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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
130472
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The United States is in the early stages of a substantial national project: reorienting its foreign policy to commit greater attention and resources to the Asia-Pacific region. This reformulation of U.S. priorities has emerged during a period of much-needed strategic reassessment, after more than a decade of intense engagement with South Asia and the Middle East. It is premised on the idea that the history of the twenty-first century will be written largely in the Asia-Pacific, a region that welcomes U.S. leadership and rewards U.S. engagement with a positive return on political, economic, and military investments.
As a result, the Obama administration is orchestrating a comprehensive set of diplomatic, economic, and security initiatives now known as the "pivot," or "rebalancing," to Asia. The policy builds on more than a century of U.S. involvement in the region, including important steps taken by the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations; as President Barack Obama has rightly noted, the United States is in reality and rhetoric already a "Pacific power." But the rebalancing does represent a significant elevation of Asia's place in U.S. foreign policy.
Questions about the purpose and scope of the new approach emerged as soon as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered what remains the clearest articulation of the strategy, and first used the term "pivot" to describe it, in a 2011 article in Foreign Policy. Almost three years later, the Obama administration still confronts the persistent challenge of explaining the concept and delivering on its promise. But despite the intense scrutiny and short-term setbacks faced by the policy, there is little doubt that a major shift is well under way. And whether Washington wants it to or not, Asia will command more attention and resources from the United States, thanks to the region's growing prosperity and influence -- and the enormous challenges the region poses. The question, then, is not whether the United States will focus more on Asia but whether it can do so with the necessary resolve, resources, and wisdom.
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| 2 |
ID:
151619
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| Summary/Abstract |
When would politicians reduce or eliminate their own discretion in the distribution of valued benefits to voters? I argue that the answer lies in the extent of partisan attachments among voters: politicians would be more likely to adopt non-discretionary or self-binding resource allocation rules in contexts where voters evince weak attachment to political parties. Non-discretionary distributive rules allow politicians to reach unattached voters with benefits without angering their loyal supporters who might otherwise expect to be favoured. They also signal politicians’ commitment to unbiased distribution of public resources, which, research shows, attracts unattached voters. Analysis of data on allocations of legislators’ development funds in Ghana provides strong support for this argument. This result is robust to controls for alternative explanations and thus advances understanding of when politicians in new democracies would pursue reforms designed to reduce or eliminate political discretion.
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