The British general election of 2010 under different voting rules

The 2010 British election resulted in what the British refer to as a “hung Parliament” for the first time in over a generation. This result further heightened the debate over the fairness and utility of the nation’s centuries-old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. Survey data are used to simulate the election outcome under four different electoral systems beyond FPTP: round-robin pair-wise comparisons, the Borda count, the alternative vote, and Coombs' method. Results suggest that in 2010, the Liberal-Democrats were Condorcet preferred to all other parties and would have won a national election under every tested method except the alternative vote, the method supported by the Liberal-Democrats during the referendum in May 2011 and, of course, FPTP as actually used.     

The UK–US intelligence alliance in 1975: Economies,evaluations and explanations

Intelligence and defence are often cited as central to the fabric of Anglo-American relations after 1945. However, we still know relatively little about how the Anglo-American intelligence relationship changed during the latter part of the twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s the UK continued its long retreat from its world role, driven by recurrent economic crises at home and anti-colonial nationalism abroad. This essay examines UK intelligence in the mid-1970s in the light of recent archival releases pertaining to the Roy Mason Defence Review. This material sheds interesting light on tensions between the military and diplomats in Whitehall over defence intelligence. More importantly, it appears to show that, partly because of the contraction of defence dispositions, UK intelligence activities were called upon to compensate and therefore became relatively more important as a substantive contribution to the alliance.     

The Waldegrave Initiative and secret service archives: New materials and new policies

Louise Atherton, Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1993). Pp.32. £3.25. ISBN 1 87362073.

Louise Atherton, SOE Operations in the Far East: An Introductory Guide to the Newly Released Records of the Special Operations Executive in the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1993). Pp.59. £3.25. ISBN 1 873162081.

Louise Atherton, SOE Operations in Scandinavia: A Guide to the Newly Released Records in the Public Record Office (London: PRO Publications, 1994). Pp.34. £3.25. ISBN 1 873162154.

FCO Historical Branch, Changes in British and Russian Records Policy: Occasional Papers No.7 (London: Historical Branch, LRD, 1993). Pp.42.

FCO Historical Branch, FCO Records: Policy Practice and Posterity, 1782–1993 (London: Historical Branch, LRD, Second Edition, 1993). Pp.17.     

Sophisticated and myopic? Citizen preferences for Electoral College reform

Different institutions can produce more (or less) preferred outcomes, in terms of citizens’ preferences. Consequently, citizen preferences over institutions may “inherit”—to use William Riker’s term—the features of preferences over outcomes. But the level of information and understanding required for this effect to be observable seems quite high. In this paper, we investigate whether Riker’s intuition about citizens acting on institutional preferences is borne out by an original empirical dataset collected for this purpose. These data, a survey commissioned specifically for this project, were collected as part of a larger nationally representative sample conducted right before the 2004 election. The results show that support for a reform to split a state’s Electoral College votes proportionally is explained by (1) which candidate one supports, (2) which candidate one thinks is likely to win the election under the existing system of apportionment, (3) preferences for abolishing the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote winner, and (4) statistical interactions between these variables. In baldly political terms, Kerry voters tend to support splitting their state’s Electoral College votes if they felt George W. Bush was likely to win in that state. But Kerry voters who expect Kerry to win their state favor winner-take-all Electoral College rules for their state. In both cases, mutatis mutandis, the reverse is true for Bush voters.     

First Steps Towards Hearts and Minds? USAID's Countering Violent Extremism Policies in Africa

The United States government has adopted new approaches to counter violent extremist organizations around the world. “Soft security” and development programs include focused educational training for groups vulnerable to terrorist recruitment, norm messaging through local radio programming, and job creation in rural communities. This article evaluates the effectiveness of one set of these multi-vectored, community-level programs through data from 200 respondents in two similar, neighboring towns in northern Mali, Africa. The data show that residents in Timbuktu who were exposed to the programming for up to five years displayed measurably altered civic behavior and listening patterns in comparison with their counterparts in the control town of Diré, which had no programming (controlling for potential covariates including age, ethnicity, and political and socioeconomic conditions). However, there was little measurable difference between the groups in terms of their cultural identities and attitudes towards the West. While this study is unable to definitively prove a causal connection between programming and behavioral outcomes, it nonetheless strongly suggests that the process of “winning hearts and minds” can be effective at certain levels but may require extended time and dedicated resources to generate higher-level results.     

Research on immigrant earnings

As the first in a trio of pieces devoted to incorporating immigration into policy models, this review of research on immigrant earnings trajectories brings to light several findings. Controlling for demographic and human capital characteristics, immigrants often start their U.S. lives at substantially lower earnings, but experience faster earnings growth than natives with comparable years of education and experience. The extent to which the earnings trajectories of immigrants and natives differ varies by country of origin, with the source-country's level of economic development being a key determinant of the size of the U.S.-born/ foreign-born difference. The earnings profiles of immigrants from economically developed countries such as Japan, Canada, or Western Europe resemble those of U.S. natives who are of the same age and education level. In contrast, the earnings of immigrants from developing nations tend to start well below those of U.S. natives with comparable education levels and experience, but rise more rapidly than their U.S. counterparts. Comparing the earnings profiles of immigrants of similar age, sex, and years of schooling, over time and across groups, a strong inverse relationship emerges between their initial earnings and their subsequent U.S. earnings growth. In other words, the lower (higher) the initial earnings are, the higher (lower) the earnings growth. These and other research results have important implications for the projection of immigrant earnings and emigration in microsimulation models, as discussed in the two articles following this one: (1) "Adding Immigrants to Microsimulation Models" and (2) "Incorporating Immigrant Flows into Microsimulation Models".     

Trending economic factors and the structure of Congress in the growth of government, 1930–2002

We investigate the role of Congress in the growth of federal public expenditure since 1930, building on the work of Kau and Rubin (Public Choice, 113:389–402, 2002). The model incorporates majority party strength and the extent of party control of Congress in addition to the median ideological position of elected representatives. We first provide estimates of the relative importance of the state of Congress and of trending supply and demand-side economic factors in the evolution of federal spending. The resulting models are then used to simulate the consequences of the radical and historically unprecedented shift to the right of Congress in 1994/95.     

Female homicide-suicide perpetrators: a controlled study

The record files of the Dade County Medical Examiner Department were reviewed and 133 homicide-suicides were identified. Of these, ten (or 7.5%) were female perpetrated. The chart data of these 10 female homicide-suicide perpetrators, chart data of 50 female homicide-suicide victims, and 50 female individual suicides systematically selected as controls were tabulated using a standardized instrument. The results were analyzed for differences using simple statistical methods. The comparisons revealed that female homicide-suicide perpetrators were more likely than female homicide-suicide victims to live in mobile homes, kill their lover or ex-lover, have their crime accidentally discovered, leave a suicide note, kill on a weekend, and be depressed, but are less likely than female homicide-suicide victims to live with a spouse. Additionally, female homicide-suicide perpetrators were more likely than individual female suicides to live in mobile homes but less likely to live alone and to be depressed.     

The political economy of sugar legislation

The findings of this paper are a rather straightforward account of the political economy of senatorial voting on the sugar program. In the spirit of Stigler and Peltzman's accounts of interest group activity, voting on sugar is indeed related to the concentration of economic interests in the Senators' states. States with high concentrations of sugar growers and processing tend to vote for the program, those with high concentration of users tend to vote against it. The emergence of corn syrup as a sugar substitute and its subsequent interests in the program further supports this perspective. These concentrated interests are associated with conditions ripe for overcoming the collective action problem and, we infer, use their organizations to influence senatorial behavior. The political variables suggest countervailing forces which can be interpreted, at least in part, as further examples of organized (here, politically organized) influences on the interests of Senators. Thus, while the model is one of opposing interests, those of producers and users tend to influence different Senators. The major group-interest trade-off, then, is between the pull of organized interests in the constituency with that of party organization at the national (or national institutional level), at least for those for whom the pull is in opposite directions.It is clear, then, that variables representing (concentrated) consumer interests as well as variables representing grower and processor interests as well as variables representing grower and processor interests are significant in determining voting patterns on sugar legislation in the Senate. This model, therefore, is not one in which one-sided organizational interests operate politically uncontested. That, even so, consumer interests are not powerful enough to prevent sugar programs from passing is clear at one level, due to the existence of the program over most of this period. The existing level of the transfers from consumers to producers and of deadweight losses must be reflective of the magnitude of their respective free rider problems. Yet voting on the program to renew or alter those benefits at any level clearly reflects these interests and their interplay.