This book explores the impact of Latin America's political culture on the international politics of the region. It offers a general account of traditional Iberian political culture while examining how relations among states in the hemisphere -- where the United States has been the central actor -- have evolved over time. The authors assess the degree of consistency between domestic and international political behavior. The assessments are supported by case studies.

Political culture refers to the basic values, ideas, beliefs and political orientations by which countries, societies, and whole regions are guided. The underlying belief systems that shape cultures and societies and cause them to behave in certain, often distinct ways. The puzzle or query that chiefly concerns this author is why the United States (US) and its foreign policy have such a hard time understanding cultures and societies other than their own. This provocative book argues that the US needs to end its attitudes of superiority and condescension toward other nations and cultures and redirect its foreign policy accordingly. After an introduction that sets forth the main theoretical and conceptual arguments, the next chapters explore all the main areas of the world. The Conclusion pulls all these themes together, analyzes the common patterns that emerge, and suggests new directions for U.S foreign policy.

The usefulness and political implications of Area Studies programs are currently debated within the Academy and the Administration, where they are often treated as one homogenous and stagnant domain of scholarship. The essays in this volume document the various fields’ distinctive character and internal heterogeneity as well as the dynamism resulting from their evolving engagements with funders, US and international politics, and domestic constituencies. The authors were chosen for their long-standing interest in the intellectual evolution of their fields. They describe the origins and histories of US-based Area Studies programs, highlighting their complex, generative, and sometimes contentious relationships with the social science and humanities disciplines and their diverse contributions to the regions of the world with which they are concerned.

Drawing on the rich resources of the ten-volume series of The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science, this one-volume distillation provides a comprehensive overview of all the main branches of contemporary political science: political theory; political institutions; political behavior; comparative politics; international relations; political economy; law and politics; public policy; contextual political analysis; and political methodology. Sixty-seven of the top political scientists worldwide survey recent developments in those fields and provide penetrating introductions to exciting new fields of study. Following in the footsteps of the New Handbook of Political Science edited by Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann a decade before, this Oxford Handbook will become an indispensable guide to the scope and methods of political science as a whole. It will serve as the reference book of record for political scientists and for those following their work for years to come.

This is an introduction for academics, students, and poltical analysts to some of the latest trends in the study and state of culture and international history: modernity, NGOs, internationalism, cultural violence, the 'Romance of Resistance', and the culture of diplomacy.

Public policy is the business end of political science. It is where theory meets practice in the pursuit of the public good. Political scientists approach public policy in myriad ways. Some approach the policy process descriptively, asking how the need for public intervention comes to be perceived, a policy response formulated, enacted, implemented, and, all too often, subverted, perverted, altered, or abandoned. Others approach public policy more prescriptively, offering politically-informed suggestions for how normatively valued goals can and should be pursued, either through particular policies or through alternative processes for making policy. Some offer their advice from the Olympian heights of detached academic observers, others as 'engaged scholars' cum advocates, while still others seek to instill more reflective attitudes among policy practitioners themselves toward their own practices. The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy mines all these traditions, using an innovative structure that responds to the very latest scholarship. Its chapters touch upon institutional and historical sources and analytical methods, how policy is made, how it is evaluated and how it is constrained. In these ways, the Handbook shows how the combined wisdom of political science as a whole can be brought to bear on political attempts to improve the human condition.