The future of political campaigning: the American example

The Internet will provide a way to force direct democracy to the fore, replacing many of the prerogatives now reserved for representative democracy. This is especially true in Europe where the continental integration of the economy has not been matched by integrated political democracy. Lobbying in the UK will become less relevant as the EU comes to predominate. Lobbying in the future will have to be directed downward — to mobilise the public — rather than upward, attempting to influence the Parliament. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Determinants of software piracy: economics,institutions, and technology

This paper determines the various influences on software piracy using a large sample of countries. In particular, our cross-sectional study estimates the effects of economic, institutional and technical factors on the piracy of software. A more comprehensive look at potential determinants of software piracy, including economic and non-economic factors, may be considered as the main contribution to a literature that is still in its infancy. Results show that a country’s stage of development and the quality of governance have the largest impact on the incidence of software piracy. Greater economic and political freedoms are shown to have opposite effects on piracy. Further, greater diffusion of the Internet and of computer technologies, other things equal, actually promote the legal use of software. Higher access prices also reduce piracy, with the impact of telephone charges being more pronounced than that of Internet access fees. There are significant variations in the impacts of different types of legal institutions and of fractionalization on piracy. The influence of digital divide between rural and urban areas does not significantly affect the piracy of software. Overall, economic, institutional, and technological factors exert important influences on software piracy, albeit with some qualitative and quantitative differences. Policy implications are discussed.     

Structuring Legal Institutions

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system.     

Transnational Strategic Networks and Policymaking in Chile: CORFO's High Technology Investment Promotion Program

Once prey to government patrimonial practices, the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), Chile's economic development agency, overcame this problem in the early 1990s. In 2000 CORFO established a High Technology Investment Promotion Program to promote foreign direct investment in high technology and other nontraditional sectors. This article applies concepts of political survival and cooperation to explain how CORFO moved from patrimonialism to technocratic independence. Then it demonstrates that governments possessing technocratic independence but lacking other characteristics typically associated with successful investment promotion efforts can develop transnational strategic networks of individuals, business associations, and universities to facilitate their learning process in order to devise more effective strategies to promote nontraditional FDI.     

Legal Validity Qua Specific Mode of Existence

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, the legal system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices.