Fear is a pervasive aspect of political life and is often explored as a transient emotional state manipulated by events or exploited by elites for political purposes. The psychological and psychiatric literatures, however, have also established fear as a genetically informed trait, and people differ in their underlying fear dispositions. Here we propose these differences hold important implicat...

Violence is an ever present and very visible feature of our political landscape. And war—its strategy, its preparation, and its conduct—remains a central preoccupation of political elites and of political scientists. In his new book Winning the War on War, Joshua S. Goldstein sifts the statistical and historiographical evidence to tell a story of how we seem to be winning the long-term fight ag...

Political scientists frequently lament the media’s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in n...

Safeguarding the energy security is an important energy policy goal of every country. Assuring sufficient and reliable resources of energy at affordable prices is the main objective of energy security. Due to such reasons as special geopolitical position, terrorist attacks and other unrest in the Middle East, securing Iran’s energy demand and increasing her natural gas exports have turned into ...

Robert M. Hartwell, in his path-breaking article on the transformation from the eighth to the sixteenth century, defined this transition as the demise and re-absorption of “a semihereditary professional bureaucratic elite” into “a multitude of local elite gentry families,” which it had hitherto coexisted with. Since Hartwell maintained that those local gentry elites had dominated the local scen...

Many theoretical approaches to Europeanization of EU applicant states portray the process as top-down: governing elites in applicant states conform to EU conditions, constituents provide a permissive consensus and all applicant states converge toward a single EU model. Such approaches direct less attention to how Europeanization is a dynamic, contradictory and contestable process. This case stu...

This article argues that by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information, the new media environment undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: If there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers. The difficulty of elites (political and media both) and academics in understanding the Lewinsky scandal stems from their failure to r...

The political trajectories of the post-Soviet states are varied, with democracy being the outcome in only a minority of these countries. The different outcomes are striking, given the similarity of starting points. The key to understanding a democratic outcome lies in the different relationships between old regime elites and civil society-based opposition forces, and the ethnic balance in the c...

Introduction While national character is a subject that has intrigued social scientists for many years, it is rarely considered in theories of international behavior. The major reasons seem to be that: (a) the study of national character is fraught with conceptual confusions and meth-odological difficulties; (b) many social scientists question whether modern, complex, culturally-mixed nations c...