How Universal is Behavior? A Four Country Comparison of Spite and Cooperation in Voluntary Contribution Mechanisms

This paper studies behavior in experimentswith a linear voluntary contributionsmechanism for public goods conducted inJapan, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.S.A.The same experimental design was used inthe four countries. Our `contributionfunction' design allows us to obtain a viewof subjects' behavior from twocomplementary points of view. It yieldsinformation about situations where, inpurely pecuniary terms, it is a dominantstrategy to contribute all the endowmentand about situations where it is a dominantstrategy to contribute nothing. Our resultsshow, first, that differences in behavioracross countries are minor. We find thatwhen people play `the same game' theybehave similarly. Second, for all fourcountries our data are inconsistent withthe explanation that subjects contributeonly out of confusion. A common cooperativemotivation is needed to explain the data.     

Railway Development and the Economic and Political Integration of the Balkans,c. 1850–2000

This article uses the evolution of the railways to examine the relationship between the level of economic integration and external political influences in the Balkans over a period of 150 years. The analysis focuses on two key themes: the long-term spatial evolution of the railway network and external influences on this infrastructure. To undertake this territorial analysis, we first established a Historical Geographical Information System (HGIS) that allowed us to interpret data on the evolution of the railway network and then related this to other data on themes such as changing international borders and the nationality of investment.     

What can the Basque peace process learn from Southeast Asia?

This article contributes to a bidirectional Asia–Europe comparative analysis of peace processes by exploring what experiences, both failures and successes, can the Basque peace process learn from the many interesting peace initiatives that Southeast Asia has seen in recent years, above all in Mindanao, Aceh, Southern Thailand and Burma. Although there are substantial differences between the Basque conflict and the Asian cases, it might be useful for the Basque case to look beyond the cases with which it traditionally has been compared to, such as Quebec, Northern Ireland or South Africa.     

The Limits of the State: Student Protest in Egypt,Iraq and Turkey, 1948–63

Student youth have been at the centre of social and political unrest in the Middle East since the era of reforms under the Ottoman Empire. However, although nationalist and revolutionary leaders encouraged students to actively participate in politics ‘for the sake of the nation’ during the first half of the twentieth century, revolutionary regimes progressively sought to ‘depoliticise’ them, once again ‘for the sake of the nation’, throughout the second half of the century. This article explores both dynamics while seeking to account for the failure of attempts to depoliticise the student body ‘from above’ in Egypt, Iraq and Turkey between 1948 and 1963.     

Is There an Informative Effect of Law? An Experimental Test

Debates on how the law affects citizens' behaviour have traditionally focused on two mechanisms: deterrence and perceptions of legitimacy. In recent years, some scholars have suggested that the law may also affect compliance through expressive mechanisms that reveal information about the world (for example, by eliciting the risks associated with a particular behaviour). Dharmapala and McAdams have called this the informative effect of law. However, to date very little empirical evidence of the existence of such an effect has emerged. In this article, we present the results of an experiment that tests for three different hypotheses as to how this effect may be produced. Our findings show that legislators' sincerity or their access to expert knowledge is not sufficient to produce information effects. Instead, we suggest an ‘asymmetry’ hypothesis: the fact that a law is passed or rejected has an asymmetrical information effect on subjects' risk perceptions.