How do intellectual leaders of professional schools of international affairs, whose institutions primarily educate and train master's students for careers in government, the non-governmental sector, and the private sector, differ from academic administrators in disciplinary departments, whose primary raison d’être is producing the next generation of scholars whose primary task is to conduct basic research, in terms of how they see the academic enterprise and their expectations of faculty research and writing? The results of our recent survey of deans of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA), the leading professional body for international relations-oriented policy schools, and chairs of Top-50 political science departments, reveal some predictable differences but also some surprising overlap. Specifically, we find a clear convergence between disciplinary departments and APSIA schools on the core requirements for promotion and tenure: Peer-reviewed publications in high-impact scholarly journals and leading university presses. But rather than relax demands for other activities by their faculty as they hold them to the expectations of their disciplines, APSIA deans still expect significant policy and broader public engagement from them. In other words, policy schools’ faculties face a greater array of professional demands than their disciplinary colleagues. APSIA schools simultaneously embrace the disciplinary criteria for excellence and still try to maintain a close policy focus as they seek to bridge the gap between these two worlds. How feasible this effort will turn out to be hinges on whether policy school faculty can indeed do it all.
Climate change is the greatest governance challenge humanity has ever faced. Understanding why some governments successfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and others fail is thus imperative. While regime type is often hypothesized to be a source of variation in greenhouse gas emissions, empirical findings about the effects of democracy and autocracy on climate action are contradictory. This research note reconciles these inconsistencies and adopts a quasi-experimental approach to investigate the relationship between democratization and greenhouse gas emissions. A fixed effects model with a synthetic control estimator is used to construct appropriate counterfactuals and evaluate the effect of regime type on emissions with data from the World Bank and Varieties of Democracy Project. The analysis shows that movement toward democracy does not have a significant effect on emissions, suggesting that research on the politics of emissions reduction should focus on factors other than regime type.
The emergence of new nuclear aspirants has posed a great threat to the post-Cold War global non-proliferation regime. These states have adopted a nuclear hedging strategy that has been deemed both strategically risky and politically difficult to maintain. Yet, hedging has not automatically resulted in nuclearisation. We analyse the conditions under which a nuclear hedger shifts its nuclear policy towards one of restraint. Drawing insights from prospect theory, we argue that a nuclear policy shift occurs when a nuclear hedger gains an asymmetric leverage vis-à-vis its adversary. Specifically, a hedging strategy that is based on loss aversion will only be abandoned when a shift in the nuclear aspirant's reference point occurs during negotiations. To test our theoretical arguments, we conduct an in-depth case study of North Korea's nuclear policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The empirical study of the changes in North Korea's negotiating stance during the Agreed Framework negotiations and the Six-Party Talks supports our asymmetric leverage thesis. We conclude with broad policy implications for the non-proliferation regime.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.