The Parable of Matthew: Identity Politics, Politics of Desire, and the Politics of Performance

Matthew Shepard's murder in October 1998 provides an opportunity to examine and reconsider identity politics as they play out around Matthew's body. After a sustained critique of identity politics, the author proposes, in their stead, a politics of performance, which offers a constructive alternative to current political agendas by allowing the simultaneous preservation and erasure of difference.     

Assessing Performance Budgeting at OMB: The Influence of Politics, Performance, and Program Size

This article investigates the impact of performance, as measuredby the OMB performance budgeting initiative called PerformanceAssessment Rating Tool (PART), on recommendations in the President'sbudget. In a multivariate analysis using data from the FY 2005budget, with appropriate controls for the political contentof programs, we find that the PART scores have a statisticallysignificant impact on budget decisions within OMB. We find thatPART scores have a larger impact on small and medium sized programsthan on large programs. We also find that the "results" componentof PART scores has a smaller impact on budget decisions thanthe "program purpose" component, a finding which tends to contradictthe goal of performance budgeting to redirect resources to programsthat produce results. The relative unimportance of the "results"component may be due to the lack of good outcome measures formost programs in PART.     

The Politics of Temporality: An Analysis of Leftist Youth Politics and Generational Contention

Based on focus groups and in-depth interviews with young leftist political party activists in Uruguay, this article analyzes the dilemmas faced by young people as they use images from the past to interpret and orient their situation in the present and their aspirations for the future. They are the heirs to a highly romantic image of what it means to be a political activist on the Left; in this sense, the shadow of the radical Sixties and the omnipresent image of armed struggle and military dictatorship define them. But the reality of politics in contemporary democratic Uruguay is that of pressing for incremental and routine social reform inside a ‘Broad Front’ where ideological definitions for the future have become hazy. This paper explores the various ways that young Uruguayan Leftists work to reconcile these different senses of time and how these mediate their relationships with ‘significant generational others’. In so doing, I place the concept of time, of the perceived and socially constructed sense of acting in the current of a particular historical time, at the center of analysis.     

Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence

The public demonstrations by Thailand's Red Shirts in early 2010 have been explained as a labour-based movement resisting Bangkok's entrenched elite, or as a mob mobilized by the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in order to destabilize the current government. This profile looks into the protests' origins and nature. It argues that there are elements of truth to both explanations, but also that the protestors adopted powerful forms of symbolism of poverty and victimhood to draw attention to their needs, and to delegitimize the force used against them. This symbolism allowed both Thaksin and the protestors to gain political ground.     

The Politics of Disability: A New Approach

This paper will argue that the politics of disability has, so far, been narrowly conceived as part of the processes of party and pressure group activity. These approaches will be examined critically and it will be suggested that they are unlikely to produce substantial political gains in terms of ensuring the full participation of disabled people in society or contribute significantly to improving the quality of their lives. Finally, it will be argued that the politics of disability can only be properly understood as part of the newly emergent social movements of all kinds and it is only within this context that their real significance can be grasped.     

The Cross-Cultural Study of Women and Politics:

This essay seeks to examine the approaches andmethods most propitious to the cross-cultural study of women and politics, because it is in the cross-cultural context where the methodological problems of studying women and politics are posted in their complexity. Using Arend Lijphart's concept of the "comparative method," the essay applies this concept to the cross-cultural study of women and politics as a means of avoiding a number of conceptual problems inherent in the subject matter. The essay focuses on political participation, broadly defined, and uses this focus as a means of illustrating through substantive examples the problems of studying women and politics. A critique of the predominantly American literature is offered, as well as an examination of the successful uses of the comparative method as examples for future research. The particular data problems for women's studies scholars are discussed. Operationalization of the variable sex or gender is placed in the context of cross-cultural study. A number of research approaches are discussed: the case study variant of the comparative method, longitudinal analysis, elite studies, cohort analysis, cross-sectional analysis, and the ecological approach. The last two approaches are critized as being particularly unsuited to studying women and politics.     

Politics: Butler's Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection

This essay examines the work of Judith Butler in relation to corporeality through an analysis of Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex and Butler's notion of politicized abjection. Abjection is considered in relation to bodily materiality and proposed as the most promising path for a revamped corporeal politics. Through a reading of two novels, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and Barbara Gowdy's Mister Sandman, the essay examines how the abject body can function as politically subversive. Throughout, the essay analyses Butler's placing of the material body in a political domain, and argues that she ultimately endorses materiality as potentially disruptive to the symbolic domain of viable bodies. This recasting of matter within her theory is shown as redefining the body as an active agent rather than a passive receptacle for regulatory norms. The essay examines this under-theorized aspect of her work, and illustrates that politicized abjection is as crucial to her philosophy as the notion of gender as performative.     

The Politics of Aging

Committed "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans," the federal government through its veterans' programs has long been a pacesetter in meeting some of the income-security and health-care needs of older Americans. But the Department of Veterans Affairs is short of funds. Key policymakers are genuinely divided over how much more they want to invest in the care of aging veterans. This paper assesses four options and concludes that it makes sense to strengthen DVA's internal capacity to meet its geriatric imperative.     

The Politics of Randomness

Recent analysis of public policy is based on elaborate political-economic models. A major advantage of these useful models is that they have micro-foundations. Their main shortcomings are that they are usually based on drastic simplifications regarding the institutional setting and, more importantly, that the results they yield are not robust to the assumptions regarding the institutional setting, the policy space or the agents’ preferences. An alternative reduced-form modeling is the public-policy lobbying contest. This model can be applied to public-policy determination in representative democracies. However, its main drawback is that the notion of contest success function (CSF), a crucial component of the contest model, does not have micro-foundations and, therefore, the random behavior of the government seems ad-hoc. In the present paper we propose a partial micro-foundation for the public-policy contest. The possible rationalization of random government behavior is illustrated in the case of the most commonly studied CSFs: the function associated with the all-pay auction and Tullock’s lottery logit functions. We also clarify how stake asymmetry, lobbying-skill asymmetry and return to lobbying effort determine the relative desirability, from the government’s point of view, of these CSFs.     

The Secret Downing Street Memo,the One Percent Doctrine,and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text

Presented to the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Montreal, Canada, on August 7, 2006, this performance text is a critique of the Bush administration and its reliance on science, or evidence‐based models of inquiry (SBR). SBR raises issues concerning the politics of truth and evidence. These issues intersect with the ways in which a given political regime fixes facts to fit ideology. Three versions of SBR are discussed. A model of science as disruptive cultural practice is outlined. I locate the interactionist project in the discourses surrounding the global war on terror and the war in Iraq. I conclude by calling for a merger of critical pedagogy with a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism.