On the Nature of Tolerance: Dichotomous or Continuous?*

The purpose of this article is to reconsider the claim made recently by Mondak and Sanders that political tolerance ought to be thought to be a dichotomous rather than continuous variable. Using data from both Russia and the United States, I demonstrate that those Mondak and Sanders regard as uniquely tolerant are most likely no more than people who were given insufficient opportunity to express their intolerance. Even if such a phenomenon of “absolute tolerance” exists (all ideas expressed in all ways are to be tolerated), it is sufficiently rare that few practical implications are indicated for those doing empirical work on political tolerance and intolerance. * I appreciate the valuable comments of Jeffcry Mondak on an earlier version of this paper.     

关于西部地区新农村建设的几个问题及对策探析

西部地区是我国经济发展相对滞后的地区,也是我国新农村建设任务更加艰巨的地区。由于多方面的原因,西部地区的社会发展相对滞后,进一步提高农村生产劳动力、创造力和可持续发展能力问题,是建设社会主义新农村必须面对的一个重要课题。文章对西部地区农业产业化、农民组织化、农村劳动力转移、造就新型农村、村镇建设与环境整治等问题进行了分析,并提出了一些对策。     

农村城镇化、城乡一体化与构建和谐社会

构建社会主义和谐社会,一个十分重要的方面就是要统筹城乡发展,推动城乡一体化进程。要充分认识农村城镇化、城乡一体化对构建社会主义和谐社会的重要意义,坚持用工业理念经营农业,切实做到以工补农、以工促农,加快农村城镇化、城乡一体化步伐,努力推动城乡和谐发展。     

冷战结束后日本马克思主义研究综述

日本马克思主义在经受了苏东剧变所带来的世界反马克思主义浪潮的严峻考验后,逐渐复苏并呈现出蒸蒸日上的发展态势.本文对此进行了梳理,并对全球化理论、环境思想以及社会主义理论等日本马克思主义研究的理论热点进行了重点概述.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

Robert Tollison and operationalizing public choice

In this tribute to Robert Tollison, I will outline his contributions to the development of public choice. I focus on Tollison’s work on rent-seeking, the political economy of reform, and the rules level of analysis in sports economics. Throughout his career, Tollison brilliantly figured out ways to take insights from price theory and public choice theory and operationalize them using multiple methods of empirical analysis, including historical interpretation and statistical testing.     

A Different Carbon Tax: The Sustainable Green Tariff

Two heated current political arguments focus on carbon taxes and tariffs. This essay will develop an argument for linking carbon emissions with tariffs, through a tax on goods entering a country based on the method of transport and distance traveled, rather than based on the country of origin or category of the product. The result would be to encourage more sustainable local production, to reduce currently externalized costs of carbon emissions, to generate new tax revenues to fund reductions in regressive social insurance taxes, and to provide benefits for those adversely affected by carbon emissions.     

Appeal rate and caseload: evidence from civil litigation in Korea

Courts of modern democratic societies have generally implemented appeal procedures to correct potential errors in ruling. However, considering the time and effort that both litigants spend, availability of an appeal cannot be better than reaching the correct judgment in the original case. This difficulty raises the policy issue of how to reduce the rate of appeals and improve welfare of litigants. In this paper, we assert that lower caseloads allow judges to expend more time and effort on each case, contributing to lower appeal rates. Analysis of court-level data from Korea corroborates our inference.