Correcting mistakes: cognitive dissonance and political attitudes in Sweden and the United States

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ. 1:86–111, 2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve on previous studies by investigating political attitudes, measured just before elections, when they are highly predictive of voting. In contrast to earlier studies I find no effect of voting on political attitudes. This result holds for both Sweden and the United States.     

Prisoners of the German past

Heimo Schwilk and Ulrich Schacht (eds.), Die selbstbewusste Nation. ‘Anschwellender Bocksgesang’ und weitere Beiträge zu einer deutschen Debatte. 3rd edn. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Verlag, 1995. vii+494pp. Ind.     

Disraeli and images of the past

He is the author of Karl Schmitt: Politics and Theory.     

The problem of past emissions and intergenerational debts

The problem of past emissions – how to share fairly the costs of climate-changing emissions caused by polluters who are no longer in existence – presents an increasingly pressing challenge to scholars and policy-makers. Since standard contribution-based principles are inapplicable when it comes to past emissions, theorists have instead proposed various non-contribution-based historical principles. This paper develops such a principle – the Inherited Debt Principle – which seeks to account for the intuition that historical injustice matters to current duties in a way that does not appeal to the counterfactual benefits derived from that injustice. This principle, it is argued, offers a surprisingly plausible solution to the problem of past emissions.     

Planning the future in the context of the past

Margo Anderson is professor of history and urban affairs and director of the Center for Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is author of numerous articles on the history of statistics and census-taking; The United States Census and Labor Force Change;and, forthcoming from Yale University Press. The American Census: A Social History.     

近几年学术界关于群体性事件的研究综述

目前我国正走向群体性事件的多发阶段,学术理论界对此进行了一定地研究和探讨,取得了丰硕的成果.本文对群体性事件的内涵界定、特点、爆发的原因以及处理群体性事件坚持的原则、方针措施等方面加以梳理,一方面可以为后续研究提供资料积累;另一方面也可以为相关部门在处理群体性事件的具体工作中提供借鉴.