Registration Deadlines and Turnout in Context

This paper analyzes the effect of registration deadlines on voter turnout. The theoretical explanation considers how registration deadlines affect turnout when individuals influence the participation of others. The theoretical model leads to a novel empirical hypothesis, that deadlines can have both a direct and indirect effect on turnout through a behavioral contagion process. The paper reports empirical findings that confirm the theoretical expectations. These results have important implications for future research on registration deadlines and Election Day registration as the effects of these reforms depend on the specific social context in which they are adopted.     

Multidimensional Poverty in Crisis: Lessons from Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe experienced an acute social, political, and economic crisis from 2001 to 2008 and is now on a recovery path. This paper explores changes in poverty between 2001, 2007, and 2011–2012 using an Alkire–Foster multidimensional poverty index. Results indicate a large increase in poverty across multiple dimensions of household wellbeing between 2001 and 2007 (the start of the crisis peak), followed by a decrease in poverty between 2007 and 2011–2012, during the recovery period. Decomposition of the index shows significantly different trends in poverty dimensions over time with implications for short- and long-term social assistance policies.     

Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to “co‐benefits” suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to “co‐benefits” as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.     

Counterinsurgency and terror expertise: the integration of social scientists into the war effort

In this paper the authors draw upon the tradition of Power Structure Research to analyse the increased interpenetration of the military and the social sciences, particularly the recruitment of anthropologists and the adoption and adaptation of counterinsurgency strategies. It is argued that such actors should be understood not as disinterested ‘experts’ but as being organically embedded in a military–industrial–academic complex. The paper considers a number of contemporary examples as well as considering the historical roots of these trends. It is argued that this interpenetration violates the ethical norms of the academy and the moral and social responsibilities of intellectuals.