Incrementalism before the Storm: Network Performance for the Evacuation of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of preparedness in disaster management networks covering the New Orleans area. This paper focuses on the operation of networks in preparing to evacuate residents in advance of a major disaster. There are two cases: the relatively successful evacuation of residents who left by private conveyance and the widely publicized failure to provide for those who could not or would not leave on their own. We trace the actions and inactions of various players to reach conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of networks in the special circumstances of disaster preparation.     

Collaboration and Leadership for Effective Emergency Management

Collaboration is a necessary foundation for dealing with both natural and technological hazards and disasters and the consequences of terrorism. This analysis describes the structure of the American emergency management system, the charts development of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and identifies conflicts arising from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the attempt to impose a command and control system on a very collaborative organizational culture in a very collaborative sociopolitical and legal context. The importance of collaboration is stressed, and recommendations are offered on how to improve the amount and value of collaborative activities. New leadership strategies are recommended that derive their power from effective strategies and the transformational power of a compelling vision, rather than from hierarchy, rank, or standard operating procedures.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

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.     

Struggling through the web of impunity—The Jorge Carpio Nicolle case

Through the lens of Guatemala’s Jorge Carpio Nicolle case I analyze the mechanisms that preserve impunity in Latin American nations struggling to emerge from violent conflict and embrace, the rule of law. I reveal how the infective influence of parallel powers, the ineffectiveness of the judicial process, and obstructive legal doctrine destroy domestic efforts to prosecute those responsible for human rights violations. The Carpio case exposes the role of international courts in providing justice when domestic courts fail to do so, and it demonstrates the importance of human rights groups in pursuing this justice. The author would like to thank Roxanna Altholz, Adriana Beltran, and Soraya Long for their invaluable assitance in conducting this research.     

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Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Explaining individual-level support for privatization in European post-Soviet economies

Abstract. This article explores the sources of individual-level variation in support economic privatization in seven European post-Soviet countries. It tests economic utilitarian and psychological explanations of variations in support for economic privatization. The economic utilitarian explanation posits that individuals seek to maximize their potential material gains from economic liberalization. The psychological explanation posits that if individuals are generally risk averse, they are not likely to support economic privatization. These hypotheses are then tested using two separate regression models. The first model estimates pooled data from across all seven European post-Soviet economies. The second model is a pooled analysis that interacts country-specific dummy variables with each of the independent variables in order to examine the country-specific effects of the responses. The results show that the economic utilitarian and psychological explanations are both strong predictors of why some support and others oppose privatization in the seven European post-Soviet countries.