A quantitative theory of preferences: Some results on transition functions

We investigate a general theory of combining individual preferences into collective choice. The preferences are treated quantitatively, by means of preference functions (a,b), where 0(a,b) expresses the degree of preference of a to b. A transition function is a function (x,y) which computes (a,c) from (a,b) and (b,c), namely (a,c)=((a,b),(b,c)). We prove that given certain (reasonable) conditions on how individual preferences are aggregated, there is only one transition function that satisfies these conditions, namely the function (x,y)=x·y (multiplication of odds). We also formulate a property of transition functions called invariance, and prove that there is no invariant transition function; this impossibility theorem shows limitations of the quantitative method.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation.     

Structure and process in interpersonal “distancing”

The present paper focuses on awho-why-where-when-how-what-whom structural model of interpersonal distancing. The term distancing denotes either approach or avoidance movement along an intimacy-immediacy dimension. This dimension itself is defined as an integration across proxemic, kinesic, paralinguistic, and linguistic interpersonal modalities. Parallels are drawn between the concepts of intimacy disequilibrium and cognitive dissonance; the latter deals with attitude-behavior discrepancies and the former with attraction-approach discrepancies. A compensatory model is expanded acrosswho's partners as well as across his sensory modalities, and the concept of intimacy overload is offered as a clarifying tool for the social refractoriness and information overload explanations appearing in various aspects of the literature.Paper presented at the Symposium on Some New Approaches for Studying and Measuring Interpersonal Communication, 82d Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, September 1974.The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Department 1229, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the writing of this paper. Much of the work was supported by NSF Grant 2852A at Wayne State University.     

Paradigm Warriors: Regress and Progress in the Study of Contentious Politics

Paradigm warfare is a well-worn way of engaging in the polemics of research, but it frequently reduces paradigms to caricatures and turns complex reports of empirical research into cartoons. This is illustrated by two one-sided accounts of the Chiapas rebellion: one based on a simplistic political opportunity cartoon and the other on a foreshortened culturalist one. Reducing the many-sided (and in some ways ambiguous) approaches of the political process model to a supposedly hegemonic paradigm neglects many substantive contributions and cuts with too broad a stroke at social movements while ignoring the many-branched contributions of research and theory on contentious politics.     

Lying about running: The functions of talk in a scene

The running scene rests upon a system of beliefs (a code) about the qualities of running performances. Membership in the scene entails the interrelated use of conversational forms and the presentation of a team identity. The forms consist of nomic talk, ritualized lying and code truth telling. Within each form, the runner may lie about or manage information regarding running performances in order to construct, maintain or attack the system of beliefs. The lie, then, plays a major role in the scene as a device of social interaction.     

Policies over time and pareto optimality

This paper is concerned with sequences of policies that occur over time in voting models and planning procedures. The framework for our analysis includes assumptions that are satisfied by models in the corresponding literatures, together with other standard assumptions for microeconomic analysis that involve time. The starting point for our analyses is the prespective that results from combining the following (widely held) views: 1) certain voting models and planning procedures can be interpreted as being non-tatonnement or sequential processes (where each policy in the sequence that is generated is actually experienced by voters or consumers) and 2) an alternative being Pareto optimal in any given period (temporal Pareto optimality) is the appropriate efficiency criterion only if the alternative is the final outcome from a tatonnement process-and that, otherwise, one should examine the efficiency of the entire path (using intertemporal Pareto optimality). Our first observation about the planning literature is that is has (by and large) neglected the efficiency criterion that is appropriate for the discrete-time procedures that can be interpreted as non-tatonnement or sequential processes-and that, what's more, such trajectories will (in general) fail to meet this criterion. Our second observation identifies some results that can be used to establish that some of these trajectories will at least be ultimately intertemporally Pareto optimal. In our discussion of voting theory, we review Buchanan's opposition to requiring (social) choice consistency for voting procedures-and his argument for this position on (Pareto) efficiency grounds. We then consider voting procedures that can be interpreted as non-tatonnement or sequential processes and arrive at the conclusion that, in these cases, (i) majority rule cycles are intertemporally Pareto inefficient and (ii) achieving intertemporal Pareto optimality requires choice consistency. We then go on to show that related observations apply to Kramer's normative conclusions about his dynamical model of political equilibrium — and identify some further references where similar observations apply. In the final part of our discussion of voting models, we arrive at the further conclusion that, in the most relevant cases, a trajectory that stays in the temporal Pareto set is not necessarily more desirable (on efficiency grounds) than one that doesn't.This paper has been improved by helpful comments and suggestions that have been provided by Kenneth Arrow, an anonymous referee, and the editor who handled the paper.Peter Coughlin gratefully acknowledges financial support provided by (i) National Science Foundation Grant No. SES-8409352, and (ii) the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (with support from National Science Foundation Grant No. BNS-8700864 and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation).     

A characterization of strategy-proof voting rules for separable weak orderings

We consider the problem of choosing a subset of a finite set of indivisible objects (public projects, facilities, laws, etc.) studied by Barberà et al. (1991). Here we assume that agents preferences are separable weak orderings. Given such a preference, objects are partitioned into three types, goods, bads, and nulls. We focus on voting rules, which rely only on this partition rather than the full information of preferences. We characterize voting rules satisfying strategy-proofness (no one can ever be better off by lying about his preference) and null-independence (the decision on each object should not be dependent on the preference of an agent for whom the object is a null). We also show that serially dictatorial rules are the only voting rules satisfying efficiency as well as the above two axioms. We show that the separable domain is the unique maximal domain over which each rule in the first characterization, satisfying a certain fairness property, is strategy-proof. I am grateful to Professor William Thomson for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank Professor John Duggan, Christopher Chambers, and seminar participants in Department of Economics, University of Rochester. I thank anonymous referees for their detailed comments and suggestions that helped me a great deal to develop the earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are mine.     

Social factors in facial display and communication: A reply to Chovil and others

This paper discusses the Chovil (1991) study, questioning the assumption that the notion of facial display as communication is incompatible with that of facial display as readout of motivational/emotional response. It is argued that (a) the Chovil paper oversimplifies the view of the competition; (b) social factors can facilitateor inhibit expression depending upon the nature of the emotion being expressed and the expressor's personal relationship with the other; and (c) social factors produce strong social emotions, so that any manipulation of sociality must also manipulate emotion.Preparation of this paper was supported in part by NIMH grant MH-40753 to Ross Buck, and by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation.     

Muddying the Waters Does Not Have to Entail Erosion: Ecological Feminist Concerns with Purity

Ecofeminists call attention to the associations that have been made between woman and nature, which can operate as a source of both subjugation and resistance, exploitation, and inspiration. This paper expands upon feminist critiques of purity by phrasing these concerns in an ecological feminist perspective. This theoretical exercise of problematizing the ideal of purity sheds light upon the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression. Preservationist work has tended to employ the logic of purity by focusing on protection of the purity of the wild regions of the earth from the polluting forces of humanity. However, such approaches retain the troublesome nature/culture dualism. The author illustrates how attempts to fragment and radically separate people from the environment can prove to be highly dangerous. She connects the theoretical resistance to purity to the important activist work that is being done to expose environmental racism. Finally, she discusses how muddying the waters and resisting the logic of purity can offer a promising approach to pressing problems revolving around the intersections of human and nonhuman oppression.     

Creating Accessible Queer Community: Intersections and Fractures with Dis/Ability Praxis

This article explores the intersections and fractures that disability theory and activism present to queer community. The authors begin by drawing upon a multiple axis approach from feminist theory, then discuss the problem of defining disability and queer. They then explore the intersections and fractures of these identities and theories, hoping to raise awareness among queer activists and scholars and introduce them to conceptual and practical tools. In particular, disability studies offers a way to reconceptualize and ground theory and practice in the messiness of real bodies and to make visible the mythic normate against which cultural Others are defined.     

Why and how East Germans rebelled

Conclusion Attempts to explain the East German uprising are particularly significant because it was probably the most important event in the collapse of European communism. The building of the Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War division between Eastern and Western Europe and its fall led to the reunification of Germany and marked the end of this European partition. Elizabeth Pond has written: When the Berlin Wall fell, the crash obliterated a country, an empire, and an era. There are several obstacles to adequate explanation, however. The reasons why East Germans rebelled cannot be separated from the end of communism in Europe. The GDR was imprisoned within the socialist bloc (similar to the way the SED locked up its own people). Rebellion could only (successfully) occur when Soviet domination had eased. The popular rebellion in East Germany was precipitated by a wave of exit unleashed by reform communists in Hungary who had eliminated border controls. The Wall was opened from outside before it was pulled down from within.Even when confined to the protests within the GDR, that is to the second stage of the revolt, the main causes of the uprising have often been misunderstood. The would-be exiters were an important part of voice and often prompted the activities of the pro-GDR opposition. Loyal voice did play a significant role in calling for and speaking at anti-regime rallies. But these oppositionists did not mobilize the population themselves. Mass exodus, and political reform elsewhere in Eastern Europe, had set off the revolt by giving many East Germans a new found sense of political efficacy that led them to act spontaneously. Without private advantages and aware of the personal risks, millions of ordinary citizens went onto the streets because they felt a collective sense of obligation to do so.The key to understanding how East Germans rebelled, that is, to explaining the distinctiveness of the revolt, is the ex-GDR's lack of national identity. While the Polish and Hungarian leaderships could initiate democratization and hope to protect some of their interests under postcommunist rule, the SED risked losing its state as well. Hirschman underestimates the GDR leadership's dilemma when he argues that the extinction of the German Democratic Republic can be seen as the ultimate penalty for the long suppression of exit and voice (p. 200). The GDR could only survive by preventing its citizens from leaving for the bigger, richer, and more democratic state in a divided nation. East Germany was inconceivable as a liberal state. Reform efforts always literally ran into the Wall.Not only does the lack of national identity explain the hardline nature of the regime, it also illuminates the revisionism of the opposition. It is only an apparent paradox that in a state without legitimacy the loyalty among the GDR intellegentsia was particularly intense. The same matter-of-fact nationalism that made many East Germans feel a part of the Federal Republic (of which they were, by nature of the West German Grundgesetz, virtual citizens), tied artists, writers, and oppositionists alike to the ideal of the better German state. They felt that the evils of German nationalism could best be preempted by socialism, which offered a clear anti-fascist position and justified the continued existence of the GDR. East Germans had to rebel against an unrelenting SED and then abandoned the pro-GDR opposition's hope for a rejuvenation of East Germany. Continued emigration and mounting protest doomed efforts to reform the regime and rescue the state. Elections had to be moved up from May to March 1990 to head off pending economic and political disaster. West German parties, which supported GDR affiliates, and Western politicians, who were well known and often better liked than their East German counterparts, played a dominant role in the campaign. The vote brought a conservative coalition to power that had promised the fastest and marginalized the two major opponents of immediate unity: the reformed communists (PDS) and the opposition alliance (Bündnis 90). Democratic transition had become part of German unification.

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An Exploratory Study of “Parasites” in Taiwan

Deriving from Parasite Single proposed by Yamada (1997), parasites in this study is redefined as those who live with and financially rely on their parents in terms of living expenses after school graduation. The current study adopts the logit model and utilizes the data from the 1999 to 2000 Taiwan Panel Study of Family Dynamics to investigate the determinants of parasites. The finding reveals that gender, age, marital status, and the value of filial piety are significantly different between parasites and non-parasites. Moreover, gender, monthly income, age and marital status are determinants of the probability of being parasites.     

Love and Sex in Constructing Identity Among Men Who Have Sex with Men

Interviews were conducted with 102 Ontario men who have sex with men who identify themselves as gay, bisexual, and not gay, concerning the meanings and satisfactions associated with their sexuality. Sexual discourses of men who identify themselves in different ways reveal some common criteria for placing self and others into the gay category. Gay, in the everyday speech of these men, appears to refer to an elaborated discourse around the potential for emotional involvement and relationships rather than a reference to an essentialized sexuality. Comparison of men who place themselves inside and outside sexual identity categories shows that many find gay identity to be a horizon of increased possibilities, rather than the limitation critiqued by queer theory. These findings are contextualized in recent debates in identity theory.     

Snarls,Quacks, and Quarrels: Culture and Structure in Political Process Theory

Political process theories of social movements have relied on a set of oppositions between culture and structure that has limited their capacity to capture the supraindividual, durable, and constraining dimensions of culture. The solution is not to abandon an emphasis on objective political structures in favor of potential insurgents' subjective perceptions of political opportunities, but rather to probe the (objective) resources and constraints generated by the cultural dimensions of political structures. Such a perspective would pay closer attention to the cultural traditions, ideological principles, institutional memories, and political taboos that create and limit political opportunities; and would link the master frames that animate protest to dominant political structures and processes.     

Theory at risk: Accounting for the excellence movement

Amidst widespread concern about educational crisis and the need for reform, the current excellence movement places a pronounced emphasis on rigor, standards, and a core curriculum of basic studies. At issue here is whether major macro-the-oretical perspectives can account for the emergence of this movement. Functional and Marxian theories do not meet this challenge well, especially insofar as they posit a tight, rational linkage between school and economy and downplay the institutional autonomy of the educational system. A status conflict approach, emphasizing middle class mobilization, offers greater insight, though it must be complemented with a recognition of constraints imposed by capitalist organization and the institutionalization of educational myths.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Gift Giving, Identity, and Transformation: The AIDS Memorial Quilt

Those who have originated the AIDS Memorial Quilt have often referred to it as a gift. In this essay, the author discusses theories related to gift giving to discuss the quilt and its constructed effects for those who experience it as a gift. In particular, Weiner's notion of inalienable possessions is highlighted to address how the quilt, as a gift that is kept inalienable from its original creators, maintains historical identity and immortality for its originators, many of whom are gay and bisexual men. Also, Hyde's notion of erotic gifts is presented to consider the quilt's ability to draw people together, create feeling-bonds among them, and affect their transformation.     

Making Minorities: Cultural Space,Stigma Transformation Frames,and the Categorical Status Claims of Deaf,Gay, and White Supremacist Activists in Late Twentieth Century America

This article compares the efforts of movement activists in three dissimilar groups to replace a stigmatized status with a valued one by portraying their groups as resembling established minorities (claims of contiguity in cultural space) and as differing from groups stigmatized as deviant (claims of distance). The most common claims assert similarity to African Americans, and frequently incorporate civil rights themes (exemplifying frame diffusion). Tactically, these minority status claims exploit both the resonance of cultural pluralism and state recognition of minorities. Strategically, minority status framing enables stigmatized groups to claim legitimacy without changing — simultaneously asserting both normality and difference.     

“Queer's” Near Absence in Academic and Student Service Websites

This essay studies several Websites that deal with mainly U.S. universities' LGBT/Queer student services and/or LGBT/Queer academic programs, and it considers the terminology such programs apply to name themselves. Notably, the term queer is almost absent on many of these sites, especially sites that are non-academic and provide student services. Drawing on Annamarie Jagose's Queer Theory, the author suggests that the term queer may be too threatening, too ambiguous, and too masculine to be useful in naming these programs and services. While numerous specific university sites have been explored, the essay focuses on the listings of services and programs found on two sites: University of Illinois-Chicago's site College/University Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Centers/Programs at http://www.uic.edu/org/lgbt and John Younger's Website University LGBT Programs: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies in the USA and Canada at http://www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/lbgtprogrs.html.     

Promoting Justice in the Delivery of Services to Juvenile Delinquents: The Ecosystemic Natural Wrap-Around Model

Caught between their child and doing the right thing, families of chronic juvenile delinquents often experience a series of injustices in the name of justice. Attempts by the system to correct the delinquency problem often result in the imposition of values and beliefs that negate the family's values, experiences and meanings of their child's behavior. The Ecosystemic Natural Wrap-around (E.N.W.) model attempts to respectfully account for the many influences that maintain problematic interactions, both internal and external, in the nuclear family of chronic juvenile delinquents. The model focuses on a variety of interventions at different levels and contexts, building on the strengths of the family, using the extended family and fictive kin networks, and clarifying the meanings associated with problematic behavior for the multiple players. The model proposed is an integrative theoretical approach, emphasizing systems theory and constructivism.     

Independence of clones as a criterion for voting rules

Independence of clones is a generalization of the condition of not being subject to the perverse consequences of vote splitting that arise under plurality voting. A new voting rule that is at least almost always independent of clones is obtained by the following algorithm: Require the collective ranking of the candidates to be consistent with the paired comparisons decided by the largest and second largest margins, and then, if possible, with the paired comparison decided by the third largest margin, and so on. The advantages of this ranked pairs rule over previously proposed voting rules that are independent of clones is that it possesses Condorcet consistency, non-negative responsiveness, and resolvability (the property that every tie be within one vote of being broken).I am indebted to Jaques Crémer, Amoz Kats, Martin Ricketts, Thomas Schwartz and an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions.