The Political Economy of Chile's Fast Economic Growth: An Olsonian Interpretation

A conceptual framework inspired by MancurOlson's contributions to political economyis used to explain Chile's recent economicand political performance, with particularemphasis on the `hidden hand', politicalstability, rent-seeking, policy-makingquality, institutions, cultural attitudesand cultural change, fortunate historicalaccidents, critical masses, and virtuouscircles and other `positive loops'. Theanalysis combines very long-term withshort-term perspectives, examining the warof Arauco, Basque immigration, open economypolicies, families' educational investment,economic technocrats, female labour forceparticipation, managerial perceptions oflabour, and (other) old myth shattering. Some future trends are also predicted.     

Risk Attitudes and Political Participation

This article contributes to existing explanations of political participation by proposing that citizens’ attitudes towards risk predict participation. I argue that people who are risk accepting participate in political life because politics offers novelty and excitement. Analyses of two independent Internet surveys establish a positive, significant relationship between risk attitudes and general political participation. The analyses also suggest that the relationship between risk attitudes and action varies with the political act: people who are more risk accepting are more likely to participate in general political acts, but they are no more or less likely to turn out in elections. Further analyses suggest that two key mechanisms—novelty seeking and excitement seeking—underlie the relationship between risk attitudes and political participation.     

Political Involvement and the Development of Political Attitudes

Political socialization research so far has focused primarily on the direction of attitudes among children and youngsters. The preconditions for the development of political attitudes among these age groups have been neglected. In theoretical discussions cognitive development has been offered as a major prerequisite. In the article it is posited that political involvement is a second major prerequisite.
The effects of political involvement are examined with respect to four aspects of political attitudes among Danish school children: the ability to express attitudes, the correlation between indicators of a particular attitude, the stability of attitudes, and the correlation between different attitudes. Except for the stability of attitudes, results are clear. Political involvement is related to the formation of attitudes. The effect of political involvement is stronger than the effect of any of the traditional socio-economic variables ordinarily considered in socialization research.     

Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs

Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new light on heterogeneity in economic elites' political preferences, arguing that economic elites from an industry can share distinctive preferences due in part to sharing distinctive predispositions. Consequently, how increases in economic elites' influence affect inequality depends on which industry's elites are gaining influence and which policy issues are at stake. We demonstrate our argument with four original surveys, including the two largest political surveys of American economic elites to date: one of technology entrepreneurs—whose influence is burgeoning—and another of campaign donors. We show that technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies—a bundle of preferences rare among other economic elites. These differences appear to arise partly from their distinctive predispositions.     

The Political Economy of Development

The approach focuses principally on economic linkages between developed and developing countries. It owes much to studies of Latin America and may be more difficult to apply to other parts of the third world where economic development is not necessarily seen as a primary objective of policy. Studies within the field have not generally succeeded at a global level. They have often been too deterministic to describe a world which is both complex and unpredictable. In any case it is more important to influence policy than to discuss the formation of historical structures. Dependency theory in particular has proved a poor guide to policy-makers. The New Right and public choice theory have been better tailored towards influencing policymakers, although this approach (like much dependency writing) divorces the content of public policy from the political system in which it is made. However, political economy of development studies have worked well at a lower level of abstraction and have contributed to a better understanding of public policy in some developing countries.     

The Effects of Campaign Participation on Political Attitudes

Participatory democratic theorists have long claimed that political participation improves citizens and helps to integrate them into the political community. In recent years political participation has been advocated as a way of reducing alienation, particularly among the young. This experimental study assesses the effects of campaign participation on the attitudes and opinions of a group of young people, particularly attitudes of alienation. Employing Q methodology, this study examines the attitudinal impact of campaign participation on 57 subjects through the use of precampaign and postcampaign Q sorts. By comparing the results with a control group it was determined that campaign participation does result in greater attitudinal shift for participants than for nonparticipants; however, the changes that occurred resulted in shifts away from alienation (as democratic theorists predict) and shifts in the direction of greater alienation (contrary to predictions).     

The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital

Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth, we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies. We conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30-year panel of 128 countries. We find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth. Rather, we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in non poor countries.     

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.     

No Compromise: Political Consequences of Moralized Attitudes

Evolutionary, neuroscientific, and cognitive perspectives in psychology have converged on the idea that some attitudes are moralized—a distinctive characteristic. Moralized attitudes reorient behavior from maximizing gains to adhering to rules. Here, I examine a political consequence of this tendency. In three studies, I measure attitude moralization and examine how it relates to approval of political compromise. I find that moralized attitudes lead citizens to oppose compromises, punish compromising politicians, and forsake material gains. These patterns emerge on economic and noneconomic issues alike and identify a psychological phenomenon that contributes to intractable political disputes.     

Explaining Capitalism: The Method of Marx's Political Economy

The central thesis of this article is that Marx's explanation of the significant phenomena of the capitalist economy draws upon a basic theoretical syntax of a determinist/latent functionalist type. This conclusion has three consequences. First, it extends the range of functionalist explanation in Marx beyond its traditional loci, namely the theory of history and the analysis of the role of the state and other institutions in stabilizing capitalism, into the very heart of Marx's project, his political economy. Secondly, it has a powerful, though indirect, impact on our understanding of what might loosely be called the normative component of Marx's writings in as much as it identifies a specific sort of unfreedom peculiar to capitalist society. Thirdly, it shows just how great a challenge is mounted against Marx's project by those who seek to recast its method of explanation along methodological individualist lines. For if the first two points are accurate, rational-choice Marxists are drawn into a critique of both the explanatory and normative core of Marxism.     

The Political Economy of Acid Rain

Over the past decade, acid rain has been transformed from arelatively unnoticed area of scientific inquiry into a majorenvironmental issue of regional, national, and internationalconcern. What is acid rain, why has it acquired such relativelysudden political prominence, and what are the prospects forthe adoption of policies addressing this issue? These questionsillustrate how the regional cleavages inherent in transboundaryair pollution problems have fractured the political coalitionswhich supported earlier environmental legislation. Understandingthe basis for that transformation, which requires informationfrom the natural and physical sciences as well as insights intothe economics and politics of the acid rain issue, is centralto developing an appreciation of the constraints on policymakingfor air quality management in the United States.     

The Catastrophic Link Between the Importance and Extremity of Political Attitudes

The catastrophe theory of attitudes (Latané and Nowak, 1994) predicts that unimportant attitudes act as continuous dimensions, with normal distributions and gradual changes in evaluation, while important attitudes act as categories, with bipolar or unipolar extreme distributions and catastrophic (abrupt) changes in evaluation. A major derivation from this theory is that attitude importance and extremity should be correlated, with more important attitudes being more extreme. This prediction was confirmed for 14 specific political issues at both the group and the individual level, as well as for political involvement and general liberalism. However, general political involvement was not related to the extremity of evaluation for specific issues; similarly, partisanship predicted extremity of general liberalism but not extremity on specific issues. Results suggest that attitude importance and extremity must be measured at corresponding levels of specificity in order for a relationship between them to hold. These results have implications for attitude change in both individuals and societies.     

State Sales Tax Policy in a Changing Economy: Balancing Political and Economic Logic Against Revenue Needs

Soon after implementation in the 1930s, the general sales taxes emerged as the largest state tax source. In 1990, income taxes produced nearly as much state revenue as did sales taxes. Although income tax revenue have increased significantly, the sales tax is not in jeopardy of being replaced in the immediate future. The sales tax still remains a vital state fiscal concern, particularly to those states without a broad individual income tax.     

国际贸易谈判的政治经济分析：一个初步的框架

加入WTO将给中国的改革开放进程带来深远的影响,也将会对中国的经济管理体制改革和政府管理体制改革带来巨大的挑战.对国际政治经济学有关贸易与国内政治的研究、国际贸易理论关于贸易政策之形成的研究、国际关系理论和博弈论关于国际谈判的研究进行了评述,并从国际政治经济学的角度提出分析国际贸易谈判的一个初步的分析框架.通过强调国内政治、策略行为和国际规则的重要性,并从公民政策偏好的形成、利益集团集体行动、两国贸易谈判之间的双层博弈、国际规则的制约因素等多方面讨论了如何分析贸易谈判.