Explaining Attitudes toward Immigration: The Role of Regional Context and Individual Predispositions

Existing research makes competing predictions and yields contradictory findings about the relationships between natives’ exposure to immigrants and their attitudes toward immigration. Engaging this disjuncture, this article argues that individual predispositions moderate the impact of exposure to immigrants on negative attitudes toward immigrants. Negative attitudes toward immigration are more likely among individuals who are most sensitive to such threats. Because country-level studies are generally unable to appropriately measure the immigration context in which individuals form their attitudes, this article uses a newly collected dataset on regional immigration patterns in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland to test the argument. The data show that increasing and visible diversity is associated with negative attitudes toward immigrants, but only among natives on the political right. This finding improves the understanding of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration and has implications for the study of attitudes toward other policies and for immigration policy itself.     

Businesses and the Internet: Implications for Firm Location and Clustering

This article discusses the economic and geographical implications of the growing use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the production process. In short, ICTs make internal and external communications more efficient and allow faster and more flexible interaction among different agents. These improvements correlate with changes in the internal organization of the business and in its strategic behavior. Those changes have implications for regional economic development.The four sections of the article include a typology of information and communications technologies and a discussion of how they diffuse; an elaboration of the concept of economic clusters and economic space in the context of ICTs; and a review of the methodological issues surrounding the development of virtual (rather than physical) clusters of economic activity.The article's, major insights include the following. Information-based, younger, and smaller businesses, and the service sector, benefit most from the Internet. Many of those businesses are integrated in networks and economic clusters; historically, they are often located in close spatial proximity to each other and/or to their customers. At the same time, a new type of virtual agglomeration is created for some type of activities through Internet interaction, which does not require physical proximity. The article stresses the need for a new paradigm to think about the relationship of business and space.     

Two Views about Socialism: Why Karl Marx Shunned an Academic Debate with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The object of this essay is to show that Marx, in his polemic Misere de la Philosophie against Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere , in effect, shunned an academic debate with Proudhon and resorted to a denunciation of him as a petit bourgeois , in order to establish his own position at the top of the international labour movement. However, with his furious attack on Proudhon, Marx succeeded in destroying the existing links between the different socialist trends. In the light of this catastrophic split between the driving forces of radical change, at the beginning of the capitalist industrialisation, the article pleads for a tolerant culture of discussion, within which the debate on different methods and means towards an alternative society and the end of capitalism, is possible.     

The Structure of the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha

Journal of Indian Philosophy - This article shows in detail that the widely held view according to which the Sarvadar?anasa?graha has a hierarchical structure is mistaken. It further...     

NGO monitoring and the legitimacy of international cooperation: A strategic analysis

States often invite NGOs to monitor international cooperation. Under what circumstances are states likely to take this step? We argue that NGO monitoring allows states to provide domestic publics with credible evidence regarding successful cooperation, but that this credibility carries a cost: if states fail to cooperate, a participating NGO will expose this failure and thus delegitimize the cooperation effort. Our formal analysis indicates that states obtain a dual benefit from NGO participation: in addition to enhanced legitimacy, NGO scrutiny helps states credibly commit to high cooperation levels vis-á-vis each other. The increased costs of failure, however, may deter state use of NGO monitoring. Surprisingly, we find that NGO monitoring is the most useful for states when the cooperation cost is relatively low. We explore the empirical relevance of our theoretical argument in NGO monitoring of World Bank development projects and compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. We also explain why NGO monitoring has been disallowed in the Global Environment Facility. Our analysis provides a firm strategic foundation for the idea that NGO participation sometimes confers benefits to states, and our theory has several empirically falsifiable implications.     

Capacity, not constraints: A theory of North-South regulatory cooperation

While neoliberal institutionalists argue that treaties facilitate collective action, many North-South regulatory treaties focus on largely national problems in developing countries. As such, these treaties present a puzzle: why a global treaty to address national regulatory problems? We argue that while activists in industrialized countries often promote regulatory treaties, these treaties garner political support among developing countries because they allow governments to enhance their national regulatory capacity. Developing countries are often not interested in banning practices such as trade in hazardous waste. Instead, developing countries want to increase their ability to control them. We test the argument against data on the global regime for hazardous waste trade. Contravening the conventional wisdom, we find that weak regulatory capacity is a powerful predictor of ratification of the Basel Convention, a treaty that does not ban hazardous waste trade but allows regulatory enhancement. By contrast, other treaties in the regime that do aim at banning hazardous waste trade receive little support among developing countries.     

Removing fuel subsidies: How can international organizations support national policy reforms?

This article investigates how international organizations can support fuel subsidy reform. Departing from earlier studies, we focus on the ability of international organizations to assist national governments directly in the enactment and implementation of national reforms. While international organizations lack the capacity to directly enforce policy or force countries to abolish subsidies, they can increase the cost of reform reversal by governments that have a preference for reform but worry about the credibility and durability of their reforms. Moreover, international organizations can support learning from peers. In practice, governments interested in subsidy reform can announce a public commitment and submit progress reports to peer review by other countries under the auspices of an international organization. We characterize the institutional design of international organizations for success, discuss the role of the civil society in the process, and offer short illustrations from recent efforts by international organizations to promote fuel subsidy reform.