Stability and voting by committees with exit

We study the problem of a society choosing a subset of new members from a finite set of candidates (as in Barberà et al. 1991). However, we explicitly consider the possibility that initial members of the society (founders) may want to leave it if they do not like the resulting new society. We show that, if founders have separable (or additive) preferences, the unique strategy-proof and stable social choice function satisfying founders sovereignty (on the set of candidates) is the one where candidates are chosen unanimously and no founder leaves the society.A previous version of this paper was entitled Voting by Committees with Exit. We are very grateful to the associate editor and two anonymous referees for their detailed suggestions and comments. We also thank Salvador Barberà, Carmen Beviá, Anna Bogomolnaia, Renan Goetz, Matthew Jackson, Howard Petith, Carmelo Rodríguez-Álvarez, James Schummer, and Tayfun Sönmez for their helpful comments and suggestions. The work of D. Berga, G. Bergantiños, and J. Massó is partially supported by Research Grants AGL2001-2333-C02-01, BEC2002–04102-C02-01, and BEC2002-02130 from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, respectively. The work of A. Neme is partially supported by Research Grant 319502 from the Universidad Nacional de San Luis. The work of D. Berga is also partially supported by Research Grant 9101100 from the Universitat de Girona. The work of G. Bergantiños is also partially supported by Research Grant PGIDT00PXI30001PN from the Xunta de Galicia. The work of J. Massó is also partially supported by Research Grant 2001SGR-00162 and the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA from the Generalitat de Catalunya. The paper was partially written while A. Neme was visiting the UAB under a sabbatical fellowship from the Generalitat de Catalunya.     

Strategic requirements with indifference: single-peaked versus single-plateaued preferences

We concentrate on the problem of the provision of one pure public good whenever agents that form the society have either single-plateaued preferences or single-peaked preferences over the set of alternatives. We are interested in comparing the relationships between different nonmanipulability notions under these two domains. On the single-peaked domain, under strategy-proofness, non-bossiness is equivalent to convexity of the range. Thus, minmax rules are the only strategy-proof non-bossy rules. On the single-plateaued domain, only constant rules are non-bossy or Maskin monotonic; but strategy-proofness and weak non-bossiness are equivalent to weak Maskin monotonicity. Moreover, strategy-proofness and plateau-invariance guarantee convexity of the range. We thank Salvador Barberà, Matthew Jackson, Bettina Klaus, Jordi Massó, John Weymark, and two anonymous referees and the Associate Editor for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank the participants in the 3rd Workshop on Social Decisions that took place in Málaga in November 2007. Dolors Berga acknowledges the financial support by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science through Research Grants SEJ2004-03276 and SEJ2007-60671 and also by the Generalitat de Catalunya through Research Grant 2005SGR-213 and the Barcelona Economics Program (CREA). Bernardo Moreno gratefully acknowledges financial support from Junta de Andalucía through grant SEJ522 and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through grant SEC2005-04805.     

Scoring rules on dichotomous preferences

In this paper, we study individual incentives to report preferences truthfully for the special case when individuals have dichotomous preferences on the set of alternatives and preferences are aggregated in form of scoring rules. In particular, we show that (a) the Borda Count coincides with Approval Voting, (b) the Borda Count is the only strategy-proof scoring rule, and (c) if the size of the electorate is greater than three, then the dichotomous preference domain is the unique maximal rich domain under which the Borda Count is strategy-proof. I thank Jordi Massó for his supervision and his never-ending encouragement. Miguel-ángel Ballester showed me how to improve on earlier drafts of the paper. Salvador Barberà, Carmen Bevía, Bhaskar Dutta, Lars Ehlers, Alejandro Neme, Shmuel Nitzan and Yves Sprumont helped me a lot with their comments. All remaining errors are mine. This research was undertaken with support from the fellowship 2001FI 00451 of the Generalitat de Catalunya and from the research grant BEC2002-02130 of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología of Spain while I have been a graduate student at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.     

Notions of equal,or equivalent,opportunities

We formulate and study three concepts of equity designed to capture certain notions of equal, or equivalent, opportunities. The central concept is that of a family of choice sets. Given such a family , a feasible allocation z is alternatively required to be such that (i) there is B such that each agent i maximizes his satisfaction in B at z _i , (ii) there is B such that each agent i is indifferent between z _i and the maximizer of his satisfaction in B, (iii) for each agent i there is B _i such that z _i maximizes agent i's satisfaction in the union of the B _j and z _i is in B _i . Most of the standard concepts of equity can be obtained as particular cases of these general definitions by appropriately choosing . We identify conditions on guaranteeing that the resulting allocations be efficient. We apply the definitions to economies with only private goods, and to economies with public goods.This is a revised version of an earlier paper circulated under the title of Notions of equal opportunities. Early drafts were presented at the Conference on Economic Models and Distributive Justice, held in Bruxelles and Namur, January 1987, and at the Public Choice Society meeting in Tucson, Arizona, March 1987. The author thanks the participants, in particular T. Schwartz, for their comments, and NSF for its support, under grant No. 85 11136 and 88 09822. The suggestions of two anonymous referees, D. Diamantaras, L. Gevers, and H. Konishi are also gratefully acknowledged.     

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.     

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.     

Big Whigs in the Mobilization of Irish Peasants: An Historical Sociology of Hegemony in Prefamine Ireland (1750s–1840s)

This paper explains the manipulation of small-holding peasants by middle-class groups in their conjoint struggles against Anglo-Irish landlords during a precapitalist conjuncture of external pressures on the institutional practice of class rule in Ireland (see Femand Braudel [1980] On History, Chicago: University of Chicago; Theda Skocpol [1979] States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Small-holding peasants and middle-class groups sought to reform the feudal practice of jurisdictional privileges by the greater gentry of Anglo-Irish landlords. A middle-class group of Irish nationalists exercised their hegemony over small-holding peasants during a social movement for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s (see Antonio Gramsci [1975] Selections from the Prisons Notebooks,New York: International Publishers). The outcomes of this social movement included the political empowerment of Catholic whigs to reform the feudal practices of corporations in Irish towns and the frustration of peasant interests to reform the feudal practices of Anglo-Irish landlordism in the countryside.     

Beyond the certainty of security: On dominant and latent conceptions of “security” in modern societies

While other political programs have a relatively short history, the programatic logic of security is rather long-standing. This article argues that security as a product is a conception of modernity which came to its limits. The question arises, which kind of conception could be beyond those limits.     

Mead,Contemporary Metatheory,and Twenty-First-Century Interdisciplinary Team Work

George Herbert Mead is reintroduced here as an exemplary practice-minded scholar. His work at Hull-House inspired practitioners to interpret and advocate for the poor and oppressed. Mead pioneered an approach to cross-cultural boundary work that was used to help clients interpret their experiences, to mediate between clients and social institutions, and to represent clients' needs to a nonsympathetic middle class. Contemporary sociological practice occurs in a fragmented, divisive society reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Chicago. Mead's notions of universe of discourse, international mindedness, and the democratic assumption are wedded to those of metatheorists and developed as a metatheory for use. Four metatheoretical tools—translation by membership focus, by metaphor, by map, and by model—are recommended to sociologists committed to interdisciplinary, multitheory service.     

Strategy-proofness versus efficiency in exchange economies: General domain properties and applications

We identify general domain properties that induce the non-existence of efficient, strategy-proof, and non-dictatorial rules in the 2-agent exchange economy. Applying these properties, we establish impossibility results in several restricted domains; for example, the intertemporal exchange problem (without saving technology) with preferences represented by the discounted sum of a temporal utility function, the risk sharing problem with risk averse expected utility preferences, the CES-preference domain, etc. None of the earlier studies applies to these examples. I am grateful to Professor William Thomson for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank seminar participants in University of Rochester, John Duggan, and François Maniquet. I thank two anonymous referees for their detailed comments, which were very helpful in revising the earlier version. All remaining errors are mine.     

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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The “Homo Sapien Genetic Survival Trait”

An explanation was sought for the reason that minorities immigrating to the USA have difficulty getting along with each other or with the majority. Worldwide an explanation was sought for the reason that nations that break up, break up along ethnic group or cultural lines. The answer for both questions appears to be an assumed survival mutation early in the development of Homo sapien to create a Genetic Survival Trait. This requires most Tribal members, as defined here, to give their primary allegiance to their Tribe and not to the USA, and to support a drive for Tribal independence. Recommendations are made for developing improved training methods in the USA to reduce this problem.     

Powers of subgroups in voting bodies

This paper discusses the power p _n of an n-member subgroup B _n of an N-member voting body, N odd and 1 n N. In contrast to bloc voting, we assume that the members vote independently with equal probability for and against a given issue. Power p _n is defined as the probability that the outcome of a vote changes if all members of B _n reverse their votes. Theorems: p _{n + 1} = _n for odd n < N; p _n + p _{N – n} = 1; P _m + p _n > p _{m + n} if m + n < N; p _{n + 1}/p _n (n + 1)/n as N for fixed even n; for rational 0 > > 1, p _N 2^–1 sin^{–1 1/2} as N . A simple summation formula is given for p _n .     

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.     

Caught in a Winding,Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory

The study of social movements has recently been energized by an explosion of work that emphasizes political opportunities—a concept meant to come to grips with the complex environments that movements face. In the excitement over this new metaphor, there has been a tendency to stretch it to cover a wide variety of empirical phenomena and causal mechanisms. A strong structural bias is also apparent in the way that political opportunities are understood and in the selection of cases for study. Even those factors adduced to correct some of the problems of the political opportunity approach—such as mobilizing structures and cultural framing—are subject to the same structural distortions. We recommend social movement analysis that rejects invariant modeling, is wary of conceptual stretching, and recognizes the diverse ways that culture and agency, including emotions and strategizing, shape collective action.     

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.     

Structuring the sexual revolution

Conclusion The explosion of sexuality We have seen how ideas of the repression of sexual energies within a sex-economic framework, the revolt of sexuality incarnated in youth and the struggle to control/educate children's sexuality, the revolt of women due to greater independence, and the scientizing of the world of morals were brought together to produce the idea of the sexual revolution - a specific interpretation of undeniable changes in mores and behavior. While it might seem that the net has been cast rather widely in describing this complex of ideas, it is my contention that all these themes, seemingly contradictory though they may be, were present in the thought of those formulating the idea of the sexual revolution. (One statement by Calverton shows the synthesis: In the revolt of youth, connected as it is with the economic independence of modern woman, the bankruptcy of the old system of marriage, the decay of the bourgeoisie as a social class, we have the dynamic beginnings of a sexual revolution growing out of the economic background of social struggle.) But the idea of a sexual revolution had another element, touched upon at the beginning of this essay, namely the belief that a distinction could be made between revolutionary and non-revolutionary times in moral history. This belief was no doubt derived from the Marxist orientation toward revolutionary times that the writers we have studied shared. But can such a discontinuous change, a spurt in evolution in which quantity becomes quality, be supposed to have happened, when we have enough records of people suggesting that there was a sexual revolution - a startling and cataclysmic disruption, to use Schur's words - underway in 1925 (Lindsey), 1927 (Darmstadt et al.), 1929 (Schmalhausen), 1936 (Reich), 1930–1955 (Hirsch), 1956 (Sorokin), 1964 (Schur), and 1966 (Reiss; Kirkendall and Libby)? To some extent, yes. There is indication of great changes in sexual behavior at certain times (though it is hard to separate age, cohort, and period effects); there was an increase in at least educated females' incidence of premarital intercourse in the 1920s. Furthermore, there are clear differences in the amount of attention paid to sexuality, and to sexual mores, during different periods. At the very least, merely the belief that one is in the midst of a sexual revolution is an important datum, for it may point to changes in extremely ideologically sensitive portions of the population (e.g., middle-class women) or to the attempt to legitimize already existing patterns of behavior.However, the writers contributing to the idea of the sexual revolution never gave very plausible explanations as to why the change from normal to revolutionary times should have happened when it did. The suggested causes have generally been continuous, and not immediately preceding the times believed to be sexual revolutions. Women's entry into the labor force followed a roughly exponential curve from 1900 to the present, the orientation of the economy toward service-sector production, as well as the increase in disposable income was, aside from the depression-war period, basically uninterrupted, and the pace of technological change certainly never slackened. The oven-ready idea of the sexual revolution I have made it clear that I think that this idea of a sexual revolution was available for people in the 1960s and 1970s - both as commentators and as actors - to use in interpreting current changes or perceived changes, and that this idea suggested the relevance of certain explanatory factors and not others. Furthermore, this conceptual vocabulary was available to interpret previous changes (such as when Shorter writes of the increase of intimacy in the nineteenth century, The libido unfroze in the blast of the wish to be free, and attributes it to the effects of increased participation in the market). Why were the same causal factors we found given as explanations for the first sexual revolution (change in economic imperatives, emancipation of women due to labor-force participation, new knowledge and contraception, the emancipation of youth due to technological change and independence from adult authority) so often invoked to explain the second sexual revolution? It certainly might be, as Steven Seidman has argued, that there was one century-long revolution involving a constant set of causes. There is, I think, a great deal of truth to this, but we must bear in mind, as Beth Bailey said, that the term sexual revolution is not a mere scholarly classification, but a term used by contemporaries who experienced a period as being different, and there may still be significant discontinuity to explain. I suspect that rather than there being one long revolution (or better, evolution) that had these constant causes, during periods of public display of new sexual mores among the middle class - mores that might have been silently changing for some time - people tended to think in terms of a sexual revolution, and with the idea of the sexual revolution, these supposed causes were predisposed to reappear.The use of the idea of the sexual revolution led to two related confusions, one stemming from the Leninist-voluntarist understanding of what constituted a revolution, and the other from the orthodox-determinist understanding, each confusing sexual change with a model of revolution. The first confusion was between, on the one hand, the importance of widespread change in sexual ethics and behavior, and, on the other, the role of self-professed sexual revolutionaries and reformers. The second was between, on the one hand, the freeing of previously repressed sexuality (again, of women and adolescents), and, on the other, change in the economic substructure.Regarding the first, the term sexual revolution, as we have seen, was coined by self-professed revolutionaries of a distinctly Leninist stripe, self-styled modernists who believed that the force of history was on their side, but who also believed in the utility of forceful agitation by the vanguard for reform. The most important effect of the adoption of the idea of revolution was to preserve this double-idea: a revolution implied both widespread or secular change (in contrast to the rebellion of a few pioneers) and also a radical overturning of previously existing order (along the lines of the programme of the rebels and pioneers). Because of this understanding of what a sexual revolution should be, sociologists and other social analysts could, on the one hand, dismiss claims that there had been a sexual revolution by pointing to the incomplete overthrow of monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the dominant pattern and norm. On the other hand, discussions of the sexual revolution tended to focus on the avant-garde of sexual nonconformism, assuming that there was some important connection between the struggles of far-sighted rebels and the secular change that undoubtedly occurred. But this voluntarist-Leninist understanding of what constitutes revolution was complimented by the other side of the concept of sexual revolution, namely revolution as inevitable secular change deeply rooted in changing economic imperatives. Like the modernists, analysts of the second sexual revolution have tended to assume that if anyone's sexuality was liberated, it was that of women and youth. Even among those who noted the equivocal nature of the freedom granted by increased permissiveness, the fundamental notion of (women's and youths') sexuality waiting to be freed (or even better, waiting for the right moment to free itself) narrowed the range of what substructural changes would be pointed to - they were those that would, it was believed, make it less costly for a pre-existing female or youthful desire for extramarital sex to be expressed. So once again, women's entry into the paid labor force was taken to explain the sexual revolution (for example, Ira Reiss: Economic autonomy reduces dependence on others and makes sexual assertiveness a much less risky procedure). However there was a catch - sociologists knew that female labor-force participation had been rising at a relatively stable (though exponential) rate since the first World War. While the 1960s did see an increase in the rate of change, it was not so large as to explain a revolution.. So explanations turned to the category of working women that seemed to be growing the fastest, namely working mothers. Unfortunately, there are some obvious problems with pointing to the significance of working mothers. The first is, of course, that it simply doesn't fit well with the idea that independent income leads to fearless sexual experimentation, which remained the dominant explanatory model. (For example, while D'Emilio and Freedman point to the importance of the rise in working mothers, recognizing that women without children had been steadily entering the labor force for some time, the influence of women's work that they speak of seems to assume singleness, not motherhood.) Ira Reiss tried to solve this problem by claiming that the employed mother played a key role in the sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s, because (1) her children had a greater variety of role models and were therefore more autonomous, and (2) they had a more expanded notion of female autonomy. This, however, undermines the argument connecting independence and assertiveness: if having a working mother expands a son's vision of women's autonomy, then why would assertiveness on women's part still be risky? But if having a working mother only expands a daughter's vision of women's autonomy, then her sexual autonomy would still be risky, and so this factor makes no difference.The second problem with emphasizing the increase in working mothers as opposed to single women is that even here careful scrutiny of the numbers belies the argument being made. If the significance of employed mothers comes from the role models they present to their young children who are learning gender roles, it is in the 1950s (at the latest) that this increase must have taken place (and thus the growth of labor-force participation of mothers with young children in the late 1960s is irrelevant). But the percentage of women with young children who were in the labor force only grew by one fourth over the decade. The bulk of the increased labor-force participation in this period came from women over forty-five - they may have been mothers, but their children were not so impressionable. The other deep change in the substructure that supposedly accounts for the sexual revolution has to do with a shift in the economy from production to consumption. This confused thesis generally and quite incorrectly maintains that there was an identifiable shift in the emphasis of the economy from savings to consumption, and that capitalism's need to find new markets explains bar culture and adult bookstores. This major shift seems to have occurred in the 1920s to cause the first sexual revolution, (D'Emilio and Freedman, Kevin White), reappeared in the 1950s to prop up the nuclear family with a new domesticity (Seidman), and then finished things off in the sixties and seventies as the completion of the turn towards consumerism (in Weeks's words), led to the increased permissiveness associated with the sexual revolution and the rise of the sexual marketplace (Weeks, Seidman). It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the genesis of this particular idea; suffice it to say that it comes from the basic dialectical materialist assumption that a revolution in sex must at least directly parallel changes in the requirements of the economic substructure.Of course, it wasn't simply changes in the economy that made sexual assertiveness less risky according to explanations of the second sexual revolution; it was also new contraceptive technology and knowledge. The sexual revolution probably could not have occurred without the pill, writes Linda Grant; the pill liberated women's desires, turning [women] into sexual beings. Were sexuality truly lurking under its cover, trying to get out, this would make sense, but as Bailey and Reiss remind us, Kinsey found that moral reservations, not fear of pregnancy, were the biggest factor in leading women not to have premarital sex. While there is no need to ignore the differences between the pill and previous forms of contraception, those previous forms seemed effective enough for analysts of the 1920s to attribute that sexual revolution to them, and effective enough to lead to a dramatic decrease in birth-rate before the invention of the pill.Finally, the conception of sexuality wanting to be let out led once more to the assumption that scientific information about the body and sexuality was inherently pro-sexual, and that this new information (now it became Masters and Johnson, or Kinsey, instead of Freud) increased sexual permissiveness. This emphasis on the effects of scientific knowledge also seems quite misplaced; it is more likely, as Gagnon and Smith have argued, that the significant knowledge was social knowledge, that is, knowledge of what people were already doing that destroyed the pluralistic ignorance (in Allport's term) that supported the idea of stability in sexual mores and behavior. (The emphasis on scientific knowledge as being inherently liberatory was a particularly interesting bit of cultural amnesia, for in the nineteenth-century European scene, those seeking sexual liberation did so not through a scientific discourse, but through a discourse of sin and the transcendence of morality. The significance of such non-scientific attention to sexuality on the history of behavior was erased by the modernist mind.)To summarize, the idea of a sexual revolution to some degree preserved a protean explanatory framework merely through its juxta-position of sexual and revolution, where revolution had vaguely Marxist-Leninist connotations. This framework naturally unfolded when people began to ask what had caused the revolution, and whether or not there truly was a revolution, and has since become the dominant framework for interpreting sexual change. A perfect example is the work of Steven Seidman, one of the foremost sociological analysts of sexual history, and someone who tends to be wary of simplistic materialist explanations. He discusses the entrance of women into the paid labor force, arguing that the contradiction between their growing economic empowerment and political subordination prompted women's demands for social and sexual autonomy including the legitimation of eroticism. Then he concludes, Capitalism, changing gender roles [due to the above], technological changes in contraception and birth control, and the broader processes of social and political liberalization contributed to the making of the twentieth century American intimate culture. Yet, social change is not the result of abstract social processes, but is merely made by people ... [and so] the roles of sex reformers and rebels were critical to sexual change in twentieth century America. Aside from the appended effects of general social liberalization (which might be seen as making the more materialistic causes redundant), we see the usual suspects despite any clear reasons why any of them are linked to their effects (why, for example, would economic empowerment lead women to call for the legitimation of eroticism?).This explanation is only comprehensible against the background of an understanding of what a sexual revolution is, i.e., one coming from the combination of Marxist-Leninist and Freudian-vitalist ideas leading to the expectation of witnessing a combination of deep, long-term, secular economic effects and the sudden discontinuous self-freeing of the repressed sexuality of youths and women. This is not simply the tendency of the sociological imagination to link any and all things to the development of capitalism, for the emphasis on discontinuity led analysts then to look for local causes (often those associated with sexual rebels - a prime example is the influence of the civil-rights movement or the second World War) to explain the timing. In both the case of the fundamental economic causes and that of the local sparks, there was a parochial attempt to explain changes that were clearly international with causes that were purely national in scope (the arguments based on economic change cannot be applied to Weimar Germany, for example). Finally, while substantiating such a claim would certainly be outside of the bounds of this article, I suggest that it is quite plausible that the preexisting idea of what a sexual revolution is affected not only how later analysts interpreted the second sexual revolution, but also how people as actors interpreted changes they lived through. While actors probably did not stress continuous economic factors as did later analysts, for both, when cultural elements were taken into account, it was the discovery of new scientific information that had (naturally) set sex free at last (many contemporary accounts by protagonists of the sexual revolution stress the illuminating information from Masters and Johnson - in contrast to the repressive effects of Freudianism!). The sexual revolution was about knowledge, liberation of the body, and economic change - not changing values or other cultural elements (even though, as we have seen above, it seems most likely that it was precisely cultural values that changed, since moral reservations were the biggest check to female premarital sex before the second sexual revolution). And sociological analysis has shared this blindness - only a few (Daniel Bell for one) argued that autonomous cultural developments were revolutionizing society. When we take a step back, sociologists have been satisfied with extremely vague and dubious explanations as to the relationship between economic development and sexual revolutions - explanations that seem to have a great deal of truth in them, but that are grounded in particular constructions of what a sexual revolution should look like.

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Alternate intimacy,marriage, and family lifestyles among low-income Black Americans

This article describes nontraditional intimacy, marriage and family structures, and patterns of interaction among low-income Black Americans. Census data are reported to document trends in the development of alternative and alternate family structures for American Blacks. An explanation of why these lifestyles have heretofore been neglected in alternative lifestyle research is suggested. The relation between social structure and ethnic preferences in determining familial lifetyle choices and options is explored. An attempt is made to delineate the social, cultural, and economic forces associated with their emergence. Finally, a theoretical approach to analyzing the genesis of diverse ethnic family structures is explored. Author's Note: The author expresses his gratitude to Teresa Donati Marciano of Fairleigh Dickinson University, Roger W. Libby of the University of Massachusetts, and the Philadelphia Regional office of the U.S. Census Bureau for their comments and assistance.     

The direct social preference relation in the theory of public expenditure

It is shown that if there is a finite number of private goods, a single public good, and the individual preferences satisfy certain monotonicity and separability conditions then there is a unique and complete social preference relation defined on the set of allocations by the requirement that the relation is individualistic in terms of the individual ordinal preferences. This relation, called the direct social preference relation, is derived without imposing interpersonal welfare comparisons and all its ordinal properties are inherited directly from those of the individual preferences. However, an allocation which is maximal in terms of the direct social preference relation on the set of feasible allocations is in general not Pareto optimal and the relation may therefore not be suitable as a guide to optimizing social choice.This version of the paper has benefitted from J. Weymark's insightful and detailed comments. In addition, valuable suggestions have been received from G. C. Archibald, C. Blackorby, D. Donaldson and D. Primont. All remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the author     

A Twin Study of Adult Gambling Behavior

A twin study explored the possible genetic influences on gambling behavior. Male monozygotic (MZ) twins (n = 42) revealed significantly greater similarity on gambling frequency associated with high-action games than male dizygotic (DZ) twins (n = 50). The heritability estimates for involvement in these types of games among males were moderate and significant. All MZ versus DZ comparisons among males for low-action games were nonsignificant, as were MZ versus DZ comparisons among females (n = 63) for both types of games. The findings suggest that genetic influences may be important in the origins of certain types of gambling by men.