Youth participation in American presidential elections has flat-lined since the 1970s, echoing similar trends in other Western democracies. But does this mean that young people have given up on politics? James Sloam argues that while young people have been driven away from voting due to a lack of political choice and the dysfunctional nature of politics, they are increasingly drawn to other forms of citizen activism. He writes that more young people are taking up petitions, boycotts and demonstrations than ever before, especially those with higher levels of education.

USApp Managing Editor, Chris Gilson looks at the best in political blogging from the Beltway. Our round-up of state blogs will follow on Saturday afternoon.

USApp Managing Editor, Chris Gilson looks at the best in political blogging from the Beltway. Our round-up of state blogs will follow on Saturday afternoon.

USApp Managing Editor, Chris Gilson looks at the best in political blogging from the Beltway. Our round-up of state blogs will follow on Saturday afternoon.

In the modern U.S., most state civil service bureaucracies are organized to be professional and independent of political influence. But have these civil service reforms, such as merit based apolitical recruitment, affected the behavior of elected politicians? In a study of states that have adopted these merit systems throughout the 20th century, Gergely Ujhelyi finds that these changes have led to the decentralization of state government spending towards local governments. He argues that as politicians lost their ability to influence policy implementation, they began to redistribute public funding towards friendly local governments. With the current trend towards a less politically insulated and more flexible civil service, state politicians may now have an incentive to centralize spending at the state level once again.

USApp Managing Editor, Chris Gilson looks at the best in political blogging from the Beltway. Our round-up of state blogs will follow on Saturday afternoon.

An attempt to create a free trade area between the European Union and the United States was officially launched at the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland in June 2013. The project is called “TTIP” – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Cameron are key supporters. But after one year of negotiations and debate, is TTIP likely to get off the ground? Dennis Novy argues that TTIP is a long-run project that will likely take several years to complete. It might falter if there is not enough political support from the top echelons of government.

For decades political pollsters have relied on questions about people’s voting intention in order to predict who will win an election. But what about asking voters about their expectation of which party will win? In new research Andreas Graefe analyzes the accuracy of expectation-based forecasts in presidential elections from 1988 to 2012. He finds that such forecasts are, on average, more accurate at forecasting the election’s outcome than four more established methods.

Undergraduate research, the practice of teaching students by engaging them in a research project, has a long record of achievement. Research-based evaluations show it is likely to have a range of positive educational and career outcomes for students. Many examinations of these benefits apply to STEM subjects. This paper sets out one approach to undergraduate research in political science, based on an apprenticeship model. Using a small survey of all those who have followed the GV314 course at the London School of Economics since 2004 the paper finds evidence that the benefits of undergraduate research appear to be quite striking outside STEM subjects too.

"Ideas of Education: Philosophy and Politics from Plato to Dewey." Christopher Brooke & Elizabeth Frazer (eds.). Routledge. May 2013. --- This book draws together a range of educational pioneers and thinkers from the canon of philosophers and philosophical schools, from Plato and Aristotle, down to Edward Carpenter and John Dewey, with attention along the way paid to both individual authors like Thomas Hobbes and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as to intellectual movements, such as the Scottish Enlightenment and the Utopian Socialists. Alice Marples finds that this book represents something of a call for links between political philosophy and education to be debated and discussed as critically in the future as they have been for centuries past.

A curious imbalance afflicts energy markets in the Persian Gulf region. Five of the six Gulf monarchies exhibit shortages in domestic supply of natural gas, with two of them turning to market-priced imports of liquefied natural gas, mostly from outside the region. Meanwhile, the sixth Gulf monarchy, Qatar, holds the world’s third-largest conventional reserves and is the planet’s number two gas exporter. Why is Qatar, given its enormous resources and relatively small domestic needs, unwilling to supply gas sufficient to meet its neighbours’ demand? After all, Qatar, like its neighbours on the Arabian Peninsula, is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a monarchical bloc that links these six Sunni Muslim-led regimes through trade, customs and immigration treaties, even marriage ties. A currency union among the six is also planned. Surely it makes more economic sense for the five gas-short monarchies to import via pipeline from such a well-endowed regional ally, rather than enter the competitive global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market with its implications for higher prices on fuel and higher costs of transport? The answers to these questions – the theme that drives our research – flow from two broad categories: pricing and politics. Briefly...

Natural resource revenues differ from other government revenues both in their time profile, and in their political and legal status: they are volatile and exhaustible, and belong to all citizens of the country in which they are located. This paper discusses the optimal expenditure of natural resource revenues, based on economic theory and with reference to existing international practices. It considers both the distributional impact and the efficiency of alternative policies, focusing on the extent to which they succeed in providing all citizens with their share of the benefits due to natural resources. It also shows how, by dropping the assumption of a representative agent, a concern for poverty and social welfare more generally interacts with and alters standard recommendations for the intertemporal management of resource revenues.

The gradual reconstitution of state control and legitimate political authority in Iraq presents local and regional actors with a range of new challenges at a time of considerable tension in the Arab world. The Iraqi polity gradually began to re-cohere in 2008 following the traumas of the US-led invasion in 2003 and the sectarian civil war between 2005 and 2007. As this process gathered momentum, an array of new, and unresolved existing, issues threaten to undermine the fragile veneer of stability in Basra and southern Iraq. These include the nature of the domestic and regional ties and networks of individuals and organizations binding Basra both to the rest of Iraq and to its broader Arabian/Persian Gulf hinterland. Hence the challenge for policy-makers in Iraq and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states is how to smooth Iraq’s re-entry into regional affairs following two decades of isolation and mutual mistrust, and three decades of conflict and under-development. This paper examines the challenges and connections between Basra, southern Iraq and the Gulf. It begins with a historical assessment of the flows of people, goods and ideas during the formative period of state-building and consolidation in the region. The creation of national boundaries and identities disrupted traditional patterns of trade and generated new fault-lines. Oil...

Reclaiming Beauty is a title bringing together authors from architecture, political science, and the wider social sciences, to discuss the central role of beauty in life and the academy. Sarah Burton explores three of the essays here, concluding that with thoughtful reading, the collection will reward the reader with original concepts and novel links.

Reconstructing Conservatism gives a contextualized assessment of Conservative Party politics between 1997 and 2010, considering four particular dilemmas for contemporary Conservatism: European integration; national identity and the ‘English Question’; social liberalism versus social authoritarianism; and the problems posed by a neo-liberal political economy. Pete Dorey finds the author skilfully and lucidly examines key intra-Party debates effectively arguing that ‘Cameronism’ is in fact, neo-Thatcherism.

In his latest book, Peter Ferdinand discusses the increasing economic integration of the Pacific Asian region as well as its impact on global affairs. Kent Deng is impressed by the breadth of the book’s coverage and the way it rethinks the once narrowly conceived boundaries of Asia.

In contrast to traditional systems of thought which regarded evil as a supernatural force that explained human misfortune, Michel Wieviorka develops a sociological analysis of evil phenomena. His aim is to explain evil, to reveal its social, political, and cultural sources, and to clarify the processes through which the present–day forms of evil – terrorism, violence, racism, and active hatred – are constituted. Jo Taylor finds that in this highly topical and engaging book.

The Report provides an in-depth examination of public attitudes towards economic and social rights using the 2005 Citizenship Survey (Rights and Responsibilities Module). The central finding is that the concept of “rights” is not understood by the public “narrowly” in terms of a limited number of civil and political rights. Rather, it is understood more broadly - with economic and social rights also being viewed as fundamental.

If the last few weeks of campaign coverage have been anything to go by, would anyone have predicted that Nick Clegg would be the new political darling on the morning after the first televised election debate? Four polls show Clegg to have been the viewing public’s clear winner last night, with stunningly high averages over the other two leaders, even in the most conservatively estimated poll done for Sky News.

Although the Election Commission has published data before on who gives what to political parties, by splitting up donations across multiple family members or between personal and company donations it has been legally possible for huge donors to largely avoid publicity. Not any more though, because Stephen Crone and Stuart Wilks-Heeg have analysed all donation income received by the Conservative party since 2011 to give the most comprehensive picture every published. The Tories owe their financial survival to just 50 key ‘donor group’ sources that account for 51 per cent of their donor income. The party’s top 15 sources for almost a third of the total. This concentration highlights the need for new funding rules to require donors to keep to the spirit of laws to limit donations, and not to evade them via ‘fame avoidance’ techniques.