The precarious state of international order: Assessment and policy implications

The international order is becoming increasingly precarious as a result of the pressures of globalisation and inadequate policy responses by many states, most importantly the United States, which still holds a pivotal role in building and sustaining international order. The present state of affairs in global governance is characterised by 1) an overwhelming concentration of power at the level of interstate relations but 2) a diffusion of power if we look at the totality of international relations, 3) the erosion of state authority and political legitimacy, 4) the growing importance of markets and of 5) fundamentalist ideologies, 6) the declining utility and the paradoxical impact of force on political order, and 7) by the still indispensable but increasingly fragile base of international order in functioning statehood at the national level. Overall, this situation reflects a mismatch between political demands on and the actual supply of international order whose present state leaves much to be desired. By way of conclusion, the article offers some policy recommendations about how to change the present precarious situation.     

China's Unbalanced Economic Growth

This paper summarizes empirical findings and results from the author's most recent research publication in Chinese: China's Unbalanced Economic Growth. It studies China's economic growth with a special emphasis on its regional disparities. It provides an analysis of China's overall economic landscape as well as an empirical study of China's unbalanced regional development. Based on its quantitative findings and results, the author predicts the emergence of ten Chinese metropolitan economies in the early twenty-first century and recommends a regional development strategy as well as implementation policies for China's future development. The major empirical findings, results and conclusions of this research are outlined in three sections: the first describes China's economic future—the emergence of ten regional metropolitan economies, the second reports the empirical findings of China's national and regional economic disparities and discusses policy implications, and the third investigates China's future economic growth and discusses its growth limitations.     

Rise of the Automobiles: the costs of increased NO2 pollution in China's changing urban environment

China's rapidly growing motor vehicle fleet is changing the makeup of its urban atmosphere. While the two major problem pollutants historically have been particulates and sulfur dioxide, the growth in the number of automobiles has generated substantially increased levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂). This paper examines and values the mortality health effects (reduced premature deaths) from cleaning up these three pollutants. Findings indicate that valued gains from reduced air pollution mortality can average 3% of a city's GDP. Moreover, the growing auto fleet may generate a ten-fold increase in NO₂-based mortality costs and offset other, ongoing cleanup efforts in many Chinese cities. Specifically, the paper explores how the increasing number of automobiles might diminish or offset environmental cleanup activities focused upon particulate and sulfur dioxide pollution.     

What Do We Know and Need to Know about the Environmental Outcomes of Collaborative Management?

Many tout the benefits of collaborative environmental management as an alternative to centralized planning and command and control regulation, but the excitement over collaborative processes has not been matched by evidence that these processes actually improve the environment. The most crucial question in collaborative environmental management remains unanswered and often unasked: To what extent does collaboration lead to improved environmental outcomes? We know much about why collaboration is occurring and how collaborative processes and outputs vary. The primary goal of future research on collaborative environmental management should be to demonstrate whether collaboration improves environmental conditions more than traditional processes and newer market-based processes. Collaboration is not a panacea; it is a choice that policy makers and public managers should make based on evidence about expected outcomes.     

Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate

Scholars have long debated the individual-level relationship between partisanship and policy preferences. We argue that partisanship and issue attitudes cause changes in each other, but the pattern of influence varies systematically. Issue-based change in party identification should occur among individuals who are aware of party differences on an issue and find that issue to be salient. Individuals who are aware of party differences, but do not attach importance to the issue, should evidence party-based issue change. Those lacking awareness of party differences on an issue should show neither effect. We test our account by examining individuals' party identifications and their attitudes on abortion, government spending and provision of services, and government help for African Americans using the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel study, finding strong support for our argument. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the microlevel study of party identification and the macrolevel analysis of partisan change.     

Selecting Committees

In selecting a committee, voters are often concerned with the over all composition of the committee rather than simply selecting a single individual as their representative. We give two examples of elections at Wheaton College in Massachusetts that illustrate the complexity of preferences that voters may have for the relationships among the individual candidates. These preferences cannot be separated into preferences on the individual candidates and are not detectable from only a voter's top-ranked committee. We outline the questions this raises for the design of committee elections in general and propose directions for future work.     

Dead Heat: The 2006 Public Choice Society Election

In 2006, the Public Choice Society chose a new president using approval voting. There were five candidates, and the election was extremely close. We indicate the sources of support of the different candidates, based in part on spectral analysis, by voters who cast between one and five votes. Using preference information that was also gathered, we show that two candidates different from the approval voting winner, including the apparent Condorcet winner, might have won under different voting systems. Because most voters did not indicate their complete preference rankings, however, these differences are hardly robust, especially since the outcome was essentially a dead heat.     

Interweaving Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights with Urban Citizenship: A View from the Winnipeg Low-Cost Housing Sector,Canada

State-society relations around low-cost housing in Canada changed from a period of strong federal leadership centred on social rights to a period of state retrenchment. A coalition of housing stakeholders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors self-organized in Winnipeg to create new low-cost housing following the 1993 discontinuation of federal social housing programs. This move toward urban citizenship was not received in the same way by Aboriginal peoples pursuing a distinctive set of rights centred on self-determination alongside common social (housing) goals. While Aboriginal rights are given regard at the federal level, they were not embedded in localized citizenship processes. Expanding the theorization of urban citizenship, the empirical results in this article reveal that discourses of democratic racism and cultural neutrality permeate mainstream views, running counter to Aboriginal citizenship pursuits.