Republican Governance Research Articles

Partisan conflict and stock volatility predictability

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of the Partisan Conflict Index (PCI) on stock market volatility within the United States. Results indicate that the PCI is a robust predictor of both in-sample and out-of-sample stock volatility across the aggregate market and most sector-specific markets. Interestingly, the predictive strength of the PCI is pronounced for the aggregate market index and the sectors of utilities, materials, industrials, information technology, energy, telecom services, and consumer discretionary during periods of Republican governance. In contrast, under Democratic governance, the PCI demonstrates significant predictive power in the health care, consumer staples, information technology, and telecom services sectors. These findings contribute novel insights into the stock volatility predictability.

The impact of the form of public governance on the economy

There is a direct connection between the model of the system of governance in a specific country and its impact on rights, freedoms, growth rates, and the standard of living of its population. In turn, the choice of a governance model depends on the action of various factors, such as the cultural level and development of society, the availability of natural reserves, the quality of the education and science system, and the level of development of the system of country’s governance. From a theoretical point of view, the parliamentary model of governance is considered the most favorable in terms of upholding citizens' rights and freedoms and promoting the well-being of the population. The presidential model ranks second, while the super-presidential model performs modestly. The testing of theoretical assumptions regarding the impact of different models of republican governance on a country's development was conducted using a sample of 147 countries. The sample encompassed the years 1995 to 2021 and was derived from the World Bank database. However, it is important to note that countries with forms of governance such as absolute monarchy or junta considered to be backward were excluded from the sample. The empirical testing conducted supports the hypothesis that countries with a parliamentary form of governance have higher expected growth and well-being for their population in the long run. However, the countries using super-presidential, presidential models of governance, and countries with limited constitutional monarchies, exhibit lower expected long-term growth rates of per capita income.

Reason and Experience in Renaissance Italy by Christine Shaw

Drawing on her unequaled expertise concerning the governments and political systems of Renaissance Italy—the fruit of decades of research in both the archival and published sources of every major Italian state (and several minor ones) between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century—Shaw has produced a comprehensive and salient analysis of what she identifies as the fundamental “political principles” of Italy’s republics. This excellent and deeply learned book—the latest of her many monographs—challenges the dismissive view of Renaissance republicanism as moribund, especially after European monarchies took control of most of the peninsula in the early sixteenth century.Shaw’s approach is grounded in careful explication of the language of the “principles” that she unearths, not from the works of political thinkers but from the records of council proceedings, proposals by government committees, debates and advisory sessions, preambles to legislation, chancery letters, diplomatic instructions and reports, and much more. These practical, collaborative, and mostly anonymous documents reflect the historical experience of five republics—Venice, Genoa, Florence, Lucca, and Siena. Their historical value, Shaw affirms, lies in their authors’ expectation that the “reasons and principles” expressed in them “would appeal to, and be agreed by, many of those to whom they were addressed” (14). For example, most citizens of republics were in agreement (at least in principle) that unity was a supreme virtue; that “nothing poses greater danger” than “dissension” and faction (16); that in republics “no ranks are recognized” (36); that “it befits justice and equity to provide that all may share in offices and magistracies” (65); that the “true and supreme prince” of a republic, even in Venice and Genoa where doges held the highest office, was “always a corporate entity, a council, or the popolo or comune” (101); that “it is just that all citizens should bear the [fiscal] burdens of their city” (104); that “he who has more should pay more” (112); and that “the administration of justice is the universal foundation of all the cities and states of the world” (163). Governments embraced such ideas to enhance their legitimacy and forge consensus.Yet Shaw also elucidates the conflicting interpretations of these principles and the sharp divisions between factions, classes, and interest groups about fact to achieve unity, curtail factions, and define ranks; about who constituted the “all” who should share in offices; about which council or which definition of the people was the “supreme prince”; and about how taxes were to be assessed and what was to be taxed. The principles no doubt rested on what Shaw calls the “core values”—justice, equality, and equity—of republican governance (4), but this fact did not prevent divergent interpretations by different social constituencies. Shaw’s subtle and discerning treatment thus merges close scrutiny of the shared idiom of republicanism with the effects on it of competing, even antagonistic, sociopolitical interests.Shaw also casts new light on Italy’s principalities. Because, she says, the “legitimacy of princely rule” was “equivocal” and not self-generated, it almost always depended either on approval by subjects (however expressed or manufactured) or on investiture by popes or emperors. Inheritance as a buttress of legitimacy was “complicated by limited acceptance of primogeniture”—noble families often seeing themselves as “equals, rivals, even superiors” to a prince’s family—and by subject cities with their own “histories of self-government” that required princes “to come to terms” with local communities (176–177). Princely regimes lacked a “concept of the crown” as distinct “from the person of the prince,” whereas in republics the “palace” metonymically distinguished the state from the party in power (216). Principalities borrowed republican principles of legitimacy, especially approval by subjects, to bolster their ambiguous status.Shaw further demonstrates the persistence into the sixteenth century of republican values in resistance to princely rule and, after Charles Habsburg became emperor, to imperial pretensions to supreme power over all states within the old boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Republics frequently rejected imperial attempts to station garrisons, build fortresses, and demand complete obedience and onerous subventions (276–290). Even after the loss of independence, therefore, deeply rooted republican principles protected long-standing liberties. This original and penetrating study illuminates promising new paths for the history of political ideas.

Multiple makings at China’s first hydroelectric power station at Shilongba, 1908–1912

ABSTRACT China’s first hydroelectric station began producing electricity in 1912, a year better known for marking the end of imperial rule and the advent of republican governance. Located a short distance outside of the southwestern city of Kunming, Shilongba (Stone Dragon Dam) was a cross-cultural endeavour that involved long-distance encounters of both materials and expertise that spanned not just vast expanses within China, but also a world divided by competing imperial interests. The technologies involved were at once both new and old. Turbines and dynamos represented the latest in German innovation, but the techniques used to carve the canal and lower the water table had been perfected over centuries. A history of Shilongba thus allows us to approach China’s transition from Empire to Republic not merely as a political process but also as one of multiple makings – of state, technology, energy, society, and not least, history itself. This paper explores these multiple makings, focusing on the first phase of construction from 1908 to 1912, when a dam was constructed, a canal dug, and the first power station established.

Beyond the Ballot box: Rethinking Greek Communism Between the Wars

The assimilation of more than one million Anatolian Greek refugees into the social, economic and political life of Greece following its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) accounts for much of the conflict that defined the period of the Second Hellenic Republic (1924–1935). The impact of the refugees on the traditional balance of mass politics at the electoral level, is well documented; their contribution to the electoral gains of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in the 1930s gave legitimacy to the communist threat and ultimately served as a pretext for the suppression of competitive politics and the end of republican governance. The nature and extent of refugee identification with communism is not well understood in the historiography, however, and remains largely based on the male refugee vote, even though the adult male refugee population accounted for a minority of the refugee population. The census of 1928 reported an ‘abnormally high’ number of widows and girls, especially among the refugees of Asia Minor, as all the males of military age (18–50) had been retained by the Turks as hostages during the evacuation of Smyrna in 1922, and many of them had perished before their release. This paper begins an overdue examination of generational radicalization outside the ballot box, among the ranks of refugee youth, and young women in particular, the group regarded by contemporaries as most vulnerable to the excesses of liberal cosmopolitanism in the new ‘motherland’.

Blockchain as Res Publica: Towards a Political Genealogy of a Distributed Ledger

This paper focuses on the political genealogy of one of the most promising and influential IT technologies of our time: the blockchain (or distributed registry). We point at important commonalities between the principles of blockchain projects and models of republican governance. In contrast to techno-anarchist and democratic ideas, the republican genealogy of blockchain has so far failed to attract the attention of researchers. After examining the basic technical properties and ideological images of blockchain, we explore how the four main principles of classical republicanism (personal freedom and autonomy of the individual; civic virtues; common good; recognition of great causes) are realized in influential blockchain projects — Bitcoin (developed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto) and Ethereum (developed by Vitalik Buterin). The functioning of blockchain nodes is supported by a community of miners, who are free, but at the same time agree to act for the development of a common thing. What the republic and the blockchain have in common is that it is impossible to have a community without cooperative action. At the same time, blockchain is a vivid illustration of Bruno Latour's argument on the role of non-humans in social relations: his code seeks to replace untrustworthy humans with rule-acting nodes, and to create a cryptographic society where untrustworthy human relations are replaced by computers' relations. This article is an invitation to begin a discussion of the political ideas that are embedded in new technologies and the models of governance that are mobilized through them, often without proper reflection on the nature of such ideas by their creators.

Management and communication ideas in the late 17th – early 19th centuries

The article examines the period from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, when on the basis of deep philosophical concepts, a new vision of the development of statehood and human values raised. At this time, a certain re-thinking of the management and communication ideas of Antiquity and the Renaissance took place, which outlined the main promising trends in the statehood evolution, which to one degree or another were embodied in practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. A systematic approach and a comparative analysis of the causes and consequences of those years achievements for the present and the immediate future of the 21st century served as the methodological basis for a comprehensive review of the studies of that period. The scientific novelty of this study is the demonstration of the theoretical heritage complexity of the Enlightenment for the general history of management and communication ideas. The article presents an analysis of the views and concepts of the late 17th – early 18th century thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who defend the right to freedom of communication and liberalization of relationships in the system: “person – society – state”, associated with their own understanding of the government role. French enlighteners François Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, Etienne Condillac were much smaller theorists in management and communication issues, but their successful epistolary and encyclopedic communication practice, starting from the third decade of the XVIII century significantly increased the self-awareness of the masses. The influence of their ideas on the possibility of progressive development of social relations, on improving the national states manageability and on how of a new type scientists were able not only to popularize knowledge, but also to practically make it an object of public communication is shown. In this context, the author considers the importance of political and legal communication problems in the vision of Charles Louis Montesquieu and analyzes the republican governance ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as an outstanding figure of the Enlightenment, who attached great importance to the forms and methods of forming of the state governance structures. At the end of the historical period under consideration, a comparative historical analysis of the most significant statements of such thinkers as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is presented. These founders of the scientific discourse around the problems of power and state, war and peace, the effectiveness of government and communication in relations with the people laid the enduring foundations of the theoretical argumentation of two opposing views on the cardinal problem of our time – the possibility or impossibility of achieving mutually acceptable foundations of a new world order peacefully, excluding all types of hybrid wars. The general picture of the scientific and technological achievements of this period, influencing the level of understanding of the management and communication functions of the state of that time, is given in comparison with the present.

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Theorising the survival of rebel governance: a primer from a Northern Irish nationalist community

ABSTRACTThis article aims to explain how informal institutions that emerge as part of rebel governance regimes during periods of conflict survive the transition to peace, with a particular focus on the continued presence of informal justice institutions in select communities in contemporary Northern Ireland. The development of this particular form of controlling political violence is explored as part of a broader republican rebel governance regime and a model of development is proposed which focuses on the protracted isolated development thereof. This approach demonstrates that such development produces more resilient institutions, which are able to survive both the transitions to peace and a post-conflict context which sees increased challenges from the state. These particular challenges are further evaluated for their inefficiency as they serve as feedback mechanisms further guaranteeing the stability of the ideational structures underpinning the informal institutions, which are based on a delegitimised statutory framework.

The institutional balance as an agent of transformation in the EU constitutional order: reconciling the simultaneous rise of the European Parliament and European agencies

This article assesses how shifts in the institutional balance transform the European Union (EU) constitutional order. Significant developments including the simultaneous rise of the majoritarian European Parliament (EP) and non-majoritarian European agencies exemplify such transformations, raising fundamental issues concerning the role such actors play in the EU. This study shows how different processes – from formal Treaty provisions and Court of Justice of the European Union jurisprudence to extra-legal processes within and beyond the Treaty – shape the role and function of both actors, thereby potentially shifting the institutional balance in a manner not envisioned by the Treaty. These questions about the impact of the institutional balance persist in the aftermath of the euro-crisis. Accordingly, this contribution critically examines such transformations to investigate whether a republican model can democratically legitimate the rise of both actors. This article contends that the rise of both actors is legitimated if the necessary ex-ante and ex-post legal and political controls linked with republican governance are in place to limit the ability for either to exercise public power in a dominating or arbitrary fashion. This republican account understands that each societal force reflects competing societal interests, constitutional values, and legitimacy claims. From this perspective, the inclusion of a plurality of societal forces in EU governance is essential for obtaining republican objectives linked to the public good, including self-governance, non-domination, and non-arbitrariness. Thus, the participation of both the EP and European agencies – each with its own version of the public good and how best to achieve it – is essential to ensure the multi-actor creation of constitutional norms geared toward the public good. This article concludes that an intensification of republicanism can secure an institutional balance that transforms the EU constitutional order in a manner that enhances the legitimation of the EU in the wake of the euro-crisis.

Reconstructing Public Administration for the Commercial Republic Part I: The Madisonian Design, Its Flaws, and the Case for a Fourth Branch

Drawing extensively on Stephen L. Elkin’s Reconstructing the Commercial Republic (2006), I review the essential features of James Madison’s constitutional design for the American republic. Madison remains our most perceptive and reliable guide for thinking constitutionally about republican governance, but his design is flawed. I review those flaws, and the regime developments that have exacerbated them, especially the rise of the administrative state. The chief problem is the vastly greater extent of the influence of business interests in the councils of government, far beyond the political advantages for the propertied class that Madison designed into the system. With the operation of the separation of powers, and the incentive for deliberative lawmaking, also out of alignment with Madison’s design intentions, I propose the elevation of the now infamous fourth branch – administration – to the status of constitutional co-equal with the other branches. I present initial arguments for the ways in which a fourth, administration branch might help restore key elements of the Madisonian design, specifically by enhancing the chances of deliberative lawmaking, improving the functioning of the separation of powers, and broadening the interests of the propertied class. I close by outlining the tasks for the second part of my analysis, to be taken up in a subsequent paper.

O conceito de "comunidade humana universal" na obra de Guerreiro Ramos

Resumo:Este ensaio procura compreender, por meio da reflexão da "cultura histórica" de Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, o conceito de "comunidade humana universal". O objetivo é contribuir para a cultura dos direitos humanos, especialmente quando se trata de pensar a gestão pública como forma de alavancar a democracia substantiva e a governança republicana. Portanto, para uma reflexão sobre o "conceito de comunidade humana universal", percebe-se a necessidade de abordar a questão por meio de três dimensões comparativas que, em nosso modo de ver, atravessam a obra sociológica de Guerreiro Ramos: a nacionalidade e o humano universal; a gestão do humano e o mundo do trabalho; e, não menos importante, a ciência social e a vida humana associada.

Accountability, Ethics, and Policy Implementation within Public and Private Sector Contracts for Public Goods and Services: Credit Bureaus as a Public Good

American public administration as a whole is based on the United States Constitution and historical founding eras. As for public administration, it is based on constitutional, democratic, political, and administrative values. “The American founders gave us a constitutional system that embraces contending principles of good republican governance” (Morgan, 2013, p. 85). Public administration deals with, the constitution, federalism, anti-federalist, and founding eras. Often the question of opportunistic federalism arises when the anti-federalist approach is considered when addressing the implementation of more decentralized government. Decentralized government also includes contracting out public goods and services.

Transformative Transatlantic Free Trade Agreements without Rights and Remedies of Citizens?

Evaluations of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) among Canada and the European Union (EU) and of the ongoing EU–US negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) depend on their legal, economic, and political methodologies for multilevel governance of public goods (PGs) like a transatlantic market. In contrast to the American and European post-war leadership for democratic governance of PGs (as recalled in Section I), the CETA fails to adequately protect democratic governance, rights of citizens, and judicial remedies in transatlantic market regulation (Section II). TTIP negotiators likewise prioritize economic and utilitarian group interests in order to limit opposition to a successful completion of TTIP; this risks undermining ‘republican governance’ and rights of citizens as limitations on the longstanding governance failures in the Transatlantic Partnership since the 1990s (Section III). Rather than complying with the EU Treaty requirements to base external free trade agreements (FTAs) on the ‘constitutional values’ that successfully govern market regulation and competition throughout Europe, trade negotiators abuse their ‘executive monopoly’ over transatlantic negotiations so as to limit their own legal, democratic, and judicial accountability vis-a-vis citizens. Civil society and parliaments should resist such ‘disconnected Westphalian governance’ and insist that international treaties with ‘legislative functions’ for protecting transnational PGs must be governed democratically and protect transnational rights and remedies of citizens so as to enable the ‘democratic principals’ to hold governance agents and their limited ‘constituted powers’ more accountable for the ubiquity of ‘market failures’ and ‘governance failures’ that continue to distort transatlantic relations, rule of law, and consumer welfare.

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere by Robert Cottrol (review)

Reviewed by: The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere by Robert Cottrol Karen “Kym” Morrison (bio) The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere. By Robert Cottrol. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. 360. $69.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $24.95 ebook) The Long, Lingering Shadow nicely blends relevant primary and secondary sources in providing an important comparative survey of the legal dimensions of race, or more specifically blackness, in the Americas. With appreciable concision, Cottrol outlines the essential elements in hemispheric comparisons related to the role of law as both a determinant and outcome of the meaning of race. Brevity, however, forestalls truly hemispheric comparisons; other than the United States, Cottrol omits regions with non-Hispanic legal systems, such as the English-speaking and French-speaking Caribbean. Cottrol offers a balanced treatment of the United States, Brazil, and Spanish (-speaking) America, with three of his nine chapters dedicated to each. His obvious expertise in U.S. legal history is apparent in his deft management of the broad ramifications of the specific cases. By contrast, his engagement with Brazilian legal studies often centers on the initiatives of singular men, such as nineteenth-century mulatto politician Antonio Pereira Rebouças. Cottrol’s management of Spanish-speaking America is more generalized as he strives for coherence in analyzing the legal history of race in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. [End Page 291] Cottrol directly addresses the well-worn Tannenbaum debate on differences between U.S. and Latin American racial practices. However, he avoids evaluating the superiority of any one legal system and upholds the modern scholarly denouncement of the previously held belief in Latin American racial democracy. In the book’s first section, Cottrol demonstrates some ambivalence in assessing any beneficial regional differences in slave laws. Despite reading some distinctive features present in the Latin America systems and defining them as “representing something of a midpoint between the ideal types represented by ancient Rome and the American Cotton Kingdom,” he re-enforces that the alienation of freedom and the de facto permissibility of slave owner violence remained common throughout the Americas (p. 45). It is perhaps with respect to free people of color in slaveholding Latin America that Cottrol might have expressed greater contrast with the U.S. case. Despite documenting the greater breadth of Latin American owner-granted and self-purchased manumission, the impact of the resultant free population remains outside Cottrol’s strict legal focus. Another limitation of Cottrol’s brevity is the extent to which he presents law as divorced from political context. This is most apparent in two instances. He writes the history of English slave law as one that developed in isolation from preceding Hispanic jurisprudence, and he later implies the operational equivalence of republican governance throughout the Americas. Also, greater distinction could have been made between the impact of structural inequality on racial voting patterns and actual legislative representation in all regions. In emphasizing law as a tool, Cottrol diminishes the importance of popular efforts to create corrective legislation in Latin America. For example, the background of black popular engagement with Latin American constitutional assemblies is left largely unexplored and current laws recognizing unique black rights (particularly in Brazil and Colombia) might be inappropriately read as unprovoked grants from liberalizing states. Similarly, Cottrol’s elite-centered discussion of the blanqueamiento/branqueamento (whitening) ideals obscures Latin [End Page 292] America’s African-descendant community activism prior to the late twentieth century. Cottrol examines the ideology of blanqueamiento almost exclusively as a political force that fostered European immigration into postemancipation Latin America. He does not extend the weight of that force into his analysis of the United States of the Jim Crow era, and he excludes from his discussion of Latin American blanqueamiento policy its operation at the social and reproductive dimensions of these societies. Cottrol usefully describes the distinct paths that led to a similar tone in the current antiracist struggles of the hemisphere’s African-descended populations. He contends that a denial of the “long, lingering shadow” of race is a pervasive force that must be constantly combated within...

American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev (review)

Reviewed by: American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev Alexis McCrossen (bio) Keywords Bible, Old Testament, Biblical language American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Eran Shalev. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. 239. Cloth, $40.00.) In the index of Bernard Bailyn’s classic The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967) appear many references to Rome, a couple to Greece, and none to the Old or New Testament. Since then, numerous historians—not the least of whom is Eran Shalev, author of Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2009)—have investigated how familiarity with ancient history and the classics informed American political and artistic culture. Shalev’s recent book, American Zion, departs from Bailyn’s model by revealing how profoundly the Old Testament influenced political debate and reflection in the United States between the Revolution and the 1830s. It shows how the Hebrew Bible was the source of images, stories, and tropes that resonated with Americans as they fashioned an understanding of themselves as a “chosen people” and of their nation as a “new Israel.” Drawing on Hebraic political studies, which investigates the “Hebraic tradition in political thought” (3, 52), Shalev has written an intellectual history that traces the origins, circulation, and adaptation of Old Testament themes in American political and religious treatises. He extends Eric Nelson’s inquiry in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2010) to the American context. Shalev investigates the fluorescence of what he calls “Old Testamentism” during the Revolutionary decades and [End Page 771] beyond, before proposing in a closing chapter that midcentury debates over slavery contributed to its demise as a frame of political and religious reference. Shalev’s focus on the political imagination rather than on politics frees the book from a developmental trajectory whereupon one sort of reference to the Old Testament begets another. In five chapters, the book instead highlights the incidence of what Shalev characterizes as “Hebraic” tropes, themes, and metaphors in various forms of political speech. Drawing attention to “biblical republicanism,” the first chapter redresses the scholarly neglect of the role of the Old Testament “in the formation and evolution of an American republican worldview” (19). It underscores how Americans relied on the Old Testament to identify corruption. Shalev masterfully explains how Americans “made sense of civic corruption through biblical narratives” (30), particularly in their oft-repeated references to the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BC); Persia’s corruptible king Ahasuerus and his mendacious, scheming minister Haman; and the Israelite town of Meroz, which sided with Canaan’s invading armies. Thus, Americans “read the Old Testament as a narrative of resistance to tyranny” (41). It gave them a language and discourse through which they could talk about tyranny and republican virtue. To close chapter 1, Shalev shows how Gideon provided a model for disinterested republican virtue as important as the Roman Lucius Quinticus Cincinnatus. George Washington, it was said, embodied the admirable traits of the biblical as well as the Roman hero. Shalev’s literary analysis, particularly discourse analysis, illuminates the book’s middle chapters. Chapter 2 explores the appropriation of Israel as a model of republican governance by figures as diverse as patriotic pastors Gad Hitchcock and Samuel Cooper, Harvard President Samuel Langdon, and the inestimable Thomas Paine. Even Lyman Beecher believed that the American Constitution came from the Bible, not Rome or Greece. The chapter concludes with a fascinating account of Mordecai Manuel Noah, who in 1825 tried to “reconstitute a Hebrew government” (77) a few miles from Buffalo on an island in the Niagara River, in a city he named Ararat, after the biblical Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark landed after the flood. Chapter 3 investigates the uses of biblical language, arguing that the discourse itself perpetuated and supported ontological claims for authority and legitimacy. The biblical style influenced nomenclature as well as [End Page 772] literary form, and provided a venue through which satire could be developed. More important...

Variable Constitutional Authority: Madisonian Founding Perspectives

This article offers a preliminary sketch of a multidimensional model of variable constitutional authority rooted in principles and practices of popular sovereignty. To do so, it draws on three sets of criteria on which James Madison relied in The Federalist: those based on processes of popular authorization, principles of republican governance, and commitments to securing rights. These criteria support analysis of gradations of constitutional authority, not only claims that it has been present or absent. Taking into account ways that the Constitution partially rather than fully represented “the people” enables a richer, more nuanced treatment of the Constitution’s initial authority than more categorical approaches such as traditional models of originalism. This approach underscores in particular the importance of being attentive to ways that the Constitution’s initial authority and meaning were pluralistic, contested, and of qualified reach, instead of being fully and definitively established at the time of the founding.

Seducing Autocracy: Tacitus and the Dynasts of the Near East

This article examines Tacitus’ exploration of the motives of Near-Eastern dynasts in Histories 2 and Annals 2. In these books, Tacitus presents Near-Eastern “enslavement” to the Roman empire as an act of will. Near-Eastern dynasts desired to “seduce” Romans into becoming masters and assuming the same despotic and morally enslaved dispositions that they as dynasts exerted. Their slaving helped frame, forge, and actuate a Roman imperial system that subjected Romans to despotic figures amid the unceasing threat of civil discord. In this sense, Near-Eastern seduction and its products symbolized Rome’s enslavement to autocracy and its circumvention of Republican governance.

Leaking by the Bucketload: The Nature of Database Leaks

The British expense account scandal, the revelations by Wikileaks, and the Palestine papers are all database leaks. Such leaks were not impossible before the revolution in information and communication technology, but they have become much simpler. Through global communication networks everybody can now leak on an industrial scale. The question addressed in this paper is: How to understand and regulate such database leaks? The romantic notion that they will empower democratic publics is problematic. Databases, typically, are not easily intelligible. At best they provide the raw data for an understanding of an institutional culture or attitude. Experts and specialists remain essential intermediaries for the interpretation of the raw data. Moreover, organizations like WikiLeaks no longer need to settle in a single jurisdiction. Database leaks are beyond the reach of national regulation. We argue that the role of specialists is ineluctable and that some form of republican governance is the best way to impose standards on database leaking.

Indebted state versus intermediary state: who owes what to whom?

Ratios of public debt to GDP are much discussed these days and questions concerning debt relative to taxation have long been explored by fiscal scholars. With respect to monarchical regimes, it seems reasonable to treat public debt as similar to personal debt, recognizing that a monarch is not an ordinary person. When public debt arises through parliamentary assemblies, however, the similarity of form between public and personal debt vanishes because a parliamentary assembly does not trade on its own account; to the contrary, it is a type of intermediary that brings together people who buy bonds and people who later pay the bondholders. In a republic there is no sovereign who is indebted to ruled subjects. The institutional framework of republican governance transforms public borrowing into a process of intermediation among citizens, which leads in turn to the alternative orientation toward public debt that this paper explores.