The Democratic Party

The article examines the role of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in the U.S. domestic and foreign policy making during the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations. The CBC structure, functions, main activities and relations with the executive power are analyzed. The CBC is one of the most influential congressional factions, which both other legislators and the executive branch of government reckon with. Under the Obama administration, CBC demonstrated the growing interest in foreign policy issues. At the same time, the U.S. color population-related problematique remained the CBC’s highest priority. Barak Obama, the first U.S. black president, failed to meet color people’s expectations while the black community viewed him as “its representative” in the government. He did not pay proper attention to the U.S. ethnic communities’ needs. On the one hand, his presidency was affected by tensions between Republicans and Democrats in the Congress which impeded implementation of his legislative agenda oriented to the color peoples’ needs. On the other hand, President Obama’s personal style was characterized by inconsistency and the lack of political will which again negatively affected his relations with the Afro-American community. Nonetheless, with the CBC support, a number of color population-focused programs have been launched in the areas, such as education, health care, social adaptation and immigration policies. Under the Republican president Donald Trump, the CBC retained its influence on American political process. However, its relations with the White House are of conflictual rather than cooperative nature. Particularly, the CBC is discontent with Trump’s policies in areas such as inter-ethnic relations, social security, health care, education, and immigration. The Black Caucus believes that Trump tries to undermine the fundamentals and achievements of Obama’s social policies that were beneficial for the U.S. color population and poor people. Given the CBC-Trump controversies on domestic policy issues, the Caucus does not pay much attention to the foreign policy problematique preferring to react to specific international challenges (for example, humanitarian issues or potential U.S. military interventions abroad) rather than to have a proactive foreign policy strategy. It should be noted, however, that the CBC does not completely identify itself with the Democratic party’s political course (although all its members are Democrats). For example, the CBC didn’t not support Washington’s hegemonic ambitions and actions in the cases of the Syrian and Venezuelan crises or Trump’s overtly pro-Israeli policies in the Near East. Hopefully, in the future, when (and if) the U.S. political establishment will start to overcome its Russophobia, Moscow could cooperate with the CBC taking into account its important role in shaping Washington’s African and Latin American policies. As the CBC’s previous political activities demonstrate, this grouping can be open for cooperation in different ways, such as traditional and public diplomacy, inter-parliamentary links, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and so on.

The main result of 18 months of calling the Obama administration extremists is that it is the Republicans themselves who will seem like the extremists by the time November comes around.

The implosion of the Republican Party since Barack Obama's victory last November has provided ample fodder for pundits of all stripes. The bizarre plot turns such as the emergence of Rush Limbaugh as the de facto leader of the party, Michael Steele's bumpy ride as chair of the party and Dick Cheney's stubborn refusal to simply go away are the stuff of political satire. The unraveling of the Republican Party has overshadowed any discussion of developments in the Democratic Party, but these are also important and have substantial bearing on our country's political future.

U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, overcoming the tragedies of his life, became a consequential figure in the history of politics and government, the Democratic Party, and social justice in America. In his 46-year career in the Senate, he compiled a record of accomplishment that included historic initiatives on race and civil rights, health care and medical research, immigration, and international relations in the Cold War and after. Defying the growing trend of political polarization in the United States, Kennedy negotiated and cut deals with conservatives like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, John McCain and Robert Dole, and liberals like Joseph Biden and Barack Obama. He won fame for carrying on the fallen standard of his murdered brothers, John and Robert. Yet his turbulent family life and lifestyle left Kennedy vulnerable to criticism and he became one of the country's most-readily-caricatured political leaders - portrayed glowingly by the Left as "the lion of the Senate," while at the same time vilified from the Right as "Teddy Bare," the rake whose reckless driving cost a young secretary her life on Chappaquiddick island in 1969. In my portrayal of Kennedy, I advance the thesis that the rigorous application of the tools, aims and standards of biography - the examination of all sides and aspects of a leader's life - can be a curative in an era of hyper-polarization, when journalism, history and truth are under fire.

This article analyzes the modern foreign policy of the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP). It uses the framework of Aaron Ettinger's work in the International Journal on an emerging left-wing in the US Democratic Party. I first situate the research within the existing literature on leftist internationalism, Canadian foreign policy, and the New Democratic Party. I then analyze a dataset that I created based on the last five NDP federal election platforms and use it to analyze 210 different foreign policy commitments. I use these findings to argue two things: (1) the NDP has a comprehensive foreign policy that reflects dual struggles of electability and left-wing ideals; (2) there is no identifiable left-wing turn in recent NDP platforms. I conclude this article with a discussion on the future of NDP foreign policy.

<i>Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism</i> by Reuel Schiller

This paper considers whether the rules governing state political parties help to explain primary election outcomes. I theorize political parties will see lower levels of competition during primary elections when they have bylaws that centralize power within the state central committee. To test this expectation, I created a dataset of state-level party rules by collecting and coding provisions within the bylaws of all 100 state-level Republican and Democratic parties. I operationalize party centralization of power as whether or not elected officials are represented within each party’s formal membership, their state central committee, and whether or not each party has an endorsement or neutrality policy when it comes to contested primaries. I find the centralization of party power does correlate with lower levels of competition in primary elections for the House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020. Specifically, parties are more likely to see uncontested primaries when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and are more likely to see fewer candidates in general when they guarantee ex-officio state committee membership to their co-partisan elected officials and when they do not have rules that require the state central committee to remain neutral during contested primary elections. While evaluating the causes of this trend is beyond the scope of this paper, these findings appear to be driven by Republican primaries.

Diversity and its Limits in Electoral Politics: The Case of North Carolina

The focus of this study is on pressures experienced by NGOs in a particular type of regime: partial democracies. This chapter starts with a discussion about this category of political context. In the literature on democratization, partial democracies have been given different names, with most authors arguing that this type of regime should not be seen as "on its way" to a full or consolidated democracy, but rather a type of regime in its own right. There is, however, an ongoing debate about what makes a democracy partial. Where should the boundary between "full" democracies and "partial" democracies be drawn? What different subtypes of partial democracy can be distinguished? Using a broad definition of partial democracies, we understand them as regimes where civil and political rights are recognized in the constitution, but where the liberties are not fully guaranteed or respected in practice. In addition, we argue that in order to understand and analyze pressures on NGOs in partial democracies, it is necessary to take into account both the formal and informal sources of power in a society.

This introductory chapter examines the political context in which Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin launched their bids for national office, paying attention to the civil rights and feminist movements of the past that has since shaped their 2008 campaigns for president. But all of this history—the centuries of the political exclusion of white women and African American women and men; the struggles and setbacks as they created places for themselves in civic life as citizens, voters, party leaders, and elected officials; shifting political values and the changing fortunes and identities of the Democratic and Republican parties—shaped the conduct and meaning of the 2008 election. Yet the chapter contends that their successes in 2008 were hardly simple American success stories—while these candidates were breaking barriers, they also were juggling the familiar tasks of a presidential bid.

In this study, the Cyprus policy of Turkey is analysed between the years 1950-1960 when the Democratic Party was in power. In the period in question, structure of bi-communal state in Cyprus was laid. Therefore, this period, has witnessed important developments which have multi-dimensional effects nowadays as well in terms of both Turkey’s foreign policy, and the future of Turkish society living in Cyprus. During the process that provides the rise of The Republic of Cyprus gradually, the Democratic Party’s vision and the policy followed about the island’s international status and the future of the people of the island have been analysed in three phases. As a result of the study during which the archive documents greatly benefited, it is seen that Turkey which had to leave Cyprus to the UK with the Lausanne Peace Treaty1923, became eligible in Cyprus again thanks to the Democratic Party’s foreign policy.

Recent surveys have shown that an increasing portion of the US public believes the two major US parties adequately represent the US public opinion and think additional parties are needed. However, there are high barriers for third parties in political elections. In this paper, we aim to address two questions: "How well do the two major US parties represent the public's ideology?" and "Does a more-than-two-party system better represent the ideology of the public?". To address these questions, we utilize the American National Election Studies Time series dataset. We perform unsupervised clustering with Gaussian Mixture Model method on this dataset. When clustered into two clusters, we find a large centrist cluster and a small right-wing cluster. The Democratic Party's position (estimated using the mean position of the individuals self-identified with the parties) is similar to that of the centrist cluster, and the Republican Party's position is between the two clusters. We investigate if more than two parties represent the population better by comparing the Akaike Information Criteria for clustering results of the various number of clusters. We find that additional clusters give a better representation of the data, even after penalizing for the additional parameters. This suggests a multiparty system represents of the ideology of the public better.

The confirmation narrative will likely not look too different from the one surrounding Justice Sonia Sotomayor. President Obama will nominate a judge with a strong resume including a degree from an elite university. The judge will have a moderately liberal voting record and perhaps be a person of color, a woman or both. Liberal interest groups will support the nominee, but some more progressive groups will be critical of the candidate's pro-business history. The right wing will attack the nominee as yet another sign of the imminent socialist apocalypse and identify minor scandals and gaffes which they will seek to make into bigger issues. The nomination fight will end with the nominee being confirmed with almost unanimous Democratic support and perhaps the support of a small handful of Republican senators as well. While the final outcome and general outline of the nomination process are unlikely to offer any surprises, the way these events play out and the political strategies and rhetoric which both parties employed are significant because they will, at least partially, frame the fall elections. While the nomination fight will share the headlines with the economic problems which the country still faces and ongoing developments in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the nomination is significant because it will probably focus largely on social issues and more unadulterated partisanship then the other major issues facing the countries. During the nomination fight, each party will seek to portray the other as an extremist. The Democrats will point to the right wing opposition to the nominee as proof of Republican intolerance and refusal to take governance seriously, while the Republicans will go back to the well of calling the nominee too liberal and out of touch with real Americans. There are also potential pitfalls in this nominating process for both parties. Obvious pitfalls for the Obama and the Democratic Party include a scandal arising around the nominee due to insufficient vetting or the more likely possibility that the nominee over the course of his or her academic or legal writing has taken positions that, while more or less mainstream in scholarly circles on the left or right, lend themselves to attack as elitist or out of touch with America. This might be called the Lani Guinier scenario. For the Republican Party the major pitfalls are the inevitability that they will again show themselves to be the party of no, and the likelihood that the party will again fail in their effort to stop the nomination. There is the additional possibility the Republican Party will not be able to rein in their more radical elements. A six week spectacle in which the opposition to the nominee is dominated by images of Tea Partiers and radical rhetoric at a time when the majority of

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama. Three Rivers Press, 1995, 453 pgs, ISBN: I-4000-8277-3, $13.95The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama. Crown Publishers, 2006, 375 pgs, ISBN: 978-1-84767-083-0, $16.50Obama: From Promise to Power by David Mendell. HarperCollins, 2007, 406 pgs, ISBN: 978-0-06-085821-6, $14.95 When Barack (‘blessed’) Obama – the child of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother – was elected as the first African-American president of the United States in November 2008, a wave of ‘Obamamania’ swept across the African continent, its Diaspora, and the world. Former South African president, Nelson Mandela, noted: ‘Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place’. Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki said: ‘The victory of Senator Obama is our own victory because of his roots here in Kenya. As a country, we are full of pride for his success’. South African president at the time, Kgalema Motlanthe, opined: ‘Your election…. carries with it hope formillions…. of people of …African descent both in Africa and in the diaspora’. Nigerian president, Umaru Yar’Adua noted: ‘Obama’s election has finally broken the greatest barrier of prejudice in human history. For us in Nigeria, we have a great lesson to draw from this historic event.’ Finally, the former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, the Ghanaian Kofi Annan, exclaimed: ‘Obama’s victory demonstrates America’s extraordinary capacity to renew itself.’...

Partisanship has often been noted as one of the most conspicuous factors in legislative voting in the U.S. Congress. This paper attempts to trace party voting to shared policy goals. After the mean attitudes of congressmen belonging to the same party were ascertained for a number of policy domains, the effect of mean party attitudes on roll-call voting was estimated by regression analysis, taking into account the deviation of individual congressmen from their respective mean party attitudes. The results demonstrate that in all three policy domains examined, i.e., social welfare, civil rights, and foreign policy, shared party attitudes leave a strong imprint on individual roll-call decisions. The voting decisions of congressmen, in fact, are found to owe more to the shared party attitudes than to their own individual attitudes. The paper also explores the communication process through which shared policy attitudes are translated within Congress into partisan roll-call votes and points to a way of reconciling the “predispositional” and the “interactional” approach to legislative decision making.