So it's been a little while since I've posted here (very busy times these are). Anyway, I wanted to link to this post by Phil Arena over at his blog. Phil discusses how his views on various topics related to IR have changed over the past few years. I agree with a lot of what he has to say on these issues–I think a lot of what IR scholars focus on, to the extent that we're interested in the domestic forces generating foreign policy outcomes, tend to place too much stock in the qualities we typically assume to characterize democracies and autocracies. I also agree that economic forces play a huge role in shaping the incentives of political actors–particularly the elites that Arena mentions.
Can Wisconsin Republicans Credibly Commit to Compromise?
What do the Wisconsin Senate Democrats hope to accomplish by being absent from the Senate and out of the state? Publicly they claim they fled the state in mid-February in order to prevent the Senate Republicans from passing a bill that would reduce the collective bargaining rights of public employees. In order for the Republicans … Read more