This article focuses on potential gaps caused by the absence from the Twenty-Fifth Amendment of provisions to deal with the disability of a Vice President and the omission from the statutory line of succession law of provisions comparable to Sections 3 and 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment for when there is an able Vice President. The analysis offers a critical review of the latent ambiguities in the succession provision to the United States Constitution, noting problems that have arisen from the time of the Constitutional Convention, to John Tyler's accession to office, to numerous disability crises that presented themselves throughout the twentieth century, to the present day. As the world becomes more complex and threats to the presidency more common, continued examination of our succession structure and its adequacy for establishing clear and effective presidential succession provisions under a broad range of circumstances is of paramount concern. This article embraces this robust discussion by offering some suggestions for improving the system in a way that does not require a constitutional amendment. The first part of the analysis traces the events that have driven the development of the nation's succession procedures. The second part examines the inadequacies, or “gaps,” that remain in the area of presidential inability, and the third part sets forth recommendations for resolving these gaps.

This article offers a new perspective on when and why individual-level authoritarian perceptions of security threats change. We reexamine claims that authoritarian members of the public responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in a counterintuitive fashion. The response was counterintuitive in that, rather than a desire for a stronger government with the ability to impose measures to address the pandemic and its consequences, authoritarian individuals rejected a stronger government response and embraced individual autonomy. The article draws on perceptions of security threats—issues that directly or indirectly harm personal or collective safety and welfare—from surveys in two different contexts in England: 2012, when perceptions of the threat from infectious disease was low relative to most other security threats, and 2020, when perceptions of the personal and collective threat of COVID-19 superseded all other security threats. We argue that the authoritarian response was not counterintuitive once we account for the type of threat it represented.

In the wake of avian flu outbreaks in 2004, Cambodia received $45 million in commitments from international donors to help combat the spread of animal and human influenza, particularly avian influenza (H5N1). How countries leverage foreign aid to address the specific needs of donors and the endemic needs of the nation is a complex and nuanced issue throughout the developing world. Cambodia is a particularly compelling study in pandemic preparedness and the management of avian influenza because of its multilayered network of competing local, national, and global needs, and because the level of aid in Cambodia represents approximately $2.65 million per human case—a disproportionately high number when compared with neighbors Vietnam and Indonesia. This paper examines how the Cambodian government has made use of animal and human influenza funds to protect (or fail to protect) its citizens and the global community. It asks how effective donor and government responses were to combating avian influenza in Cambodia, and what improvements could be made at the local and international level to help prepare for and respond to future outbreaks. Based on original interviews, a field survey of policy stakeholders, and detailed examination of Cambodia's health infrastructure and policies, the findings illustrate that while pandemic preparedness has shown improvements since 2004, new outbreaks and human fatalities accelerated in 2011, and more work needs to be done to align the specific goals of funders with the endemic needs of developing nations.

People vary in climate change skepticism and in their views on disaster cause and prevention. For example, the United States boasts higher rates of climate skepticism than other countries, especially among Republicans. Research into the individual differences that shape variation in climate-related beliefs represents an important opportunity for those seeking ways to mitigate climate change and climate-related disasters (e.g., floods). In this registered report, we proposed a study examining how individual difference in physical formidability, worldview, and affect relate to attitudes about disaster and climate change. We predicted that highly formidable men would tend to endorse social inequality, hold status quo defensive worldviews, report lower levels of empathy, and report attitudes that promote disaster risk accumulation via lesser support for social intervention. The results of an online study (Study 1) support the notion that men’s self-perceived formidability is related to disaster and climate change beliefs in the predicted direction and that this relationship is mediated by hierarchical worldview and status quo defense but not empathy. An analysis of a preliminary sample for the in-lab study (Study 2) suggests that self-perceived formidability relates to disaster views, climate views, and status quo maintaining worldviews.

Recent research suggests that contemporary American society is marked by heightened hostile racial rhetoric, alongside increasing salience of White nationalists who justify an ideology of racial hierarchy with claims of biological superiority. Media coverage of such genetics research has often emphasized a deterministic (or causal) narrative by suggesting that specific genes directly increase negative outcomes and highlighting reported genetic differences between racial groups. Across two experimental studies, we examine the effect of the media’s portrayal of scientific findings linking genes with negative health and behavioral outcomes on measures of racism. We find that deterministic genetic attributions for health and behavioral outcomes can lead to more negative racial out-group attitudes. Importantly, we also investigate potential interventions in the presentation of genetic science research. Our research has implications for understanding racial attitudes and racialized ideology in contemporary American politics, as well as for framing scientific communication in intergroup contexts.

We examine the likely acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine in the period prior to political polarization around vaccine mandates. Two representative cross-sectional surveys of 1,000 respondents were fielded in August and December 2020. The surveys included items about the COVID-19 vaccine and vaccine mandates. Respondents self-identifying as liberal were the least likely to believe the vaccine had undisclosed harmful effects (p< .001), conservatives were the most likely (p < .001), and moderates fell in between. Individuals with a bachelor’s degree were less likely to think the vaccine had undisclosed harmful effects than individuals without a bachelor’s degree (p < .001), and 60.5% of those individuals did not support a government vaccine mandate. Political ideology was more often strongly associated with avoiding government involvement compared to education level. In summary, both liberal political ideology and higher education were significantly associated with endorsing intended vaccine uptake. We discuss these results in terms of positive versus negative rights.

Reviewing the work of Lynton Caldwell, Robert Blank, and Andrea Bonnicksen is both a privilege and a challenge. These three scholars rank among the key figures in the development of biopolicy as a legitimate research and teaching subfield within political science. Each of them worked in academia, on significant bioethical advisory boards, and with policymaking entities, and also contributed to numerous externally funded research projects. Across long and prolific careers, Caldwell, Blank, and Bonnicksen engaged seriously with the political, social and ethical issues raised by significant advances in many bio-scientific domains. This essay analyzes several of their works across two broad themes: 1) the development of the subfields of biopolitics and biopolicy, and 2) the tension between science policy and democratic governance. While each of them wrote significant and well-received books, the focus here is on insights to be gleaned from an idiosyncratic selection of their scholarly articles across the time period, 1966 to 2007. To borrow Michel Foucault's term, this brief and necessarily selective archaeology of the published journal record nevertheless demonstrates the significance, durability and prescience of the authors' insights. (I expect that at least one, if not all three, of these authors might raise objections to the mention of Foucault, but the term “archaeology” in this instance is apt.)

Doi:10.2990/32_2_2, published by Association for Politics and the Life Sciences at Texas Tech University and the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, October 2013.

Nurses, as other life science students, have been prejudiced against politics, imagining that it only contaminates techno-scientific enterprises. However, the new, professional nurse is aware of the need for political understanding and political skills. The transformation of the socio-economic status of the health care industry from a social service to a business provides an excellent opportunity for introducing the nursing student to political thought in a positive conjunction with practical analysis.

To generate a credible metapolitical framework, I embrace rather than avoid the current problems about the nature of the subject matter of politics. An aggressive, philosophically informed attack on the myth of autonomous, objective science opens the student's intellectual map of reality, and lays the groundwork for a proposed (paradoxical) complementarity of the two traditional models: politics as a science and politics as a humanity. This uncomfortable, middle ground position, abandoning any global Rationalism, again makes historical and contemporary case studies a relevant—in fact essential—part of political education. This is an effective approach to introducing the nursing student, whose education is dominated by classical, rationalistic, scientific images, to political studies.

Is it possible to prevent biological, chemical, and toxin warfare from occurring? The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), an international treaty banning the possession and hostile use of biological and toxin weapons, already exists; and a similar chemical weapons treaty is currently being negotiated. The older Geneva Protocol of 1925 bans the “first use” of these weapons in war. It might seem that the threat of use of these weapons of mass destruction is nearly at an end.

Biopolitics must be taught in a context that makes it possible for students to acquire competence in at least evolutionary biology, genetics (with the proper molecular biology perspective), biological anthropology, neurobiology, and the evolution of behavior. A more modest beginning may be necessary, however, and actually has been pursued at various institutions.

Although a systematic study of experiences in teaching biopolitics has not been prepared, various impressions have been obtained. In spite of some seemingly discouraging situations with respect to biopolitics, expectations that a biobehavioral perspective ultimately will be the principal and pervasive frame of reference for a proper study of political processes and institutions are justified.