The Politics of Religion

The Politics of Religion in Restoration England. Edited by Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie
From Persecution to Toleration. The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England. Edited by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke.
The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. By John Spurr     

Pinochet: The Politics

Against the background of the Pinochet affair, the author considers that a new era of international politics is in the process of being created. The House of Lords' ruling which has allowed extradition procedures against the former Chilean dictator, is understood as a formidable and groundbreaking decision in international law based on the defence of human rights against crimes committed by authoritarian and unlawful rulers. The decision taken under the European Convention on extradition and the setting up of a Permanent International Criminal Court in the summer of 1998 are, according to the author, signs that international law and international politics are moving in the direction of a universal acceptance that violators of human rights must bepunished.
However, the author is also cautious about the tension between the new path opened to international politics and the old power politics based on the absolute and indivisible sovereignty of the state. Double standards will certainly prevail and powerful states, in particular the United States, are reluctant to accept that international law and international politics are in the process of change.     

The Politics of Judicial Selection

Some of Stuart Nagel's earliest work has a continuing significance to research on the selection of state court judges. His research provides answers to why partisan election of judges, in spite of the flaws of this selection system, remains a major system for selecting state court judges. And Nagel's early research offers important insight about contemporary issues in the selection of judges such as the differences between elected and appointed judges and the role of race and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.     

The Domestic Politics of Globalisation

This article provides a domestic-focused account of the impact of globalisation on Australia. The overriding aim of government in recent years has been to educate the population about the imperatives of globalisation and the need for economic liberal policy change. Labor succeeded in breaking down Australia's protectionist policy structure but both Labor and Coalition governments have found it difficult to manage globalising policy change. The Howard government has continued Labor's efforts to sell globalisation but has often diluted its message through its policy choices and rhetoric. It has been less concerned with maintaining the consistency of its message. This reflects the continuing need for governments to manage what can be called the domestic politics of globalisation. Contrary to the arguments of global determinists, domestic politics continues to shape policy and the impact and trajectory of globalisation.     

The Politics of Moral Patience

Abstract

Pluralistic societies perpetually seek for ways to get along, given the reality of that pluralism. That search generates pluralistic responses which include forbearance, concord, tolerance, radical democracy, among many others. This paper begins to explore the putatively rich notion of moral patience as a way of being in the world as Christians; moral patience as a way of living with the ‘‘other’’ without reducing the importance of the Christian faith and practice; moral patience as a way of setting the stage for living with long-term difference but without terminal division; moral patience not just as a way of taking a long time to make decisions, but as the finding of a way forward and getting on with life without first coming to some form of unified resolution. Specifically, my purpose is to argue that moral patience creates time and space for the Christian community to develop an ethic of discipleship; i.e. a politics that finds its source in the patience of God, in the imitation of Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Spirit. Such moral patience acts as a sort of political and ethical capacity, and encourages us to believe that because God has time, we also have time — to listen, to be vulnerable, to engage in important conflicts without becoming violent, to refuse to be driven by the speed that society seeks to impose on us, and to resist the notion that the world and other people are directly in our control — indeed to resist the notion that we are radically autonomous individual entities. The paper concludes with a brief glance at how the Christian practice of moral patience might shape work in a number of fields of moral inquiry.     

The Politics of Service Delivery Reform

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policy‐makers as their agents, and policy‐makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated by an additional set of external actors — international financial institutions and donors. In practice, international agencies and core government officials usually act as the ‘principals’ in the determination of reforms. The analysis identifies the interests involved in reform, indicating how the balance between them is affected by institutional and sectoral factors. Organizational reforms, particularly in the social sectors, present greater difficulties than first generation economic policy reforms.     

The Politics and Administration of Privatization

Privatization grows out of the theoretic constructs of public choice theory. Through the nurturing efforts of those such as E. S. Savas, privatization has been transplanted from the academic greenhouse to the fields of practical government Against the field of fads–empowerment, total quality management, reengineering, strategic planning, and benchmarking–privatization stands out.
Privatization has endured and spread. To many, privatization restores the dynamic balance of government and individual freedom. To others, privatization, like kudzu (initially a solution to soil erosion in the South), threatens to crowd out all other forms of "public" service delivery.     

The Development of Comparative Judicial Politics

Abstract

Much of the scholarly debate over the Heidegger controversy has endeavored to either connect or free his philosophy from fascism. Against both these tendencies, I argue that the central concepts of Heidegger's philosophy are politically underdetermined. Throughout both his late and early periods, Heidegger's primary ambition remained the illumination of the question of being, a project that I argue made his ontological framework inherently relativistic.     

The Politics of the Good Samaritan

Abstract

Liberals usually misconstrue the recent political movements, worldwide, that have been motivated by fundamentalist religious ideologies. We often dismiss the representatives of these movements both morally and intellectually as fanatic, benighted anachronisms that cling to medieval absolutes. We would be better served, however, if we regard these movements and their representatives in the light of Reinhold Niebuhr's psychology of sin. The purpose of such a construal would not be the cheap, ironical pleasure of accusing fundamentalists of sin, but to provide a more nuanced grasp of their beliefs and behavior, and to open a more promising avenue in our attempts to defuse the furor and mitigate the damage caused by their movements on the national and international stage.