1989 Revisited: Getting to the bottom of the GDR'S demise

Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED‐Diktatur in Deutschland. Nine Volumes. By Enquete Kommission. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1995.

Aufarbeitung und Versöhnung, ‘Leben in der DDR, Leben nach 1989’. Three Volumes. By landtag mecklenburg‐vorpommern. Schwerin: Stiller & Balewski, 1996.

The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989. By Jeffrey Kopstein. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Der Zusammenbruch der DDR am Beispiel der mecklenburgischen Stadt Parchim. By Fred Mrotzek. Hamburg: Kramer Verlag, 1996     

East German political attitudes: Socialist legacies v. situational factors a false antithesis

This paper introduces the two main competing approaches that attempt to explain east German political attitudes in post‐unification Germany, the ‘situational thesis’ and the ‘socialisation thesis’. Furthermore, the paper suggests that these ‘either/or’ approaches are in fact inseparable and only make sense when taken together. Political attitudes in east Germany are influenced by the past, the recent past and the present. The result of both the socialisation process in the GDR and the traumatic transformation process following unification is weak civic participation and a lack of trust in formal institutions. Without trust and without a vibrant civil society, economic performance will remain low.     

The Carbondale Caper

Abstract

“In July, 1950, Wesley R. Fishel, then an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State College, met Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese politician out of power, in Tokyo, Japan. The professor and the politician kept up a correspondence and, in early 1951, Fishel had his friend made a consultant to Michigan State's Governmental Research Bureau.” With these words Robert Scigliano and Guy H. Fox begin “Technical Assistance in Vietnam: The Michigan State University Experience”. The authors, whose duties with the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) in Vietnam “spanned all but four of the project's eighty-six months,” describe a university activity, infiltrated by the CIA, which still sends shudders through professors across the country.     

Does federally subsidized rental housing depress neighborhood property values?

Few communities welcome federally subsidized rental housing, with one of the most commonly voiced fears being reductions in property values. Yet there is little empirical evidence that subsidized housing depresses neighborhood property values. This paper estimates and compares the neighborhood impacts of a broad range of federally subsidized rental housing programs, using rich data for New York City and a difference‐in‐difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that federally subsidized developments have not typically led to reductions in property values and have, in fact, led to increases in some cases. Impacts are highly sensitive to scale, though patterns vary across programs. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Surrogate Versus Direct Measures of Political Culture: Explaining Participation and Policy Attitudes in Illinois

To date, there has been little persuasive validation of Elazar'sconcept of political subcultures as it applies to mass publics.This study represents an attempt to establish an agenda forfuture research utilizing this popular formulation of the relationshipbetween the citizen and government. A statewide sample of 805residents of Illinois was given agree-disagree statements representingElazar's individualistic, moralistic, and traditionalistic subcultures.The data are used to explore three basic research questions:Do individuals discriminate themselves along the political subculturedimensions suggested by Elazar? Can region of residence, religion,or ethnicity be used as surrogates for individual level politicalculture? And, can political culture, measured directly at theindividual level, add significant independent explanation ofpolitical behavior and opinions beyond that of socioeconomiccharacteristics?     

The cognitive and affective components of political attitudes: Measuring the determinants of candidate evaluations

Past research suggests that beliefs and emotions operate as partially distinct determinants of political attitudes. In addition, while positive and negative beliefs about a political object are bipolar in structure, positive and negative emotions have been demonstrated to be relatively independent. In this past research, beliefs and emotions have been assessed with different measures. Yet current models of survey responding suggest that responses to survey items are often influenced by the manner in which the researcher poses the questions. As such, it is not clear whether the uniqueness of these belief and emotion measures reflects a bona fide difference between two underlying constructs, or merely an artifactual difference induced by differing methods of measurement. In this study, beliefs and emotions are shown to operate as partially unique predictors of candidate evaluation even when employing corresponding methods of measurement. The independence of positive and negative emotion, however, only arises when employing a dichotomous measure. When employing ordinal measures, positive and negative emotions contain a substantial component of bipolarity. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Social Dimensions of Resource Use: The Freshwater Case

This research note describes an integrated regional model of the interactions between water resources and society. It examines the relations between rural and urban sectors of society and the effect on resource use of changes in supply and demand due to climate change, population movements, and other natural and social processes. This modeling effort is part of a larger project conducted at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research to study the regional evolution of water resources in three different geographical areas. This larger project is in turn linked to the research focus on global water resources within the international Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme.