Abstract: Israel's contenders for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest (known as the ESC or, as here, Eurovision) were the Israeli Jewish-Arab duo Achinoam Nini and Mira Awad. The chosen song was "There Must Be Another Way," a tri-lingual appeal for peace and reconciliation sung in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The decision to nominate Nini and Awad as Israel's representatives to Eurovision was announced in early January, in the midst of a full-scale war Israel launched on Gaza and its inhabitants, which came in response to several years of rockets ired into Israel from the Hamas-led territory. Given the timing and the high proile of the ESC, an annual competition held among active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the duo's collaboration generated much public debate in Israel and beyond. The debate highlighted the symbolic charge of the song and its performers, and it continued throughout the year, animated by the political situation, the duo's activities, and the media that closely followed the process leading to the May 2009 contest and its aftermath. This article will analyze the meanings given to the artistic collaboration of the two performers that were circulating in the public sphere to show how, in this war-torn region, cultural and political domains are intertwined such that wars are fought not only with guns and rockets but also within cultural spheres, and that both domains are constitutive of highly contested social constructions of ethnic and national afiliations. Eurovision is a site in which the intersection of popular culture with national and international politics is especially visible, due to its country-centered format, the voting processes, and the extent of mass mediation--over 100 million viewers each year (Haan, Dijkstra, and Dijkstra 2005). The voting process takes place at the national level irst when the representative song is chosen, and later during the Eurovision Song Contest, when each country votes for other countries' representative songs. Since the late 1990s, the voting process at both stages typically combines popular votes counted in local telethons with votes cast by a panel of experts commonly associated with each country's broadcasting apparatus (Cleridos and Stengos 2006). (1) Songs must be newly written for the occasion, and the participatory nature of the selection process serves to mobilize citizens to share in the creation of what Benedict Anderson calls the "physical realization of the imagined community" (1983:145). According to Anderson, the moments in which songs are publicly shared to signify an event--for example, anthems sung on national holidays--create an experience of simultaneity in which people who are unknown to each other come together in a special kind of imagined community: the nation. What Anderson is pointing to is that music provides one of the ways in which nationhood is culturally constructed. The participatory nature of Eurovision provides for similar moments of simultaneity, both when the public votes for the song and image that would represent the nation, and when it votes for other nation's songs. At the same time that Eurovision is a participatory event, the Eurovision voting process also leaves much of the control in the hands of government-affiliated institutions. In other words, what represents "the nation," and also determines the relative value of cultural production of other nations, combines both popular vote and government control. This process highlights the important role cultural policy has in the creation of the imagined community, and in the delimitation of the cultural boundaries of this community with respect to other communities. Miller and Yudice (2002) analyze cultural policy as a conflation of two registers: the aesthetic register and the anthropological register, which, when combined, provide for the training of citizens to share common values. The songs represented at Eurovision provide the musical and lyrical content that is interpreted at the aesthetic register, while the context of national representation directed by government institutions inculculates nationalist sentiments among citizens in a manner deemed appropriate by such institutions. …

Abstract: The power to nominate and confirm federal judges is shared by Congress and the president, yet few works explicitly address the role that Congress plays in shaping the preselection pool for judicial nominees. In this article, we illuminate this debate by exploring judicial nomination requests from Members of Congress to the Eisenhower and Ford Administrations. In explaining who is nominated, the characteristics of the nominee matter more than the characteristics of the nominator, with the party affiliation of a nominee being the strongest predictive factor. Institutional characteristics are more prevalent at the confirmation stage, where the Senate relied more heavily on its members and the judicial experience of nominees than did presidents in nominating them. Given our results, partisanship appears to have mattered earlier than presumed in judicial nominations, with even ostensibly nonpartisan presidents such as Eisenhower understanding the importance of appointing like-minded individuals to lifetime pos...

Abstract: "PEOPLE MATTER" IS A CENTRAL CONCLUSION FROM THE UNITED NATIONS Intellectual History Project and the penultimate sentence of the first of seventeen published volumes. (1) Yet critical contributions by individuals who work at the world organization are usually overlooked or downplayed by analysts who stress the politics of 192 member states and the supposedly ironclad constraints placed by them on international secretariats. However, I have devoted considerable professional energy to international administration, both as an analyst and as a civil servant. (2) My proposition is straightforward: the United Nations should rediscover the idealistic roots of the international civil service, make room for creative idea-mongers, and mark out career development paths for a twenty-first century secretariat with greater turnover and younger and more mobile staff. This essay explores the origins of the concept, problems, the logic of reform, and specific improvements. Examples come from the UN's three main areas of activity--peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development. (3) Overwhelming Bureaucracy and Underwhelming Leadership: The "Second UN" If the conceptual UN is unitary, the real organization consists of three linked pieces. The "Second UN" consists of heads of secretariats and staff members who are paid from assessed and voluntary budgets. Inis Claude long ago distinguished it from the arena for state decisionmaking, the "First UN" of member states. The "Third UN" of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), experts, commissions, and academics is a more recent addition to analytical perspectives that first appeared in these pages. (4) The possibility of independently recruited professionals with allegiance to the welfare of the planet, not to their home countries, remains a lofty but contested objective. During World War II, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sponsored conferences to learn from the "great experiment" of the League of Nations (5). One essential item of its legacy, the international civil service, was purposefully included as UN Charter Article 101, calling for "securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity." (6) The Second UN's most visible champion was Dag Hammarskjold, whose speech at Oxford in May 1961, shortly before his calamitous death, spelled out the importance of an autonomous and first-rate staff. He asserted that any erosion or abandonment of "the international civil service ... might, if accepted by the Member nations, well prove to be the Munich of international cooperation." (7) His clarion call did not ignore the reality that the international civil service exists to carry out decisions by member states. But Hammarskjold fervently believed that UN officials could and should pledge allegiance to a larger collective good symbolized by the organization's light-blue-covered laissez-passer rather than the narrowly perceived national interests of the countries that issue national passports in different colors. Setting aside senior UN positions for officials approved by their home countries belies that integrity. Governments seek to ensure that their interests are defended inside secretariats, and many have even relied on officials for intelligence. From the outset, for example, the Security Council's five permanent members have reserved the right to "nominate" (essentially select) nationals to fill the key posts in the secretary-general's cabinet. The influx in the 1950s and 1960s of former colonies as new member states led them to clamor for "their" quota or fair share of the patronage opportunities, following the bad example set by major powers and other member states. The result was downplaying competence and exaggerating national origins as the main criterion for recruitment and promotion. Over the years, efforts to improve gender balance have resulted in other types of claims, as has the age profile of secretariats. …

Abstract: At most companies, the board of directors has sole authority to nominate candidates for election to the board. In recent years, some governance experts have advocated rules lessening these restrictions and allowing shareholders greater access to nominate candidates.Supporters of proxy access argue that, because directors are the representatives of shareholders, shareholders should have the right to nominate individuals to serve on their behalf. Opponents argue that shareholders lack firm-specific knowledge about the qualifications necessary to fill a board vacancy, and that proxy access will open the board to “special interests.”We examine the issue. What impact will proxy access have on director elections? Will it improve or impair governance quality? Topics, Issues and Controversies in Corporate Governance and Leadership: The Closer Look series is a collection of short case studies through which we explore topics, issues, and controversies in corporate governance. In each study, we take a targeted look at a specific issue that is relevant to the current debate on governance and explain why it is so important. Larcker and Tayan are co-authors of the book Corporate Governance Matters, and A Real Look at Real World Corporate Governance.

Abstract: This report briefly describes the role of the Senate in the confirmation process, defined in the Constitution; Article II, Section 2 provides that the President "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint high government officials."

Abstract: This paper aims to explain amendments to the Court Organization Law in Taiwan with a revised insurance theory. With the effort of the Prosecutors Reform Association (PRA) and the Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF), significant changes were made to the Court Organization Law in 2006. The prosecutorial system in Taiwan thus benefits from the changes as a result of the judicial reform. Among the changes, the first is the nomination of the Prosecutor General, the head officer in the Taiwanese prosecutorial system. The Prosecutor General would be nominated by the President and need to be approved by the Parliament. In addition, a four-year term of office is guaranteed to the Prosecutor General by the law. Secondly, the Prosecutorial Personnel Review Council (PPRC) obtained its legitimacy. Nine members on the council would be elected while the other eight would be appointed. The third change is the establishment of the Special Investigation Division (SID). Due to these changes, the prosecutorial system has increased its power and independence. The insurance theory alone is not sufficient to explain the changes. According to the insurance theory, stepping-down politicians who hold a long-term vision will choose to give up their control of the judiciary. However, the judicial reform went through a different way in Taiwan. Reform groups aligned with the KMT, which was then the opposition party, to force the party in power, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to make changes. Therefore, this paper aims to explain these changes with a revised insurance theory. Because politicians in Taiwan paid more attention to short-term interests under the unsteadiness of domestic politics, the amendment was mainly pushed by the KMT, which was expected to replace the DPP regime after the presidential election of 2008. Although the DPP might lose some power once the way to nominate the Prosecutor General changed, it was willing to assent to the amendment. It was because the DPP could still have the right to nominate the Prosecutor General after the amendment. Under the circumstances, changes in the Court Organization Law, therefore, became plausible.

Abstract: Berry et al.'s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a state's members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a member's ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker.