The Polls: Polling on Panama-Si; Don't Know; Hell, No

The transfer of the Panama Canal was the most frequently polledforeign policy issue during the period 1975-78. Contradictorytrends based on differently worded questions can be traced.But the results of the last polls, taken after both treatieshad been ratified, show the same level of opposition as wasmost commonly found when the issue began to be widely publicized.     

Cosmopolitanization in action: connecting scales in international environmental organizations

In this article we analyse how professionals in two international environmental organizations (IEOs) concerned with biodiversity act as ‘entrepreneurs of cosmopolitanization’ by establishing connections between the various scales they mobilize in their daily work. Drawing on an empirical survey, we show that these professionals mobilize a range of activities to meet a twofold requirement. The first requirement is for universality, which corresponds to their status, their determination to adopt a scientific approach and to the scale at which they initially defined the problem of biodiversity loss. The second requirement is to embed in specific contexts. Tension between these two types of requirement is inevitable. It is inherent in the cosmopolitan perspective and leads to contextual arrangements between the global approach to environmental problems and the forging of alliances with national, regional or local institutions and actors, according to opportunities and requirements. Connecting the various scales of environmental action unavoidably remains a partially achieved objective.     

Autonomic and Decisive Forms of Competition

A basis is proposed for a theory of competition which will cover all its forms and all areas of social relationship where it occurs. Forms may be classified as either autonomic , in which entities are ordered or winners determined by the process itself; or decisive , in which results are determined by a decision-maker. The first category includes two subclasses: crescive , in which relative rates of growth determine winners, and Richardson competition, in which competitors seek to outachieve one another.—Editor     

A Problem of Dimensionality in Normal Mixture Analysis

Suppose the p -variate random vector W , partitioned into q variables W₁ and p - q variables W₂, follows a multivariate normal mixture distribution. If the investigator is mainly interested in estimation of the parameters of the distribution of W₁, there are two possibilities: (1) use only the data on W₁ for estimation, and (2) estimate the parameters of the p -variate mixture distribution, and then extract the estimates of the marginal distribution of W₁. In this article we study the choice between these two possibilities mainly for the case of two mixture components with identical covariance matrices. We find the asymptotic distribution of the linear discriminant function coefficients using the work of Efron (1975 ) and O'Neill (1978 ), and give a Wald–test for redundancy of W₂. A simulation study gives further insights into conditions under which W₂ should be used in the analysis: in summary, the inclusion of W₂ seems justified if Δ 2.1, the Mahalanobis distance between the two component distributions based on the conditional distribution of W₂ given W₁, is at least 2.     

FAVORITE SONS: INTERGENERATIONAL WEALTH TRANSFERS AMONG POLITICIANS

In this paper we investigate the degree of occupational following in politics, and its impact upon the career success, and behavior (while in office) of both sons and fathers. We find that sons follow into their politician/fathers' footsteps to a degree surpassed in the general population only among farmers and self-employed proprietors. There is substantial, indirect evidence which suggests that following is motivated to a large extent by the transfer of valuable name recognition and voter loyalty.     

Cornish identities and migration: a multi‐scalar approach

Abstract In this article we argue that theories of transnationalism have value in exploring the historical context of migration and that historical contexts help to shape such theoretical conceptualizations. Historians of migration have now begun to engage more directly with the literature of transnationalism, focusing on the networks that linked settler and home communities. Here we add to this by examining a nineteenth‐century migrant community from a British region through the lens of transnationalism, applying the concept to the case of the Cornish, whose economic specialization produced culturally distinct Cornish communities on the mining frontiers of North America, Australia and South Africa. In doing so, we bring together the issues of scale and time. We review the multiple levels of the Cornish transnational space of the late nineteenth century, which exhibited aspects of both core transnationalism and translocalism. This waned, but in the later twentieth century, a renewed interest in a transnational Cornish identity re‐emerged, articulating with changing identity claims in Cornwall itself. To capture better the experience of the Cornish over these two very different phases of transnationalism we identify another subset of transnationalism ‐ that of transregionalism.