medicare Advantage Program, and Erika Walters (also a biology major) will work with David Hedge on the problems of under utilization of the recently enacted CHOICES program in Alachua County.


05-07-2007


Larry Dodd was selected as UF's 2006-2007 Teacher/Scholar of the Year. The annual award is given in recognition of excellence in teaching and distinction in scholarship. It is UF's highest faculty honor and includes a $5,000 award.


04-04-2007


Beth Ann Rosenson received a a Congressional Research Award through the Dirksen Congressional Center. The $3,100 award will be used toward her book project on the Congressional ethics process. The project examines how the definition of unethical behavior in the U.S. House of Representatives has evolved and changed over the last two centuries and examines partisanship in the ethics process.


03-05-2007


Michael Heaney and Jason Kassel have been named Congressional Fellows by the American Political Science Association for the 2007-08 academic year. Michael and Jason will spend the year working on Capitol Hill for a member of Congress. In past years, the APSA Congressional Fellowship has been held by Larry Dodd (1974-75), as well as UF Ph.D.s, such as Marian Currinder (2003-04), Elizabeth Oldmixon (2001-02), and Fiona Wright (2001-2002).


01-31-2007


Philip Williams (Political Science) and Manuel Vasquez (Religion) received a $450,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to support a three year study entitled, "Latin American Immigrants in the New South: Religion and the Politics of Encounter." The study will explore the multiple roles that religion plays in shaping interethnic and interracial relations, immigrant incorporation, and collective mobilization in metro Atlanta, an area that has experienced a dramatic growth in Latino population in the last decade. The project builds on Williams's and Vasquez's previous research in South Florida, that focused on the migration experiences and religious lives of Guatemalans, Mexicans, and Brazilians. Extending the scope of their research to the greater Atlanta metropolitan area will allow them to assess comparatively the impact of Latino immigration in the New South.



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