William R. Keech: in Memoriam

Public Choice - We analyze the non-contributory health insurance program (“green cards”) in Turkey with RDD (Regression Discontinuity Design) and show that more citizens receive green...     

Performance Measurement in U.S. Counties: Capacity for Reform

This study examines the capacity of U.S. counties to undertake performance measurement. Based on a national survey of counties with populations over 50,000, the authors address the following questions: To what extent do counties implement performance measurement? Which capacities must be present for different levels of implementation and success? What can counties do to increase their capacity for performance measurement? And, what is the effect of county structure and functions on the use of performance measurement? This study finds that the success of performance measurement is greatly affected by counties' underlying organizational capacities.     

Rebuttal versus Unmasking: Legal Strategy in R. v. Zundel

Conventional scholarly wisdom has it that most Italian Americans in the United States were loyal supporters of the policies of Fascism in the inter-war years but eventually rejected the antisemitic measures that Benito Mussolini's regime adopted in their ancestral country in 1938. Contrary to such an interpretation, Luconi argues that many Italian Americans themselves held antisemitic attitudes and, therefore, did not distance themselves from Fascism after Mussolini launched his campaign against Italian Jews. He also contends that these attitudes resulted less from an ideological commitment to Fascism than from both the strained relations between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans, and the antisemitic climate of opinion that characterized American society in the 1930s. Italian Americans and Jews were partners in the labour movement and the Democratic Party. Yet the former resented the latter's distrust in Italian Americans' labour militancy, as well as the earlier rise of Jews in the hierarchies of the unions and the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Italian Americans and Jews competed for jobs, political patronage, cheap housing and relief benefits, especially during the Depression years. Such ethnic rivalries and the appeal of right-wing organizations to Italian Americans contributed to make the latter prone to antisemitism. As a result, few Americans of Italian descent came out against the racial policy of the Fascist regime.     

U.S.-India Space Partnership: The Jewel in the Crown

The new strategic partnership between the United States and India is creating opportunities for security cooperation. A key element in this partnership—U.S.-India space cooperation—will most likely become the defining relationship for international space cooperation around which other space-faring nations will posture. The Indian space program is rapidly developing world-class capabilities and presents itself as a worthy partner. The U.S. space program should be able to provide innovative ideas for fruitful collaboration. Despite these propitious circumstances, there are potential obstacles of cost, security, and risk. The biggest obstacle, however, might simply be bureaucratic intransigence and inertia. The opportunity is here, now, for the United States and India each to add an important new jewel to their crown of international space cooperation activities. Most importantly, this new space partnership should enhance the security and prosperity of the United States, India, and the world.     

Pleasing the Principal: U.S. Influence in World Bank Policymaking

How do policies in international organizations reflect the preferences of powerful institutional stakeholders? Using an underutilized data set on the conditions associated with World Bank loans, we find that borrower countries that vote with the United States at the United Nations are required to enact fewer domestic policy reforms, and on fewer and softer issue areas. Though U.S. preferences permeate World Bank decision making, we do not find evidence that borrower countries trade favors in exchange for active U.S. intervention on their behalf. Instead, we propose that U.S. influence operates indirectly when World Bank staff—consciously or unconsciously—design programs that are compatible with U.S. preferences. Our study provides novel evidence of World Bank conditionality and shows that politicized policies can result even from autonomous bureaucracies.     

Incumbency effects in U.S. presidential campaigns: Language patterns matter

Incumbent U.S. presidential candidates have been overwhelmingly successful over the past 150 years. Attempts to explain this success rate have examined both structural advantages enjoyed by incumbents and differences in rhetorical and linguistic style in campaigning, although it is less clear why incumbency conveys an advantage here. This article finds that the language used by U.S. presidential candidates over the past twenty years has an underlying structure associated with electoral success: 1. speech patterns of incumbents differ notably from those they used in their first-term campaign; and 2. speech patterns of winners are different from those of losers. Both differences are consistent, and can therefore be postulated to indicate strength of influence. The resulting inductive model of influential language is characterized by: increased positivity, complete absence of negativity, increased abstraction, and lack of reference to the opposing candidate(s). The greatest intensity of model language is used by incumbents in their second campaign and the least by losers in a first-cycle open campaign. Language improvement by incumbents occurs rapidly, suggesting that it is the result of changing self-perception rather than a conventional learning process. This finding has broader implications, suggesting that both success, and the presence of competing groups trying to make similar arguments, improve the quality of the influencing language used.     

Japan's new electoral system:: la plus ça change . . .

We examine the impact on parties and candidates of Japan's new electoral rules, first used in the 1996 House of Representatives election. We argue that the Japanese rules, which not only permit dual candidacy but also allow votes cast in the single member district (SMD) portion of the race to allocate proportional representation (PR) seats to dual candidates, effectively defeat the purposes of electoral reform. The new arrangement transforms PR representatives into locally-based politicians who will rely on personalistic rather than party-based or programmatic campaigning, effectively converts single-member districts back into the multi-member districts of the past, enhances incumbency advantage, and will push the ratio of candidates to seats down as low or even lower than before.     

Paradoxical individualization: ideological polarization in the U.S. in historical-comparative and theoretical perspective

ABSTRACT

Beginning with Karl Marx, theorists have seen individual autonomy and ideology as opposing elements. Ideology was considered the product of mental, cultural or social constraints. People did not choose their world view – they fell victim to it. With the increase of individual autonomy, however, ideology would wither away. In the late 20th century, the advocates of individualization theory have similarly predicted the vanishing of clear-cut ideological divisions in a world in which any form of collective identity was difficult to sustain. Political eclecticism and the mixing of different political world views would become the new norm. Politics was now ‘beyond left and right’, as Anthony Giddens once famously argued. In my article, I show that this understanding of the relationship between individualization and ideological polarization is flawed. By discussing the extreme ideological polarization in the U.S., I disprove the notion that our need for ideology vanishes the more our freedoms expand. On the contrary, precisely the increase in individual autonomy – in terms of mobility patterns, media use and lifestyle differentiation – has helped to turn the country into a series of closed echo chambers and to deepen the ideological fault lines of American society.     

Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections

The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely on two factors: (1) the importance of these issues to the state's voters and (2) whether gender gaps had been decisive in previous statewide contests. Analysis of exit-poll data indicates that when campaigns focused more on women's issues, women became more likely to vote Democratic while the vote choices of men were unaffected. Thus, campaign strategies do appear to influence the importance of gender differences in voting behavior.