The impact of the Master Settlement Agreement on cigarette consumption.

In 1998, 46 states and the four major tobacco companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which stipulated that the tobacco companies pay states $206 billion over 25 years and take steps to reduce youth smoking. The remaining states settled separately. We sought to determine the effect of the settlements on demand for cigarettes. Using a nationwide sample from 1990 to 2002, we estimated a model of the decision to smoke cigarettes. The settlements affected smoking primarily through price increases for cigarettes, although there was evidence that other policy instruments influenced smoking rates for younger smokers. By 2002, the settlements had reduced overall smoking rates by 13 percent for ages 18 to 20 and older than 65 and 5 percent for ages 21 to 64.     

Do cigarette pictorial warnings really work for Korean smokers?

According to previous research, cigarette pictorial warnings are effective in not only preventing smoking but also in inducing smoking cessation. In Korea, however, the smoking rate has not changed much despite implementing pictorial warnings on cigarette packaging. Thus, in this study, I focused on how smokers perceive cigarette pictorial warnings. To do this, I conducted in-depth interviews with cigarette buyers at a convenience store where real cigarettes were purchased, and I observed their behaviors at the same time. Thirty buyers responded to the interview. During the interviews, respondents said that when they first saw a tobacco warning picture, they were affected by it at the moment, but it did not help at all to quit smoking. Rather, they justified smoking by considering the warning picture as a picture or a cigarette company logo. They also had a positive illusion of, “It will never happen to me” about the smoking-related illnesses presented in the warning pictures. Above all, cigarette warning pictures were not effective in reducing rates of smoking. This means that the tobacco warning picture policy did not properly influence smokers' perceptions. Further research on the usefulness of cigarette pictorial warning is needed.     

Testing Social Ties against Merits: the Political Career of Provincial Party Chiefs in China, 1990–2007

The literature of Chinese politics focuses on two determinants in selecting government officials—merits and social ties. On the one hand, local officials who produce higher economic growth are more likely to be promoted. On the other hand, local officials who have social ties with top Party leaders are more likely to become candidates of future leaders. Since1990 two major factions have dominated in the Chinese politics. Strong tie with one faction might be perceived as a threat to the rival faction. My empirical analysis will examine what determined the promotion outcomes of provincial Party chiefs from 1990 to 2007. Five indicators of social ties are used in the Cox event history analysis: ties built through family, college, birthplace, workplace, or mishu. In the analysis the factionalist argument holds better than the meritocratic argument. But the story of social ties is complex because different social ties have different effects on promotion outcomes.     

A Comparison of Tobacco Policy in the UK and Japan: If the Scientific Evidence is Identical,Why is There a Major Difference in Policy?

Tobacco policy in the UK and Japan has diverged markedly. In the 1980s, both countries oversaw regimes with minimal economic and regulatory policies. Now the UK has become one of the most, and Japan one of the least, controlled (advanced industrial) states. These developments are puzzling to public health scholars who give primary explanatory weight to scientific evidence and a vague notion of “political will”, because policy makers possessed the same evidence on the harms of tobacco, and made the same international commitment to comprehensive tobacco control. Instead, we identify the role of a mutually reinforcing dynamic in policy environments, facilitating policy change in the UK but not Japan: policy makers accepted the scientific evidence, framed tobacco as a public health epidemic, placed health departments at the heart of policy, formed networks with public health groups and excluded tobacco companies, and accentuated socio-economic conditions supportive of tobacco control. This dynamic helps explain why the UK became more likely to select each tobacco policy control instrument during a series of “windows of opportunity”. Such analysis, generated by policy theory, is crucial to contemporary science/practitioner debates on the politics of “evidence-based policy making”: the evidence does not speak for itself, and practitioners need to know how to use it effectively in policy environments.     

Income, assets, and health insurance: economic resources for meeting acute health care needs of the aged.

In this article, the authors use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the relationship between economic resources and acute health care needs among the aged. The circumstances of individuals who rely on Medicare as their only form of health insurance are considered in detail because they are potentially more vulnerable when faced with health care expenses. Particular attention is given to the amount of family income and personal contingency assets held by this group and the level of out-of-pocket liability for acute care they might have been expected to face in 1984. The authors point out that their research findings would be strengthened by linkage of a more current SIPP data set to Medicare program records and the development of Medicaid eligibility simulation capability in the SIPP context.     

THE PERFORMANCE OF NATIONAL HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS: A "GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS" FINDING FOR REFORM POSSIBILITIES

This paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of how macro health systems work by comparing three possible sets of influences on national health care outcomes: 1) health care facilities and their presumed link to national affluence, 2) social characteristics which are assumed to promote healthy behavior, and 3) political variables in the form of welfare state development. Our findings bear both optimistic and pessimistic connotations. On the one hand, the somewhat limited importance of the first set of factors shows that good health in a country is not simply the function of high spending levels. However, the surprisingly strong role of “social development” in determining health care outcomes that emerges implies that much more than the direct provision of health care must be manipulated to ensure optimal health for a nation's population.     

Pareto Efficiency and Majority Voting: Why High Taxes on the Middle Class may be Desirable

In this paper we use a simple median voter model to analyze the effects of tax systems with differing degrees of progressivity. We find that relatively high taxes on middle incomes have two important advantages: On the one hand, they help to ensure that all citizens are better off than they would be in a world without government, and on the other hand, they reduce the tax level chosen in the election. Therefore, the progression in the middle income range not only ensures that Wicksell's requirement of ex post efficiency of the tax system is achieved, it may also increase social welfare.     

Going It Alone or Playing to the Crowd? A Critique of Individual Budgets and the Personalisation of Health Care in the English National Health Service

The introduction of individual budgets into English health care is a recent example of the pervasive drive towards personalisation in welfare sector organisation and delivery. As a heavily centralised and highly bureaucratic institution, the National Health Service (NHS) is an obvious target for personalisation. On the other hand, as a symbol of solidarity and nationhood it retains a powerful place within the collective psyche, such that radical reform might expect to encounter resistance. This paper analyses the assumptions that are inherent in personalisation and raises concerns over its ability to transform health‐care services. At the heart of these concerns is the tension between appeals to tailored service provision and empowerment on the one hand, and promotion of a strong social contract, public trust in institutions, and collective identity on the other. Lessons are drawn for personalisation in other sectors and settings.     

Elections and the Development of Civil War: An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka

Present empirical research on the connection between elections and civil war often treats causality as a one-way effect because it focuses exclusively on either the onset or the consequence of civil war. What is omitted in the literature is the endogenous nature of the election–conflict nexus throughout a civil war. This article dedicates itself to filling that gap. Treating administrative units in conflict as part of a rebellion network, we apply a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to the case of Sri Lanka. We find that, on the one hand, rebellion is less likely to occur in Tamil regions if national winners in presidential elections enjoy high local approval ratings (selection effect). On the other hand, regions involved in the rebellion network converge in terms of their local support for the national winner of the presidency (influence effect). Overall, our model-based simulation analysis shows that the influence effect has a larger impact on the endogenous relationship than the selection effect.     

A Definition of Democracy

In a recent paper John D. May has nominated Responsive Rule for a definition of democracy. Responsive Rule prescribes necessary correspondence between governmental acts and the wishes with respect to those acts of the persons who are affected. In this paper the definition is criticized for being unclear on a vital conceptual issue and for not fully expressing the essence of democracy. On the one hand it is maintained that democracy's subject population remains undefined as the meaning of the word affected' is unclear, and three distinctions are brought forward to illustrate the problem of separating affected persons from persons not affected. On the other hand May's identification of democracy with equality in the weight of wishes is called in question, and it is maintained that wishes should meet a qualifying criterion. Three procedures for identifying qualified wishes are discussed, and it is suggested that information must be included in a conception of democracy in order to separate rational wishes from irrational wishes.     

A note on the political economy of immigration

In this note it is shown that the different attitudes towards immigration can be explained in terms of economic interest, although the public immigration debate is dominated by moral and political arguments. On the one hand, immigration supporters are mainly found among those who may expect economic gains from immigration – skilled workers and especially members of certain professions. On the other hand, unskilled workers who stand to lose economically because they can be easily substitued for by immigrants are for the most part opposed to immigration.     

Modeling individuals' behavior: Evaluation of a policymaker's tool

With a continuous decline in the cost of manipulating data and a continuous increase in the richness of data banks, policymakers have increasing opportunities to build and apply so-called microsimulation models—models that attempt to simulate the behavior of the individuals in a large population under a specified program. The efforts of the Department of Labor to use a model in evaluating proposed changes in the unemployment insurance system point up both the power and the weaknesses of such models. Any user who applies these models without attempting to understand which of their strengths and weaknesses are most important for analyzing the problem at hand is asking for trouble. Easy to use or not, these models are not user-friendly.     

An Application of Unconditional Quantile Regression to Cigarette Taxes

This study investigates heterogeneous response to state cigarette tax increases using unconditional quantile regression (UQR). We make two contributions to the empirical policy analysis literature. First, we argue that UQR provides more policy‐relevant information than conventional quantile regression in most empirical state policy analyses. Second, we document cigarette tax elasticity across a sample of adult smokers in the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements between 1992 and 2011. Our ordinary least squares regression show an imprecise negative relationship between taxes and cigarettes smoked in the past 30 days, while UQR reveals a U‐shaped relationship: Only moderate smokers reduce their smoking following a cigarette tax increase, and the magnitude of the effect is small. A $1.00 (135 percent) increase in the cigarette tax leads to a 3.5 percent reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked in the past 30 days among the most responsive smokers (implied tax elasticity = ?0.03).     

The political economy of smoking regulation and taxation

Although anti-smoking policies are on the political agenda in almost all developed countries, a general understanding of these policies is still lacking. Applying the majority voting model of Buchanan and Vanberg (Public Choice 57(2):101–113, 1988) to tobacco taxation and smoking regulation shows that different smoking policies are feasible, depending on the composition of the majority of voters with smokers and non-smokers: (1) internalization of spill-over costs with a mixed majority of smokers and non-smokers as well as (2) a combination of regulation and taxation with a non-smoker majority. Moreover, the influence of the tobacco industry is also discussed.     

Gründe für wechselndes Wahlverhalten: Helfen neue Instrumente Licht in das Dunkel zu bringen?

Attempts to analyze the reasons for vote switching between consecutive elections have been in general quite disappointing. On the one hand, this result may be attributed to idiosyncrasies of vote switching; on the other hand, it may be a product of not fully adequate research strategies. This paper explores the second possibility. First, we suggest to study switchers not as a whole, but to distinguish different groups of switchers according to the political relevance of the different kinds of switching. Secondly, we discuss whether the analysis of switching could benefit from the use of panel data instead of cross-sectional data: the operationalization of switching by panel data should be superior to the widely used recall method. The hypotheses derived in the theoretical discussion receive strong support from empirical evidence from the German general election of 1998: both the differentiated measurement of switchers and the use of panel data enhance analysis of switching based on cleavage theory and the Michigan model. More generally, we conclude that our understanding of this dynamic element in electoral politics depends on the methodological adequacy of research.     

Retrospective Voting and Political Representation

This article develops a theoretical model of political representation under the single-member district system. I establish the existence of equilibria in which legislative voting of each legislator depends only on her preference and her electorate's preference and voters sanction badly behaved incumbents and retain well-behaved ones based solely on their own representatives' roll-call records. In equilibrium, voters achieve a partial representation with respect to representatives' behavior in each district. However, with respect to representation of the social majority, my findings are indeterminate. On the one hand, there exists an equilibrium in which the majority-preferred alternative is the outcome guaranteed, except in very special circumstances. On the other hand, this equilibrium is not generally the unique equilibrium, and, for some parameter values, there is an equilibrium in which the majority-preferred alternative is less likely than the alternative preferred only by the minority to be the outcome.     

Epidemiological accountability: philanthropists,global health and the audit of saving lives

Abstract

There have been concerns about the recent private turn and re-emergence of philanthropies in world health, with many worrying about philanthropies’ perceived lack of transparency and accountability. In contrast, I argue that while the private turn might have led to a decline in democratic or public accountability, it did not bring an end to all forms of accountability. Specifically, I suggest that philanthropists’ involvement in global health has led to the spread of another, new form of accountability: epidemiological accountability. The latter is a combination of two regimes of expertise and practices hitherto kept separate: audit and epidemiology. To substantiate this argument, I draw on my research on the Bloomberg Initiative – a global effort to reduce tobacco use spearheaded by the Bloomberg and Gates foundations.     

Assessing Voter Registration Among Transgender and Gender Non-conforming Individuals

Although public attention to transgender (trans) politics has increased dramatically in recent years, the scholarly community still has a limited understanding of how trans and gender non-conforming (GNC) individuals participate in the political system. Trans/GNC individuals are faced with a dual reality. On one hand, they are part of a highly organized and activated group whose rights depend on political engagement; on the other hand, individuals often face barriers to political participation including a lack of proper identification and low socioeconomic status. In this paper, we explore the effects of these competing forces on trans/GNC voter registration. We use the theory of oppositional consciousness to hypothesize that being part of a political and highly mobilized population helps trans/GNC individuals overcome barriers to participation. Using data on over 5000 self-identified trans/GNC individuals from the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey we show that, though individuals are less likely to participate if they lack gender-conforming identification, on the whole trans/GNC individuals in this survey register at rates that are consistent with or higher than the general population. The evidence points to the importance of the trans political movement in activating and developing oppositional consciousness in its members. We explore the implications of these findings and what they mean for future research.

     

Is Ethnic Diversity Bad for Any Dimension of Social Capital? Trust,Networks and Voluntarism in Norwegian Communities

Ethnic diversity has been posed as a threat to social capital, but results from existing research are inconclusive. This study takes as its starting point that different aspects of social capital may be influenced differently by ethnic diversity and uses one specific welfare state context – Norway – to explore such variations. Analysing an original dataset, nine different measures are used to explore three dimensions of social capital in 61 communities in Norway, amongst the majority population and residents with immigrant background. The results suggest, first, a differentiated impact of ethnic heterogeneity on trust. Ethnic diversity is negatively associated with spatially bounded forms of trust, but not with generalized trust. Second, a negative association with traditional forms of voluntarism is found – albeit this latter relationship is much weaker than the former. Third, the results suggest that these relationships are fairly similar across different (immigrant) groups. Although residents with immigrant background typically express lower levels of generalized trust than the majority population, the relative differences between residents living in diverse or homogeneous communities are limited. Given its strong institutions Norway could be seen as a least likely case for studying the impact of ethnic diversity on social capital. On the one hand, effects are more limited than what has been found in studies from the United States. On the other hand, the fact that effects are found on community trust and volunteering indicates that this type of societal model can indeed be affected by ethnic diversification.     

Depression and attitudes to change in referendums: The case of Brexit

Depression is the most common mental illness and its profound impact on cognition and decision-making has implications for political judgement. However, those implications are unclear in the case of referendums offering a choice between status quo and change. On one hand, one component of depression is the kind of life dissatisfaction associated with voting for change. Yet cognitive models also portray depression sufferers as biased towards the status quo: they are less inclined to research change, more pessimistic about its benefits and more likely to exaggerate its potential costs. In this paper, we use data from Understanding Society to examine the impact of those cross-pressures on support for Brexit. Prior to the referendum, while life dissatisfaction and generally poor health predicted support for Leaving the European Union (EU), those diagnosed with depression were disproportionately likely to support Remain. Supporting our claim that the latter was a sign of status quo bias, this difference disappeared once the result was in and leaving the EU had become the widespread expectation. The study highlights the unexplored importance of mental health for political judgements, emphasises the multidimensionality of conditions like depression and illustrates the psychological role of status quo bias in referendum voting.