Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

The political geography of macro-level turnout in American political development

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The result is a somewhat impoverished conception of turnout that often removes the political from political participation. In this article, I argue for a new, macro-level perspective that highlights the political dimension of turnout by placing turnout in the local political settings in which it has taken place. I contrast two competing explanations of macro turnout variation across local electorates, a political account and Elazar's cultural thesis, and discuss their implications for the political geography of macro turnout in American electoral history. I then examine this political geography by employing a local indicator of spatial association (a LISA statistic) to identify the spatial structuring of macro turnout in the United States from 1828 through 2000. I demonstrate that a political perspective provides greater leverage than Elazar's cultural perspective in explaining the political geography of macro turnout in the United States.     

解放战争时期胡适的政治思想与政治主张

胡适认为世界文化的主流和方向是争民主、争自由,自由主义是可以促进社会文明进步的理论,国民党已经开始向民主政治靠拢;他大力宣传自由主义,在国共斗争中支持国民党,反对共产党的政治理论和政权制度.     

A fragile political sphere

The Italian political sphere is characterized by an endemic fragility whose origins can be traced back to the post-unification practice of trasformismo and the ensuing system originally summarized by Paolo Farneti as ‘monopolist coalition’. Here, through shifts in alliances and personal agreements, a powerful centre coalition permanently holds power and blocks the opposition from becoming a possible alternative government. The ruling class fails to function as a party and uses parliament and the government as organizational tools of its hegemony. As a consequence, the functioning of the democratic system is distorted and the role of the public sphere inhibited. From the Risorgimento, through fascism, to the First and Second Republics and Berlusconism, this article assesses the fragility of Italy's political sphere as a recurrent constant in the history of the nation and the result of ‘tare storiche’ that remain unhealed.     

Trends in political science

Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed.: Contemporary Political Science: Toward Empirical Theory, McGraw‐Hill, New York, 1967, pp. 276, $7.90.     

Myths in political anthropology

Lewellen, Ted C. Political Anthropology, An Introduction. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Publishers Inc., 1983. 192 pp. Bibliography, Index, Illustrations. $22.95 cloth, $10.95 paper.     

Essays in political philosophy

The Desert and the City and Rational Enthusiasm are experiments in comparative historiography, based on no more evidence than is necessary in order to carry out the comparison, since to pursue either text into its historical context would be to pursue its intended meaning and no longer to compare it with the other. The essays aim to imagine an eighteenth-century judgement on a fourteenth-century text, intended not to support such a judgement, but to imagine what Gibbon would have said of Ibn Khaldun and to understand each the better by doing so; in particular, to show how the former would have responded to the latter as he has become known to us since the twentieth century.