Civil Rights,Federalism, and the Administrative Process: Favorable Outcomes by Federal,State, and Local Agencies in Housing Discrimination Complaints

Some theorists argue that cooperative intergovernmental relations are critical to policy implementation in the United States. This assertion is explored in the context of fair housing enforcement by comparing favorable administrative outcomes in fair housing complaints at the federal, state, and local levels from 1989 to 2004. What conclusions can be drawn from this systematic comparison of intergovernmental enforcement in one policy area over an extended period of time? First, cooperative federalism works well in fair housing enforcement. Second, of special significance, state civil rights agencies resolve complaints in favor of complainants nearly as often as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and localities sometimes do so even more frequently.     

Cheap bribes and the corruption ban: A coordination game among rational legislators

Legislators in modern democracies (a) accept bribes that are small compared to the value of the statutes they pass and (b) allow bans against bribery to be enforced. In our model of bribery, rational legislators accept bribes smaller not only than the benefit the briber receives but than the costs the legislators incur in accepting the bribes. Rather than risk this outcome, the legislators may be willing to suppress bribery altogether. The size of legislatures, the quality of voter information, the nature of party organization, and the structure of committees will all influence the frequency and size of bribes.     

Making Sense of Hell: Three Meditations on the Holocaust

This essay is an inquiry into the epistemology of the holocaust. It contests organic explanations of the event in favour of an interpretative pluralism . Different questions are seen as demanding different forms of inquiry: what made the holocaust possible requires a political analysis, the issue of its uniqueness calls for a sociological perspective, while an anthropological approach is necessary in order to illuminate its enduring symbolic significance. The essay will deal with these matters in an innovative manner. Thus, in concert with one another these three meditations will provide a new constellation for viewing the holocaust even as they confront certain prevailing prejudices and assumptions.     

Crowding-out in productive and redistributive rent-seeking

This paper presents a general rent-seeking model in which participants decide on entry before choosing their levels of efforts. The conventional wisdom in the rent-seeking literature suggests that the rent dissipation increases with the number of potential participants and with their productivity of effort. In this paper, we show that this result of the rent-seeking literature is far from general and applies only when participants are relatively weak and enter the game with certainty. In the presence of strong competitors, the expected total dissipation actually decreases, since participation in the game is less frequent. We further consider the impact of competitors’ exit option, distinguishing between “redistributive rent-seeking” and “productive rent-seeking” situations. In redistributive rent-seeking, no social loss results from the fact that all competitors exit the race. In productive rent-seeking, instead, lack of participation creates a social loss (the “lost treasure” effect), since valuable rents are left unexploited. We show that the lost-treasure effect perfectly counterbalances the reduction in rent dissipation due to competitors’ exit. Hence, unlike redistributive rent-seeking, in productive rent-seeking the total social loss remains equal to the entire rent even when parties grow stronger or the number of players increases.     

Algirdas Julien Greimas

Translated from the French by Teresa M. Keane