Christian Müller: Das vertragstheoretische Argument in der Ökonomik

Politische Vierteljahresschrift -     

Affirmative action,duality of error,and the consequences of mispredicting the academic performance of african american college applicants

The implications of different potential affirmative action policies depend on three factors: selection rate from the applicant pool, base rate of qualified applicants, and accuracy of performance predictions. A series of analyses was conducted under various assumptions concerning affirmative action plans, causes of racial differences in average college admissions test scores, and racial differences in accuracy of performance predictions. Evidence suggesting a lower level of predictive accuracy for African Americans implies that, under a program of affirmative action, both proportionately more false positives (matriculated students who do not succeed) and proportionately more false negatives (rejected applicants who could have succeeded) will be found among African American applicants. Unless equivalent levels of predictive accuracy are achieved for both groups, no admission policy can be fair simultaneously to majority group applicants and African American applicants. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Modes of participation over the adult life span

Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, in their 1972 workParticipation in America, advance the notion that political participation is not unidimensional, but is comprised of different modes. In recent years, the availability of panel and cross-sectional time series data has led to greater interest in the temporal dimension of political participation. Using data from nine American National Election Studies, we confirm the Verba and Nie findings with respect to voting and campaign participation and expand upon them. We examine the factor structure of indicators used in composite indices of voting and campaign participation and find that the structure of participation is stable across age groups, cohorts, and periods, confirming that composite indices of voting and campaign participation are not confounded by age, cohort, or period effects.This study was supported by grants from the Wayne State University Graduate School and the National Institute on Aging (NIA 5 AG06344-02).     

The rally 'round the flag effect in U.S. foreign policy crises, 1950–1985

We calculate the rally 'round the flag effect (Mueller, 1970, 1973) for all 41 U.S. foreign policy crises, 1950–1985, identified by the International Crisis Behavior Project (Wilkenfeld, Brecher, and Moser, 1988). The mean change in the president's approval rating is surprisingly small: 1.4 percent among all respondents. The greatest influences on the rallying effect of a crisis are whether or not the United States is involved in an ongoing war and, especially, theNew York Times's coverage of the president's major response to a crisis. When a major response is reported in the headlines, the rally is more than 8 percentage points greater,ceteris paribus, than when it is not reported on the front page. TheNew York Times's reporting is influenced by the nature of the president's response, the efforts of his administration to publicize his actions, the degree of Soviet involvement, the location of the crisis, and the willingness of opposition leaders to take a newsworthy position regarding the president's performance.     

Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies

This paper examines the extent to which organizational hierarchies are democratic or (in the more usual language of administrative studies) participative, in the sense that the views of a large proportion of organizational membership are taken into account when an organizational choice is made. We view organizations as making choices in a “bottom-up” manner: subordinates recommend options to their superior, and if subordinates are in sufficient agreement their superior accepts their advice. We prove that as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, organizational choices can be dominated by a smaller and smaller proportion of the total organizational membership. In the limit, a vanishing small proportion of the membership can dominate policymaking.     

Books in review

His books include Two-Person Game Theory: The Essential Ideas; Fights, Games and Debates;and Mathematical Models in the Social Behavioral Sciences.     

The Downsian model of electoral participation: Formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect

This paper applies a game-theoretic model of participation under uncertainty to investigate the negative relationship between constituency size and voter turnout rates: theconstituency size effect. We find that this theoretical model accounts for almost all of the variation in turnout due to size in cross sectional data from school budget referenda.     

RETHINKING AMERICAN JAIL DEATH RATES: A COMPARISON OF NATIONAL MORTALITY AND JAIL MORTALITY, 1978, 1983

This article provides insights in to the problem of jail deaths in America by drawing upon relevant data from the 1978 and 1983 National Jail Censuses and other official sources. The goal o f the research is to compare national death trends with jail death trends in order to determine (1) if the problem is as grave as the available literature suggests, and (2) if any major changes have occurred as a result of federal court activism. Indeed, we found that when an adjusted general population death rate is employed certain cause-specific rates are actually lower in jail. This generalization, while true for natural causes and homicides, was not the case for suicides. Depending upon which general population rates are compared with which jail rates, inmates committed suicide at a rate that was between five and fifteen times higher than the rate for free-world citizens. Between censuses, the general trend in jail death rates was generally downward, although once again suicide rates tended to exhibit less of a decrease than the rates for homicides and death by natural causes. Possible explanations for this anomaly and policy implications are addressed in the article.