Political economy of crime and punishment under Stalin

Why do dictatorships favor harsher punishments than democracies? We use a rational choice approach to explain the stylized facts of Stalin’s dictatorship—preference for harsh sanctions, higher incarceration rates, greater use of capital punishment, low tolerance for theft of state property and workplace violations. They are shown to be explained by the preferences of a rational dictator, who does not internalize the social and private cost of punishment.     

社会资本视角下慈善组织公信力影响因素研究

近年来我国慈善组织的公信力屡遭考验,嫣然基金事件又将慈善组织推到了风口浪尖。信任是社会资本的重要内容,从社会资本理论出发,根据文献梳理,找出慈善组织公信力影响因素主要有信息透明度、合法性、社会网络、内部治理结构以及慈善文化。目前我国慈善组织公信力提升应先从信息透明度与内部治理结构着手,为我国慈善组织深化改革提供了长远发展的突破口。     

Political sophistication affects how citizens’ social policy preferences respond to the economy

Theoretical and empirical accounts of public opinion show that people’s social policy preferences are affected by the state of economy. According to the countercyclical view, economic downturn increases citizens’ demands for social policy whereas the procyclical view states that citizens demand less social policy during economically tough times. This article argues that individuals’ differences in political sophistication and, specifically, the commonly associated social-psychological characteristics are part of the micro-foundations for those different responses. People acquire and process information differently, which influences their political preferences. Public opinion and macroeconomic data from Europe during the economic crisis support the argument. The results show that people with lower levels of political sophistication tend to be procyclical, whereas this relationship weakens and moves towards countercyclical opinion structures with increasing levels of sophistication. These findings help to explain social policy preferences in response to the economy, and they offer insights into the origins of social policy preferences.     

The Politics of Social Welfare Reform in Urban China: Social Welfare Preferences and Reform Policies

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societal groups’ preferences for social welfare has given rise to two lines of cleavage in urban China with respect to social welfare—between state sector and non-state sector employees and between labor market insiders and outsiders. The Chinese authoritarian regime’s political priority—economic growth with social stability—has induced the government to accommodate public social welfare preferences in social welfare policies. Therefore, the three dimensions of Chinese social welfare reform policies since the mid-1980s reflect and respond to the social cleavages derived from societal groups’ different preferences for social welfare.     

Does Wal-Mart reduce social capital?

Social capital has attracted increasing attention in recent years. We use county-level and individual survey data to study how Wal-Mart affects social capital. Estimates using several proxies for social capital—such as club membership, religious activity, time with friends, and other measures—do not support the thesis that “Wal-Mart destroys communities” by reducing social capital. We measure exposure to Wal-Mart two ways: Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents and Wal-Marts per 10,000 residents aggregated over the years since 1979 to capture a more cumulative “Wal-Mart Effect.” We find that the coefficients on Wal-Mart’s presence are statistically insignificant in most specifications.     

Exploring Social Capital: as Concept and Practice in Australian Public Health Policies and Programs

Over the past twenty years interest has grown in the concept of social capital in international and Australian public policy. We explore how social capital is understood as a concept and used in practice for guiding policy development and program delivery in South Australian public health programs. The empirical research compared policy makers’ and practitioners’ understandings of social capital and how theories about social capital and health inequality were translated into practice in three case study projects. It found that there are shifting discourses between social capital and related concepts, including community capacity building, and social inclusion/exclusion. Policy makers reported less use of the concept of social capital in favour of social inclusion/exclusion reflecting changing political and policy environments where terms come into favour and then go out of fashion. In this transition period the two terms are often used interchangeably although there are some conceptual points of difference.     

Defending the European court of human rights: Experimental evidence from Britain

As nationalist sentiments gain traction globally, the attitudinal and institutional foundations of the international liberal order face new challenges. One manifestation of this trend is the growing backlash against international courts. Defenders of the liberal order struggle to articulate compelling reasons for why states, and their citizens, should continue delegating authority to international institutions. This article probes the effectiveness of arguments that emphasise the appropriateness and benefits of cooperation in containing preferences for backlash among the mass public. We rely on IR theories that explain why elites create international institutions to derive three sets of arguments that could be deployed to boost support for international courts. We then use experimental methods to test their impact on support for backlash against the European Court of Human Rights in Britain (ECtHR). First, in line with principal-agent models of delegation, we find that information about the court's reliability as an ‘agent’ boosts support for the ECtHR, but less so information that signals Britain's status as a principal. Second, in line with constructivist approaches, associating support for the court with the position of an in-group state like Denmark, and opposition with an out-group state like Russia, also elicits more positive attitudes. This finding points to the importance of ‘blame by association’ and cues of in/out-group identity in building support for cooperation. The effect is stronger when we increase social pressure by providing information about social attitudes towards Denmark and Russia in Britain, where the public overwhelmingly trusts the Danes and distrusts the Russians. Finally, in contrast to Liberal explanations for the creation of the ECtHR, the study finds no evidence that highlighting the court's mission to promote democracy and international peace contains backlash. We show that the positive effects of the first two arguments are not driven by pre-treatment attitudes such as political sophistication, patriotism, internationalism, institutional trust or political preferences.     

Brown kids in white suburbs: Housing mobility and the many faces of social capital

Abstract

Social capital has many faces in the geography of urban opportunity, and as such, particular housing policies might have positive effects on some forms of social capital and negative effects on others. The author defines social support and social leverage as two key dimensions of social capital that can be accessed by individuals. A sample of 132 low‐income African‐American and Latino adolescents is used to examine the early impacts of a Yonkers, NY, housing mobility program on social capital.¹

Overall, program participants (^‘’movers^‘’) appear to be no more cut off from social support than a control group of “stayer” youth. On the other hand, movers are also no more likely to report access to good sources of job information or school advice— to leverage that might enhance opportunity. Adding just one steadily employed adult to an adolescent's circle of significant ties has dramatic effects on perceived access to such leverage.     

Die Qualität von demokratischen Regimen. Zur Erklärung der politischen Performanz in Italien und Indien durch Robert Putnam und Patrick Heller

Long-term processes of democratization have brought about a great number of states with democratic regimes. Therefore, political sociology has to focus in its research on the determinants of the quality of democracies. This article compares two theoretical perspectives: first, Robert Putnam’s attempt to explain the political performance in the Italian regions by the strength of their civil society and their social capital and secondly, Patrick Heller’s study about the Indian state of Kerala, which underlines much more the importance of the mobilization and organization of the lower classes and the functioning of the state apparatus. An empirical analysis of the determinants of the social development of the 15 largest Indian states and further studies in political sociology indicate a greater plausibility of Heller’s approach. Therefore, Putnam’s core concepts of social capital and civil society are reconstructed in a concluding theoretical discussion so that a connection to Heller’s theses and to other fields of research in the social sciences becomes possible.     

Japan’s ‘pro-nuclear civil society’: Power in the analysis of social capital and civil society

ABSTRACT

Civil society research can be categorized into a school in the tradition of Gramsci focusing on social movements and a Tocquevillean school focusing on associations and social capital. The author reviews both schools’ research on the Japanese case and analyses a number of pro-nuclear citizen groups built up by the Japanese nuclear industry. The author analyses their financial data and historical development to demonstrate that they have been built up as countermovement by the nuclear industry. The author traces their mobilization processes to criticize the social capital approach. In Japanese political science, traditionally a dense web of hierarchical associations and ties of obligation have been seen as enforcing clientelism and top-down political control. This makes Japan an interesting case for the social capital approach. Social capital researchers have reinterpreted hierarchical networks as indicators of a strong civil society. Taking into account Bourdieu’s notion of social capital challenges this view and supports arguments of state influence forwarded by parts of the Gramscian school.     

Communication in committees: who should listen?

In a parsimonious model of a collective decision problem with partially conflicting interests, we show that restricting communication may enhance decision quality. If disclosed information is observed by decision makers with different preferences, individuals may strategically withhold information. In this case, a committee member’s silence arouses the other members’ suspicions. As a consequence, in case of residual uncertainty, individual votes may react less to information that is publicly observed.     

Sophisticated and myopic? Citizen preferences for Electoral College reform

Different institutions can produce more (or less) preferred outcomes, in terms of citizens’ preferences. Consequently, citizen preferences over institutions may “inherit”—to use William Riker’s term—the features of preferences over outcomes. But the level of information and understanding required for this effect to be observable seems quite high. In this paper, we investigate whether Riker’s intuition about citizens acting on institutional preferences is borne out by an original empirical dataset collected for this purpose. These data, a survey commissioned specifically for this project, were collected as part of a larger nationally representative sample conducted right before the 2004 election. The results show that support for a reform to split a state’s Electoral College votes proportionally is explained by (1) which candidate one supports, (2) which candidate one thinks is likely to win the election under the existing system of apportionment, (3) preferences for abolishing the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote winner, and (4) statistical interactions between these variables. In baldly political terms, Kerry voters tend to support splitting their state’s Electoral College votes if they felt George W. Bush was likely to win in that state. But Kerry voters who expect Kerry to win their state favor winner-take-all Electoral College rules for their state. In both cases, mutatis mutandis, the reverse is true for Bush voters.     

A precise restatement and extension of Black's theorem on voting orders

Duncan Black originally suggested that ‘the later any motion enters the voting, the greater its chance of adoption.’ We formalize this reasoning as a theorem, which we prove. We then specify the implications of this theorem for agenda control. If the social preference is known and there is no majority winner, one is best off choosing a specific voting order, which may or may not have one's most preferred alternative last. If the social preference is unknown, the optimal agenda is one in which voting is in reverse order of one's preferences.     

Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden1

That organizational involvement has a positive impact on political action is a well‐established finding in empirical research around the world. To account for this, theorists since Tocqueville have pointed to the returns in human capital, in particular ‘civic skills’, yielded by associations. This article, by contrast, is a study of whether social capital theory can help explain the same effect. According to the logic of ‘weak ties’, organizational involvement provides bridging social capital by connecting the individual to a wider range of people. As a result, the input of requests for participation increases and this ultimately leads to more activity. Unspecified in this argument, however, is what aspect of associational memberships is most conducive to such weak ties: the sheer number of memberships, or the extent to which one's memberships provide links to people of dissimilar social origin. In an unprecedented empirical test based on survey data from Sweden in 1997, it is shown that being connected to multiple voluntary associations is what matters for political activity, not the extent to which one's memberships cut across social cleavages. Moreover, the social capital mechanism of recruitment is more important in explaining this effect than the human capital mechanism of civic skills, since the former can account for why even passive members, not just organizational activists, may become more prone to take political action.     

Robert D. Tollison and the economics of politics

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.     

Do high taxes lock-in capital gains? Evidence from a dual income tax system

The purpose of this paper is to study whether investors’ willingness to realize capital gains falls when the marginal tax rate on capital gains is raised. We use a rich register-based panel data set covering almost 8% of the Swedish population. The results indicate that a 10% increase in capital gains tax rate reduces the number of realizations of capital gains with 8.7% and the realized amount, given the decision to realize, with 1.9%. In addition, we find that wealthy individuals seem to respond more to changes in capital gains tax rates than less-wealthy.     

The utility of bonding social capital

Abstract

In most studies of social capital, bridging social capital is emphasized as ‘good’ for democracy and economic performance. It is rarer to find studies showing that bonding social capital can bring positive effects. Mostly, bonding social capital is either overlooked or depicted as the ‘villain’ that leads to ethnic conflict, intolerant behaviour and poor economic and democratic development. In this article, it is argued that this picture needs to be revised. If we assume that bonding trust is a negative force for development and democracy, we ignore a substantial portion of the political history of the West. Also, new empirical evidence from India suggests that bonding social capital is related to good governance. High levels of bonding trust cannot only facilitate political cooperation. They may also work as a shield against public sector employees who attempt to exploit citizens in a corrupt or clientelistic manner. The conclusion drawn in the article is that the view of social capital as a prime mover with inherent normatively attractive qualities should give way to a perspective where social capital is more properly regarded as an intermediate variable where the way it is combined with, or interacts with, other factors determines outcomes.     

An extension of Black's theorem on voting orders to the successive procedure

Duncan Black (1958) stated his voting order theorem — ‘the later any motion enters the voting order, the greater its chance of adoption’ — exclusively for the amendment procedure. Niemi and Gretlein's (1985) extension is similarly limited. Here we show that with a change in the focus from social preferences to individual preferences, both Black's theorem and that proved by Niemi and Gretlein apply as well to the successive procedure.     

Keeping the other candidate guessing: Electoral competition when preferences are private information

We analyze a, model of two candidate competition in which candidate and voter preferences are private information. If candidates simultaneously commit to policy platforms the uncertainty about candidate preferences reinforces the incentive for platform divergence. After a candidate observes the other candidate’s stance but before she learns about voter preferences she may face regret about her choice. This ex post irrationality suggests that a 1 period model may not capture the relevant incentives. In a multi-period proposal game in which candidates first make non-binding public proposals and then they make binding public proposals (similar to Ledyard, 1989) we find that candidates are uninformative during the first stage, as they have a disincentive to reveal their preferences to the opposing candidate. This finding offers an explanation for candidate ambiguity or inconsistency early in an election which does not involve efforts to deceive voters. Candidates may be trying to keep their opponent guessing. With a strong pre-election commitment technology, candidates can only be deterred from this type of behavior if they anticipate that a sizeable number of voters (more than a majority) will vote contrary to their preferences over policy.