Eric Heginbotham, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, has joined the Pacific Council on International Policy, as a non-resident fellow focused on East Asian political and security issues. Among the projects he will carry out is a monograph on the triangular relationship among the United States, China and Japan. Heginbotham earlier served as a senior fellow of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has also been a visiting faculty member of Boston College's political science department. He speaks Japanese and Chinese and lived in Asia for more than 10 years. Heginbotham received a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently completed a book manuscript on civil-military relations in East Asia, Crossed Swords: Divided Militaries and Politics in East Asia, and has published articles on Japanese and Chinese foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, International Security, and the National Interest, as well as chapters in several edited books.

Ron E. Hassner (speaker) is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies and a CISAC affiliate. His research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. His publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and political-religious mobilization and the role of national symbols in conflict. Professor Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-3. In 2003-4 he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University.

Gail Lapidus (respondent) is a senior fellow emerita at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Lapidus is also professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chair of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies from 1985 to 1994. A specialist on Soviet society, politics and foreign policy, she has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995), From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Soviet System in Crisis, with Alexander Dallin (Westview, 1992), and Women in Soviet Society (University of California Press, 1979). A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.

On Tuesday, November 14, the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) will be hosting a first look at Making IT: The Rise of Asia in High Tech.

Making IT is edited by Henry S. Rowen, Marguerite Gong Hancock and William F. Miller, and features findings by scholars from from the United States, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China and India.

As Stanford University Press publishes Making IT this November, we invite you to attend this first look and discussion among scholars, policymakers and industry leaders.

Eleonora Pasotti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Cruz and Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. Her work has been concerned with the relationship between democracy, personal power and electoral law. Pasotti's research at CDDRL is directed toward three aspects of this relationship: how proportional and majoritarian electoral systems interact with clientelistic networks; how institutions shape the cost structure of political mobilization; and how institutions of vote mobilization, from clientelism to mass campaigning, distort the normative goal of democracy. Her previous work has been based largely on the politics of Naples, Italy, but has broad comparative implications for the study of clientelism, patronage politics and populism in the developing world as well. Prior to joining the faculty at Santa Cruz, Eleonora completed a PhD in Political Science at Columbia University under the direction of Charles Tilly, Jon Elster, and Ira Katznelson. She also holds an MSc in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Roland examines party politics, particularly in the context of the European parliament. Using key research throughout, he examines where loyalties lie, what affects these loyalties, and what the makeup is of the European parliament. Prof. Roland also takes a brief look at how this compares to national politics in different countries.

Synopsis

Prof. Roland explains that roll call analysis has long been an obsolete method of estimating politicians’ true values. This is mainly due to party politics. Legislative behavior, which is what Prof. Roland explores primarily in this talk, is offered a very rich platform for study in the European parliament, which consists of representative parties from 27 countries which also form into European parties. Prof. Roland explains that loyalties can lie with one’s national party, European party, and country. However, there is no reason for them to overlap. Because the European parliament plays very little role in elections in the nations of Europe, Prof. Roland argues that parties vote almost purely for legislative decision-making purposes. Prof. Roland also cites that voting for the EU parliament is not like a parliamentary democracy because nobody is put into power. In addition, he notes that the European Parliament has had a shifting role as time has passed, going from a consultative position to a probable vetoing power, as Prof. Roland predicts.

These numerous aspects of the European parliament raise several questions for Prof. Roland. He explores the strength of party cohesion within the parliament and methods used to enhance it such as disciplining those who vote against the party of contentious issues or giving signals of unification. Prof. Roland also examines what he explains as the ‘agreement index’ to investigate where members vote; for their national party, their European party, or their country. This rating, which has continually lowered, indicates that more vote for their national parties than member states or European parties. Prof. Roland is also interested in whether members’ votes are influenced more by their personal values or the party discipline effect.

Prof. Roland comes to a variety of interesting conclusions. He sees that there is overlap when members of the European parliament place themselves on the left-right scale. However, no such overlap is present in their voting patterns, showing clear evidence of the effect of party discipline. Prof. Roland finds that bigger parties, because they are more pivotal, are more cohesive as there is more at stake in their unity. On the other hand, national fractionalization has a negative effect of cohesion while ideological diversity plays almost no role in determining the extent of party cohesiveness in the European parliament. Employing a variety of statistics, Prof. Roland shows that the increase in the parliament’s power has also increased party cohesiveness. Therefore, Prof. Roland believes that while disagreement has increased in the European parliament, party cohesion has increased but not for ideological reasons. He ends by explaining that the role of ideology is in forming party coalitions in a parliament whose dimensions consist mainly of left and right.

About the Speaker

Gerard Roland is professor of economics and political science at University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1988. He is the author of five books, including Transition and Economics: Politics, Markets and Firms, published by MIT Press in 2000.

Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Graduate School of Business.