On the influence of extreme parties in electoral competition with policy-motivated candidates

We study and compare equilibrium platforms in models of unidimensional electoral competition with two and four policy motivated parties. We first analyze the plurality game, where the party getting the most votes is elected and implements its proposed platform. Restrictions on the set of credible announcements are needed to get existence of equilibria. Comparing equilibria with two and four parties, we obtain that moderate parties react to the introduction of extreme parties by proposing the same or more extreme equilibrium platforms. We then study the proportional system, where the policy implemented is a weighted sum of the proposals, with the voting shares as weights. Here, the existence of extreme parties leads moderate ones to choose more centrist platforms. We finally test the robustness of our results with respect to, first, the enlargement of the strategy space to entry decisions and, second, to asymmetric distributions of voters' blisspoints.

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Bringing the Material Back In: Understanding the U.S. Position on Climate Change

This paper analyzes how natural resource interests have been translated into political outcomes in the form of American climate change policy. Incorporating data about natural resource use and national decision-making, this paper concludes that comprehending fully political decisions about global climate change in the United States requires us to recognize how land-use interests in the growth machine are translated into political outcomes. The findings of this paper suggest that, in order to understand social phenomena more fully, sociologists must recommit to studying the conjoint constitution of natural resources and social processes.

Changing Meanings of Authority in Contemporary Rural India

The article explores political meanings in the context of recent economic and political changes in a village in south India. Cultural constructions of political relations emerged in conversations between the author and village informants in Andhra Pradesh. Informants perceived decline in the power and authority of former village lords and talked about the establishment of authority in the new setting. In processes of democratization which had taken place, showing and receiving honor and respect continued as political and social preoccupations. However, deserving honor and respect has become less a statement about political superiority and domination and more about individual moral qualities.

The scoring rules in an endogenous election

Plurality rule is mostly criticized from being capable of choosing an alternative considered as worst by a strict majority. This paper considers elections in which the agenda consists of potential candidates strategically choosing whether or not to enter the election. In this context, we examine the ability of scoring rules to fulfil the Condorcet criterion. We show for the case of three potential candidates that Plurality rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies a version of the Condorcet criterion in two cases: 1) when preferences are single-peaked and, 2) when preferences are single-dipped.

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Different Paths to Similar Outcomes? Industrial Relations Reform and Public Policy in Australia and New Zealand

In recent years, both Australia and New Zealand have embarked on significant labor market reforms which have resulted in more decentralized and individualized systems of industrial relations. Although both countries share a common heritage of state-sponsored conciliation and arbitration, which fostered a centralized approach to labor market regulation, each has responded in its own way to economic and political pressures to reform its long-established industrial relations system. Despite differences in the process of indusrial relations reform, both countries now have industrial relations systems which are more individualistic and in which unions play a less significant role than in the past.

The Politics of Civic Combinations

In this article, we explore the ways in which partnerships with the state within state-led developmental programs might effect the autonomy of civic organizations (COs) and their readiness to enter in political action. To identify the relationship between collaboration with the state and civic autonomy we draw on data from a survey of 740 Hungarian regional civic associations. We did not find support for the theses that mixing with the state might undermine the autonomy of COs and lead to their political neutralization. Also, we did not find support for the hypotheses that political action is solely about money or it is the property of non-autonomous NGOs. We have identified several mechanisms that allow COs to combine participation in partnership projects with maintained autonomy and political activism.

Business Diversification in the Securities Industry: Implications for the Exchanges

The growth strategies of the listed exchanges affect the morphology of the securities industry as they are focused on the consolidation of trading infrastructures and, on the other hand, on the diversification of the business model. New “conglomeral exchanges” are characterized by a far-reaching production function. Since they integrate product-service lines which are complementary, they potentially herald competitive distorsions limiting the investor’s freedom of choice and prejudicing the interest for the best result from the investment.

The Financial Assimilation of an Immigrant Group: Evidence on the Use of Checking and Savings Accounts and Currency Exchanges

This article examines the determinants of financial market participation for a particular group of immigrants: Hmong refugees in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Our findings indicate that controlling for income and education, Hmong immigrants are less likely to have savings accounts and credit cards and are more likely to use currency exchanges, compared to randomly selected non-Hmong households living in the same neighborhoods. However, these effects are mitigated by time spent in the US. Financial assimilation appears to take 15–20 years. These findings expand our understanding of immigrant assimilation and highlight some of the complexities associated with the process of assimilation.

Politics as a Vocation: Notes Toward a Sensualist Understanding of Political Engagement

Drawing data from works of political non-fiction that help to reveal the moral and sensual underpinnings of political practice, this paper seeks to adumbrate a sensualist understanding of political engagement. After beginning with a brief discussion of Weber’s seminal essay “Politics as a Vocation,” I then construct an ideal type of political passion with which to highlight the inherent shortcomings that plague traditional explanations of political action. My argument is that these approaches are all vitiated by their reliance on Chinese-box epistemology. I go on to suggest that in order to obtain a genuinely sociological account of political engagement, one must develop methods that are true to the experiential specifics of politics while recognizing the conditions that shape the possibility of those very experiences.

Reduced prizes and increased effort in contests

We study the general class of two-player public-policy contests and specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the “perverse” effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.

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The Decline of the US and the Flatenization of International Order

Based on the current global financial crisis, the article introduces two recent typical perspectives on international order from the angle of discussion on the decline of the US, pointing out that the real trend of the development of international political economic order is flatenization. International power will be distributed in a flat model. In this kind of order big powers, main regional nation groups and important international organizations and institutions will share power in an increasingly equal way. The demands for reform of the international financial system against this financial crisis also reflect the trend of flatenization of the international political economic order.

Solar Festivals and Climate Bills: Comparing NGO Climate Change Campaigns in the UK and Australia

This paper compares climate change campaigns conducted by environmental nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. The NGOs represent a diversity of political access, financial resources, and international connections. Three campaign activities common to both countries undertaken between 2004 and 2006 are analyzed for their effectiveness via interviews and document review. This examination is embedded within an analysis of the political, economic, policy, and social contexts of each country. It is shown that in the UK climate change has been used as a pivotal leadership issue, that the fossil fuel industry’s influence is not predominant, and that NGOs enjoy political legitimacy. Whereas, in Australia climate change has only recently emerged as a political priority, the fossil fuel industry has had significant political and financial influence, and NGO advocacy has been marginalized. It is argued that NGOs are embedded in the political and policy contexts of their country, and the greatest campaign traction and NGO influence can only be achieved when these contexts provide favorable conditions.

Development of Citizen-Organized Environmental NGOs in China

Social movement theories provide a framework for explaining the post-1990 rise in China’s citizen-organized environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs), which consisted of at least 128 organizations as of 2004. We use a political process model, which is based on favorable political opportunities, cognitive liberation, and indigenous organizational strength, to explain the sharp growth in citizen organized ENGOs. In addition, we employ a world society perspective to help clarify why the political environment in China became favorable for ENGO growth, and how international ENGO practices were diffused within China. Our analysis shows that the relatively high status of ENGO founders together with their personal and professional networks also played important roles in ENGO growth.

The inverse plurality rule—an axiomatization

Under the ‘inverse plurality rule’, voters specify only their least preferred alternative. Our first result establishes that this rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies the minimal veto condition (MV). We then prove that the inverse plurality rule is characterized by MV and the four well known conditions that characterize scoring rules; namely, Anonymity (A), Neutrality (N), Reinforcement (RE) and Continuity (CO). Our new characterization result is related to the characterizations of approval voting and of the widely used plurality rule. We finally show how the axiomatization of the inverse plurality rule can be extended to the axiomatization of elementary scoring rules (vote for t-alternatives scoring rules). We are indebted to two anonymous referees for their most useful comments.

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The Structure of the Chinese Banking System and Credit Access Problems for SMEs

This paper examines the structure and the main characteristics of the Chinese banking industry. In particular, the paper analyses the problematic aspects of credit relations of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The SMEs are facing several problems in accessing the bank loans market, dominated by the political and contractual weight of state-owned enterprises. However, some recent reforms have improved the situation, a fundamental condition for additional positive results. Nevertheless, further and more pervasive modernization efforts are needed to consolidate these results and to develop the relationships between banks and SMEs.

Over Time Dynamics of Monetary Intergenerational Exchanges

Using data from 9,674 individuals in three waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we used three latent-class transition models to predict the probabilities of monetary transfers that study participants made to adult children and received from their adult children over a 6-year period of time, from 1998 to 2002. Generally, we found a high degree of stability in over time transition patterns. Whereas time invariant predictor variables (i.e., age, race, and gender) were related to the probabilities of transfers in Wave 1 of the study, these variables were not predictive of over time changes. Only changes in marital status were consistently related to intergenerational exchanges of monetary resources over time.

A Calmly Disruptive Insider: The Case of an Institutionalized Advocacy Organization at Work

Through a case study of a leading service provider organization in Philadelphia, this paper explores the advocacy work of a publicly funded, professionalized, institutionalized nonprofit organization. In this article I relate how in the spring of 2002, staff at the organization responded to a recurring political issue: local business groups were again calling for official action against “aggressive panhandlers” in the downtown district. I use ethnographic and historical data to show that the organization’s institutionalization and ties to the public sector have allowed staff to develop resources and skills for being both contentious claim-makers and influential actors in the institutional political arena.

Temporal Distributions of Crime and Disorder in Casino and Non-Casino Zones

Research on the relationship between casinos and crime has yielded mixed conclusions. Some authors argue that casinos are crime attractors and provide fertile grounds for disorder in the surrounding communities. Others claim that the impact of casinos on the crime problem has been over-stated and that casinos in themselves are not crime generators. Relying on calls for service and incidents known to the police, this research reveals the specific spatial and temporal characteristics of all criminal and disorderly behaviors around casino venues.

Dichotomous preferences and the possibility of Arrovian social choice

Consider an individual whose judgments are always based on a fundamental criterion such as a political ideology or a religious doctrine. In a choice situation, he always prefers any alternative that is compatible with the criterion to any that is not. When individuals are allowed to have preference spaces restricted in this manner, we investigate Arrow-consistent domains. We observe that a diversity of attitudes is essential in order to escape an Arrovian impossibility.This paper received the Kanematsu Fellowship from RIEB, Kobe University in May 2002. We are much indebted to two anonymous referees of this journal, three anonymous referees of the Kanematsu Fellowship, Jun Iritani, William Thomson, and John Weymark for helpful comments. We also thank Takashi Kamihigashi, Tetsuya Kishimoto, Ryo-ichi Nagahisa, Hiroaki Nagatani, Tadashi Sekiguchi, Koji Shimomura, Tomoichi Shinotsuka, Koichi Suga, Makoto Tanaka, Ken Urai, and participants at the Kobe-Osaka Joint Seminar in Mathematical Economics at Osaka University in March 2001, the meeting of the Japanese Economic Association at Hiroshima Syudo University in May 2001, the Far Eastern Meeting of the Econometric Society in Kobe in July 2001, the Seventh Decentralization Conference at Waseda University in October 2001, the Sixth International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare at Caltech in July 2002 for valuable suggestions. The first version was written while we were graduate students in Economics at Kobe University.

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