In This Issue
| Author | Kay Lawson |
| Published date | 01 October 2006 |
| Date | 01 October 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0192512106067354 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
In This Issue
If there is a theme running through the very different studies presented in this
issue it is productive innovation. Each of the first two articles adopts a new way to
study a familiar problem and delivers an important new answer; the third
demonstrates how a new teaching method can produce new receptivity in students
of international relations; the fourth uses a surprising method to provide missing
evidence for a study we continue to debate; and the fifth treats a topic that has the
potential of becoming ever more salient in international affairs.
By focusing on particular types of spending and taxing and particular social
policies, Harold L. Wilensky (“Trade-Offs in Public Finance: Comparing the Well-
Being of Big Spenders and Lean Spenders”) goes beyond aggregate data to study
the economic performance of big spenders and lean spenders in the world’s rich
democracies. He highlights how two very different types of political economy can
achieve good economic performance at the level of the state, yet have a
remarkably different impact at the level of the citizen.
Similarly, André Freire (‘Bringing Social Identities Back In: The Social Anchors
of Left–Right Orientation in Western Europe’) demonstrates the value of
including a variable too often dismissed in the study of another enduring
problem: the importance of social factors in explaining individual left–right self-
placement. By including social identities as well as structural and organizational
dimensions, he arrives at conclusions that are in direct opposition to those more
commonly maintained.
The phenomenologically informed hermeneutic study by April Morgan (“The
Poisonwood Bible: An Antidote for What Ails International Relations?”) discusses
how a new way of using fiction in the classroom can be used to heighten students’
(and our own) understanding not only of political events (in this case, the
underdevelopment of the Congo), but also of the relative power of theories of
international political economy. Empathy and understanding deepen explanation
– and this applies to theory as well as to empirical fact. Morgan shows how to use a
powerful story to make this happen.
Was there really a postwar shift in global values from materialist to post-
materialist? Those who say there was receive an entirely new kind of support from
the work of Masaki Taniguchi (“A Time Machine: New Evidence of Post-Materialist
Value Change”). Taniguchi analyzes more than 30,000 Japanese newspaper
editorials dating from 1945 to 2000 and demonstrates, by both qualitative and
quantitative techniques, that, at least for Japan, the answer is “Yes.” In passing, he
International Political Science Review (2006), Vol 27, No. 4, 331–332
DOI: 10.1177/0192512106067354 © 2006 International Political Science Association
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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