Do Labour Parties Suffer from Declining Turnout? Evidence from Norwegian Local Elections

The argument that declining voter turnout harms social democratic parties has received little support in research on national elections, but partisan consequences of declining turnout in local elections has been less explored. Norwegian local elections – where both turnout and support for the Labour Party have declined since the early 1960s – are used as a test case. Analyses of aggregate data gave no systematic support for the hypothesis that Labour suffers from lower turnout. Declining turnout and declining Labour Party vote were not causally related, and the correlation between the two variables seemed to be the result of other long-term social changes. Analyses of survey data pointed to three flaws in the premises on which the hypothesis was based. First, the effect of declining turnout on the biased class composition of the abstainers was ambiguous. Second, the Norwegian Labour Party suffers less from differential turnout than before as a result of declining class voting. Third, the Labour Party may suffer from a demobilisation of the working class, but the party may also benefit from a demobilisation of the young.     

Stakeholders,natural resource management and Australian rural local governments: A Q methodological study

This paper reports on a Q methodological study of stakeholder perceptions of rural local government management of natural resources. Data analysis of the Q sorts revealed that there are five distinct stakeholder perspectives relating to rural local government and natural resource management. In terms of natural resource management at the local level rural stakeholders perceive local government as an unwilling participant, an inconsequential participant, as a problematic participant, as a potential participant, and, most positively, a participatory partner. The paper describes each of these five stakeholder perspectives in detail before examining the implications of these findings for greater natural resource management at the local level in non-metropolitan Australia.     

Terrorism: Review of 1988 and prospects for 1989

This article is the first to explore the Israel Defense Forces's official statistical data on Palestinian terrorism toward Israeli targets during the al-Aqsa intifada 2000–2004. Focusing the analysis on the logic of terrorist target choice, the article identifies two separate results: First, an unambiguous difference in the form of the attacks contingent on whether they are carried out in the state of Israel or in the Occupied Territories. Second, based on the same distinction, the analysis points out how the attacks are targeted toward distinctively different categories of the Israeli populace. Causes of the results are discussed.     

Privatizing Urban Services Through Homeowners Associations: The Potential and Practice in Phoenix

Homeowners associations (HOAs) are private nonprofit corporations that regulate, “tax,” and provide urban services to growing numbers of U.S. residents. As such, HOAs may affect cities' public service delivery. Interviews with department heads in Phoenix, Arizona reveal how enclaves of private services influence the city's planning and provision of public services. The findings suggest that HOAs do not substitute private for public services in Phoenix. Instead, qualitative differences in the services themselves (particularly concerning their purpose and scale) and in the legal powers of their providers create a more nuanced pattern of public-private service delivery.     

Notes on contributors

Robyn Eckersley: Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Arne Naess: Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Translated and revised by David Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

M. Annette Jaimes, ed.: The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. Race and Resistance Series, Boston, South End Press, 1992.

Alexander Wilson: The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992.     

Comment on William G. Grigsby and Steven C. Bourassa's “Section 8: The time for fundamental program change?”

Abstract

Grigsby and Bourassa claim that the major problems with the housing voucher program are that most families with affordability problems are not served and that housing assistance is not part of the federal safety net. They propose replacing the program with a housing entitlement for most very low‐income renters, with eligibility linked to receipt of safety‐net benefits. Resources to serve additional families would be generated in part by changes like those found in the Department of Housing and Urban Development's recent block grant proposals.

The Grigsby‐Bourassa proposal lacks a clear assessment of likely costs. Also, there is a risk that the means the authors propose will be heard, but that their call for expansion will not. Finally, their proposal does not intersect with other ideas to modify a basically successful program to better achieve its goals, and questions about rental markets and family and landlord behavior also must be answered.     

Social Norms and the Paradox of Elections’ Turnout

People vote although their marginal gain from voting is zero.We contribute to the resolution of this paradox by presentinga model for equilibrium configuration of attitudes regardingthe decision to vote. Each individual is seen as an element ofa social network, within which pairs of individuals expressideas and attitudes, exerting mutual influence. We model therole of such networks in propagating the mutual influenceacross pairs of individuals. We show that it may suffice thata small set of individuals have a strong feeling about showingup to vote to generate a significant turnout in elections.