Elinor Ostrom: uncommon

The placement of various tee boxes on golf courses subsidizes the first shot of each hole for certain players. McCormick and Tollison find that this subsidy is statistically larger (other factors equal) in the southern US states and that it has been decreasing over time. These findings illustrate more general issues of chivalry, gender, age, and opportunity costs. The economics profession will undoubtedly continue to use sports data to better understand the behavior and interactions of people and firms in the economy.     

Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom,and Beyond

The article overviews and elaborates the concept of polycentricity, defined as a structural feature of social systems of many decision centers having limited and autonomous prerogatives and operating under an overarching set of rules. The article starts by introducing the concept as it was advanced by Michael Polanyi and developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It continues introducing possible instances of polycentricity as well as related notions, as part of an attempt to further elaborate the concept through a concept design approach that systematically applies the logic of necessary and sufficient conditions. The article concludes by arguing that the polycentricity conceptual framework is not only a robust analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena, but is also a challenging method of drawing non‐ad hoc analogies between different types of self‐organizing complex social systems.     

Book Reviews: The Balance between Forgetting and Remembering

Books reviewed Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Trials Richard Goldstone, For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator Joanna Van Selm, (ed) Kosovo's Refugees in the European Union Peter Shore, Separate Ways: The Heart of Europe Tommaso Padoa‐Schioppa, The Road to Monetary Union in Europe: The Emperor, the Kings and the Genies Kenneth Dyson, The Politics of the Euro‐Zone: Stability or Breakdown? Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980: The Class Cleavage Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States Richard Little and Mark Wickham‐Jones, (eds) New Labour's Foreign Policy: A New Moral Crusade? Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt, (eds) Welfare and Work in the Open Economy Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt, (eds) From Vulnerability to Competitiveness Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt, (eds)Diverse Responses to Common Challenges Andrew Samuels, Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow 1920–43     

Remembering Attack Ads: An Experimental Investigation of Radio

Political Behavior - This article seeks to advance our understanding of the influence of attack advertising on the public in two ways. First, we examine whether the content of individuals'...     

Remembering Bill Niskanen: pursuing economics as a public science in the service of liberty

This short essay is a memorial piece about William A. Niskanen (13 March 1933–26 October 2011). The essay starts with his time at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, and gives most attention to his contributions to public choice. Especial attention is paid to his Bureaucracy and Representative Government, which opened vast territory for subsequent analytical exploration. A good deal of attention is also paid to his Autocratic, Democratic, and Optimal Government because this work both conveys his interest in comparative constitutional analysis and is useful for illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to this material.     

Remembering and Voting: Theory and Evidence from Amnesic Patients

One of the most prominent claims to emerge from the field of public opinion is that citizens can vote for candidates whose issue positions best reflect their own beliefs even when they cannot remember previously learned stances associated with the candidates. The current experiment provides a unique and powerful examination of this claim by determining whether individuals with profound amnesia, whose severe memory impairments prevent them from remembering specific issue information associated with any particular candidate, can vote for candidates whose issue positions come closest to their own political views. We report here that amnesic patients, despite not being able to remember any issue information, consistently voted for candidates with favored political positions. Thus, sound voting decisions do not require recall or recognition of previously learned associations between candidates and their issue positions. This result supports a multiple memory systems model of political decision making.     

Landscape as Symbolic Form: Remembering Thick Place in Deep Time

Abstract

The current intense concern with landscape in the arts and social theory is seen as a response to the shaking of the Modern world-view, which has attended the growing awareness of the ecology crisis. The dilemmas associated with developing a new conception of the relationship between humans and the natural world is explored through a critical engagement with the work of Heidegger and Habermas. The article develops a symbolic conception of landscape as a place where the human world and the earth meet and a new sense of the human condition set within ecological constraints can be articulated and reflected upon.     

Hungary's U-turn in Kornai's system paradigm perspective: a case for national authoritarian capitalism

Public Choice - In an article published in 2016, János Kornai proposes to add a third form of governance between democracy and dictatorship to his binary model of system paradigm. It is an...     

The preconditions for successful evaluation: Is there an ideal paradigm?

The dominant paradigm in evaluation research is undergoing serious challenge. This article explores the ideal role of evaluation in decisionmaking, the methodologies for conducting evaluations, the congruence between evaluation methodology and actual organizational behavior, and the relationship between evaluators and program managers. We conclude that although there are serious disparities between the ideal and the actual in each of these four areas, and especially in the congruence between evaluation methodology and organizational behavior, there is not likely to be a change in the dominant paradigm because it is difficult for practitioners to use the language and values of new organizational perspectives.