Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups offer the analyst a highly complex challenge. The current literature classifies Islamic terrorist organizations as either networked or hierarchical. Yet, this classification fails to account for the appearance on the international stage of a new type of global terrorism. Most notably, it does not capture the structure and mode of operation of Al Qaeda as it emerged after the 2001 U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan. This article therefore introduces a new concept-the Dune organization-that is distinct from other organizational modes of thinking. This conceptualization leads to a new typology of Islamic terrorist organizations.This typology concentrates on organizational behavior patterns and provides a framework for a comparative analysis of terrorist movements, which is applied to a study of Al Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

No abstract

As elected politicians' knowledge, information and expertise about the policy process decrease, so will their ability to control it and to independently shape its agenda. When elected politicians spend less time in their positions due to cabinet instability, they will have less knowledge about policy issues in comparison to career bureaucrats. Multiparty parliamentary systems are characterized by cabinet instability, hence increasing the likelihood of this phenomenon. Indeed it has been shown that in these systems the bureaucracy is the main player in the policy process. This paper illustrates this phenomenon in the Israeli context, a clear example of a multiparty democracy with an unstable cabinet and a dominant bureaucracy.

No abstract

While national government elections are perceived as firstorder institutions that result in relatively high turnout rates, local elections are viewed as second-order institutions and are usually characterized by low turnout rates. We claim that this behavior is conditioned by the stakes that voters associate with elections as well as the voters' relative position in the socio-ethnic stratification structure. In this article we show that such conditions may yield an inversion in voters' perspectives. In other words, voters who are alienated from national government institutions and who are effectively mobilized by leaders of their socio-ethnic groups, which have high stakes in second-order institutions, tend to invert their preference with regard to the significance of elections. In such instances, national elections become second-order elections, and local elections become first-order elections. We use ballot-box level data from two national and two local elections in Israel to test this theory.