Equilibria in multi-party competition under uncertainty

This paper presents a model of multiparty competition when extraneous considerations unobservable to the parties influence voters' behavior. This leads political parties to model voters' preferences by means of probabilistic choice rules. The equilibrium analysis for 2,..., 6 parties is provided and compared to the outcomes of the standard (certainty) model.We thank one referee for very careful comments. The first author is grateful to the NSF for financial support.     

Finding the majority-rule equilibrium under lexicographic comparison of candidates

This paper considers the well studied problem of the existence of an undominated point, under the assumption of lexicographic preferences of voters, as espoused by Taylor in [24]. We extend Taylor's model to situations were we allow for (i) voters to have different ranings of the issues in n-dimensional issue space and (ii) a candidate to be disregarded by a voter if his stand on any one or more of the issues involved in the election is perceived to be too extreme by the voter and (iii) combinations of (i) and (ii). We extend the results of Taylor by demonstrating the non-existence of an equilibrium point in these models in general and then showing that under special circumstances, specialized variants of the “median” point(s) represent equilibrium or undominated points in these models too. Thus a model of voting behavior results that is closer approximation of reality in that historically incumbents tend to win. The primary conclusion of the paper is to suggest that incumbents tend to have an advantage when the election process is characterized by a large presence of special interests or as information becomes more expensive to acquire. Received: 13 February 1996 / Accepted: 27 March 1997     

On fairness and welfare analysis under uncertainty

This paper investigates the role of fairness, uncertainty, and a “veil of ignorance” in efficient resource allocation. It focuses on the choice of private and public goods, the method of financing, as well as the choice of information available for public decision-making. A fair-equivalent and Pareto efficient allocation is presented using a maximin criterion defined in terms of individual willingness-to-pay. The paper investigates the role of information in public decision making in terms of its implications for both efficiency and fairness. While better information typically generates improved efficiency, it can also contribute to unfair allocations. The effects of asymmetric information are discussed. Received: 4 May 1998/Accepted: 28 February 2002 We would like to thank two anonymous referees for very useful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. The research was supported in part by a Hatch grant from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.     

Private provision of public goods under price uncertainty

In this paper, price uncertainty is introduced into the model of voluntary provision of public goods. The analysis is carried out depending upon whether individuals make real or nominal contributions. We highlight the significant factors that determine the complex effects of changes in uncertainty on the level of provision, the level of welfare, and the gaps between equilibrium and optimal values of these variables. In particular, we show that in some situations it would be desirable to introduce artificial randomness in prices in order to alleviate the free rider problem and to increase welfare.We are indebted to two referees for their comments and suggestions.     

Being a Citizen

There has been a striving in Sweden, ideologically and legally, since the 1960s to develop and extend citizenship to persons with learning disabilities. This article had the purpose to capture and describe how persons with learning disabilities conceive citizenship and opportunities to participate in the societal arena. Twenty-three persons with learning disabilities were interviewed two times. Qualitative analysis focused on three themes: areas of interest, voting and significant persons. The analysis displayed that the informants' conceptions about citizenship differed in relation to environmental contexts. Significant persons are discussed as having considerable importance when exercising citizenship.     

Linking Citizen Participation to Empowerment Practice

Abstract

The author examines the social work literature on citizen participation and empowerment in order to identify key concepts that can be used to define empowerment-oriented community practice. A historical overview of the emergence of citizen participation and empowerment in the practice literature is presented, along with an overview of similar innovations and concepts related to social service delivery: the use of informal help and the Independent Living Movement. This literature is used to develop a model of empowerment practice that focuses on the importance of participatory decision-making structures in community-based organizations.     

Citizen Schools' partner-dependent expanded learning model

Citizen Schools, a national nonprofit organization, shares lessons learned through years of experience developing and sustaining effective partnerships with schools around the country.     

Relationship admitting families of candidates

A central theme in social choice is to determine when must there be a relationship among a group's sincere election rankings of several different subsets of candidates. This issue is completely resolved here for positional voting methods. Namely, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for a family of subsets of candidates to determine when there is a choice of positional voting methods so that there are relationships among the election rankings. The same issue is resolved for a related family of social choice mappings. Then, in part, these necessary and sufficient conditions are used i) to analyze sequential voting procedures, ii) to show how to create new classes of axiomatic representations for social choice mappings that uniquely characterize the Borda Count, and iii) to determine the limits of indeterminacy for positional voting election outcomes.This research was supported in part by NSF grant IRI-8803505 and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.     

Irresponsible Engagement and the Citizen Investor

The study investigates how shareholders are constructed and engaged with through public relations in the Australian financial sector. The web sites and annual and sustainability reports of major Australian companies and investment funds were examined through qualitative content analysis. Findings indicate that a hierarchical distinction exists within the discrete but amorphous stakeholder group known as shareholders, where privilege and disadvantage exist alongside disparate levels of power and agency. This is perpetuated by and through irresponsible public relations, which constructs a discourse of ownership that excludes citizens as legitimate stakeholders limiting their capacity to influence more ethical corporate decisions and practices. Recommendations are offered for how public relations might engage shareholders more responsibly.     

What Is a Good Corporate Citizen?*

Au caeur du débat sur les corporations multinationales se trouve la question de déterminer si ces corporations agissent en « bons citoyens » Cependant, les critères à utiliser dans une telle analyse n'ont pas retenu l'attention des politicologues, économistes, sociologues et théoriciens en organisation. Certains des critères rencontrés dans les débats actuels et la situation de divers types de corporations par rapport à ces critères font l'objet de cette étude. Les donnés révèlent que, pour certain critères, la nationalité des propiétaires est importante mais que, pour d'autres critères, on observe davantage de variation entre types de corporation qu'entre propriétaires de différentes nationalités. Un nombre de questions sont soulevés au sujet de l'identification du critère le plus important et au sujet de la configuration de critères necessaires pour definir le « bon citoyen corporatif » Il s'agit d'une étude d'exploration visant à soulever des questions concernant un problème relativement peu travaillé en théorie de l'organisation. The question of what is “good corporate citizenship” is presently a central issue in the national debate regarding multinational corporations. However, the criteria used to answer this question have not been dealt with in detail by political scientists, economists, sociologists, or organizational theorists. Some of the criteria which have been raised in the current debate and the extent to which various types of corporations perform in terms of each criterion are examined. The data show that for some criteria the nationality of the corporate owners is important, but for other criteria variations occur between types of corporations rather than between the nationality of the owners. A number of questions are raised regarding which criterion is the most important and which combinations of criteria are necessary in order to determine “good corporate citizenship” in Canada. The paper is exploratory and intended to raise questions for discussion on this relatively unexplored problem in organizational theory.     

对青少年公民意识教育的若干探讨

青少年阶段是公民意识形成的关键时期,也是公民意识教育的关键时期。加强青少年公民意识教育,对于培养中国特色社会主义建设者和接班人、构建社会主义和谐社会等都具有重要意义。当前,要把思想和行动统一到中央精神上来,准确理解当代青少年和公民意识的特点,深刻认识青少年公民意识教育的新境遇、新挑战和重大契机,全面把握青少年公民意识形成、教育的规律,从而确立青少年公民意识教育的科学实践路径。     

Japanese Citizen Participation in International Development Aid

With data from the 2006 Japanese General Social Survey, this study examines factors associated with citizen participation in international development aid (IDA). In line with the literature on correlates of charitable giving of time and money, it finds that structural positions of individuals, measured by their demographic, socioeconomic and social network characteristics, are associated with the probability of citizen participation in IDA. Moreover, the study shows that variables such as English skills, measured by the ability and opportunity to use English, and the level of endorsement of Official Development Assistance projects significantly and positively predict IDA participation status. Implications of these findings are discussed for future research on charitable giving for international development in Japan and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere.     

Pre-election polling and third party candidates

I analyze voters’ incentives in responding to pre-election polls with a third party candidate. Third party supporters normally have an incentive to vote strategically in the election by voting for one of the major candidates. But these voters would vote third party if the third party candidate is doing surprisingly well in the polls. Because voters are more likely to vote third party if the third party candidate is doing well in polls, voters who like the third party candidate best have an incentive to claim they will vote third party in the polls so that more voters will ultimately vote third party in the election. The differing incentives faced during polls and elections accounts for why third party candidates do better in polls than in elections.     

Citizen radicalism and democracy in the Dutch Republic

Conclution In this article I have investigated one of the supposed founder-members of R. R. Palmer's Age of Democratic Revolution, the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s. My purpose was to show that this movement, even though the Patriots made extensive use of such standard items of the democratic vocabulary as popular sovereignty and representation, did not envisage a political system that might be reasonably fitted into the revolution that Palmer had in mind.Instead, the Patriots stood within a long tradition of urban middle-class opposition politics. They held on firmly to both form and content of that tradition. What was new about them was the intensity and thoroughness with which they worked toward their goal of remedying the, as they saw it, corruption of the political system. We might even speculate that they had carried this particular tradition of urban corporatist republicanism to its logical extremes; that is to say, to a point where an even more radical step would be necessary to overcome the resistance of the established powers. They might, for example, have considered to take popular sovereignty at its face value, and over-come their distaste of democracy, so as to include the lower classes into their movement. That step, however, would have taken them outside the tradition that provided them with a specific brand of political liberty. Before the intervention of Prussian troops in the fall of 1787 they were not prepared to make such a momentous decision. For this would have implied a dropping of much that was essential to the corporatist ideology, which had been the prime motivation for their actions in the first place.Corporatism was deeply rooted in the Dutch society of the Old Regime. Economically, it provided major sections of the middle class with some sort of protection against the vicissitudes of conjunctural fluctuations and other uncertainties besetting the small but independent merchant or craftsman. Socially, it made these people into a community, in which they had some sort of social status. Politically, it gave the whole of the middle class a claim on the authorities, while at the same time keeping the lower classes at bay.Corporatism was not unique to the Dutch Republic. We have seen that German towns knew a similar middle-class ideology and similar political movements. French towns too had their privileges and their guilds. Nevertheless, they did not produce anything like the kind of political protest that was voiced by the Dutch and German middle classes. Against the idea of a single democratic revolution I have pitted the differentiated model of European state-formation, and tried to link an investigation of a particular form of collective action to that model. The pattern of a politically vital urban middle class in Germany and the Netherlands on the one hand, and its absence in France - and Britain, for that matter - on the other, in fact seems to coincide very well with the model of a commercial versus agrarian (or feudal) zone. These conclusions may lead us to some further speculations, both on the theoretical level, as well as in regard to this particular piece of Dutch history.When we look forward, toward the Batavian Republic that was founded in the wake of the French invasion of 1794–95, the ensuing struggles between moderates and radicals about political reforms - deemed necessary by all parties - do not so much present themselves as a clash between conservatives and revolutionaries, but as one between two different strands of reform. The moderates kept to the traditions of localism and corporatism, and strove for a return to the roots of the old republican constitution. The radicals on the other hand, had come to the conclusion that the problems of the Dutch state were of a magnitude that could only be overcome by wiping the slate clean and starting all over again, this time along the lines that had been suggested by the French example. The fact that many Dutch radicals had lived in exile in France in the years after 1787, where they had first-hand experience of a revolution in a completely different setting from the one at home, may perhaps in large part account for their specific brand of politics. At the same time, they can serve as prime examples of the revolutionaries-as-statemakers that Theda Skocpol has drawn attention to.This leads us to the second point. This investigation has, once more, suggested the importance of state formations in the analysis of political processes. The Dutch state had come into being in its specific form because this form served the interests of both the indigenous ruling class, that resented interference by centralizing bureaucracies, and the commercial community, that resented interference by anyone. For the local oligarchs it was of prime importance that the state's power should derive from theirs, instead of the other way. The merchants wanted the state to provide them with protection against foreign aggression and nothing more. Against this coalition any centralizing institution would have to muster an equally formidable coalition of its own. The attempt was hardly ever made.The state, being the way it was, refuted some ideologies and institutions, while supporting and legitimating others. Of course, the latter were generally concomitant with the larger make-up of the state. They did, however, leave room for maneuver as both ideologies and institutions tended to be two-sided: The stress on self-government by the local patricians, for example, might be taken up by other parts of the populace as well, and turned against patrician dominance. In the same vein, the militias that should preserve public order, might turn into vehicles for rebellion. Thus, the state could not prevent opposition, but it dictated the forms it would take - the demands put forward, the means of popular mobilization. Even though the Dutch state, in terms of organization, did not seem equal to these tasks at all, it held sway over both its supporters and its discontents.     

Citizen Perceptions of Channels for Urban Service Advocacy

Citizen recognition of channels for advocating change in policeservice is explored in the light of factors that might leadto recognition of a citizen organization rather than to a directcontact with a public official. Hypotheses to be tested usedboth individual and contextual factors that may influence whetheran advocacy channel is recognized and what channel is recognized.Sense of political efficacy is used as an intervening variable.The analysis shows that the poor, the less educated, minorities,and residents of large cities are all less likely to recognizea channel for advocating police service change. The data providelimited support for a "compensatory" interpretation of the roleof citizen organizations in urban service advocacy.     

Issue Framing and Citizen Apathy Toward Local Environmental Contamination

We adapt the frame-alignment perspective in order to demonstrate how institutional framing shapes media coverage of a toxic crisis. This framing activity is described as a new approach to managing public responses to contamination that differs from the approach characterizing contamination episodes at Love Canal and Woburn, MA. Our analysis focuses on the process by which actors responsible for managing toxic crises carefully construct and manage a coordinated risk frame. We refer to this as institutional framing and illustrate how it shapes media framing of a toxic event. We conclude by proposing further research to identify the causal relationship between institutional framing and the absence of mobilization.     

The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project

This article describes and updates the work of the Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project, which engages with community concerns in order to effect change on many system levels. The project draws on family therapy's tradition of interest in larger social issues and adds democratic public theory and community organizing strategies. Since 1999 we have developed 14 citizen initiatives with a wide range of groups on a diverse set of problem areas. We describe the overall project and several of its initiatives, we address research and evaluation issues, and we outline opportunities for marriage and family therapists to learn how to do this work in their own communities.