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Since the arrival of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the discourse of American military strategy has been framed around a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This article takes up the question of whether the RMA discourse represents a real strategic shift through an examination of the distribution of Defense Department spending on procurement across economic sectors and geographical space for the period 1990 to 2004. Detailed analysis of procurement data shows that the RMA builds on an earlier transformation in the United States' defense posture around the post-cold war disarmament rather than signal a new era for the military. military posture on two fronts: first, that information technology would become both the source of the United States' continued military superiority and the source of new military threats; second, that war fighting would be more efficient, and more effective, if the military mobilized a leaner, nimbler, and more technologically advanced fighting force. Some questioned whether such a revolution could, in fact, create an armed force capable of dealing with new, nontraditional, and asymmetric military threats that were seen to define the new, post-Soviet, military landscape. However, when Donald Rumsfeld entered the Defense Department in 2001, the RMA became enshrined in official Defense Department policy statements. Since then, new questions have been raised as to whether the United States' military has gone through a real revolution in its military affairs.Participants in this debate draw on careful readings of emerging Defense Department policy statements and on the conduct of recent American military operations as sources of evidence. Other scholars have suggested that evidence of fundamental shifts in a nation's military strategy is found in changes in the patterns of defense spending activity across industrial sectors and across geographical space. This article takes up the latter approach, which has yet to be applied to the RMA debate. If there was in fact a major strategic turning point based on the Rumsfeld version of the RMA in 2001-what I will call the "RMA thesis"-then this strategic shift should be reflected in noticeable changes in the pattern of defense spending along these two dimensions.Specifically, in this article I chart the shifting sectoral and geographical distributions of defense procurement spending from 1990 to 2004. Using these data, three specific questions will be addressed. First, has the industrial composition of defense procurement shifted during this period and, if so, does it coincide with shifts in the military's strategic discourse? Second, has the geographical distribution of procurement spending at the state level changed since the end of the cold war and, if so, do these changes coincide with changes in the military's strategic discourse? Third, to what extent are these two trends interrelated?While "revolutionary" language has characterized the George W. Bush administration's discourse on the military, in answering these questions this article will sho...

A perennial concern among scholars of globalization is the relationship between global social formations and national and subnational political and economic developments. While sociological understanding of "the global" has become increasingly rich, stressing the complex relationship between material and cultural pressures, an undertheorized nation state often sits on the receiving end of the sociologist's model of globalization. The goal of this article is to help move the sociology of globalization out of the analytical trap of globalnational dualism by developing an account of the transnationalization of political authority. Building on neo-Marxist and Weberian theories of the transnational, or global state, which explicate the macro-structural dynamics that have led to the transnationalization of the state as such, I look at the process of the transnationalization of political authority from an institutional perspective, one that focuses on processes of transnationalization within, and across, specific state agencies. These theoretical points are empirically motivated through an historical investigation of the transnationalization of monetary authority and its relationship to the international diffusion of policies of austerity from the era of the classical gold standard through the economic crisis of 2008.

When and how do tax regimes become sites of social protest and support broader movements of social policy reform? This question has drawn increasing interest from political sociologists and political scientists who have looked at the ways in which tax regimes create political cleavages that create the foundations for major shifts in state policy making or become the focal points of collective identity formation, leading to “tax protests.” In this paper we seek to contribute to this line of inquiry through an examination of the politics of Canadian tax policy from 1988 through 2008. What makes this case so compelling is that during these years the debates over tax policy raged over, first, the implementation and, later, the reduction of a federal value-added tax (VAT). However, rather than fueling a broad-based tax protest, debates over the VAT heightened interprovincial political cleavages that allowed the Conservatives to tie the question of the VAT to a broader economic program of typically “neoliberal” reforms: improving private-sector competitiveness and shrinking the size of the state. Drawing on a statistical analysis of the Canadian Election Study and an historical analysis of the conflict over taxation, we show how the federal structure of the Canadian state, and its policies of revenue equalization across the provinces, created an interprovincial adversarial politics that made sales tax reduction a key issue for Canadian voters. Our findings show how recognizing the historically contingent and institutionally specific context of struggles over tax policy helps to explain cross-national variation in the politics of taxation.

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