Organizations,Credibility, and the Psychology of Collective Action

Political organizations frequently attempt to recruit sympathetic citizens to support their causes. Doing so requires communicating credibility—that is, persuading potential new supporters that they can actually achieve the goals they set out to achieve. In this article we investigate two of the predominant kinds of information that organizations might use to establish credibility: retrospective information (about past successes) and prospective information (about future plans). Using one field experiment and one survey experiment, we find that retrospective information fails to increase people’s willingness to spend scarce resources supporting political organizations. We find that this occurs because information about past successes suggests that the organization can succeed without any additional help. In contrast, we find that prospective information motivates new participants to become active.     

Institutional Constraints,Managerial Choices,and Conflicts in Public Sector Supply Chains

In this research, we compare the governance mechanisms that public sector managers and private sector managers leverage when responding to conflict in supply chain relationships. We find evidence that public sector managers are more likely than private sector managers to rely on written (formal) contract mechanisms, but that both public and private managers use relational (informal) governance mechanisms to similar extents. We also find that managers from both sectors perceive an improvement to the quality of the exchange relationship when a relational approach is emphasized in managing the conflict. Our research provides an important contribution to our understanding about the actions public managers take in dealing with supply chain conflicts and suggests potential policy alternatives to foster contracting efficiency and effectiveness.     

‘Swanning back in’? Foreign fighters and the long arm of the state

As foreign fighters have flocked to conflicts in Syria and elsewhere, their home governments have often claimed a right not only to criminalise their doing so, but also to deprive them of the right to return. This article challenges some problematic assumptions about the intersection among political allegiance, extraterritorial jurisdiction and the right of abode. It traces the origins of today’s conventional wisdom to a particular modern experience of state–society relations, including the rise of administrative ambitions that outrun the original bounds of the territorial state. In contrast, it argues for an ‘unbundling’ of state authority, prepolitical membership in society, and cross-border political action. This position would chasten overreaching views about states’ ownership of their citizens, while still leaving other ways to deal with jihadist violence.     

Community Privilege and Environmental Justice: An Agent‐Based Analysis

Several theories compete to explain observed race‐ and ethnicity‐based environmental injustice in society. This paper focuses on analyzing the extent to which firms' siting decisions based on community privilege can explain this outcome. A unique feature of this analysis is that we include analysis of both unwanted land uses (disamenity firms) and desired land uses (amenity firms). The environmental justice analysis of amenities other than green spaces is rare, but amenities are crucial components of urban areas to which environmental justice studies must attend. We use an agent‐based model to explore community outcomes when environmental disamenities choose locations based on low community privilege, and compare this with scenarios in which disamenities only seek to minimize the cost of land. We also assess differences in environmental justice outcomes when amenities choose locations in areas with high community privilege. While disamenities' focus on locating in areas with low community privilege indeed affects environmental equity, the effect of amenity location is also important, and there are powerful interaction effects. The importance of privilege‐based location is found in these simulations regardless of which social group—majority or minority—is assumed to be the privileged group. This study suggests a limitation of EJ policies and models that focus on the politics of disamenity siting without considering the politics of amenity siting.     

Understanding the nature of change: how institutional perspectives can inform contemporary studies of development cooperation

This article argues that core lines of sociological institutionalist thought provide a set of valuable conceptual and theoretical vocabularies for exploring and explaining contemporary concerns of development cooperation. It identifies four broad categories of issues of central attention in the current study of development cooperation, and couples these with four avenues of sociological institutional research that may provide us with theoretical and conceptual frameworks for further empirically exploring and theoretically extrapolating these. Increasing attention to these theoretical concerns not only helps us progress the study of development cooperation, it may also allow us to inform contemporary institutional thinking.     

Capital mobility,perspectives and central bank independence: Exchange rate policy since 1945

Hegemonic stability theory has been the traditional explanation in International Political Economy for the trend from fixed to floating exchange rates which was brought about by the collapse of Bretton Woods. This approach is found to be problematic. A more powerful explanation is the postwar rise in capital mobility, which produces a trade-off between exchange rate stability and policy autonomy. Preferences for these two policies have been a function of perspectives on economic policy and the degree of central bank independence. Independent central banks prefer domestic policy autonomy to exchange rate management, as they have no socio-political incentives to produce competitive, stable exchange rates. Their interests are predominantly in achieving low domestic inflation. In addition, current perspectives hold that the best way of securing international exchange rate stability is to pursue stable macroeconomic policies at home, resulting in the predominance of floating exchange rate policies. This trend will continue into the near future despite opportunities for international cooperation presented by the rationalization of world monetary politics into a G3 following the introduction of the euro. This may have adverse effects on the global economy for three reasons. First, there is a long-term danger that triad regionalization will result in a revival of neo-mercantilist policies, in which the exchange rate could play a part. Second, a high proportion of world trade and finance will be denominated in dollars and euros, rendering the stability of the dollar/euro exchange rate a global public good. Third, dollar/euro exchange rate misalignments which harm either the U.S. or EMU will be harmful to the global economy because of the high percentage of world GDP accounted for by these two areas.     

Collaborative Institutions in an Ecology of Games

This article seeks to improve our understanding of policy institutions and cooperation by adapting Long's (1958) analysis of the ecology of games to the context of collaborative land use and transportation planning in California. The traditional institutional rational choice analysis argues that collaborative institutions reduce the transaction costs of cooperation among multiple policy actors. The ecology of games framework extends IRC by emphasizing the consequences of multiple institutions and identifies several reasons why collaborative institutions may actually reduce the amount of cooperation in existing policy venues. Analyses of survey data from policy actors in five California regions demonstrate that higher levels of cooperation in collaborative institutions are associated with lower levels of cooperation in other land‐use and transportation planning institutions.     

Electoral and structural losers and support for a national referendum in the U.S.

The U.S. is one of only a few democracies in the world never to hold a national referendum. Recent national surveys reveal that a majority of respondents approve of a national referendum both cross-nationally and in America is relatively stable. Building on previous work (Bowler and Donovan, 2007), we find public opinion on a reform proposal is fluid and responsive to electoral politics, rather than stable as reported in earlier work. In this paper, we argue that contemporary support for a national referendum in the U.S. is contingent on whether a citizen is a short- or long-term “winner” or a “loser” when it comes to electoral politics. We expect that public support for a national referendum in the U.S., where legislation referred by Congress would be subject to a popular vote, may vary at the individual level because of short-term electoral fortunes as well as long-term structural conditions. Strategic voting as well as losing in candidate races and policy issues may be important, but so might be partisanship, with non-partisans the most likely to benefit from citizen law-making at the national level. Support for a national referendum might also be contingent upon state context, that is, upon use of direct democracy in the state where a person lives, as well as the population of a state. The results based on a natural experiment and 2008 panel survey data provide an important window into understanding public opinion on institutional change more broadly.