The consequences of the US DOJ’s antitrust activities: A macroeconomic perspective

Do the antitrust law enforcement activities of the US Department of Justice act as exogenous “technology shocks” or as “markup shocks” limiting market power and promoting economic growth? We analyze annual time series data from 1947 to 2003 on three measures of federal antitrust intervention: the ratio of the Antitrust Division’s budgetary expenditures to GDP as well as the numbers of civil and criminal antitrust cases instituted. We find that changes in the levels of these policy variables act like negative technology shocks and that the negative effects are transitory; antitrust policy generates no subsequent offsetting increases in productivity.     

Shadowing ‘the exceptional’ behind the ‘ordinary’: mapping a network of intelligence laundering

ABSTRACT

Under the imperative of ‘prevention’, the process of information production for investigatory purposes forms a crossover between intelligence gathering and law enforcement. Digital surveillance programmes collect personal data prior to any probable cause of suspicion, whereas law enforcement activities are concerned with collecting evidence of crimes after the event. When future looking preventative approaches to the prosecution of crimes are forced into the linear, temporal narrative by which criminal investigations unfold, a tension emerges. The article demonstrates the ultimate incompatibility between ‘out of the ordinary’ intelligence activities and ‘ordinary’ criminal investigations by unearthing the procedural character behind evidence laundering.     

When Casey’s blood pressure rose: a case study of intelligence politicization in the United States

This article contributes to the debate on the politicization of intelligence with a case study of a major attempt of politicization that so far largely escaped academic attention: the Special National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union’s role in international terrorism produced by the US Intelligence Community in spring 1981. Despite direct and indirect manipulation by members of President Reagan’s Cabinet, this case differs from those usually discussed in a decisive way – politicization failed. Based on the empirical analysis, a theoretical model of intelligence politicization is introduced that extends Joshua Rovner’s oversell model, which can explain why policymakers demand intelligence support but is insufficient due to its exclusive focus on the consumers of intelligence, by integrating the incentives of intelligence producers and specifying the determinants of whether politicization succeeds or fails.     

On the emergence of a classic work: a short history of the impact of Gordon Tullock’s Welfare Costs of Tariffs,Monopolies, and Theft

Public Choice - Gordon Tullock’s “Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft” is by now widely regarded to be a classic work in public choice. However, like many...     

The perils of multinational intelligence coalitions: Britain,America and the origins of Pakistan’s ISI

This article examines how Great Britain helped create Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) with two goals: (1) establishing a Pakistani branch of a Commonwealth intelligence network; (2) ensuring information security within that network. Ultimately, this endeavor failed because of perceived deficiencies in Pakistan’s security institutions and Britain’s inability to address Pakistan’s security needs. By the mid-1950s ISI forged close ties with the United States which offered more and with fewer political strings attached. This article offers new insights on intelligence alliance formation during the cold war. It also provides a useful case study in the weaknesses of multilateral intelligence coalitions.     

It’s not me,it’s you: the functioning of Wall Street during the 2008 economic downturn

Public officials have blamed Wall Street and its complex financial products for causing the 2008 economic downturn. This article addresses three popular claims saying that complex financial markets are at fault and need more regulation. It argues that even in the midst of a major economic downturn, the much-maligned mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and unregistered hedge funds functioned almost exactly as designed. When macroeconomic conditions worsened, firms and investors that were paid to assume certain risks had to assume them. Those that opted for safer investment vehicles with more levels of private protection faced fewer problems. Although many investment vehicles lost money, one must differentiate between problems that manifested themselves in markets and problems with the market itself. Even though government policies caused many of the problems, public officials always have an incentive to point the finger at Wall Street and to argue for more regulations when their policies negatively affect markets.     

‘The clash of races’ and ‘the Jewish intelligence’: a specifically French form of social antisemitism

The phenomenon of ‘social antisemitism’ is well known. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, an idiosyncratic variant had emerged in France. Where, elsewhere, social antisemitism tended to be ingrained and unthinking, this French variant was (typically) more theoretical, and its practitioners tended to be among the most prominent authors and thinkers. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, and also developed a series of facile generalizations about the essentially inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. Griffiths examines this phenomenon, both for its characteristics and for its widespread existence in French intellectual circles, by taking a specific subject: the reception of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann. A wide range of writers and critics—a number of whom had in other circumstances a reputation for liberal values and attitudes, and had been among those who had deplored the excesses of the antisemitic mob during the Dreyfus affair—are found to echo the views put forward by Lacretelle in that novel, and even to elaborate on them. Many of these writers were to adopt a completely different attitude towards the Jews after the Second World War; when the position of the Jews was fully realized, their earlier ‘social antisemitism’ proved less powerful than their human sympathies. But this is not to devalue the importance of the danger posed by social antisemitism, which could provide the basis for far more virulent forms of racism to flourish.     

Missing the overlap between theory and practice: Patten’s ‘equal recognition’ in the face of the Catalan case

Drawing on the particularities of Catalonia (and related cases), the general point of this contribution is to argue that Patten’s equal recognition theory is modeled upon a too-restricted set of empirical assumptions, a circumstance that might harm its value as a tool for the orientation, evaluation, and reform of public policy. What is absent in Patten’s account – or at least not properly inserted into it – are four built-in modules that we have named ‘history’, ‘democracy’, ‘international relations’, and ‘migration’. When it comes to recognition of minorities, the past matters more often than Patten is willing to accept; democracy can lead to permanent departures from equal recognition on the part of self-governing national minorities; in the recognition game, there are other relevant players than simply states and their minorities; and one of these players, namely immigrant groups, can (albeit involuntarily) distort equal recognition schemes.     

Inventing the ‘axis of evil’: the myth and reality of us intelligence and policy-making after 9/11

George W. Bush has claimed that the latest intelligence estimates single out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’ fomenting terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. However, the intelligence itself demonstrates that this concept has been largely manufactured and the CIA bypassed in favor of a pre-existing political consensus among right-wing Republicans. In reality, the ‘axis’ serves to perpetuate an American ‘preponderance of power’. It justifies specific policies which had already been decided before Bush came to power and which now have popular acceptance through their association with the successful war on terrorism.     

Information Technology (IT) woes and intelligence agency failures: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s troubled IT evolution as a microcosm of a dysfunctional corporate culture

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has experienced a number of high-profile failures – across nearly four decades – in developing its Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Repeated missteps are indications of problems with the Bureau’s broader culture that degrade its effectiveness across missions. A significant factor contributing to this dysfunctional culture is the diversification of the FBI’s responsibilities, to the point of losing a corporate identity. Reform will require an assessment of the Bureau’s purpose, the elements which it should retain in furtherance of this vision, and the steps to align its workforce with the competencies necessary to pursue this mission.     

Voting in the UN: a Second Image of China’s Human Rights

It is generally agreed that China has a poor domestic human rights practice. In contrast, China has a better-than-average voting record on human rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Based on a new UNGA human rights dataset that we identified, we found that since joining the United Nations (UN) in 1971, China voted in the affirmative on human rights resolutions 79 % of the time, compared to the world average favoring ratio of 75 %. This positive image of consistently voting in the affirmative on UNGA human rights resolutions suggests a second image of China’s human rights. However, while the Chinese government is willing to accept the international human rights regime, it also strategically alters its endorsement of UNGA human rights resolutions based on changing levels of domestic threats.     

Who’s afraid of a world state? A global sovereign and the statist-cosmopolitan debate

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian.     

‘A curious relationship’: Barack Obama,the 1960s and the election of 2008

ABSTRACT

Ward explores the diverse ways in which memories, understandings and misunderstandings of the 1960s were mobilized during the 2008 election cycle. At the time, Barack Obama's campaign and triumph were hailed by many as marking a series of a decisive breaks with the past, notably with the culture wars and fiercely ideological political partisanship unleashed in the late 1960s. Others suggested that Obama represented a new kind of candidate who somehow transcended, or might even heal, the racial divisions in the United States, in a fanciful vogue for ‘post-racialism’ that Ward argues was also connected to popular conceptions of the 1960s and, in particular, to a misreading of the social philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr and his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. While some commentators stressed rupture and discontinuity with the past in interpreting Obama's victory, others—friend and foe alike—were keen to stress continuities with the past, often explicitly with a 1960s routinely, if simplistically, parsed into ‘good’ early and ‘bad’ later periods. ThusWard considers Obama's connections to the civil rights and black power movements, as well as to other 1960s organizing traditions, charismatic leaders and conceptions of federal government, arguing that the decade continues to offer an important, if ambiguous touchstone in contemporary American politics and social memory.     

District magnitude and representation of the majority’s preferences: a comment and reinterpretation

Drawing on new data that combine recorded votes from the Swiss National Assembly with canton-level referendum results on identical legislative proposals, Portmann et al. (Public Choice 151:585–610, 2012) develop an innovative strategy to identify the effect of district magnitude on the relationship between representatives and their constituents. We replicate PSE’s central result and also estimate a related model that allows for the possibility of non-monotonicity in the relationship between district magnitude and representatives’ deviance from referendum median voters. Our results indicate that representatives elected in low-magnitude multi-member districts deviate from canton-level majorities less than either MPs from single-member districts or those from high-magnitude multi-member districts.     

Unpacking the intensity of policy conflict: a study of Colorado’s oil and gas subsystem

This article applies the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) to describe and explain the characteristics of policy conflict within the oil and gas subsystem in Colorado. We use data from a survey of policy actors to assess three cognitive characteristics of policy conflict: divergence in policy positions, perceived threats from opponents’ positions, and an unwillingness to compromise. Aggregating these indicators across policy actors in the subsystem, we find a moderately high level of policy conflict intensity, but we also find substantial variation in the characteristics of policy conflict across policy actors. To help explain this variation, we examine how interpersonal and intrapersonal attributes of policy actors relate to the characteristics of policy conflict. In particular, we find that insular policy actor networks, interest group affiliations, and rigidity of risk and benefit perceptions associate more consistently with conflict characteristics than political views, education, or experience. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of this first application of the PCF and reiterate the need for theoretically and empirically rigorous measures of policy conflict.     

Representation and Local People’s Congresses in China: A Case Study of the Yangzhou Municipal People’s Congress

Local people’s congresses have become increasingly active, carrying out legislative activities and (supposedly) supervising state organizations. Based on the analysis of bills submitted to Yangzhou Municipal People’s Congresses, we find that congress delegates have increasingly represented the interests and demands of the geographic areas from which they are elected, and that the local people’s congress has become a place to present and coordinate various competing interests, which are often contradictory to the interests of the local Party committee that represents the higher authority of the state. In other words, the local people’s congress has become a place where two interests intersect: the “central” interests represented by the local Party committee and the “local” interests represented by the local people’s congress delegates.     

Anatomy of a massacre: the roots of heightened labour militancy in South Africa’s platinum belt

Abstract

On 16 August 2012, a protracted strike at a platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, culminated in the killing of 34 mineworkers by local security forces. Some viewed this tragedy through the lens of South Africa’s apartheid past, recalling such events as the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Others saw this episode as the latest cycle of angry protest and violent repression stemming from heightened inequality and poverty under global capitalism. This paper explores a set of institutional factors that occupy the middle ground between these two narratives about the massacre at Marikana. At the national level, despite progressive labour regulations and a long-standing alliance between the leading trade union (COSATU) and the ruling African National Congress, institutional channels for social dialogue and collective bargaining were less effective than expected given COSATU's inability to criticize policies focused on business-led growth at the expense of the social protection of workers. At the sectoral level, gigantic platinum companies faced with falling commodity prices sought to limit losses by planning retrenchments and limiting wage increases, triggering repeated and sometimes violent wildcat strikes, especially when workers’ grievances were set aside by local representatives of the COSATU-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers. The argument may be seen as a labour-focused variant of Huntington’s ‘gap hypothesis’: workers’ militancy has grown as existing institutional frameworks for ensuring labour peace have failed to effectively channel the frustrations of workers most in need of social protection.     

Hŭngnam revisited: the ‘secret’ nuclear history of a North Korean city

Abstract

This article critically examines allegations that H?ngnam, North Korea, served as a transwar site of nuclear weapons research conducted first by Imperial Japan during World War II, then by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, and subsequently by North Korea itself. Rumors of ‘nuclear research’ being conducted there likely derived from and were conflated with reports of secretive efforts by these parties to prospect for, to mine, and to dress uranium-bearing ores in the surrounding area. The article presents new information from recently declassified CIA records and current Russian research.