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Carter's Conversion
The Hardening of American Defense Policy
Brian J. Auten
University of Missouri Press, 2008
When presidential candidate Jimmy Carter advocated defense budget cuts, he did so not only to save money but also with the hope of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons. Three yearslater, when President Carter announced his support of full-scale development of the MX missile and modernization of NATO’s Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force, it marked a dramatic policy shift for his administration.
In light of Carter’s cost-cutting in the first year of his administration, previous observers have attributed Carter’s subsequent shift either to the “shocks of 1979”—the Soviet Union’s move into Afghanistan and the seizure of power by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran—or to domestic political pressure, such as interest group activity, executive-legislative bargaining, or interbureaucratic conflict. Brian Auten now argues that these explanations only partially explain this midterm policy change.
In Carter’s Conversion, Auten reveals how strategic ideas and studies, allied relations, and arms control negotiations each worked to deflect Carter’s initial defense stance away from the policy path suggested by the prevailing international military environment. He also shows how the administration’s MX and Long-Range Theater Nuclear Force decisions subsequently hardened following significant adjustments to these three variables.
Employing the approach to international relations known as neoclassical realism, Auten demonstrates that Carter reassessed his strategic thinking and revised his policy stance accordingly. Integrating declassified documents, interviews, and private archives with a mountain of secondary sources, he provides a historical analysis of defense policy transformation over the first three years of the Carter administration and a detailed examination of how Carter and his national security team addressed challenges posed by the expansion of Soviet military power.
Full of rich history and cogent analysis, Carter’s Conversion presents a wealth of detailed arguments about how Carter adjusted his policy outlook, couched in a thorough understanding of weapons, arms control dynamics, and defense policy-making. As a revision ofcommon interpretations, it provides both an example of self-correcting policy change and a realist argument about the end of superpower détente and the start of the “Second Cold War.”
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The Challenger Launch Decision
Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA
Diane Vaughan
University of Chicago Press, 1995
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, millions of Americans became bound together in a single, historic moment. Many still vividly remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the tragedy. In The Challenger Launch Decision, Diane Vaughan recreates the steps leading up to that fateful decision, contradicting conventional interpretations to prove that what occurred at NASA was not skulduggery or misconduct but a disastrous mistake.

Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.

Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.

No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.
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The Challenger Launch Decision
Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Enlarged Edition
Diane Vaughan
University of Chicago Press, 2015
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, millions of Americans became bound together in a single, historic moment. Many still vividly remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the tragedy. Diane Vaughan recreates the steps leading up to that fateful decision, contradicting conventional interpretations to prove that what occurred at NASA was not skullduggery or misconduct but a disastrous mistake.

Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them. In a new preface, Vaughan reveals the ramifications for this book and for her when a similar decision-making process brought down NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
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Cheap Threats
Why the United States Struggles to Coerce Weak States
Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain
Georgetown University Press

Why do weak states resist threats of force from the United States, especially when history shows that this superpower carries out its ultimatums? Cheap Threats upends conventional notions of power politics and challenges assumptions about the use of compellent military threats in international politics.

Drawing on an original dataset of US compellence from 1945 to 2007 and four in-depth case studies—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2011 confrontation with Libya, and the 1991 and 2003 showdowns with Iraq—Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain finds that US compellent threats often fail because threatening and using force became comparatively “cheap” for the United States after the Cold War. Becoming the world’s only superpower and adopting a new light-footprint model of war, which relied heavily on airpower and now drones, have reduced the political, economic, and human costs that US policymakers face when they go to war. Paradoxically, this lower-cost model of war has cheapened US threats and fails to signal to opponents that the United States is resolved to bear the high costs of a protracted conflict. The result: small states gamble, often unwisely, that the United States will move on to a new target before achieving its goals.

Cheap Threats resets the bar for scholars and planners grappling with questions of state resolve, hegemonic stability, effective coercion, and other issues pertinent in this new era of US warfighting and diplomacy.

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Choices
An Introduction to Decision Theory
Michael Resnik
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
Provides a broad yet rigorous introduction to the fundamentals of decision theory (the collection of mathematical, logical, and philosophical theories of decision making by rational individuals) that pays particular attention to matters of philosophical and logical interest.
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Citizen Power
A Citizen Leadership Manual Introducing the Art of No-Blame Problem Solving
Harry S. Pozycki
Rutgers University Press, 2020
The Citizens Campaign, co-founded by the author and his wife, Caroline B. Pozycki, offers citizen leadership training and citizen leadership service opportunities for regular citizens. CITIZEN POWER gives all Americans the know how to become no-blame problem solvers and be part of what is emerging as a new model for a citizen driven national public service.
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Civil Wars and Foreign Powers
Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict
Patrick M. Regan
University of Michigan Press, 2002
We have seen recent massive intervention by the United States and its allies in Europe in internal conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict, Patrick Regan systematically answers the question about the conditions under which third parties intervene in civil conflicts to stop the fighting. It uses data on all civil conflicts since 1945 to identify those conflicts that are amenable to outside interventions and the types of interventions that are more likely to be successful.
Outside Intervention in Intrastate Conflict is a book about how governments can help facilitate the end of civil conflicts. In a time when internal conflicts appear to be increasing in number, and increasingly destabilizing, governments need to know what policies work and when. Interventions are generally of two sorts--unilateral, or when one state takes action, and multilateral, such as UN or NATO action. This book examines the conditions under which each form of intervention is most likely and most effective. The analysis suggests that three conditions associated with multi-lateral interventions will increase the likelihood of success: mutual consent of the parties involved; impartiality on the part of the intervenors; and the existence of a coherent intervention strategy. The questions are posed from the perspective of the decision maker and the answers offered are framed in a language familiar to the decision-making community. The book mixes descriptive case material with systematic statistical analysis of a unique data set of all civil conflicts since World War II, providing contemporary examples to illustrate overall trends in the data. Beyond the policy implications this work is also rich in theoretical development about issues of conflict and conflict management.
This book will appeal to students of international conflict, civil war, ethnic conflict, and those who are concerned with developing policy in the post-cold war world to deal with intrastate conflict.
Patrick M. Regan is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Binghamton University.
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Cloud Ethics
Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others
Louise Amoore
Duke University Press, 2020
In Cloud Ethics Louise Amoore examines how machine learning algorithms are transforming the ethics and politics of contemporary society. Conceptualizing algorithms as ethicopolitical entities that are entangled with the data attributes of people, Amoore outlines how algorithms give incomplete accounts of themselves, learn through relationships with human practices, and exist in the world in ways that exceed their source code. In these ways, algorithms and their relations to people cannot be understood by simply examining their code, nor can ethics be encoded into algorithms. Instead, Amoore locates the ethical responsibility of algorithms in the conditions of partiality and opacity that haunt both human and algorithmic decisions. To this end, she proposes what she calls cloud ethics—an approach to holding algorithms accountable by engaging with the social and technical conditions under which they emerge and operate.
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Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making
A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Policy Choices
Juliet Kaarbo
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Every day, coalition cabinets make policy decisions critical to international politics. Juliet Kaarbo examines the dynamics of these multiparty cabinets in parliamentary democracies in order to assess both the quality of coalition decision making and the degree to which coalitions tend to favor peaceful or military solutions. Are coalition cabinets so riddled by conflict that they cannot make foreign policy effectively, or do the multiple voices represented in the cabinet create more legitimate and imaginative responses to the international system? Do political and institutional constraints inherent to coalition cabinets lead to nonaggressive policies? Or do institutional and political forces precipitate more belligerent behavior?

Employing theory from security studies and political psychology as well as a combination of quantitative cross-national analyses and twelve qualitative comparative case studies of foreign policy made by coalition cabinets in Japan, the Netherlands, and Turkey, Kaarbo identifies the factors that generate highly aggressive policies, inconsistency, and other policy outcomes. Her findings have implications not merely for foreign policy but for all types of decision making and policy-making by coalition governments.

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Coastal Alert
Energy Ecosystems And Offshore Oil Drilling
Dwight Holing; Natural Resources Defense Council
Island Press, 1990

Coastal Alert explains how citizens can protect coastal resources from the damaging effects of offshore oil drilling.

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Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow
Kenneth J. Arrow
Harvard University Press, 1984

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

The third volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers concerns the basic concept of rationality as it applies to an economic decision maker. In particular, it addresses the problem of choice faced by consumers in a multicommodity world and presents specific models of choice useful in economic analysis. It also discusses choice models under uncertainty, giving the basic theory and critiques of this theory based on experimental evidence and applications. Among the major papers are "Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations," a masterly survey of subjective probability and choice theory, and "The Theory of Risk Aversion," an exposition of the theory of choice under uncertainty.

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The Collision of Political and Legal Time
Foreign Affairs and the Supreme Court's Transformation of Executive Authority
Kimberley L. Fletcher
Temple University Press, 2018

How does the U.S. Supreme Court shape constitutional and political development? In The Collision of Political and Legal Time, Kimberley Fletcher answers this question by analyzing the key role the Court has played in interpreting presidential decision-making in the area of foreign affairs since 1936. She reconsiders the Curtiss-WrightCourt, which instituted a new constitutional order that established plenary powers independent of congressional delegation. Fletcher also reexamines Japanese internment and detainee cases, demonstrating the entrenchment of the new constitutional order and how presidential ascendency becomes institutionalized. Other cases, such as Youngstown, illustrate how the Court, during a time of war, will check Executive power and authority. 

The Collision of Political and Legal Time examines these cases and controversies in foreign policymaking through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries to show that the Court is not passive or constrained; it does not merely follow politics or the majority coalition. Through her nuanced analysis, Fletcher makes a larger argument about the role of the U.S. Supreme Court as an agent of change, which ultimately transforms power, shapes politics, and redirects history.

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Communication and Imperial Control in China
Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693–1735
Silas H. L. Wu
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Congress and Economic Policy Making
Darrell M. West
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987

Economic policymaking has perpetually been one of the central dilemmas facing Congress, leading to huge budget deficits and disagreements among legislators about spending priorities and tax policies.

This book examines congressional decision making on economic policy during the Reagan administration. It looks at legislative actions on Reaganomics, tax reform, and the politics of deficit reduction, and shows the importance of looking not just at the consequences of these decisions but also at the legislative processes that led to them.

Using an “activist-based” approach and previously unexamined data, Darrell West shows that district activists, often more conservative than the public at large, exerted a disproportionate and misleading effect on congressional voting. When this support eventually proved unstable, a more skeptical Congress began to eventually back away from the president's policies. This move had serious consequences for deficit reduction and policy initiation, and also influenced the final shape of the tax reform package adopted in 1986.
 

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Congressmen's Voting Decisions
John W. Kingdon
University of Michigan Press, 1989
This classic study of voting decisions in the U.S. House of Representatives, based on extensive interviewing and observation, combines theory and substance, generalization and detailed description. With a new introduction, this influential and innovative book remains the best statement of the ways in which legislators reach decisions. The work contributes in critical ways to scholars’ and students’ understanding of such larger features of legislative process as representation of constituencies, the place of specialization in the making of public policy, the extent and types of legislative rationality, the importance of principles in decisions, and the place of legislatures in larger political systems.
 
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Crime and Justice, Volume 9
Prediction and Classification in Criminal Justice Decision Making
Edited by Don M. Gottfredson and Michael Tonry
University of Chicago Press Journals, 1988
Prediction and Classification: Criminal Justice Decision Making, a collection of commissioned essays by distinguished international scholars, is the ninth volume in the Crime and Justice series. Like its predecessors, Prediction and Classification is essential reading for scholars and researchers seeking a unified source of knowledge about crime, its causes, and its cure.
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Crisis Bargaining and the State
The Domestic Politics of International Conflict
Susan Peterson
University of Michigan Press, 1996
The first book to systematically explore the importance of domestic institutions to crisis bargaining, Crisis Bargaining and the State argues that the influence of a state's bargaining behavior on its opponents foreign policy depends on the nature of the opposing government--its institutional structures and the strategic beliefs of its leaders. The author shows in three detailed case studies--the Crimean War crisis, the Fashoda crisis, and the Berlin crisis--the significance of domestic factors to questions of war and peace.
Peterson offers a comprehensive analysis of the domestic politics of crisis bargaining. She uses differences in state structure to explain variations in foreign policy processes and outcomes. By introducing domestic structure as a crucial intervening variable between the international environment and a state's foreign policy during an acute conflict, Peterson shows how existing cognitive and bureaucratic approaches provide complementary, not competing, explanations of crisis bargaining.
Crisis Bargaining and the State: The Domestic Politics of International Conflict applies recent research in the field of international political economy on the relationship between ideas, institutions, and the international environment to the issue of crisis bargaining. It will appeal to students, scholars, and policymakers interested in crisis bargaining, international security, and international relations.
Susan Peterson is Assistant Professor, Department of Government, The College of William & Mary.
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The Crowd You're In With
A Play
Rebecca Gilman
Northwestern University Press, 2009

The Crowd You're in With is the fifth play by award-winning American playwright Rebecca Gilman. In it, a Fourth of July backyard barbecue is the setting for a comic, thought-provoking, ultimately disquieting exploration of the question of whether to have children. Melinda and Jasper, the hosts, are deeply divided by the issue; Tom and Karen, their landlords, decided long ago to remain childless; Windsong and her husband, Dan, are expecting a baby.

As the play progresses, the motivations of these characters reveal themselves as ever more complex. Even as the characters often speak in very practical terms about their decisions, Gilman never loses sight of the mystery underlying a life-shaping decision guided by both rational thought and biological imperative, which ultimately speaks to the even larger question of free will and determinism faced by every person.

The Chicago-based Gilman has won numerous awards including the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright and the Scott McPherson Award. Her play The Glory of Living was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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