Are city elections unique? Perceptions of electoral cleavages and social sorting across levels of government

A long tradition of scholarship has argued that the cleavages that animate urban politics are distinct from those that structure regional or national politics. More recent scholarship has challenged this view, demonstrating the relevance of cleavages that apply at higher levels of government, such as partisanship and ideology, for urban elections. We contribute to this debate by investigating the perceptions of urban residents themselves. Using survey data from a major Canadian city, we use a novel survey question battery to compare how urban residents understand municipal and provincial electoral cleavages. We consider two questions that speak to the distinctiveness of local politics: (1) How do electors perceive coalitions of support at the two levels of government, and do perceptions of coalitions differ across levels? (2) How do perceptions compare to actual electoral coalitions at the two levels? We find little evidence to support the view that local electoral cleavages are unique.     

Are minorities free riders? Applying the social resistance framework to public goods production in Central-Eastern Europe

One of the key reasons for the scholarly and policy concern about the rising levels of ethnic diversity is its apparently detrimental effect on the production of public goods. Although numerous studies have tackled that issue, there is still much ambiguity as to the precise micro-level mechanisms underpinning this relationship. In this article, a novel theoretical explanation for this relationship is proposed, building on the social resistance framework. This proposition is tested using a new cross-sectional public opinion survey covering 14,536 respondents in 817 neighbourhoods across 11 Central Eastern European countries. Analysing national minorities defined by postwar border changes means one can overcome the endogeneity problem faced by research based on immigrant groups. The findings show that it is the combination of a minority group's discrimination and its spatial clustering that makes minorities reluctant to contribute to public goods. The article constitutes a novel theoretical and methodological contribution to the research on the effects of diversity on public goods provision.     

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.     

Why Are they Silent?

A frustrating feature in the Chinese higher educational landscape is the ubiquitous and appalling lack of student responsiveness in the classroom. Most of the explanations that have been provided for the causes of the unilateralism in the classroom discourse of Chinese higher education have placed under scrutiny various factors, from personal traits of students, such as shyness, to Confucianism. All these explanations attribute this unilateralism to, if not blame it on, the same external factor: the cultural specificity of Chinese college student. Whereas it is right to narrow the search for the causes down to the domain of culture, it does not really make much sense to simply single out parts of the Chinese culture for explanations. Instead of dwelling on specific components of the Chinese culture, the present article proposes drawing the attention to a certain functional mechanism within the culture: self-construal, which is also manifested in other cultures. It argues that the students’ minimum discourse performance in Chinese university classrooms can be understood as a result of their semi-conscious act of internal modeling, which entails confirming and reinforcing their identities based on evaluations of the situation and conforming to certain social norms that are prevalent in school. The self-construal in Chinese university classrooms perfectly reflects a kind of power imbalance between the teacher and students, which has a profound shaping force upon the students in their modeling of self-identity in regard to that of the teacher and is not conducive to students’ overall development, as it inhibits critical thinking and real academic innovation.     

Are We Civilized Yet?

The term “civilization” has been used in many contexts where accusations of Western imperialism, racism, and the like do not at all apply. Works on the history of science and technology in ancient cultures provide one such example, when they speak of Egyptian civilization or early Chinese civilization. It is also not true that works of the Enlightenment view the non-western world as less civilized and inferior. An entire genre of writing inspired by Jesuit accounts discovered in China a higher form of society that Europe should emulate. Two such works were Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World and François Quesnay’s Le Despostisme de la chine, which offer, respectively, an extended satire and a sharp critique of European society.     

Do Job Corps performance measures track program impacts?

Since the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, performance measurement systems based on short‐term program outcomes have been increasingly used to assess the effectiveness of federal programs. This paper examines the association between program performance measures and long‐term program impacts, using nine‐year follow‐up data from a recent large‐scale, national experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation's largest federal job training program for disadvantaged youths. Job Corps is an important test case because it uses a comprehensive performance system that is widely emulated. We find that impacts on key outcomes are not associated with measured center performance levels. Participants in higherperforming centers had better outcomes; however, the same pattern holds for comparable controls. Thus, the performance measurement system is not achieving the goal of ranking and rewarding centers on the basis of their ability to improve participant outcomes relative to what these outcomes would have been otherwise. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Are women more likely to throw the rascals out? The mobilizing effect of social service spending on female voters

Public Choice - This study focuses on gender differences in voter reactions to a corruption scandal in one’s preferred party. We analyze, in a framework of ‘exit, voice and...     

Are opinion leaders better represented?

Few studies have analysed the effect of political engagement on legislators’ responsiveness. This article focuses on opinion leaders defined as citizens who regularly discuss politics and who attempt to persuade others to change their viewpoint. It investigates whether opinion leaders are better represented compared to other voters. Taking advantage of the Swiss institution of direct democracy, the article combines roll-call votes and information from popular votes to compare the voting behaviour of legislators and citizens on exactly the same policy proposals. It thus overcomes limitations pertaining to the lack of identical information on elites’ and citizens’ preferences that is common in the literature. The findings show that opinion leaders are better represented than the rest of the electorate in those instances where both sub-groups disagree, and that issue salience does not increase responsiveness to rank-and-file voters. These findings have important implications for understanding unequal representation.     

Does campaign spending help voters learn about ballot measures?

What happens when a ballot measure becomes an orphan and there are no campaign expenditures for or against the measure? California's Proposition 91 provides one example of such a scenario and offers a rare opportunity to study what voters learn about a ballot measure in the absence of a campaign. Using an election survey, I assess what voters exiting the polling booth learned about Proposition 91 and compare it to what they learned about several other measures on the same ballot. My results suggest that even without a campaign, a large majority of voters still know a fact about Proposition 91. I also find that campaigns can greatly increase knowledge of the facts they choose to emphasize.     

When Are Agenda Setters Valuable?

Why do industries donate money to legislative campaigns when roll‐call votes suggest that donors gain nothing in return? I argue that corporate donors may shape policy outcomes by influencing powerful agenda setters in the early stages of lawmaking. On the basis of a new data set of more than 45,000 individual state legislator sessions (1988–2012), I document how agenda control is deemed valuable to legislators and groups seeking influence on policy. Employing a difference‐in‐differences design, I assess the revealed price, as measured by campaign contributions, that firms are willing to pay for access to committee and party leaders and document how this price varies across industries and institutions. The results indicate that industries systematically funnel money to the legislative agenda setters by whom they are regulated, and to those endowed with important procedural powers. I document that the value of agenda‐setter positions has increased dramatically in recent years. Finally, exploiting changes in state laws, I show that relaxing contribution limits significantly benefits committee chairs and party leaders more so than it does other legislators, suggesting that agenda setters have strong incentives to obstruct restrictive campaign finance reforms.     

Are There Universal Collective Rights?

The first part of the paper focuses on the current debate over the universality of human rights. After conceptually distinguishing between different types of universality, it employs Sen’s definition that the claim of a universal value is the one that people anywhere may have reason to see as valuable. When applied to human rights, this standard implies “thin” (relative, contingent) universality, which might be operationally worked-out as in Donnelly’s three-tiered scheme of concepts–conceptions–implementations. The second part is devoted to collective rights, which have recently become a new topic of the human rights debate. This part provides the basis of political–philosophical justification and legal–theoretical conceptualization of collective rights, as rights directly vested in collective entities. The third part dwells on the problem of universality of collective rights. It differentiates between the three main collective entities in international law—peoples, minorities, and indigenous peoples—and investigates whether certain rights vested in these collectives might, according to Sen’s standard, acquire the status of the universal ones. After determining that some rights are, in principle, plausible candidates for such a status in international law, this paper concludes by taking notice of a number of the open issues that still need to be settled, primarily by the cooperative endeavor of international legal scholars and legal theorists.