Sociobiology: Science or ideology?

Arthur Fisher is science editor of Popular Science Magazine.He is a director of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.     

Promoting efficiency and equity through institutional design

This paper develops and experimentally tests an institution that is specifically designed to promote efficiency without sacrificing equity. The principal result of the analysis is that the institution developed here performs well in the sense that efficiency is increased for a wide range of different initial distributions of wealth. The framework developed in this paper is relevant to policy makers who are interested in implementing more efficient institutions, but who are constrained by the political environment in which they operate.The author is currently a senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers on leave from Carnegie Mellon University. The views in this paper represent those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Council. I would like to thank Roger Noll for helpful comments and suggestions and Charles Cuny and Jim Merino for valuable research assistance. This research was funded in part by the California Air Resources Board and the National Science Foundation.     

BOOK NOTES

N evil J ohnson , Government in the Federal Republic of Germany: The Executive at Work.
R enate M ayntz and F ritz W. S charpf , Policy-Making in the German Federal Bureaucracy.
J ill R oe (ed.), Social Policy in Australia
M irra K omarovsky (ed.), Sociology and Public Policy
R obert -F. K eith et al., Northern Development and Technology Assessment Systems: A Study of Petroleum Development Programs in the Mackenzie Delta-Beaufort Sea Region and the Arctic Islands. Science Council of Canada Background Study No. 34.
K enneth J. R ea , The Political Economy of Northern Development. Science Council of Canada Background Study No. 36.
D epartment of T ransport , Marketing Urban Transport Seminar
R oss C urnow (comp.), Australian Broadcasting Index, 1900–1942     

Mutual Optimism and War

Working with the definition of mutual optimism as war due to inconsistent beliefs , we formalize the mutual optimism argument to test the theory's logical validity. We find that in the class of strategic situations where mutual optimism is a necessary condition for war—i.e., where war is known to be inefficient, war only occurs if both sides prefer it to a negotiated settlement, and on the eve of conflict war is self-evident—then there is no Bayesian-Nash equilibrium where wars are fought because of mutual optimism. The fundamental reason that mutual optimism cannot lead to war is that if both sides are willing to fight, each side should infer that they have either underestimated the strength of the opponent or overestimated their own strength. In either case, these inferences lead to a peaceful settlement of the dispute. We also show that this result extends to situations in which there is bounded rationality and/or noncommon priors.     

Democracy and populism

He is currently president of the New England Political Science Association and has been a member of the Advisory Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include America’s Constitutional Soul; Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power; Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories;and a new translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince.     

Direct-broadcast satellites and cultural integrity

Electronic and mass media create counterweights to established authorities. Ithiel de Sola Pool is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also a member of the following: American Political Science Association; Council on Foreign Relations; American Association for Public Opinion Research and American Sociological Association. He is the author of Satellite Generalsand editor of Handbook of Communications. [Deceased]     

Meritocracy revisited

Michael Young is author of The Rise of the Meritocracy,reissued in paperback by Transaction. Among his other books is Family and Kinship in East London (with Peter Willmott).He is founder and director of the Institute of Community Studies in London. He is a past chairman of the Social Science Research Council of the United Kingdom and founder of the Open University. He is a member of Parliament as Lord Young of Dartington.     

Mutual Optimism as a Rationalist Explanation of War

Blainey (1988) argued that crises are more likely to end in war when two nations disagree about their relative power. Fey and Ramsay (2007) claim that this widely used “mutual optimism” explanation is theoretically incoherent. Their criticism neglects the need to specify a behavioral causal mechanism that links beliefs to the outbreak of war. We show how the rationalist game‐theoretic work on the causes of war provides such mechanisms—the risk‐return trade‐off and costly signaling—and demonstrate that these models are immune to Fey and Ramsay's critiques. We also show that the class of models Fey and Ramsay propose make the substantively unwarranted assumption that an actor can unilaterally impose peace on an opponent who strictly prefers war. Their finding that war does not occur in equilibrium has nothing to do with mutual optimism. We conclude that the mutual optimism explanation can be grounded on firm rationalist foundations.     

The Jewish community of Danzig 1930–1939

Günter Grass is a German writer and politician. He was born in Danzig in 1926. This article was first published in Danzig 1939: Treasures of a Destroyed Community,issued by the Jewish Museum of New York.     

Reforming rent control in New York City: the role of research in policymaking

This document describes the role of the New York City Rand Institute and other research groups in the rent control reforms enacted by the New York City Council in June 1970, summarizes the major research and analytical studies performed in this connection by Institute staff members, and offers some lessons for those contemplating similar work for public agencies.Much of the material included here was presented at the November 1970 annual meeting of the Regional Science Association as part of a session devoted to the Institute's housing studies, and will appear in Vol. XXVII of the Proceedings. The section of this paper summarizing our research studies borrows heavily from a similar summary prepared by my Institute colleague, Michael Teitz, for another occasion; I am grateful for his permission to use it here.     

The UN Security Council,normative legitimacy and the challenge of specificity

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensuring broader respect for human rights. Both of these purposes are minimally morally acceptable for legitimacy. Second, we distinguish between three different competences of the UNSC: 1) the decision-making competence, 2) the quasi-legislative competence, and 3) the referral competence. On this basis, we argue that different procedural standards are required to legitimise these competences, which leads to a more differentiated understanding of the Security Council’s legitimacy. While maintaining that the membership structure of the Council is a severe problem for its legitimacy, we suggest other procedural standards that can help to improve its overall legitimacy, which include broad transparency, deliberation, and the revisability of the very terms of accountability themselves.     

Changing the Subject: The Case for ‘Social Politics’

Running through Bernard Crick's In Defence of Politics is an implicit faith in the ability of liberal democracy to deliver progress. From the perspective of 1962 such optimism seems well founded. After the years of post war austerity there had been more than a decade of steady growth, the middle class was expanding fast providing unprecedented levels of absolute social mobility (more benign and less complicated than the relative social mobility which today's politicians disingenuously claim to pursue). Matthew Taylor explores the case for ‘social politics’.     

In the shadow of the constitutional council: The ‘juridicisation’ of the legislative process in France

This study examines, first, why and how the French Parliament was ‘juridicised’, that, is, gradually placed under the tutelage of the Constitutional Council, and, secondly, the influence of past Council jurisprudence and the threat of future censure on the legislation of the 1986 parliamentary sessions. This influence is greater than has been heretofore acknowledged ‐ indeed, one simply cannot assess the legislative process without understanding the role, direct and indirect, of the Council. Assessment of the legislative effects of Council control of legislation shows that the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of judicial review in France, and the extent to which the Council functions as a gouvernement des juges, is understandable and probably permanent.     

Inefficient redistribution and inefficient redistributive politics

This paper examines the effect of inefficient redistribution in Myerson’s (American Political Science Review 87:856–869, 1993) model of redistributive politics. Regardless of the absolute levels of the efficiency of political parties’ transfers to different voter segments, parties have incentive to (stochastically) shift resources away from voter segments with large relative efficiency gaps between the two parties’ transfers towards voter segments with smaller relative efficiency gaps. Because of this dependence on relative, and not absolute, levels of efficiency, the parties’ optimal strategies may lead to large discrepancies between the sum of the budgetary transfers and the sum of the effective transfers.     

The Iroquois Confederation Constitution: An Analysis

The Iroquois Confederation was not an influence on the U.S.Constitution, but it is worthy of study as an independentlydeveloped political system with the oldest surviving constitutionin North America. A systematic institutional analysis of theGreat Binding Law, the orally transmitted constitution of theConfederation, reveals, among other things: tribal inequalitydespite their formal equality under a unanimity rule; a highlevel of responsiveness despite a nondemocratic, elitist methodfor selecting leaders; many ancillary institutions for achievinga traditional form of consensus rather than simple majorityrule; two means of elevating men to the Confederation Council,each a paradoxical blend of the pre political and the post-traditional;the first use of a formal amendment process in constitutionalhistory; and an underlying "code of imperialism" that, togetherwith the second method of selecting Confederation Council members,transformed a defensive alliance into a potent actor in NorthAmerican history. Overall, the Confederation institutionallyapproximated an Aristotelian "mixed regime" which, despite itscreation under circumstances the Iroquois describe in Hobbesianterms, was quite libertarian.     

Instrument choice,political reform and economic welfare

The purpose of this paper is to formally examine the effect of placing constraints, such as the line-item veto or a balanced budget amendment, on legislative behavior. There are two basic findings that emerge from the analysis. First, constraints on one type of instrument, such as spending, will in general result in more widespread use of other kinds of instruments, such as regulation. Second, it is naive to conclude that constraints on legislative behavior will promote economic efficiency and/or reduce the growth of government. The primary contribution of the paper is to suggest how changes in the political environment can affect instrument choice, economic welfare, and the size of government.This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation Decision, Risk and Management Science Program. The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments of Ed Campos and Allan Meltzer. The views in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Council.     

Interactions between scientists and public officials: A comparison of the use of science in regulatory programs in the United States and West Germany

This essay compares and contrasts important attributes of the use of scientific knowledge and judgment in regulatory decisions in the United States and West Germany. It decribes the broader historical context for such decisions in each country. Although the system in America exhibits considerable conflict and assumption of adversarial positions, it is argued that a more fundamental attribute of the system is that policy decisions are reviewed according to rules of evidence and its interpretation. Similarly, although the German system involves a great deal of consultation, a more fundamental aspect of policy decisions there is that of the determination of the social obligation to act. In the United States, it is more important that a decisionmaker has properly developed and interpreted the evidence than that he or she has consulted with all the relevant parties. In Germany, the order of importance of the two is reversed.Based on seminars given in Berlin in December 1984 at the International Institute for Environment and Society of the Science Center Berlin and in Washington, DC in January 1985 at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.The author, a National Research Council Fellow, wishes to thank his colleagues in Berlin and Washington for their comments, many of which have been integrated into this essay. The ideas presented here, however, remain the responsibility of the author.     

Book Reviews

Book Reviewed in this article:
Competitive Policy Council. 1992 First Annunal Report to the President and Congress: Building A Competitive American
Council on Competitiveness. 1991. Gaining New Ground: Technology Priorityes for American's Future
National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Publick Policy, panel on the Goverment Role in Civilan Technology. 1992. the Goverment Role in Civialian Technology: Building a New Alliance
U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment 1991. Biotechnology in a Global Economy
Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. 1992 The search for Rational Droug Control     

The Council: An Institutional Chameleon?

Council reform is a topic that has become a key issue in the wider discussion about reshaping the institutions of the European Union. This article explores five different images of the Council: as a partner of the Commission; as a club of governments; as a venue for competition and bargaining between governments and other political actors; as an arena for networked governance; and as a consortium for developing "transgovernmental" collaboration. It is conventional to examine the Council as both executive and legislative in character. More interesting, perhaps, is its evolving practice as a forum for experimentation.     

Regulatory change and environmental protection in the British and German chemical industries

Abstract. Business interest associations in the European chemical industry have traditionally been well organized and enjoyed a harmonious relationship with governments of various complexions. This very favourable balance for the industry has been disturbed by the salience of the environmental issue. This has led to a certain deregulation, or breakdown of existing regulatory mechanisms. Increasing concentration on the European Community level as the locus of environmental policymaking has led to a dual response on the part of business interest associations, reflecting an older contrast between national styles of government/business relations. The British chemical industry has preferred the national route, is much more hostile to environmental regulation than its German counterpart, and often finds itself isolated, depending on the Department of Trade and Industry to ensure that its viewpoint is articulated by the British Government in EC negotiations. The German industry still clings to self-regulation, but, given the high level of environmental consciousness in the Federal Republic, has developed a reluctant preference for action at the European level. This has been manifested both in the Europeanisation of its links with the German Economics Ministry and in its support for the European Council of Chemical Manufacturers Associations; the latter is well placed to exert influence on both the EC Commission and the European Parliament.