The Politics of Randomness

Recent analysis of public policy is based on elaborate political-economic models. A major advantage of these useful models is that they have micro-foundations. Their main shortcomings are that they are usually based on drastic simplifications regarding the institutional setting and, more importantly, that the results they yield are not robust to the assumptions regarding the institutional setting, the policy space or the agents’ preferences. An alternative reduced-form modeling is the public-policy lobbying contest. This model can be applied to public-policy determination in representative democracies. However, its main drawback is that the notion of contest success function (CSF), a crucial component of the contest model, does not have micro-foundations and, therefore, the random behavior of the government seems ad-hoc. In the present paper we propose a partial micro-foundation for the public-policy contest. The possible rationalization of random government behavior is illustrated in the case of the most commonly studied CSFs: the function associated with the all-pay auction and Tullock’s lottery logit functions. We also clarify how stake asymmetry, lobbying-skill asymmetry and return to lobbying effort determine the relative desirability, from the government’s point of view, of these CSFs.     

Sowing Seeds of Democracy

Bernard Forrest, Joshua. (1998). Namibia's Post-Apartheid Regional Institutions: The Founding Year. University of Rochester Press, 408 pages.     

Anti-politics and the spirit of capitalism: Dissidents,monetarists, and the Czech transition to capitalism

Theory and Society -     

Family Factors, Theft, Vandalism, and Major Deviance Among a Multiracial/Multiethnic Sample of Adolescent Girls

This article reports on a study of 503 African-American, Hispanic, and White non-Hispanic adolescent girls attending public schools in Miami, Florida, The primary objectives of the study were to determine the prevalence of 13 self-reported delinquent behaviors in the sample, to compare these rates among the three groups of students, and to explore the predictive influences of several family factors that correlate with delinquency. It was found that 37.5% of the sample engaged in one or more acts of serious delinquency, with African-Americans reporting they had engaged in significantly more of these behaviors. The best predictors of theft/vandalism were low family pride and family substance abuse for Hispanics, low family communication for African-Americans, and low family pride for White non-Hispanics. The findings indicate that traditional family factors that have been used repeatedly to understand delinquency by male adolescents were not strong predictors of delinquency among the adolescent girls in the sample.     

Next steps in the expanded learning discourse

This concluding chapter examines the emerging themes, challenges, opportunities, and next steps for ELTO.     

Enclaves, language, and the location choice of migrants

Empirical studies in the migration literature have shown that enclaves (networks) negatively affect the language proficiency of migrants. Most of these studies do not address the choice of location as a function of language skills. Using data on Mexican migration to the US, we show that migrants choose smaller networks as their English language proficiency improves.

The political economy of population economics

The relationship between political economy and population economics involves many important issues such as the roles of voters, interest groups, families, and social policy. In this short note, we discuss the new and intriguing issues raised by current research at the intersection of these two subjects.     

Gendered Self-Improvement: Autonomous Personhood and the Marriage Predicament of Young Women in Urban China

How does gender shape the experience and imaginaries of self-realisation? This article explores practices of self-improvement among young women in China, namely workshops for interpersonal skills. These practices direct participants to express themselves as autonomous persons, disembedded from social hierarchies and familial responsibilities. Unmarried women who attend workshops conceive of marriage as an unavoidable impediment to their self-realisation. This is due to a prevailing gender inequality in marriage, as well as the ongoing expansion of an ideal of individual autonomy in China through economic reforms. In this article, I do not centre my analysis on a cultural clash between this ideal and local cultural practices. Instead, it is the possibility of this ideal, which is always shaped and restricted by socio-economic imperatives, that induces women’s frustration with their local culture. The fact that this ideal promises universal attainment highlights for women the gender roles that limit their autonomy.     

Learning with excitement: bridging school and after-school worlds and project-based learning

A bridging typology captures a range of ways that after-school programs connect children's diverse worlds and support project-based learning.