Political Geography Quarterly最新文献

This article examines the regional basis of US tariff policy as reflected in the 1987 vote in the House of Representatives on the Gephardt Amendment to the 1988 Omnibus Trade Act. The Amendment was a major protectionist proposal that would have reversed the secular trend toward trade liberalization initiated in 1934. There are reasons for expecting that the decline of America's hegemony in the international economy, combined with endogenously-generated changes in the structure of the domestic economy, would alter historic regional cleavages respecting trade policy. The probit estimates indicate that new regional differences have emerged to influence voting behavior in the House on trade policy. The historic regional foundations of trade policy familiar since the early 19th century have been transformed: the North remains the most protectionist region, but the traditionally liberal South now approaches the North in protectionist sentiment, while the once protectionist West, and especially the Northwest, have become predominantly liberal. These effects persist when partisanship and congressional district characteristics are taken into account, and have important implications for the future of American politics and the international trading system.

The contagious diffusion of voting support has been suggested in previous research as one factor affecting electoral decisions. An analysis of the support received by the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales in the last six general elections found further evidence that geographical location was important. Particularly for Scotland, later support was geographically proximate to previous areas of nationalist strength. This positive indication of contagious diffusion and contagious retrenchment was present when some controls for socio-economic characteristics of the individual constituencies and the intervention of other parties were included in a multivariate analysis.

During the past two decades, issues of local economic growth have come to dominate urban politics and planning in American cities, and local governments have adopted increasingly entrepreneurial economic-development strategies. Explanations of this by previous writers have claimed that entrepreneurial behavior by the local state is either economically determined, or stems from the initiatives of relatively autonomous political agents. In this paper it is contended that, in order to reassess these conflicting explanations, it is necessary to analyze how economic and political processes operating at different spatial scales interact to determine local policy formation and outcomes, and a conceptualization of local state action using this approach is developed. This is then applied to explain the evolution of downtown development policies in the central cities of American metropolitan areas. It is also argued that local context must be incorporated into the analysis in order to account for inter-urban variations in policy outcomes, and an abbreviated comparison of two central cities, San Francisco and Minneapolis, illustrates the importance of this.

This paper reviews legal sources and court interpretations responsible for progression towards European union in 1992 as a new form of federalism which assumes the existence of divisible sovereignty. Since 1951, treaty law and a doctrine of implied powers have restricted the sovereign rights of European Community member-states and transferred to central agencies the exclusive competence to engage in an increasingly wider range of international relations no longer restricted to economic contracts and social policies. Problems of ‘mixed agreements’ and conflicts with GATT over a common commercial policy (CCP) demonstrate tensions still to be resolved as further traditional powers are surrendered during the steps following endorsement of the Single European Act (1987).

This paper explores the relationship between geopolitics and security in post Second World War American political discourse. Geopolitics is one of four security discourses (the others being sovietology, strategy and the realist approach in international relations) which American ‘security intellectuals’ have drawn on in constructing the ‘Soviet threat’, America's predominant ‘Other’ in the last four decades. The ‘Soviet threat’ is the rationale used in the US foreign policy of containment militarism designed ultimately to ensure US national security. Using a formulation of geopolitics in terms of discourse this paper widens the conventional understanding of geopolitics to show how geopolitical conceptions operate ideologically. Focusing on the practices of the discourses of security shows that a broader understanding of geopolitics in terms of discourse reveals a persistence of geopolitical thinking in US discussions of security. A final section briefly suggests how the concept of security can be reformulated and outlines the role of a critical geopolitics in revealing how geopolitical discourse operates.