Two models of the urban crisis: An analytical essay on banfield and forrester

This essay examines the arguments and evidence used in two recent models of the urban crisis—Edward C. Banfield'sThe Unheavenly City and Jay W. Forrester'sUrban Dynamics. Although Banfield's model is sociological and Forrester's is economic and physical, both imply that not much can be done to alleviate urban problems and that positive programs may make them worse. The authors of this critique contend that the articulation of argument and evidence is inadequate to support the implication. They advocate that promising current programs be refined on the basis of evidence and experience and that policymakers continue to search for efficient new programs through social experiments.     

Distilling frenzy from academic scribbling: How economics influences politicians

Some economists misunderstand the way their work is used in policymaking. They claim to be providing dispassionate predictions and parameter estimates to politicians, but often—sometimes unwittingly—the economists' main contribution is to construe a complex issue as a problem (for example, a market imperfection) capable of solution. And the economists' solutions depend as much on their conception of the public good as on their technical algorithms. As a result, for good or ill, economics is as influential for its implicit ethical theory as for its predictions. Ignorance of that fact makes some social scientists less influential with policymakers than they might otherwise be.     

Systems Theory and Complexity: A Potential Tool for Radical Analysis or the Emerging Social Paradigm for the Internationalised Market Economy?

The aim of this paper is to critically assess the claims of systems theory and complexity in the analysis of social change and particularly to examine the view that—if certain conditions are met—both could potentially be useful tools for radical analysis. The conclusion drawn from this analysis is that, although systems theory and complexity are useful tools in the natural sciences in which they offer many useful insights, they are much less useful in social sciences and indeed are incompatible, both from the epistemological point of view and that of their content, with a radical analysis aiming at systemic change towards an inclusive democracy.     

Dynamic latent trait models: An application to Latin American banking crises

Dynamic latent trait models combine information from a variety of manifest variables, possibly measured on different scales, that are presumed to be indicators of an unobserved latent phenomenon, while allowing appropriate consideration of the longitudinal character of time series. I use a Bayesian dynamic latent trait model of banking sector financial accounts measured at the country/quarter level to build an indicator of banking system robustness in Latin America. As a methodological innovation, I extend dynamic latent trait models to take into account country-specific effects of bank regulatory regimes through hierarchical modeling of factor loadings. I suggest how these models can be applied to other types of phenomena—for example to combine existing political regime indicators to build a more informative measure of democracy.     

National health insurance: Some lessons from the Canadian experience

In the current American debate over national health insurance an examination of the Canadian governmental experience is very instructive. Canada is enough like the United States to make the effects of Canadian health insurance policies rather like a large natural experiment. The Canadian experience—universal government health insurance administered by the ten provinces with some fiscal and policy variations—can be used to predict the impact in the United States of proposed national health insurance plans on the medical care system, and the reaction of mass publics and national policymakers to these effects.The central purpose of the Canadian national health insurance was to reduce and hopefully eliminate financial barriers to medical care. In this it succeeded. But it also produced results which Canadian policymakers never anticipated: essentially unexpected side-effects on cost, quality, organization, and manpower distribution of the particular national health insurance program adopted. It should be cause for concern, the article concludes, that most of the prominent American national health insurance proposals resemble the Canadian program in failing to provide a single level of government with both the means and incentives to curb the inflationary effects of national health insurance. The lesson from Canada is that unless the system has very strong anti-inflationary mechanisms and incentives built into it, national health insurance will feed the fires of medical inflation despite great formal governmental authority to control it.     

Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.     

Foreign policy indicators: Predictors of war in history and in the state of the world message

Despite the promising advances in the construction and use of social indicators, there has been little application to the formulation, monitoring, or evaluation of foreign policy. In the formulation stage—our concern here—predictor or early warning indicators could be very useful. The annual state of the world message contains many such predictive indicators of war, but in a purely verbal and intuitive form. Three of these (prior war, relative capabilities, and alliance levels) are converted into operational language and then put to the empirical test. In general, the indicators do not predict war (over the past 150 years) as postulated by the Administration. These tests are, however, very incomplete, and our objective is not to evaluate the Administration's arguments, but to suggest one way in which indicators could improve the quality of foreign policy formulation.This is a revised and abbreviated version of the paper originally prepared for the 1972 meetings of the American Political Science Association held in Washington, D.C. We want to acknowledge the important assistance of Hugh Wheeler, the comments and help of John Stuckey, Russell Leng, Stuart Bremer, Catherine Kelleher, and Charles Gochman, and the support of the National Science Foundation under grant no. GS-28476X1.     

Do indicators influence treaty ratification? The relationship between mid-range performance and policy change

Treaties are a valuable tool for policymakers because they are both legally binding on, and symbolically powerful signals of, commitments of states that ratify. Why states choose to ratify treaties is unclear, although social pressures appear to play some role. This article argues that global performance indicators can influence the ratification process, but that the effect varies depending on where states fall on these measures. In the mid-range of a scale, fast ratification has significant benefits and relatively few costs. However, indicators have less of a catalysing effect at the extreme ends of the scale, where the costs are higher and the benefits are lower. This article uses policy performance indicators as independent variables in duration analyses of the ratification of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2003) and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (2000). It finds states in the mid-range of the indicator are faster to ratify than states that are not ranked, whereas the other categories are statistically insignificant. These findings imply that indicators matter for those in the middle, but not as much for those at the extremes. This finding enriches our understanding of treaty ratification and has potential implications for performance metrics as a tool to promote policy change for those states in the middle, highlighting the strengths and limitations of indicators as a force for change.     

Paths between Positivism and Interpretivism: An Appraisal of Hay's Via Media

Hay's Political Analysis raises foundational issues for all social scientists, not least in its outline for a via media , or middle way, between positivist and interpretivist social science. In this view, social science should be firmly grounded in empirical study but take seriously the notion that there is no privileged vantage point from which to generate dispassionate knowledge claims about the social world. This article asks whether this apparent via media is coherent and meaningfully captures what it means to be doing positivist and interpretivist social science without, so to speak, conceding too much ground to the other approach.     

The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change

Political scientists have paid much more attention to the effects of institutions than to issues of institutional origins and change. One result has been a marked tendency to fall back on implicit or explicit functional accounts, in which the effects of institutions explain the presence of those institutions. Institutional effects may indeed provide part of such an explanation. Yet the plausibility of functional accounts depends upon either a set of favorable conditions at the design stage or the presence of environments conducive to learning or competition. Exploring variability in the relevant social contexts makes it possible to both establish the restricted range of functional accounts and specify some promising lines of inquiry into the subject of institutional origins and change.     

Design strategies for theory testing: The efficient use of field experimentation in local level political research

This paper identifies certain characteristics of field experimentation that if more widely appreciated could persuade more political scientists — especially behavioralists — to consider adopting a field experimental strategy in dealing with the testing of their theoretical models. Specifically, this paper identifies the greater ease of analysis provided by experiment-generated data and certain improvements in the design and execution of field experiments that ease the burden of the researcher at the most difficult phase of such research, that is, at the design and data collection stages of the research. These improvements involve the integration of more than one test design into a field experiment such that a given field experiment can be used to answer a multiplicity of questions. This can include situations where two or more researchers work their own tests into a given experimental occasion such that the magnitude of effort is reduced for all involved — and thus the final product will not only be more methodologically defensible but also more practical to accomplish.     

The dynamics of interest group evaluations of Congress

We apply a dynamic spatial model to interest group ratings of the members of Congress over the period 1959–1981. Spatial distances between an interest group and the members of Congress are assumed to be monotonic with the ratings. Our pooled cross-sectional time-series data set consists of 203,387 ratings by 59 interest groups. We restrict the spatial coordinates of the interest groups and members of Congress to be polynomial functions of time. Two significant dimensions are recovered: the first dimension, which accounts for approximately 75% of the variance, represents liberal-conservative positions on economic issues; the second dimension, which accounts for approximately an additional 5% of the variance, represents liberal-conservative positions on social issues. Nearly all the interest groups and most members of Congress are ideologically consistent. They are either liberal on both dimensions or conservative on both.     

Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention

ABSTRACT

The incorporation of socioeconomic concerns into transitional justice has traditionally, as a result of prevailing liberal notions about dealing with the past, been both conceptually and practically difficult. This article demonstrates and accounts for these difficulties through the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country which has been characterized by a complex transition process and a far-reaching international intervention, encompassing transitional justice and peacebuilding as well as political and economic reforms. Examining the limits of international intervention in Bosnia and the marginalization of socioeconomic justice issues, the article analyses the events surrounding the protests that broke out in February 2014, and the ensuing international engagement with the protest movement. Faced with a broad-based civic movement calling for socioeconomic justice, the international community struggled to understand its claims as justice issues, framing them instead as problems to be tackled through reforms aimed at completing Bosnia’s transition towards a market economy. The operation of peacebuilding and transitional justice within the limits of neoliberal transformation is thus instrumental in explaining how and why socioeconomic justice issues become marginalized, as well as accounting for the expression of popular discontent where justice becomes an object of contestation and external intervention.     

‘For good measure’: data gaps in a big data world

Policy and data scientists have paid ample attention to the amount of data being collected and the challenge for policymakers to use and utilize it. However, far less attention has been paid towards the quality and coverage of this data specifically pertaining to minority groups. The paper makes the argument that while there is seemingly more data to draw on for policymakers, the quality of the data in combination with potential known or unknown data gaps limits government’s ability to create inclusive policies. In this context, the paper defines primary, secondary, and unknown data gaps that cover scenarios of knowingly or unknowingly missing data and how that is potentially compensated through alternative measures. Based on the review of the literature from various fields and a variety of examples highlighted throughout the paper, we conclude that the big data movement combined with more sophisticated methods in recent years has opened up new opportunities for government to use existing data in different ways as well as fill data gaps through innovative techniques. Focusing specifically on the representativeness of such data, however, shows that data gaps affect the economic opportunities, social mobility, and democratic participation of marginalized groups. The big data movement in policy may thus create new forms of inequality that are harder to detect and whose impact is more difficult to predict.

     

Education-based group identity and consciousness in the authoritarian-libertarian value conflict

The increasing importance of New Politics or authoritarian-libertarian values to electoral behaviour in advanced Western industrial democracies and the previously documented strong link between such values and educational attainment indicates that, contrary to the claims of some New Politics theorists, the ideological conflict is anchored in the social structure – in particular in educational groups. For this interpretation to be warranted, however, it should be possible to document the existence of education-based group identity and group consciousness related to the value conflict. The article develops indicators of the core variables out of Social Identity Theory. Based on a unique survey from Denmark, which includes the new set of indicators, the analyses show that members of the high and low education groups have developed both group identity and consciousness reflecting a conflict between the groups and that these factors are related to authoritarian-libertarian values. The results are interpreted as reflecting a relationship of dominance, which supports the view that the ideological conflict is structurally anchored.     

Racial Contexts and White Interests: Beyond Black Threat and Racial Tolerance

The impact of racial context on white voters' support for black candidates in biracial elections has drawn considerable attention from students of racial politics. Two major theories—black threat and social interaction—use different geographic units and provide conflicting explanations. The present study seeks to contribute to the resolution of the controversy by empirically examining white crossover voting at both election unit and neighborhood levels. Twenty-nine mayoral and councilmanic district elections in New Orleans from 1977 to 1998 are investigated. The findings are not consistent with the hypotheses derived from black threat and social interaction theories. Rather than a reflection of racial tolerance or hostility, the changes in white crossover voting in different racial contexts may indicate a rational and strategic adjustment on the part of white voters when they face the prospect of black electoral success.     

Nationally poor,locally rich: Income and local context in the 2016 presidential election

When social scientists examine relationships between income and voting decisions, their measures implicitly compare people to others in the national economic distribution. Yet an absolute income level (e.g., $57,617 per year, the 2016 national median) does not have the same meaning in Clay County, Georgia, where the 2016 median income was $22,100, as it does in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where the median income was $224,000. We address this limitation by incorporating a measure of one's place in her ZIP code's income distribution. We apply this approach to the question of the relationship between income and whites' voting decisions in the 2016 presidential election, and test for generalizability in elections since 2000. The results show that Trump's support was concentrated among nationally poor whites but also among locally affluent whites, complicating claims about the role of income in that election. This pattern suggests that social scientists would do well to conceive of income in relative terms: relative to one's neighbors.     

Forecasting and the systems approach: A critical survey

Long-range forecasting for social systems deals with complex feedback interactions between all sectors and elements of such systems, and thus inherently implies facing the challenge of the systems approach. The latter may be characterized as an attempt to understand the self-organizing behavior of social systems and to grasp its potential dynamic implications. A survey of current approaches to forecasting attempts to discuss the state of the art and potentials for further development in this light. Many modelling approaches—in particular econometrics—are inherently restricted to mechanistic modes of behavior. Formalized man-technique interaction—for which innovative approaches have become known—may aid forecasting for adaptive modes of system behavior; computer simulation of structural models has considerable potential in this area. Finally, forecasting techniques may be applied so as to stimulate human inventive thinking. The systems approach provides the proper perspective for the meaningful use of formalized approaches to forecasting.This paper is based on a contribution to the conference on Long Term Planning and Forecasting sponsored by the International Economic Association in Moscow, December 11–16, 1972. A related paper, outlining the theoretical frame of reference, will be published under the title Forecasting and Systems Approach: A Frame of Reference inManagement Science in 1973.     

Japanese Network Capital: The Impact of Social Networks on Japanese Political Participation

Recent scholarship shows that social capital has a large influence on political behavior. Social capital’s definition includes trust, norms of reciprocity, and social networks. Most studies, however, ignore the networking component. Here, we test the influence of social networks on political participation using new Japanese survey data. We separately test the effects of involvement in formally organized voluntary associations and informal social networks. We also examine whether hierarchical networks have a different impact on participation than equal relationships. To determine if networks with bridging or bonding social capital affect participation differently, we also measure the openness to outsiders of these networks. Negative binomial regression models indicate a strong positive relationship between formal and informal social networking—including network hierarchy and some forms of openness—and political participation.