New methods for strategic analysis: Automating the wargame

A new method for automating political-military games as a means of analyzing strategic forces was recently developed and demonstrated by The Rand Corporation. Interest in this technique sprang from dissatisfaction with the dominant methods of analyzing strategic forces: manual political-military games and force exchange models. While each brings important capabilities to the analysis of strategic forces, neither method can independently handle all of the variables required to satisfy the current demands placed on strategic analysis. Rand drew upon the discipline used to develop models and the flexibility inherent in gaming to develop its automated wargame. The method promises significant improvement over the traditional methods of strategic analysis in breadth of input and flexibility of application.     

Susceptibility to coalitional strategic sponsoring

It usually happens that the alternatives to be voted on in committees are chosen or sponsored by some particularly active committee members. For example, in parliaments, some representatives and some government members are known to be especially active in introducing bills on which the whole committee will later vote. It appears that parliamentary agendas—namely amendment and successive elimination voting rules—are vulnerable to strategic behavior by groups of individuals introducing motions which are not their most preferred alternatives. Our aim in this paper is to evaluate how frequently this type of behavior arises.     

Campfire decision-making and strategic management: A politics and leadership approach to economic development

Privatization is recommended unconditionally by some scholars as the optimal means for achieving economic development. While privatization can be helpful medicine, it provides no universal cure for all the ills associated with low economic growth. A country's economic and political institutions are intertwined. Mandating privatization without being mindful of both political and economic consequences to such a policy can bring undesirable consequences during and after policy implementation. This paper proposes that to enhance the likelihood of economic growth a leader should blend economics with politics. Sensitive political leadership can stimulate a bonding among citizens, a bonding which can generate the commitment to risk by investing personal savings, to work the long hours which much precede the rewards, and often to be satisfied by a job well done rather than with material reward. Analogous to the chief executive officer of a successful corporation, the effective political leader involves stakeholders, steers decision processes, takes reasonable risks, encourages private investment, and rations public resources according to national priorities. Collective decision-making guided by the political leader, who also acts as a strategic manager during implementation, is offered as a model for development.     

A strategic response to class size reduction: Combination classes and student achievement in California

The California class size reduction program provided schools with cash rewards for K–3 classes of 20 or fewer students. I show how program rules made it possible for schools to save money by using mixed‐grade classes to meet class size reduction obligations while maintaining larger average class sizes. I also show that this smoothing of students across grades is associated with a significant test score gap for certain second and third grade students. My estimates suggest that class size reduction may lead to lower test scores for students placed in combination classes. Alternative explanations of teacher experience and credentialing changes cannot explain the test score pattern. This result spotlights both the underappreciated role of age heterogeneity in classroom learning and the difficulty of replicating the success of policy experiments in statewide reform. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The vulnerability of point-voting schemes to preference variation and strategic manipulation

This essay measures and analyzes for a special class of point-voting schemes (the Borda method, plurality rule and the unrestricted point-voting scheme) sensitivity to preference variation (a simple change in the socially winning alternative resulting from alteration of a single voter's preferences) and vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation (a change in the winning alternative that benefits the voter whose preferences are altered). Assuming that society (n voters with linear preference orders on a finite set of m alternatives) satisfies the impartial-culture assumption, that is, each randomly selected voter is equally likely to hold any one of the randomly picked possible preference orders on the alternatives, we demonstrate:

1. for a given rule and a fixed number of voters, the sensitivity to individual preference variation and the vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation are greater, the larger the total number of alternatives.
2. For a given rule and a fixed number of alternatives, the vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation, in general, is not greater the smaller the total number of voters. Such a relationship does hold, however, if n is sufficiently large.
3. For any given combination of number of voters and number of alternatives, the unrestricted point-voting scheme is more sensitive to preference variation than the Borda method, which, in turn, is more exposed to such variation relative to the plurality rule. A similar conclusion does not hold with respect to vulnerability to individual strategic manipulation, unless the number of voters is sufficiently small.

     

A doctoral program in the policy sciences

The complex nature of policy problems requires innovative approaches to problem analysis and a new social science interdiscipline focused on policy processes. The Policy Science Program at SUNY Buffalo is designed to advance this field and to train hybrid Ph.D.'s as research-scientists/practitioners. These new policy science professionals will augment policymaking organizations as policy analysts, evaluation researchers, knowledge brokers, research feedback disseminators, process monitors, and consultants. Their training must include research methodology, analytic approaches, orienting conceptual schemes from systems theory, social sciences, and specific problem domains, and operating skills. The curriculum includes both academic and field-training aspects.Though the program is oriented toward the applied sciences, it is an attempt to mold a version of the new combination of revised social science paradigms and analytic approaches identified by Dror as the Policy Sciences.     

A taxonomy of runoff methods

We look at ways of classifying runoff methods in terms of characteristics such as number of rounds, rules used to determine which candidates advance to the next round, and rules which determine the final winner. We also compare runoffs and so-called instant runoffs such as the alternative vote.     

试论公共政策公共性提升之道

公共性是公共政策的本质属性 ,本文就公共政策的公共性作出了一些具体的阐述和分析 ,其中包括公共政策公共性的涵义 ,也就是公有性、公治性和公享性三方面的内容 ;公共政策公共性的具体表现内容 ,也就是公共政策主体、价值观、手段和对象的公共性。此外 ,本文利用公共选择理论对公共政策的非公共化进行了阐释 ,并提出了增强公共政策公共性的一系列政策