Foreign aid and terrorist groups: incidents,ideology, and survival

Public Choice - During recent decades, terrorist groups have sought refuge in weak or failed states from which to launch their attacks. Foreign aid to states harboring those groups may or may not...     

A simple way of estimating interest group ideology

Political scientists have developed accepted numerical estimates of political ideology for legislators, candidates, parties and even nations, but interest groups lack such scores. This absence puts interest group research at a disadvantage compared to other subfields. I generate ideology scores for 72 groups across 10 years by combining groups’ evaluations of Members of Congress with Poole and Rosenthal’s estimates of Members’ ideologies. Alternative methods are explored, and the validity of the scores is demonstrated. Examinations of the scores focus on the relative distribution of groups and Members of Congress and the link between a group’s ideology and its campaign contributions.     

The economics of AIDS-related health insurance regulations: Interest group influence and ideology

The projected growth in the U.S. in the number of persons with AIDS has created concern about sources of financing the costs of health care services for persons with AIDS. Private health insurers have modified or considered modifying underwriting practices in response to the AIDS epidemic, but several state governments have developed significant regulatory constraints on AIDS-related underwriting practices. We model the state government's decision to impose AIDS-related regulatory constraints (HIV testing restrictions, restrictions on the use of information about sexual orientation, and mandated AIDS coverage). We find that HIV-testing restrictions tend to be more likely in states with relatively high AIDS prevalence rates and insurance industries that are relatively weak politically. States with prevailing attitudes favorable to persons with AIDS (i.e., relatively liberal states) are more likely than other states to impose HIV-testing restrictions. Measures of prevailing attitudes (ideology) appear to be the primary determinants of regulations prohibiting questions about sexual orientation, but economic interests are the primary determinants of mandated AIDS coverage.The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of Ned Becker, Janet Bronstein, David Colby, Patrick Donnelly, Roger Faith, Robert Hughes, Robert McGuire, Delfi Mondragón, Mike Morrisey, Jack Nelson and an anonymous reviewer, with the usual disclaimer.     

Terrorist networks, support, and delegation

The paper presents a game-theoretic representation of a general terrorist organization (GTO) that delegates responsibility to local terrorist representatives in n countries. The GTO achieves a strategic advantage by deploying a more radical representative when the government is perceived to be weak and terrorist supporters are committed. When the government or terrorist supporters alter their posture, the GTO may regret its local representative. Outside assistance can change a besieged government’s posture, thereby removing the GTO’s delegation advantage. When both the GTO and the government delegate to surrogates, the delegators are worse off if the government appears to be weak.     

Terrorist Threat,Leadership, and the Vote: Evidence from Three Experiments

From 9/11 in the U.S. to train, subway, and airport bombings elsewhere, individuals frequently must make political decisions in the shadow of terrorist attacks. To date, few studies have examined how times of terror threat influence voters’ decision-making processes. Using data generated from three experiments we show that, in times of terrorist threat (compared to good times), individuals weight leadership more heavily in the voting booth. Our results also shed light on how much weight is given to other determinants of the vote (issues and partisanship) across these two conditions.     

Authoritarianism: Personality and ideology

Abstract. The concept of authoritarianism has generally been considered a personality construct, although the approach of Adorno et al. was inspired by previous approaches with an ideological 'fascist' angle. These two approaches were, to an appreciable extent, mixed in later conceptualizations. Here, I propose their disentanglement. The classical Adorno et al. F-scale is considered a personality variable. Apart from that, an ideological libertarianism-authoritarianism dimension is constructed, partly validated by its relationship to a shortened unidimensional version of the F-scale. The personality variable of authoritarianism is shown to have no substantial empirical relationship to voting intentions in the Netherlands. However, the ideological measure of authoritarianism is relatively strongly and stably associated with intended voting behaviour. The study also clarifies the ongoing debate over the relationship between authoritarianism and left-right ideology. The weak relationships between measures of authoritarianism and left-right ideology signify the existence of 'left-wing authoritarianism' in the Dutch population.     

Ethos,ideology, and partisanship: Exploring the paradox of conservative democrats

Despite the increasingly liberal cast of the national Democratic Party, self-identified conservatives continue to represent a significant segment of the party. At least 25 percent of Democratic identifiers considered themselves to be conservatives during the 1972–1988 period. This paper explores the puzzle of why significant numbers of political conservatives continue to identify with the Democratic Party. We argue that conservative Democrats relate to their party not because of political ideology, as do Republicans and to a lesser extent, liberal/moderate Democrats, but because of the symbolic values associated with the main groups in the party—what we refer to as party ethos. This proposition is examined by analyzing a new set of open-ended questions included in the 1988 American National Election Study probing citizens' images and assessments of the Republican and Democratic parties.The data utilized in this paper were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data forAmerican National Election Study 1988: Pre- and Post-Election Survey were originally collected by Warren E. Miller and the National Election Studies. Neither the collector of the original data nor the Consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.     

国际恐怖犯罪的特点、成因及对策

国际恐怖主义是当前国际社会所面临的主要挑战之一,它严重危害了国际社会的整体利益。尤其是近几年来,国际恐怖犯罪活动猖獗,以本.拉登为首的恐怖组织,更是制造了几起震惊世界的恐怖犯罪事件。这种特殊的犯罪形式引起了国际学术界和实务界的广泛关注。因此,研究这种犯罪的特点、成因及其处置对策具有十分重要的意义。     

Economics, ideology and vote: Southern Europe, 1985–2000

Abstract.  This article analyses the role of economics in voting behaviour in Greece, Portugal and Spain. First, it describes the objective economic conditions in these countries and investigates the degree to which they reflect the electorates' economic perceptions. Second, a multilevel model of voting behaviour for Greece, Portugal and Spain is tested to determine if, as expected, economics is more important than social and political cleavages. This approach allows one to assess the effects of both individual voters' economic perceptions and objective economic conditions to determine which are more important, and to compare their effects with social and political cleavages. With the exception of Greece, the economic voting model will also be tested under different political conditions (i.e., type of government in each country).     

Corporate governance,property and democracy: a conceptual critique of shareholder ideology

Despite the resilience of national institutions and practices there are increasing signs that national systems of corporate governance are giving way to an idealized American model of shareholder activism and liquid equity markets. These pressures are ideologically backed by 'shareholderism', which consists of three claims: a prudential, a functional and a moral claim. The prudential one claims superior efficiency for shareholder control and market allocation of capital. The functional one bases its claim for shareholder control on the contribution of risk-carrying capital. The moral one is based on a liberal doctrine of ownership that grounds exclusive control rights in title-holders. This paper addresses the functional and moral claims. It argues that public equity markets do not contribute capital and that the Lockean conception of property is both untenable and morally reprehensible. Instead corporate democracy is proposed as a way to accommodate the conflicting claims of stakeholders. To do so an intelligent division of democratic labour is required. The paper ends with a sketch of such a model, through short outings to the real world of Dutch corporate governance.     

Political fragmentation, party ideology and public expenditures

In this paper we propose an original model of competition for effective political power between majority and opposition coalitions. The model indicates that the electoral margin of the majority and the fragmentation of both coalitions are key variables that determine their effective political power. We estimate the model in the case of the French départements. Our econometric results support the model and show that the per capita social expenditures in the French départements depend on the effective political power of the majority.     

The rise of the modern welfare state, ideology, institutions and income security: analysis and evidence

In the 25-year period between 1960 and 1985, there was a great expansion of welfare state programs throughout the West. The fraction of GDP accounted for by social expenditures doubled in much of Europe and grew by 40–50% in many other OECD nations. After 1985, growth in social insurance programs slowed relative to other parts of the economy. This paper explores the extent to which institutions and ideological shifts may have accounted for the period of rapid growth, for differences in the extent of that growth, and for the subsequent reduction in the growth rates of social insurance programs.     

Values and partisanship in left-right orientations: measuring ideology

Abstract. This paper analyzes whether left-right scales provide an interval measure of citizen issue attitudes that is comparable across eight Western European countries. Two commonly held views of left-right self-placement are juxtaposed: (1) the theory that issue attitudes are the primary component of left-right self-placement, and (2) the theory that partisanship is the primary component of left-right self-placement, which entails that left-right scales will take on different substantive meanings in countries with different types of party systems. Distance measures and least squares regression show that left-right scales are generally an appropriate instrument for cross-national tests of theories that have as an explanatory variable the ideological orientations of voters.     

Left-right party ideology and government policies: A meta-analysis

Abstract. This paper summarizes how the partisan influence literature assesses the relationship between the left–right party composition of government and policy outputs through a meta–analysis of 693 parameter estimates of the party–policy relationship published in 43 empirical studies. Based on a simplified 'combined tests' meta–analytic technique, we show that the average correlation between the party composition of government and policy outputs is not significantly different from zero. A mutivariate logistic regression analysis examines how support for partisan theory is affected by a subset of mediating factors that can be applied to all the estimates under review. The analysis demonstrates that there are clearly identifiable conditions under which the probability of support for partisan theory can be substantially increased. We conclude that further research is needed on institutional and socio–economic determinants of public policy.     

Autocracies and Terrorism: Conditioning Effects of Authoritarian Regime Type on Terrorist Attacks

Although empirical research has generally demonstrated that democracies experience more terrorism than autocracies, research suggests that this depends upon complex institutional differences that go beyond the democracy‐autocracy divide. This study examines these differences, linking institutions to strategies of coercion and co‐optation. Using zero‐inflated negative binomial regression estimations on Geddes’ (2003) autocratic regime‐type data for 161 countries between 1970 and 2006, we find that single‐party authoritarian regimes consistently experience less domestic and international terrorism relative to military autocracies and democracies. This finding is robust to a large number of specifications, underscoring the explanatory power of regime type for predicting terrorism. Our explanation for these findings is that party‐based autocracies have a wider range of coercion and co‐option strategies that they can employ to address grievance and dissent than do other, more strategically restricted, regimes.