Les députés, leurs assistants et les usages du crédit collaborateurs. Une sociologie du travail politique

This analysis of how the staffs of members of the French parliament are organized focuses on the tasks that deputies assign to their parliamentary assistants. The distribution of tasks among assistants suggests that the organization and division of labor should be understood mainly in relation to the pressures generated by elections in the home district. Most staff-members are assigned to this work, since a seat in the National Assembly very much depends on providing services to constituents. The staff is so involved in solving constituents’ “personal” problems of various sorts that its members are forced to devise strategies for regulating demand and providing often token responses. Developing relations with constituents even affects the staff's legislative tasks. For deputies, it is a way to reduce the “occupational” risks inherent in elective office. Deputies adapt to a voting system that pushes them to adopt a conception of representation closer to being a spokesperson for a district's inhabitants than being a representative of the Nation.     

IDEOLOGY AND LEGISLATOR SHIRKING

We argue that legislator shirking (voting on the basis of personal ideology rather than the interests of one's constituents) can exist, but its appearance should conform to the law of demand. We test and confirm this theory using votes on defense expenditure bills in the U.S. Senate in 1982. We assume the cost of shirking is relatively higher on narrowly focused bills on specific weapons systems with well-defined beneficiaries, and relatively lower on general defense expenditure bills with uncertain final distribution of funds. We find greater influence for senators' ideology in general versus specific bills.     

Competitive lobbying for a legislator's vote

This paper develops a model of interest group lobbying based on the central premise that such lobbying is fundamentally an exercise in strategic information transmission. Lobbyists typically possess information that legislators do not and, inter alia, such information is relevant to legislators when it concerns the consequences — either policy or political — of supporting one bill rather than another. However, given that the interests of lobbyists do not necessarily coincide with those of legislators, the extent to which a lobbyist is able to persuade a legislator to act in his or her interest is moot. The paper explores the extent to which lobbyists can influence a legislative decision in such a setting; in particular, we are concerned with the incentives for interest groups to acquire costly information and lobby a legislator when there exist other groups that do not share the same interests. Among the results are that a legislator will on average make better decisions with lobbying than without, and that the more important is an issue to a special interest group, the more likely is the legislator to make the correct full-information decision.Herb and Gloria Weiss are indirectly responsible for this paper. Unfortunately, neither they nor the anonymous referees can be held responsible for any errors or omissions the paper might contain.     

Kelso’s binary economy as social ethics

Professor Robert Ashford (1996) has undertaken to bring attention to the economic ideas of the late Louis Kelso, best known as the inventor of leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). ESOPs are but a small part of a much more ambitious policy program for spreading capital ownership, a program predicated on Kelso’s unique economic theory, dubbed “binary economics,” and intended to create a “binary economy.” This article critically examines two normative arguments for creating a binary economy as a question of social ethics. It finds that the argument that a binary economy would be more just has a serious flaw related to Kelso’s concept of “productiveness,” but that the argument that a binary economy would be more democratic offers a more promising normative basis for instituting a binary economy. It concludes that the rest of Kelso’s theory and his policy program are worth further examination.     

Norwegian lottery winners: Cautious realists

The study investigated 261 lottery winners of prizes of NKR 1 million (US $150,000) or more in the years 1987–91 in a postal survey. The modal Norwegian winners were middle-aged married men of modest education, living in small communities. Emotional reactions to winning were few, aside from moderate happiness and relief. Winners emphasized caution, emotional control and unconspicuous spending, e.g. paying debts and sharing with children. There was only a slight increase in economic spending. A wish for anonymity was frequent, together with fear of envy from others. Betting was modest both before and after winning. Experiences with winning were predominantly positive. Life quality was stable or had improved. An age trend was observed, accounting for more variance than any other variable. The older winners seemed to represent a puritan subculture of caution, modesty and emotional restraint. A slightly more impatient pattern of spending was characteristic of younger winners. The results support Kaplan's 1987 and others' findings that lottery winners are not gamblers, but self-controlled realists and that tenacious, negative cultural expectations to the contrary are myths, but perhaps also deterrents of uncontrolled behavior.     

Interlegislator Relations and Policy Making: A Sociological Study of Roll‐Call Voting in a State Legislature1

Legislative roll‐call voting is crucial in policy making. Standard approaches to studying roll‐call voting focus on legislator attributes, ignoring how social factors, such as legislator relations, may drive voting. Using original data based on a state legislature, I adopt a relational approach to examine how legislator relations impact roll‐call voting net of attributes. Results show that relations strongly influence voting, adding significantly to the explanatory power of the models. These results imply that standard approaches to studying roll‐call voting should incorporate consideration of social factors, suggesting the value of social influence models in studies of political phenomena.     

The impact of legislator and constituency ideology on voting on the assault weapons ban

Using variables that represent a legislator's entire legal constituency, previous research by social scientists has concluded that views of the legislator's constituency have little effect on how legislators vote. This question is reexamined by defining constituency as those voters most likely to vote for the legislator (i.e., members of the legislator's own political party and independents). Furthermore, instead of measuring constituency by either a demographic or vote-based measure, a survey measure of the ideological identification of voters (i.e., the voter's self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) is introduced. It is found that the ideology of a senator's electoral constituency was an important factor on the recent U.S. Senate vote to ban 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. The findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and measure constituency.     

Shadow Welfare II

Abstract

Tax expenditures are any exemption, credit, deduction, or exclusion from the payment of taxes. At the state level, such expenditures often remain unaccounted for, create little economic development, and leave state and local governments with reduced resources for funding basic services such as fire, police, schools, and other general welfare spending. This paper illustrates methods state and local governments use to grant large tax breaks, the resulting financial problems legislators typically solve by raising individual taxes or cutting spending, and the implications for social welfare practitioners.     

Constituent diversity and congress: the case of NAFTA

An important finding of legislative research is that constituency variables are more important predictors of a legislator’s vote when constituent preferences are homogeneous, as opposed to when the various elements of the legislator’s constituency are pulling the legislator in opposing directions (Goff & Grier, Public Choice, 76, 5–20; Bailey & Brady, American Journal of Political Science, 42, 524–544). We examine these expectations on a highly salient vote, the 1993 senate vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement. While we find support for the view that constituency variables are more important in homogeneous than heterogeneous constituencies, we also find that by confining constituency variables to economic factors scholars overlook the importance of constituent ideology on legislator behavior in homogeneous constituencies.     

Economic perspectives on public relations

This paper explores the relationship between economic theory and public relations, in order to explain how public relations management contributes to companies’ overall economic gains. It uses a “blend” of economic theories to explain the role and contribution of public relations from the economic point of view. The paper sees a link between the strategic management of public relations as a function, and portions of neoclassical theory, as well as to alternative economic approaches relating to investments and transaction costs.     

Theorizing the relationship between inequality and economic growth

This article explores a promising theoretical approach for reassessing the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The article draws some insights from the influential inverted U-curve hypothesis originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, but drastically recasts the original arguments by shifting two fundamental premises. First, retaining Kuznets’s emphasis on the importance of economic growth in generating demographic transitions between existing and new distributional arrays, we argue that a “constant drive toward inequality” results after replacing a Schumpeterian notion of “creative destruction” for the dualistic assumptions in Kuznets’s model. Second, while Kuznets devoted considerable attention to the impact of institutions on distributional outcomes, we argue that institutions should be understood as relational and global mechanisms of regulation, operating within countries while simultaneously shaping interactions and flows between nations. The article argues that economic growth, unfolding through institutions embedded in time and space, produces a constant drive towards inequality that results in a multiple and overlapping matrix of distributional arrays, an overall income distribution (e.g., within and between countries) that is both systemic and historical.     

Cultural evolution and economic growth: a theoretical hypothesis with some empirical evidence

This paper begins with a review of the literature on culture and development and finds that a “questionable” controversy divides the field: on one side are supporters of the ‘achievement motivation’, while on the other side are supporters of the ‘trust syndrome’, both in search of the ultimate attitude promoting economic development.This controversy is analysed through the lens of a broader conceptual framework, and a solution is proposed to settle the debate. The theoretical hypothesis asserts that economic culture, as any other aspect of culture, passes through stages of development. In the early stages, economic culture dwells on the problem of wealth distribution and, only later, does it focus on the core question of its growth. Using empirical data extracted from the World Values Survey Archives, we verify that during this latter stage both achievement motivation and trust syndrome are needed to promote economic growth.     

What Drives the Voting on Abortion Policy? Investigating Partisanship and Religion in the State Legislative Arena

Abstract

Much of the public policy debate on abortion now centers in the nation's state capitals. This research assesses the impact of partisanship and religiosity on the voting behavior of state legislators. Recent research indicates that a legislator's religious affiliation and the religiosity of their home districts can be a powerful predictor of votes on abortion bills, but this research uses a unique data set developed to analyze voting in the Florida House of Representatives to re-test those ideas and test several new ones. This work challenges the notion that member religion or district religiosity is more influential than partisanship in predicting votes on abortion. Ordered probit techniques show partisanship, gender and legislator religion (for Catholic and Jewish members only), to be the most significant predictors of abortion voting behavior. A number of district characteristics are found to be less significant. Theoretically, this suggests that legislators fulfill their party obligations as trustee on the floor of the House, more so than following constituent interests in the classic delegate role, as originally noted by Burke.     

President Nixon sees a ‘cover up’: Public relations in federal agencies

Early in his first term. President Nixon initiated an effort to make major cuts in the number of personnel of federal agencies engaged in public relations as well as in the agencies' public relations budgets. He described those public relations employees as “covered up pretty properly.” His goal was to “get the public relations complement in each Department reduced by 50 per cent regardless of what they are officially called.” This article reports on the origin, implementation and denouement of President Nixon's war on public relations in public administration at the federal level of government.     

State implementation of TANF: where do we stand in 2001?

To provide a context for understanding the evaluations discussed in this volume, this paper gives an overview of the federal TANF legislation and describes features of state TANF programs that are particularly relevant for appreciating the need for evaluation and for interpreting evaluations. These features include the states’ policies regarding work by applicants and recipients, policies to divert applicants from welfare, and rules designed to change individuals’ behavior regarding childbearing, childrearing, and marriage. Because the implementation of state policies depends on practices at the front lines of the welfare system, some features of the ‘culture’ of local welfare offices are also examined.     

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS, CONSTITUENT PREFERENCES, AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

We model the behavior of a vote-maximizing legislator in order to predict interest group campaign contributions to incumbent politicians. We show that committee assignments and voter preferences affect the price a legislator requires to produce policies for any interest group. An econometric analysis of actual interest group contributions shows that these groups make significantly larger contributions to legislators on committees with jurisdiction over especially relevant policy issues and to incumbents with non-hostile constituencies. These results support our theory; interest groups act as if committees matter in the determination of policy and voters' interests constrain interest group behavior.     

Economic versus psychological forecasting. Evidence from consumer confidence surveys

Permanent and widespread psychological biases affect both the subjective probability of future economic events and their retrospective interpretation. They may give rise to a systematic gap between (over-critical) judgments and (over-optimistic) expectations – the “forecast” error. When things go bad, then, psychology suggests that people tend to become particularly bullish, amplifying the forecast error. Also, psychology argues that personal/future conditions are systematically perceived to be better than the aggregate/past ones. All this sharply contrasts with standard economic assumptions. Evidence from a unique dataset covering 10 European countries over 22 years confirms the presence of structural psychologically driven distortions in people’s judgments and expectations formation.     

Getting my stories straight: A narrativist in quest of congruence

Drawing on his work in the area of narrative gerontology, the author reflects on the measure of congruence that exists between the theories he has been developing about the storied complexity of adult development and his lived experience as an aging individual himself. His reflections include a discussion of his former career as a parish minister and his ongoing passion for “the writing life”. He concludes with some speculation on the possibility of combining his interests in narrative and aging with his continuing interest in theological themes.     

Federal Public Investment Spending and Economic Development in Appalachiai

Abstract This analysis examines the relationship between federal public investment spending and economic development in the special case of Appalachia. We propose that the effects of federal public investment spending on economic development operate indirectly through private capital accumulation. We use a spatial lag regression model to test our ideas for the 1980s and the 1990s. In the first step, we show that average federal public investment spending from 1983–1989 and 1993–1999 has net positive effects on measures of private capital accumulation in Appalachia. In the second step, we add three indicators of county economic development in 1989/1999 and find that earnings and nonfarm employment growth during the respective decades predicts higher levels of economic development at the end of the decades. However, while federal public investment spending has positive effects on measures of private capital accumulation, it has no direct effect on measures of economic development.     

Beyond the Career Mystique: “Time In,” “Time Out,” and “Second Acts”

The career mystique is the belief that working hard and putting in long hours continuously throughout adulthood is the path to occupational success, personal fulfillment, and a secure retirement. This is a false myth, increasingly irrelevant for most contemporary Americans, given that (1) few employees today have the back up of full-time homemakers, and (2) a competitive, information economy has fostered a global labor market, destroying the implicit contract linking seniority with security. America’s 21st century workforce requires a reconfiguration of “time in” paid work, including opportunities for “time outs,” as well as for “second acts.”President’s Address, Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, February 2004; also presented at the parallel research and policy forum “Sustainable Careers for a Changing Workforce.”