A technical appraisal of the IIASA energy scenarios

Several shortcomings in a major study of the world's energy system are described. The study, entitled Energy in a Finite World, resulted in widely publicized conclusions and urgent policy recommendations that were derived from detailed projections of the global energy future. A set of computer models was used to produce these projections, which are analyzed here in two ways. First, treating the models as a black box, it is shown that several principal results are effectively prescribed informally in input data that pass through the models unchanged. Second, despite claims of robustness, detailed sensitivity analysis shows that the energy supply projections are highly sensitive to perturbations in various input data. Early work that revealed this problem is not cited, and standard sensitivity tests are not provided in the study. Thus, despite the appearance of analytical rigor, the study's conclusions are evidently based on opinions rather than objective robust analysis.Bill Keepin is Research Fellow at the Beijer Institute, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Box 50005, S-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden. This work was carried out at IIASA, where he was Research Scholar from October 1981 to June 1984.     

The many faces of counterterrorism: an introduction

This article sets the stage for the special issue by describing the many faces of counterterrorism policy. The article highlights some key concepts??e.g., domestic and transnational terrorism, and alternative types of counterterrorism policies??that are applied throughout the special issue. The two data sets exploited in this issue??s empirical contributions are also described. Next, each of the 12 articles is introduced and briefly summarized. The main conclusions and insights of the articles are distilled and placed in perspective.     

The 2006 Earnings Public-Use Microdata File: an introduction

This article introduces the 2006 Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF) and provides important background information on the file's data fields. The EPUF contains selected demographic and earnings information for 4.3 million individuals drawn from a 1-percent sample of all Social Security numbers issued before January 2007. The data file provides aggregate earnings for 1937 to 1950 and annual earnings data for 1951 to 2006. The article focuses on four key items: (1) the Social Security Administration's experiences collecting earnings data over the years and their effect on the data fields included in EPUF; (2) the steps taken to "clean" the underlying administrative data and to minimize the risk of personal data disclosure; (3) the potential limitations of using EPUF data to estimate Social Security benefits for some individuals; and (4) frequency distributions and statistical tabulations of the data in the file, to provide a point of reference for EPUF users.     

Experimentalist governance: An introduction

This symposium critically engages with the volume Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture (2010), edited by Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. “Experimentalist Governance” (EG) opens up an original theoretical perspective on the emergent governance architecture of the EU and sheds new light on developments in key policy sectors. This symposium brings together a transatlantic group of distinguished political scientists and legal scholars to discuss the added value of EG as a concept for analysis, its theoretical underpinnings, empirical relevance, and normative implications, in terms of legitimacy. Contributors discuss EG from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, referring to a variety of empirical examples in the EU context and beyond. The symposium closes with a response from the authors to their critics. This collection of essays sheds new light on debates around the nature of the EU and democratic governance beyond the nation state.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Empirical social choice: an introduction

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue.     

Feminism and the political: introduction

The paper compares and confronts the work of two of the most distinguished living Marxist philosophers: G. A. Cohen from the English-speaking world, and Louis Althusser from France. It develops a critique of certain of Cohen's theses from the standpoint of ideas present in the work of Althusser. But it also problematizes certain presuppositions common to the work of both – in particular, the notion that historical development (transition or revolution) should be explained in terms of some general theory of non-correspondence between productive forces and production relations: the difference being simply that, within this scheme, Althusser accords explanatory primacy to the latter, Cohen to the former. Cohen's and Althusser's accounts of technological innovation and development are also compared, in connexion with the contrasting place which they attribute to the notice of human rationality on the one side and class struggle on the other.