GENDER IDEOLOGY AND STATUS ATTAINMENT OF CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN WOMEN IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Theoretically derived measures and hypotheses concerning the connection between family ideology, gender ideals, and status attainment levels of conservative Christian women are examined in the twenty-first century. Conservative Christian women have a more intensive view of mothering, a stronger prolife stance, a younger age of childbearing, a higher number of children and a lower education level. These trends tend to intensify for women who convert to conservative churches after the age of 16 and reduce for women who engage in wage-work. A belief in Biblical inerrancy directly reduces educational attainment as does a higher intensity of mothering, a younger age of childbearing, and higher number of children. While there is no discernible direct effect of religiosity on income level, there is an indirect effect that is important to note.     

MEASURING PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR THE NEW CHRISTIAN RIGHT: THE PERILS OF POINT ESTIMATION

It has been reported that 30% of American adults support the"sociomoral platform of the Moral Majority" (Simpson, 1983).We lodge several criticisms of this estimate and/or the wayit has subsequently been interpreted, involving the treatmentof "don't know" responses, the selection of response categorycutting points, the passage of time, the effects of questionwording, and substance. We derive a much different estimateof public support for the Moral Majority platform in the sameyear, but our more basic conclusion is simply that public opinionon this issue, as on most complex issues, cannot be fairly reflectedby a single number.     

THE AGENCY OF POLITICS AND SCIENCE

We study a principal‐agent relationship between a politician and a researcher that captures stylized facts regarding the involvement of politics into scientific research. The politician has some ideal policy that he would like to implement, but needs to contract with a researcher to choose a policy that is supported by scientific advice. We study the implemented contracts under symmetric and under asymmetric information about the researcher's ability and concern for reputation, and discuss with which types of researchers the politician will contract. We identify several conflicts between the interests of voters and those of the politician. (JEL D72, D82, D83)     

STATUS POLITICS AND ECONOMIC CLASS INTERESTS:

The status politics paradigm has been utilized to examine many social movements, including prohibition and anti-pornography. The model assumes that economic and non-economic factors can be disassociated in such studies. This article disputes this and examines county-level 1918 prohibition referendum voting data from California. California is examined because it had a large wine industry, many breweries, and regionally separated religious and ethnic communities, with Germans and ethnic Catholics in the North and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the South. Multivariate analysis shows that status factors influenced referendum voting patterns: evangelical Protestants supported the measure, and ethnic Germans and Irish opposed it. However, economic forces were also instrumental in determining the referendum outcome.     

PARTY POLITICS AND THE PRICE OF PAYOLA

The literature contains two competing views of the role of political parties: parties are treated either as associations of interest groups supported to the degree that they offer electoral support in the lawmaker's district, or as expressions of the personal ideologies of the lawmakers. In this paper parties are treated as bargaining agents for groups of lawmakers in their dealings with interest groups. Interest groups are depicted buying votes on proposals where those votes are cheapest. Parties are combinations of consistently low-price vote suppliers. The theory has empirical power that discriminates between it and the two competing models.     

INFO-WAR AND THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST CURIOSITY

The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 and the subsequent declaration of the ‘war on terror’ by US and European powers, placed a particular burden upon feminists in those countries to call attention to the centrality of gender discourse in the current geo-political era. This essay recognises the urgency of exploring the ‘war on global terror’ from a feminist perspective, and applying pedagogical expertise to encourage wide-ranging, informed debate within the academic classroom. Identifying the feminist questions at the heart of contemporary discourse on freedom and civilization can become a valuable way to develop a critique of imperialism from many different locations. Two themes are pursued: the language of difference, and the implications of speaking about women and gender in different situations; and the challenges of postmodern warfare, which demand a close critique of information sources. The international enterprise to reconstruct civil society in Afghanistan offers urgent opportunities to test the feasibility of transnational feminist work, in theory and practice. Finally, the essay considers the importance of bringing different kinds of contemporary texts into the classroom. The best-selling The Bookseller of Kabul is examined as a useful subject of critique. Bringing a feminist perspective on whiteness can also be helpful in analysing representations of orientalist, racist texts. Finally, feminist analyses of militarism provide a valuable way to connect patterns of power ‘at home’ with the way that war is represented to the public.     

ANA MENDIETA AND THE POLITICS OF THE VENUS NEGRA

The theorizations by some early feminists of the affiliation between Earth and woman, the ‘archetype of the Great Goddess’, and the ‘universal female’, are today regarded with embarrassment as essentializing, ultimately disempowering gestures. This article examines a 1981 project by Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta for the feminist art journal Heresies. In this project she combines a photograph of one of her own earthworks with her translation of the nineteenth-century Cuban legend The Venus Negra. By investigating this legend in the context of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism, and this earthwork in terms of twentieth-century US/Latino politics, this article argues that the Earth is not necessarily the essential category it appears to be. It claims that the discursive deployment of the Earth - the nation's primitive Other - subverts ideologies of the nation and contributes to its performative renegotiation. Further, it suggests that, in using this legend to disrupt the hegemonic construction of nation, both the legend's authors and its contemporary translator play with the performativity of both gender and race.     

THE POLITICS OF THE DOORSTEP

This paper considers the legacy of continuing activism of women in the North East of England who organized in support of the 1984–85 miners’ strike. It refers to the traditional responsibility of women in mining localities for the maintenance of neighbourhood and kin relations and using the example of a key activist in one ex-mining village, it argues that the values associated with ‘mining community’ remain relevant as a reference point for a self-conscious, politicized reshaping of local relationships in post-industrial conditions. The material basis for this self-conscious approach has shifted from the masculine sphere of mining work and its associated community institutions to the feminized sphere of location and neighbourhood.     

NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,POPULISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE LIFEWORLD

Since the 1960s, New Social Movements (NSMs) have been prominent as new actors on the political scene. But, by comparison with other radical political agents, they have made a relatively poor showing in mainstream political theory. Habermas, for example, criticizes NSMs, including second-wave feminism, for merely masquerading as new forms of radical political agency. By introducing some ideas from Laclau, I show how to counter Habermas's criticism. I then rethink NSMs as a new post-liberal form of democratic-emancipatory political agency, which by contrast with the politics of the public sphere that Habermas champions, is anchored in the less organized reaches of the lifeworld.     

THE POLITICS OF PROTECTION:

This article examines the factors influencing the enactment of protective legislation for women, specifically maximum hours and minimum wage laws, by state lawmakers in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Traditional class theories of the state argue that employers are generally able to shape state policies to suit their interests. Yet, although employers staunchly opposed protective laws, most states enacted such laws. This article seeks to understand the conditions under which social groups, such as the women's reform groups who supported protective laws, are able to win legislative reforms in the face of employer resistance. Four conditions are found that allowed a gendered movement to counter the economic interests of employers: the women's groups' ability to form organizations and coalitions with powerful political actors, their use of a legitimating ideology, historically specific circumstances that reduced employer opposition, and the nature of the particular form of legislation being demanded.     

THE DISTRIBUTION OF POLITICAL POWER, THE COSTS OF RENT-SEEKING, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Poor economic growth in many countries can be explained by the misallocation of entrepreneurial resources to activities that do not foster growth. This paper deals with the relation between the distribution of political power, the allocation of entrepreneurial resources and growth. We model growth as deriving from Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who try to increase profits through innovation. We endogenize the choice of time devoted to this activity vis-a-vis other ways of increasing income, such as obtaining government subsidies. More unequal access to the political redistribution mechanism makes rent-seeking activities less profitable, and results in higher growth.     

ELECTORAL POLITICS, INTEREST GROUPS, AND THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT

This paper considers how government size responds to a change in the influence of interest groups. First, an election model is developed that has an equilibrium and in which interest groups have unequal influence. The authors then show that an increase in a group's influence per se does not cause government size to increase but does cause its size to increase when the government (1) cannot change tax shares or (2) provides a good benefiting one (untaxed) group, whose sole interest is in maximizing its consumption of the good. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the normative implications.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF BITCOIN

The recent proliferation of bitcoin has been a boon for users but might pose problems for governments. Indeed, some governments have already taken steps to ban or discourage the use of bitcoin. In a model with endogenous matching and random consumption preferences, we find multiple monetary equilibria including one in which bitcoin coexists with official currency. We then identify the conditions under which government transactions policy might deter the use of bitcoin. We show that such a policy becomes more difficult if some users strictly prefer bitcoin because they can avoid other users holding the official currency in the matching process. (JEL C78, E41, E42, E50)     

POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS AND THE KNOWLEDGE-GAP HYPOTHESIS

The knowledge-gap hypothesis suggests that a sudden infusionof information into a social setting serves to increase, ratherthan decrease, the gap in knowledge between high- and low-statusvoters. Political campaigns represent an especially appropriatesetting to test this hypothesis, because of (1) the increasedinformation that generally characterizes campaigns and (2) theimportant political consequences to lower status voters if thehypothesis is correct. A two-wave panel survey during the 1978New Hampshire gubernatorial campaign finds that on one issuethe knowledge gap increased during the campaign, while on another,perhaps less complex issue, the gap remained constant. Thesedifferences are hypothesized to be a function of different diffusioncurves of the high- and low-status voters, with implicationsfor the varying lengths of time states allow for campaigns betweenthe primary and general elections.     

VOTING IN FIRMS: THE ROLE OF AGENDA CONTROL, SIZE AND VOTER HOMOGENEITY

Voting is a common feature of most firms. Unrestricted voting, however, can lead to unstable decision making. We find that firms make tradeoffs among collective decision making, production scale, firm structure, and voter characteristics that are consistent with efforts to economize on the costs of voting. Firm responses include agenda control, restrictions to obtain a homogeneous voting population, and limits on firm size. We consider three long-surviving producer cooperatives, representing extreme cases of collective decision making, and find that their organization is sensitive to the costs of voting and to the employment of mechanisms to constrain those costs.     

CHALLENGES TO EU POLITICAL INTEGRATION AND THE ROLE OF DEMOCRATIZATION1

The European Union project of political integration faces three main challenges. The first concerns the constitutional make-up of the European Union as a political system. Key here is the role of subsidiarity and the question of statehood. The second challenge has to do with the opportunity structures for participation in a multilevel and supra-national context of governance. The third challenge is that of political identity. In the contemporary political debate, the first of the above challenges is discussed almost exclusively in terms of institutional mechanisms, the third in terms of symbolic identification based on culture and language. Opportunity structures for participation are thought to matter as a means of legitimacy or, alternatively, in terms of political acceptability. The underlying assumption is that policy is mainly a matter of technocratic management and politics a question of identity. This is the key problem of the contemporary discourse regarding European integration and the EU democratic deficit.