Public Opinion and Collective Obligations

This article attempts to identify the general principles that underlie public reasoning about collective obligations and that help explain when political parties can create new obligations or defend existing ones. I use these principles to President Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to create government health-care plan and attempts by President Bush to privatize Social Security. The success of a party in selling – or defeating – an obligation depends upon what people believe about the competence and capacity of government and the value of autonomy – choices made by each citizen; whether people perceive the obligation as providing floors or establishing ceilings by limiting choice or otherwise restricting opportunities for the better-off; and whether the program is more like insurance or more like welfare. A party’s ability to maintain credibility with voters also depends upon whether party leaders can suppress issues that threaten intra-party elite pacts. When attempts to suppress “taboo” issues like “stem cells” or “black crime” fail, the party loses credibility with its voters and attempts to defend or sell obligations fail.

Manufacturing Trust: Community Currencies and the Creation of Social Capital

In this study I examine whether an innovative government program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in increasing the level of generalized interpersonal trust in the community by rewarding civic participation by local citizens. Japan has sponsored the development of a number of “community currency” programs at the local level that are designed to create social capital. A community currency is a local “money” that is only useable within a neighborhood or town. In a typical community currency program, a town rewards civic volunteers with credits to barter with other citizens, use at participating stores, or pay for town services. These programs are specifically designed to stimulate generalized trust by rewarding civic engagement and encouraging social interaction. I evaluate whether the new Tekona community currency program in Ichikawa, Japan has been successful in raising levels of trust among participants, as compared to a randomly selected control group of town residents. I find that community currency involvement increases general trust, which demonstrates that it is possible to institute government programs that create social capital.

Justice: Plain Old and Distributive: Rejoinder to Charles Taylor

This paper argues that the views of Charles Taylor on justice in income and wealth distribution are fallacious, especially in regard to issues such as private property rights, justice, human rights, and theft. As to this last point, Taylor maintains it is possible, under certain circumstances, to “legitimately steal.” We regard this as a philosophical howler of the first order. We also demur from his contention that equity and equality can be used as synonyms.

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A Question of Authority: Religion and Cultural Conflict in the 2004 Election

In this study I adopt a view of cultural conflict that extends beyond the usual set of controversial “moral” issues like abortion and gay rights to include symbolic issues related to patriotism and group affect. Using a set of survey items asking about respondents’ preferences in child-rearing, I create a measure of individuals’ orientations toward authority that proves to be a potent predictor of attitudes on cultural issues, affect toward social groups, party identification, and vote choice. This authority effect persists even in the presence of extensive multivariate controls for demographic and religious variables. I find that both authority measures and religion measures shape political attitudes, suggesting the need for a multi-faceted approach to understanding cultural conflict.

Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout

A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls, and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election. However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient should be more willing to vote. We use a “choice game” from experimental economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter turnout.

Brothers’ Keepers?

Relying on rarely analyzed public opinion data from the 1930s and early 1940s, we take issue with the notion popular in contemporary liberal circles that the New Deal era represented a period of expansive commitment to the security and well-being of the poor and politically disenfranchised. At least where the public is concerned—as opposed to the progressive policy makers in the Roosevelt administration—the jobless were regarded with suspicion, immigrants should be forced to “go home,” women belong in the kitchen not on the shop floor. The harsher the economic conditions (by state), the more conservative were the public attitudes. Hence New Deal legislative victories accrued despite rather than because of public support.

How Serious is the Global Warming Threat?

Despite the media’s and politicians’ insistence that the science of global warming is “settled”, there are good reasons to distrust climate model projections of future global warming. While the supposed scientific consensus is that mankind is very likely to blame for recent global warmth, this is mostly a statement of faith made from a position of relative ignorance about natural variability in the climate system. Since we do not understand what causes decadal- to century-scale natural climate variability, it has simply been assumed to either not exist, or to be relatively small. But even if predictions of catastrophic warming are accurate, the worldwide demand for energy is so large that there is little mankind can do without radically new energy technologies. Since it is only the wealthy countries of the world that can afford the R&D efforts to develop those technologies, punishing the use of fossil fuels, and the resulting negative impact on economies, might well delay the development of cost effective carbon-free energy sources that so many people are now calling for.

Beyond Good and Evil: The Black–White Divide in Critical Race Theory

Derrick Bell’s work challenges the dichotomy that separates legitimate legal reasoning from “mere” fiction through hybrids that play across science fiction, Platonic dialogue, and autobiography. Despite its merits, I argue that Bell’s position reifies and strengthens, rather than deconstructs, structures of tyranny; it maintains the problematic rhetorical construction of United States race relations in terms of the black–white divide, either alienating, or leaving little or no room for other racial groups constructively to revise power and identity. In contrast, bell hooks’, Mari Matsuda’s and Robert Chang’s work, though tentatively sketched, construes current race and gender relations in terms of a chiaroscuro of power, rather than a simple dichotomy.

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Export processing zones and corporate environmental performance in emerging economies: The case of the oil,gas, and chemical sectors of Trinidad and Tobago

Export processing zones (EPZs) are increasingly being established to promote economic growth in developing countries. However, they remain controversial and are often criticized for being associated with a “race to the bottom” characterized by the easing of labor and environmental standards. This paper investigates whether the decision to locate facilities inside these zones is associated with higher corporate environmental performance. Findings indicate that facilities operating in Trinidad and Tobago’s EPZs are more likely to show higher corporate environmental performance than those outside. Additionally, firms in state-managed zones appear to show higher corporate environmental performance than those located in privately managed zones. Enhanced institutional pressures from regulators, local communities, and fellow tenant firms may explain these differences. These results suggest that environmental policy makers and environmentalists can take advantage of already established EPZs to promote enclave enhanced institutional pressures associated with superior corporate environmental performance.

Dictatorship of the Professoriat?

The following interview is with a retired eastern German professor whose career constitutes a case history in the comparative politics of “academic unfreedom”. Professor Erhard Naake was the only Ph.D. student in the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to write his dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work was considered “anti-socialist” throughout the history of the GDR regime. Because Herr Naake had the temerity to select Nietzsche as his thesis topic – a philosopher whose work was banned from GDR bookstores and never taught in GDR schools or even universities – he never received an appointment as a professor in a GDR university. Ironically, however, even after the collapse of the GDR in 1989–1990, Herr Naake was penalized by the new powers-that-be in reunited Germany. He once again suffered a violation of his academic freedom when the university evaluation boards, which were composed of western German scholars, refused to let him keep his recently acquired position as a professor and instead summarily fired him, thus leading to his enforced retirement. As we shall see, the dramatic life story of Herr Naake reflects not only complicated issues of academic freedom and communist versus capitalist political values, but also the rich and complex history of eastern Germany both under the Nazis and GDR Communists and within reunited Germany since 1990.

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Political Disagreement in Context: The Conditional Effect of Neighborhood Context, Disagreement and Political Talk on Electoral Participation

Despite scholarly interest in determining how exposure to disagreeable political ideas influences political participation, existing research supports few firm conclusions. This paper argues that these varied findings stem from an implicit model of contextual influence that fails to account for the indirect effect of aggregate social contexts. A model of contextual influence is outlined which implies that the neighborhood partisan context moderates the effect of political disagreement in social networks on campaign participation. The evidence shows that network disagreement demobilizes people who are the political minority in their neighborhood, but has no influence on people in the majority. When viewed together, these findings indicate that a person’s relationship to the broader political environment sets distinctive network processes in motion.

Zeugmatic Spaces: Eastern/Central European Feminisms

This article stems from a sense of discontent and frustration that the cultural position of Eastern/Central European feminisms have not been theorized enough in comparison with other non-First World feminisms. To construct my argument, I use a rhetorical figure, zeugma, which is able to underpin the specificity and the commonalities of the post-Communist area feminisms as compared to the hegemonic feminisms of the world or to Third World feminisms. Zeugma (from an ancient Greek word meaning “bridge”) is a figure of speech that relies on balance and acceptance of grammatical difference. An almost perfect cultural space shifter, Eastern/Central Europe produces feminist discourses that constitute, in my opinion, zeugmatic spaces in the worldwide concerto of world feminisms. I suggest that many of the problems of contemporary feminist theory arise from the context that has defined feminist theory. Only if we fully understand this context will we be in a position to understand how to escape from the dilemmas posed by this context” (Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care) “Which is why the critique of all discourses concerning gender, including those produced or promoted as feminist, continues to be as vital a part of feminism as is the ongoing effort to create new spaces of discourse, to rewrite cultural narratives, and to define the terms of another perspective—a view from ‘elsewhere’” (Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender)

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Designing property rights for water: mediating market,government, and corporation failures

Recent decades have seen an acceleration in public concern about the allocation of increasingly scarce water supplies. There are many reasons for this concern, such as growth in urban populations. In this article, we focus on how surface water’s special qualities (the combination of spillovers, rent-seeking behavior, and common pool resources) complicate the assignment of property rights in any legal framework. These characteristics make specific market structures necessary in order to efficiently allocate rights. The state usually designs those structures. Yet, just like markets can fail, so can governments fail to effectively allocate those rights. So designers often turn to quasi-judicial conservancy boards as a second-best solution. We argue that those boards may themselves fail through a form of “corporation failure.” We address these three types of failures, and offer an analysis of two cases that suggests that the likelihood conservancy boards will suffer from corporate failure depends on the actions of the boards and outside stakeholders (like governments).

When Education Research Matters

The tangled relationship between education research and policy has received little serious scrutiny, even as paeans to “scientifically based research” and “evidence-based practice” have become a staple of education policymaking in recent years. For all the attention devoted to the 5-year-old Institute of Education Sciences, to No Child Left Behind’s call for “scientifically based research,” to professional interest in data-driven decision-making, and to the refinement of sophisticated analytic tools, little effort has gone into understanding how, when, or why research affects education policy. Instead, most discussion has focused on how to identify “best practices” or “scientifically based” methods and how to encourage classroom educators to use research findings. In this article, based on the new volume, When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, Frederick M. Hess examines these questions.

The Incongruities of Grutter

This article scrutinizes the inconsistencies in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger Supreme Court decision which upheld the University of Michigan’s law school affirmative action policy. The decision, which now governs university admissions policies in all 50 states, ruled that “diversity” remains a compelling state interest that legally justifies discriminating between individuals on the basis of their race in determining college admissions. This article examines two incongruous justifications offered by the Grutter court in justification for their ruling: the “critical mass” justification and the no “undo harm” argument. Neither rationale is able to withstand careful, logical examination.

A spatial analysis of green teams: a tactical response to marijuana production in British Columbia

Over a period of 4 years (1997–2000), British Columbia (BC) experienced tremendous growth in the illicit production and distribution of domestically grown marijuana. By the close of 2000, each policing jurisdiction in BC had adopted a particular policy in response to grow operation proliferation. In summary, four policy responses were noted. First, some maintained the status quo wherein enforcement of police initiated investigations and citizens’ tips continued, but with no additional resources specifically dedicated to grow operations. Second, some jurisdictions suspended the majority of investigation and enforcement of grow operations. Third, some agencies implemented or reinforced existing resource intensive drug squads, which focused on trafficking, sales and production of all types of drugs. Finally, some of the jurisdictions formed specialized tactical units known as “green teams” that focused solely on the enforcement of marijuana production. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of green teams using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and difference-in-difference estimates. The results indicate that green teams decrease grow operations within their target area without significant displacement to surrounding areas.

How High-Yield Farming Saves Nature

High-yield farming—more agricultural output per acre of farmland—has been a boon to mankind and to nature. If today’s agricultural efficiency was the same as in the 1950s, the world would need three times the cropland to produce today’s food supply. That would mean that 15-16 million mi² of forest would have been destroyed—all the global forest area available today. Rising population and increased affluence will require a tripling of agricultural efficiency in the next 50 years if we are to protect wildlife at the same time. More investment in agricultural research and education will be required, but this is what produced the previous green revolution.

The nature of the beast: are citizens’ juries deliberative or pluralist?

Citizens’ juries are a form of “minipublics,” small-scale experiments with citizen participation in public decision-making. The article presents a theoretical argument that improves understanding relating to the design of the citizens’ jury. We develop the claim that two discourses on democracy can be discerned: the deliberative and the pluralist. By looking at the design features of citizens’ juries we conclude that they are based on pluralist reasoning to a far greater extent than most authors seem to realize, and that the association with deliberative democracy is therefore one-sided. Based on empirical findings, we attempt to shed further light on the actual operation of citizens’ juries. Observations of two recent Dutch juries suggest on the one hand that a learning process and a positive effect on the sense of political involvement occurred. On the other hand, we saw a certain level of groupthink in one of the citizens’ juries, and found that the juries are not greatly representative in terms of political preferences. Our findings point firstly to a need for greater awareness among the organizers of juries of the two democratic discourses. This would lead to more consistent jury design. Secondly, our research emphasizes the need for more hands-on critical research of minipublics.

On the Other Side of the Curtain: A Reassessment of Non-Elite Human Rights Experiences and Values in Poland

In this paper, I explore the formation of human rights attitudes among what I call the “silent majority” in the post-communist countries of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This is the large, diverse group of people never directly confronted with harsh methods of repression under communism. I argue here that the foundations for conceptualizing human rights are based on the degree and saliency of exposure to rights violations and that, for many citizens of Central and Eastern Europe, life behind the “iron curtain” is associated with relatively fewer rights violations than life after the iron curtain’s fall. Comparative personal experiences will play a key role in explaining how these citizens conceptualize human rights. I test this argument by applying it to the cases of Poland, where I conducted a total of 68 randomly selected non-elite interviews in an effort to probe for key factors defining individuals’ conceptions of human rights.

The Freedom of Expression in Global Perspective

This paper presents recent events including the Danish cartoon crisis occasion—a re-examination of John Stuart Mill’s argument for freedom of expression. Despite the appeal of liberalism, Mill’s philosophy had from the start been subject to intense criticism. The rise of political Islam opens a new phase in the debate; the difficulties pointed out by Mill’s critics are indicative of the obstacles that liberalism still faces.