Lobbying when the decisionmaker can acquire independent information

Politicians trade off the cost of acquiring and processing information against the benefit of being re-elected. Lobbyists may possess private information upon which politicians would like to rely without the effort of verification. If the politician does not try to verify, however, the lobbyist has no incentive to be truthful. This is modelled as a game in which the lobbyist lobbies to show his conviction that the electorate is on his side. In equilibrium, sometimes the politician investigates, and sometimes the information is false. The lobbyists and the electorate benefit from the possibility of lobbying when the politician would otherwise vote in ignorance, but not when he would otherwise acquire his own information. The politician benefits in either case. Lobbying is most socially useful when the politician's investigation costs are high, when he is more certain of the electorate's views, and when the issue is less important.     

La nacionalización del hogar en España

The nationalization of the domestic sphere in Spain is a topic that has been largely ignored. Recently, the interest in the study of banal nationalism and the impact of nationalism on everyday life has been on the rise, particularly for the Francoist and democratic era; however, its origins are not clear at all. An examination of developments in domestic architecture, interior decoration, and even gardening shows that the domestic sphere was nationalized during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Regionalist architecture was in vogue for villas and country-houses and furniture was increasingly modeled after local artisanal traditions. Domestic practices such as cooking, consuming, and cleaning were also increasingly connected with supposedly “national” traditions. During this period Spanish cuisine and many of its regional dishes were “invented”. The first phase of the nationalization of the domestic sphere in Spain is analyzed using a wide array of primary sources (press, manuals, speeches, etc.), thus contributing to the history of nationalism, gender studies, the history of architecture, and food studies, which by focusing on modernization processes largely disregarded this profound nationalization of the private sphere.     

Status and practices of the legal text

Translated by Isabelle Llasera from Statut et pratiques du texte juridique, in D. Bourcier and P. Mackay (eds.),Lire le droit. Langue, texte, cognition (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1992).