Attitudes and Bureaucrats: Assessing the Representativeness of Local Officials in New Hampshire1

Abstract Since the late 1950s and 1960s, New Hampshire has experienced unprecedented growth. During the past two decades, this growth has begun to be felt in the state's North Country, particularly among its many small communities. As a result of developmental pressures in this region, numerous local problems related to the environment and socioeconomic conditions surfaced. The responsibility for meeting the challenges of such growth and development often fell on amateur bureaucrats. Relatively little is known about how representative such officials are of their local citizenry in terms of attitudes and opinions or sociodemograph-ics. This paper presents the results of a study comparing demographic characteristics and assesses the congruence of attitudes of citizens and local government officials in the North Country of New Hampshire.     

Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund

Michel Callon has conceptualised economic actors as made up of socio‐technical agencements: collectives of human beings, technical devices, algorithms, and so on. This article reports a pilot, partially observational study of a hedge fund, a category of actor in financial markets that is of growing importance but that has so far attracted little attention in economic sociology. It draws on that study, and on interviews with other financial market practitioners, to delineate what is involved in viewing such an actor as made up of an agencement, and discusses the merits of doing so.     

New jobs in energy research and development—A survey

This article presents some of the findings of a very comprehensive survey of the scientific and technological industrial research and development organizations in the Houston Gulf Coast area. This article argues that there are new and emerging occupation in energy research and development, and, presents some of the attributes that industrial organizations felt were desirable for individuals entering these occupations. It provides a means to facilitate the short-and long-range planning of industrial organizations, governmental agencies, and educational institutions in the hiring and training of individuals for new and emerging occupations in energy research and development.     

Social Landscapes of the Inter‐Mountain West: A Comparison of ‘Old West’ and ‘New West’ Communities*

Abstract Rural communities have experienced dramatic demographic, social, and economic transformations over the past 30 years. Historically characterized by close links between natural resources and social, cultural, and economic structures, few of today's rural communities remain heavily dependent upon traditional extractive industries like ranching, forestry, and mining. New forms of development linked to natural and cultural amenities, including tourism and recreation, have evolved to sustain the link between community and resources. The Inter‐Mountain West region offers an excellent example of this distinction. Many of the region's rural communities have experienced substantial population growth resulting from the in‐migration of a new kind of rural resident. Their arrival, in a process some have associated with the emergence of a “New West,” has transformed rural places. However, amenity‐related social and economic structures have not occurred uniformly across space. This paper uses factor analysis and exploratory spatial data analysis to analyze demographic characteristics related to the “New West” phenomena in Inter‐Mountain West communities and the spatial patterns found in the degree of “New West‐ness” that each community exhibits.     

Changes that cause changes

Beyond determining whether procedures can be manipulated, the real goal for any analysis of “strategic behavior” is to identify all settings where and when this can be done, who can do it, and what they should do. By applying the geometric approach of Saari [7, 8] to the Kemeny's Rule (KR), we demonstrate how surprisingly simple this analysis can be, we identify all three candidate KR strategic behavior, and we show how an almost identical analysis answers most other multiple profile concerns (e.g., the abstention paradox and when voters just make errors). We also introduce new measures, which can be used with any procedure, to compare strategic and other behavior involving “changes.” These measures help to identify settings where it may be more important to worry about honest mistakes than strategic voting. Received: 16 April 1999/Accepted: 29 September 1999     

Analyzing a nail-biting election

Using Brams and Fishburn's report and data, the SC&W election is analyzed with an emphasis on explaining the theoretical reasons for the conflicting outcomes. In the process, some new results are obtained. Received: 20 June 2000/Accepted: 26 March 2001     

Can Registration-Based Sampling Improve the Accuracy of Midterm Election Forecasts?

We compare the predictive accuracy of preelection polls usingtwo types of sampling frames, random digit dialing (RDD) andregistration-based sampling (RBS). The latter involves stratifiedrandom sampling from voter registration lists. In order to assessthe accuracy with which RDD and RBS predict election outcomes,we collaborated with the Washington Post, Quinnipiac, and CBSNews polls, which conducted parallel RDD and RBS surveys inMaryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota prior tothe November 5, 2002, elections. The results suggest that inthe gubernatorial and congressional elections studied, RBS performedas well, if not better, than RDD, both in terms of forecastingaccuracy and cost.