The Feminist Citizen-Subject: It’s not About Choice,It’s About Changing It All

This article ties together two different sources related to the Trial of Pussy Riot in Russia in 2012. On the one hand, I consider legal documents, such as court proceedings, police reports, and the sentence. On the other, I analyse a life-history interview with one of the accused, thus giving her a voice that is not mediated by juridical institutions within criminal law procedure. This allows an analysis of two different subject positions produced by these texts: a conformist citizen and a feminist activist-citizen. I pay more attention to the latter. I conclude that in order to retain an activist position, the feminist subject has no option but to resist.     

Is there a long‐run relationship between population growth and living standards? The case of India

This note examines the existence of a long‐run, cointegrating relationship between population and per capita GDP in India for 1950–93. Unit root tests show that per capita GDP is integrated of order one while population is integrated of order zero; further, estimation of the bi‐variate relationship using the cointegration procedure of Johansen shows that no long‐run relationship exists. Thus, population growth neither causes per capita income growth nor is caused by it. A corollary is that population growth neither stimulates per capita income growth nor detracts from it.     

Economic partnering with the poor: why local governments should work with community-based development organizations to promote economic development

Much of conventional economic development ends up as a transfer of wealth from the public sector to successful firms. Instead, local governments would be better off working to support the efforts of community-based development organizations to expand the economic pie for those most in need. Suggestions are made of ways to bring about equity development programs that would help those most in need rather than merely subsidizing established businesses.     

Donald and Winston at the Ministry of Alternative Facts

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian classics have risen in response to the audacious attempts of President Donald Trump to manipulate public opinion by circulating “alternative facts” throughout the presidential campaign and since his November 2016 election victory. Various statements by Trump and his advisors that exemplify what has come to be known as the “post-factual world” account for the meteoric rise and final breakthrough of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the top of the bestseller lists in spring 2017.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.