POLITICAL COMPETITION WITH CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS AND INFORMATIVE ADVERTISING

This paper presents a theory of political competition with campaign contributions and informative political advertising. Policy‐motivated parties compete by selecting candidates and interest groups provide contributions to enhance the electoral prospects of like‐minded candidates. Contributions are used to finance advertising campaigns that provide voters with information about candidates' ideologies. Voters update their beliefs rationally given the information they have received. The paper uses the theory to analyze the welfare economics of contribution limits. Such limits are shown to redistribute welfare from ordinary citizens to members of interest groups. (JEL: D72, H40)     

Getting to the Top: Selection and Training for Senior Managers in the Police Service

This paper examines the processes by which the senior police officers in England and Wales are chosen and prepared for their role. Based upon research interviews with a sample of chief constables and assistant chief constables, it develops a critical assessment of the quality of each of the three key stages in this respect: the selection of those considered to have the potential to become senior officers, senior management training, and the appointments process at police authority level. In the light of the assessments made, the paper considers alternative schemes to those which currently operate at each stage of the process.     

The Significance of Shils

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker. The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by associating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully comparable alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially similar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tradition, with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendrik de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and liberalism in terms of an account of civility and tradition, and how this argument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liberalism.     

A PLAGUE ON THE PANOPTICON: Surveillance and power in the global information economy

With technological advances in data-manipulation, the increased 'informability' of our daily lives and the potential for social management, surveillance has become a key site for understanding the workings of power within the global informational economy. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon has, courtesy of Foucault, become a dominant metaphor in surveillance studies. This central eye, aimed at the moral reform of institutionalized bodies and operating through a de facto closure of individual agency, tends to limit our conception of the complex ways surveillance serves and disrupts power. Through analysis of commercial and workplace surveillance, this paper shows that power is contested and agency never completely closed down. To comprehend this negotiated relationship, an alternative framework - 'plague management' - is presented. This envisions surveillance within a social setting operated by multiple agents who themselves are open to the gaze of those surveyed. The aim of this project is to categorize rather than to reform and cure, and moreover space is available for resistance. On the global scale, new technologies have opened up space for informal, local surveillances to be effectively linked to media and Internet audiences. These 'surveillance networks', informal alliances of a variety of actors, have the potential to radically alter orthodox relations of power by evading the information controls of the state and connecting a local gaze with the global community. This paper concludes that although surveillance studies has rightly been concerned with the control capacities of IT, a balance must be actively sought with the facilitative, enabling and even democratic impulses nascent in the new technology.     

Evaluation of Embedded Intelligent Real‐time Systems*

Over the past two decades, questions have surfaced about the effectiveness and contribution of intelligent systems to decision makers in a variety of settings. This paper focuses on the evaluation challenges associated with intelligent real‐time software systems that are embedded in larger host systems. With the proliferation of such systems in operational settings such as aerospace, medical, manufacturing, and transportation systems, increased attention to evaluations of such systems, and to resulting software safety, is warranted. This paper describes one such evaluation and proposes a set of evaluation criteria for embedded intelligent real‐time systems (EIRTS). Implications of the evaluation and the evaluation criteria are discussed.     

Choosing the Number of Instruments

Properties of instrumental variable estimators are sensitive to the choice of valid instruments, even in large cross‐section applications. In this paper we address this problem by deriving simple mean‐square error criteria that can be minimized to choose the instrument set. We develop these criteria for two‐stage least squares (2SLS), limited information maximum likelihood (LIML), and a bias adjusted version of 2SLS (B2SLS). We give a theoretical derivation of the mean‐square error and show optimality. In Monte Carlo experiments we find that the instrument choice generally yields an improvement in performance. Also, in the Angrist and Krueger (1991) returns to education application, when the instrument set is chosen in the way we consider, it turns out that both 2SLS and LIML give similar (large) returns to education.     

Coupling Social Solidarity and Social Harmony in Hong Kong

The various forms of social solidarity are empirically uncharted, especially in relation to social harmony. With respect to resource exchange theory, inclusive solidarity or intergroup acceptance is more conducive to social harmony than mechanical, organic, distributive, and dialogic forms of solidarity. The theoretical prediction holds in the present study that surveyed 1,093 Hong Kong Chinese. Importantly, one??s experience of inclusive solidarity tended to contribute to one??s practice of social harmony and experience of societal social harmony. Moreover, results show that experiences of organic, distributive, and dialogic solidarity also appeared to induce the practice of social harmony. In contrast, mechanical solidarity did not seem to be helpful for sustaining social harmony. Different forms of solidarity thereby exhibit differential impacts on social harmony.     

A future agenda for research on climate change and human mobility

In the past 15 years, research activities focusing on the interlinkages between climate change and human mobility have intensified. At the same time, an increasing number of actors and processes have sought to address human mobility in the context of climate change from a policy perspective. Hitherto, research has been limited in terms of geographical preferences as well as conceptual and methodological focus areas. This paper argues that to address the evolving policy space, future research on climate change in the context of human mobility needs to become more differentiated, integrated and generalized. This includes concerted efforts to better integrate researchers from the global South, improved cross-linkages between different datasets, approaches and disciplines, more longitudinal and comparative studies and development of innovative qualitative and quantitative methods.     

Toward an Understanding of Founder's Syndrome: An Assessment of Power and Privilege Among Founders of Nonprofit Organizations

On the subject of stewardship, Block (1996, p. 47) writes, “Stewardship not only affects the use of power, but it also confronts the way we hold privilege.” He also states, “Holding on to privilege is an act of self‐interest, the antithesis of service and stewardship.” As Block uses it, the term privilege denotes a class structure within governance settings, and self‐interest refers to using one's power (through the exercise of privilege) to ascertain an objective that may not be in accord with others'.