David Eden,Autonomy: Capitalism,Class and Politics

The urban street is a significant canvas within the material cartography of the nation-state's spatial frontier. Between March and May of 2010, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, also known as the “Red Shirts,” painted Bangkok red as one of the most cohesive assemblage of street protests in Thai political history. Each protestor donated ten cubic centimeters of blood to be poured at several sites, including the Government House of Thailand, the ruling Democrat Party headquarters, and the Prime Minister's residence. Other vials were used to paint murals along the walls of the Old City. The intensified aesthetic presence of Thailand's rural voting majority challenged a historic marginality in the Thai polity, and was one of many semiotic tactics that foreshadowed the violence of the eventual military intervention under the name “Operation Reclaim Space.” The city itself was projected as a wounded body, while the Red Shirts—as Thongchai Winichakul [“The ‘Germs’: The Reds' Infection of the Thai Political Body,” New Mandala, May 3, 2010, available online at < http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/05/03/thongchai-winichakul-on-the-red-germs/#more-9382>] so observed at the time—were heavily objectified as germs invading the sanitary walls of the city. This approach to protest in Bangkok treats the development of the contemporary polis as an urban physiology, simultaneously driven by an intensification of presence and the “good health” prerogatives of acceptable citizenship in the global city.     

Rational Choice and Politics

The rational-choice approach brings scientific deductive methods to bear on politics. Appropriate methods are derived from physics, when actors interact probabilistically but non-rationally, and from game theory when they interact rationally. Collective action problems occur in the provision of public goods. As policies are themselves public goods, this leads to the game-theoretic analysis of voting, bureaucracy and lobbies. It is inconsistent to believe that economic actors are basically self-interested but that political actors are not. Rather, one should treat people as equally (not necessarily wholly) self-interested in each sphere. The paradoxes of social choice are then shown to have important implications for political science.     

Childcare Policies and the Politics of Choice

Governments have intervened in two basic ways on childcare: via the provision of leaves to care (usually taken by mothers) and the provision or (often only partial) financing of childcare services. These policy options reflect the fundamental debate on how young children should be cared for. Labour has developed both policy areas since 1997, but there is a question mark over how far mothers and fathers have a ‘real choice’ to work and/or to care. Parents' choice in this policy area is a sensitive political issue and, this article suggests, requires a careful balancing of policy instruments. Policy goals may conflict with preferences and there is also the difficult issue that parents' choices may prejudice their future welfare in a work/welfare system that is tending to assume that there will be increasing capacity for self‐provisioning.     

论中国民族区域自治与民主政治建设——以广西民族区域自治为个案分析

民族区域自治属于民主政治范畴.世界上不同政体的国家有不同的民族治理模式,中国采用民族区域自治的办法解决民族问题,是由我国的历史发展、文化特点、民族关系和民族分布等国情决定的,也是符合各民族人民共同利益和发展要求的.本文从民族区域自治是民主政治建设的重要组成部分、民族区域自治制度对我国民主政治发展的贡献、广西民族区域自治的成功经验与启示这三个方面入手,阐述了民族区域自治与民主政治建设的关系.     

The Politics of Choice and Competition in Public Services

The politics of choice and competition in public services are complex. Only public service users seem basically to want choice. Providers prefer alternative models of service delivery especially those that rely upon trust. Social democrats prefer voice and trust; conservatives want choice and competition to be exercised in the context of a full private market. Yet, so long as they are properly designed, policies aimed at promoting choice and competition can serve the interests of all these groups better than the alternatives.     

Democracy and Troubled Autonomy: Sectarian Politics and Civil Society in Japan

Civil society organizations (CSOs) exist in overlapping fields of influence, often within contentious relationships. Although the autonomy of a CSO is generally considered critical, currently available conceptualizations of civil society tend to focus on its relation to the state and minimize the role of political parties and social movement organizations. Drawing on the case study of the Women's Democratic Club (WDC), a women's organization in Japan established in the period immediately after World War II, this article examines the ways in which CSOs' embeddedness in their socio-political contexts problematizes organizational autonomy. As a non-partisan organization with democratic values, the WDC promoted egalitarianism and embraced heterogeneous membership within the organization. However, its embeddedness in the political left and its members’ divided and conflicting loyalties challenged its autonomy as an organization. This article seeks to contribute to the inclusion of non-governmental organizations in theoretical and empirical considerations of autonomy of civil society.     

Autonomy,residence, and return

This article argues that those unjustly displaced from a particular territory T cannot involuntarily lose their rights to reside there, or, as a consequence, their rights of return to it, even if they develop territorially grounded conceptions of the good where they now reside. The contrary position fails to accord the unjustly displaced the respect due to them in virtue of their personal autonomy. Facts commonly alleged to justify the supersession of rights of return to T only provide evidence that the unjustly displaced have abandoned their rights to reside there, or would do so if given a just opportunity to return. The rights of those now residing in T, which author argues may include those responsible for the unjust displacement, may limit the right of return but are unlikely to preclude it altogether.     

Politics Lost, Politics Transformed, Politics Colonised? Theories of the Impact of Mass Media

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the literature on the relationship between politics and mass media, mainly in discrete topic areas such as the impact of mass media on electoral behaviour, the emergence of new forms of political communication, or media political economy. At the same time, this diverse literature has often focused on a single general issue, typically characterised in terms of the 'transformation' of politics. Despite this common theme, there has been relatively little attempt to connect and compare the different approaches. Looking at the theoretical differences in the new literature on politics and mass media reveals three perspectives – pluralist, constructivist, and structuralist. These approaches have too often tacitly co-existed, instead of more competitively striving to advance knowledge in the three main topic areas above.     

Bicameralism and Party Politics in Germany: an Empirical Social Choice Analysis

This paper analyses whether and how party politics transform German bicameralism. Based on the policy positions of bicameral legislators, the study computes the win sets, the yolks of each chamber and a Nash solution in order to analyse empirically the effects of party politics on German bicameralism. In comparison to the basic bicameral model, hypotheses on bicameral conflict and policy stability are tested in the case of similar and different party majorities in the two-dimensional policy space of German labour politics. The results show that party politics transform German bicameralism in two ways. Similar majorities collapse bicameral checks-and-balances, while different party majorities come close to the basic bicameral model with high policy stability and conflict between both chambers.     

School Quality,Residential Choice,and the U.S. Housing Bubble

Using data from the American Housing Survey (years 2001–2009), we find that purchase prices for homes selected primarily to access self-identified “good schools” rose (relative to homes selected for other reasons) during the key U.S. housing bubble period, compared with the periods before and after the bubble. We observe a similar pattern in homebuyers' mortgage-to-income ratios. Various regression specifications and propensity score matching techniques show that these trends persist conditional on a range of household, demographic, and economic controls. Our results suggest that the strong, bubble-era pursuit of good schools may have played a role in the housing bubble's expansion.     

Redistricting, Candidate Entry, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century U.S. House Elections

The effects of redistricting on candidate entry patterns in contemporary House races has received growing attention in the scholarly literature, yet virtually no consideration has been given to this question in the context of historical elections. This is unfortunate as the wider variation in congressional redistricting during the nineteenth century gives us increased leverage in terms of understanding strategic candidate behavior. Utilizing a new dataset of candidate quality for nineteenth-century House races, we examine whether candidates with prior electoral experience are more likely to run in districts that are altered during the redistricting process, and provide an account of how differences in the prevalence of redistricting may affect strategic entry decisions of politicians. Our results suggest that entry decisions and electoral outcomes are affected by redistricting in this era. Moreover, our analysis provides an opportunity to use history to test contemporary theories of congressional elections in a broader context .