Proceedings
of the
 Georgia Political Science Association 
Annual Meeting

2005 Edition

Abstracts of Papers

This study on democratization in Africa examines the progress and setbacks experienced by African governments from the early 1990s to 2005. As an attempt to reverse the previously coercive and single-party styled governments to modern, open, and fair political systems, the reversal toward democratization symbolizes how African governments encouraged and allowed for the coexistence of multiple party and contested elections. Ordinarily, the legalization of multiparty politics, however essential, satisfies only “phase one” of a democratization process. Thus, any assessment of the success of transition to democracy, as in the case for Africa , must include how incumbent leaders relinquish power when their tenure of office ends, and more importantly, how ruling governments respect basic human and civil rights. This study fills that void. It evaluates Africa ’s political reform on the basis of the environment in which governments legalized multiparty politics, the pattern of leadership succession, and the state of human rights in the respective countries. It concludes that even though many African governments made modest progress on these measures, imposition of  restrictions and intolerance of the pre-1990 era existed in the conduct of elections, the leadership succession process, and in vital civil and human rights granted to citizens.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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II. Is this Maddox Country?: Georgia Democrats in Transition, 1966-1971


Tim Boyd


Vanderbilt University

Southern Democrats in the post-1945 era faced two major dilemmas: how to respond to the emergence of an increasingly competitive Republican opposition in a region that had long been a one-party system and what level of support to give the national Democratic Party’s civil rights policies. By the mid-1960s it was clear that to work with the national party, Southern Democrats would have to reach an accommodation with the Civil Rights Movement. Given that Democratic dominance in the South had been won by vowing to uphold white supremacy, this was no easy transition to make. This study considers the way Georgia ’s Democrats negotiated these twin dilemmas following the 1966 election of hard-line  racial conservative Lester Maddox as Governor. On the one hand, Maddox’s ability to win the  Democratic nomination over former Governor Ellis Arnall was a serious setback to hopes of moderates for developing a progressive Democratic Party in the state that would  stand in opposition to a conservative Republican Party. However, a concerted  grassroots   effort by Loyalists born out of opposition to Maddox’s election campaign  began a chain of events that unseated Maddox's chosen delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and paved the way for the return of moderates to control of the state party by 1970 - a control that has been maintained ever since. The manner in which Maddox’s leadership was successfully challenged is a powerful illustration of the manner in which Southern Democrats in general adapted to and shaped the “New South” politics of the post-civil rights years. 

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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III. In His Own Words: Ellis Arnall on Political Reform

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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The purpose of this project is to examine the international pulls and domestic pushes that contribute to U.S.-led humanitarian interventions. This project employs a comparative case study approach to three instances of U.S. humanitarian interventions in the post-Cold War context: U.S.-Iraq/Operation Provide Comfort (Kurds after Gulf War), U.S.-Kosovo/Operation Allied Force in 1999, and Tsunami Disaster relief 2004-2005. In each case, the United States intervened under the rubric of the pursuit of humanitarianism. At the base level, each situation experienced internal conflict producing civilian casualties, refugees, starvation, disease, internal displacement, and extensive human rights violations. While some measure of extensive research exists on the first two cases, the use of the comparative case study method in these situations is relatively thin. Therefore, of each case the paper will ask what provided the impetus and momentum for U.S. involvement or noninvolvement. The consequences and implications of this study may be that in the post-Cold War international system, America’s uses of humanitarian interventions have been designed to promote its national interests and hegemonic goals. In addition, it may find a mixture of motives for humanitarian involvement as it offers that the certainties of altruistic humanitarian intervention are becoming blurred with self-interested power pursuits.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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V. Reservoirs of Opportunity: A Study of Public Participation in

This study examines the National Recreation Lakes Study Commission as an instance of public participation in federal decision-making. Methods of the publics’ participation included written comments, public hearings, and workshops. Using commission records, I determined the affiliation of participants as well as their types of participation. This case study found strong support for elite participation theory and little evidence to support the theory that public participation legitimates agency decision-making by making it more democratic.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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VI. American Democracy: Myth or Reality?

This study asks a few subversive questions, beginning with the one posed in its title and recommends more collaboration between political scientists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in democratic research. Is or should the United States be a model of democracy for the world? Can political science methodology provide  answers to such questions? After a brief discussion of democratic theory, focusing on participation, the paper examines cross-national studies that empirically test political participation. The methodology underlying these studies is critiqued, pointing to problems such as ambiguous questions, response accuracy, and unconscious ethnocentrism. The role that participant observation might play in supporting and validating survey research is discussed. Research on local level politics in Bavaria and California, focusing on political structure and local elections, provides a case study to illustrate these points. The study concludes with suggestions for improving local participatory democracy.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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This essay proposes that we rethink the concept of “rational” conflict resolution and uses local ways of managing conflict in the Pacific region as a context for exploring the benefits of a critical approach to current practice. It proposes that Pacific peoples’ modes of managing conflict are local, contingent, flexible, and ongoing. As a consequence, it suggests that a more constructive approach for twenty-first century conflict management policy and planning is to incorporate “uncanny” understandings of sociocultural difference into external conflict management strategies. External interventions need to recognize and incorporate the input of each country’s citizens as well as sophisticated anthropological knowledge about the peoples concerned. The “uncanny,” that is, turning what Westerners believe to be familiar into something less familiar and less settled, requires Western analysts to rethink their intellectual training in relation to power. We need to consider the historical contexts in which Western power has been wielded over others, to reflect upon how power relations between “outsiders” and local peoples are enacted, and how Westerners often impose their modes of thinking and models of behaviour on local peoples in inappropriate ways. Two case studies are provided to support the proposition: the first embraces the “uncanny” to better understand ongoing intrastate conflicts in Papua New Guinea; the second unveils how women have used their gendered social networks to reduce conflict in Bougainville Island. The Pacific ethnographic detail suggests that externally-generated conflict management models are rarely relevant to local peoples’ needs. Consequently, flexible and apposite conflict management strategies that are part of ongoing reform processes must incorporate local peoples’ ways of thinking and being in order to be effective.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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VIII. Invest or Spend?: Political Capital and Statements of

In executive-congressional relations, Statements of Administration Policy (SAP) are an overlooked institutional mechanism. These statements outline the President’s position on particular measures and may include supporting language or veto threats. This paper focuses on the relationship between political capital and veto threats. To determine the credibility of veto threats, Congress assesses the President’s available political capital. In this paper, job approval ratings from the first George W. Bush administration determine presidential political capital. Combined with SAPs from the 107th and 108th Congresses, these job approval ratings disprove the hypothesis that increased political capital increases veto threats. The data show that increased political capital may actually decrease executive opposition language to legislation, such as veto threats. The conclusion provides four possible explanations for this phenomenon: divided government, investing political capital, legislative and electoral cycles, and congressional anticipation.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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IX. Veiled Contests during Primary Elections: A Hypothetical

Under some circumstances, during “open” primaries challengers in the Republican and Democratic Parties can find themselves competing for the same voters. This is particularly possible if both parties’ frontrunners have largely secured their bases. If strong Republican and strong Democratic identifiers support these frontrunners, the challengers are forced to rely on independent and weakly partisan voters. Such voters often base their vote on candidate orientation and short run issues. They are capable of choosing to vote in either party’s primary depending on the relative appeal of the non-mainstream candidates. The “winner” of this veiled primary and his/her party will receive a higher proportion of these uncommitted voters. Sometimes this provides enough support to win or do well in the primary against the favorite. Recognizing that a candidate faces a de facto primary challenge from an opponent in the other party’s primary poses issues which have been under addressed by strategists or scholars.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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X. Militant Democracies or Just States with (Realist) Issues

In a recent article in the journal International Politics, Harald Müller attempts to explain why some democracies fight wars through the development of two ideal types of democracy, one which adopts the stance of militant liberalism and the other of pacifist liberalism. This paper offers a critique of Müller’s argument and his classification of militant and pacifist democracies. As an alternative explanation, I turn to the empirical uniformities on wars that have been identified through quantitative, data-based research as increasing the probability of the onset of war. These factors include power status, duration of independence, number of borders, level of economic development, and the presence of enduring rivalry. I demonstrate that these factors are more important in explaining the warlike nature of some democracies.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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This study examines the backgrounds, characteristics, and socialization of women standing for election in the lower house in India’s 2004 national election. It seeks to find generalizable patterns—on the basis of education, class, caste, etc—across the kinds of women who are drawn to political life in contemporary India and looks for any variation across political parties in the kinds of women who seek and are given party tickets to stand for election. The findings, which provide an elucidation of women politicians and those seeking office, could be juxtaposed against findings from other election periods in India to measure changes, and indeed could be used in a comparative context with data from other countries. Ultimately, questions of women’s political socialization, background, and other pertinent characteristics are important in making predictions about the roles that women will play in the political futures of their countries.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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XII. Conflicting Obligations: The Impact of NATO Membership on

Obligations of NATO membership for the ten new states admitted between 1999 and 2004 bear the seeds of conflict in three different respects. The ten nations differ in their contrasting inheritances from the pre-1989 communist past. Several were previously minorities in a larger federation, while others were not. As well, the new members bring with them into the alliance both internal ethnic conflicts and a problematic history with certain neighbors. In some cases, Cold War intervention by the Soviet Union intensified those conflicts. The Iraq War of 2003 created additional tension between the new and old NATO membership. This split had the potential to affect other regional organizations such as the European Union. However, it is possible to conclude tentatively that NATO planners have taken account of these differences in their structuring of early twentieth-first century missions. An examination of the new NATO Response Force as well as of NATO’s operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq discloses a series of cooperative frameworks. The deep involvement and even occasional leadership by new members in these missions constitute a harbinger for stability within the military alliance in the future.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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XIII. Russia’s Women: Political Lepers, Social Afterthoughts

After providing a brief historical overview of the role of women in the Soviet polity, the article examines women’s representation in Russia’s post-communist political system. Moreover, women’s representation in the Russian government and society is evaluated in a cross-national, comparative context. The authors discuss the major impediments to women’s greater representation in Russian political life while providing certain recommendations to help redress the representation gap.

Georgia Political Science Association • Conference Proceedings • 2005

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 Please contact Dr. Joe Trachtenberg , Editor-in-Chief, with questions and concerns at joetrachtenberg@clayton.edu or (678) 466-4810.  

Georgia Political Science Association: www.gpsanet.org