Barriers to third‐party advertising in Canadian elections

A survey of public interest group leaders suggests some reasons why few third parties have chosen to advertise in recent elections. It indicates that public interest groups abstain from election advertising not because of the strictures of the Canada Elections Act but for other reasons, notably cost and fear of losing charitable status or of jeopardizing their access to and influence with officials. While the significance of these findings is limited by the scale of the survey, the results do raise tantalizing questions that warrant further research.     

Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society

By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social group at all, then it consists not only: 1) in the argumentative contesting of a whole range of not-as-yet wholly formulated visions of future ways of ‘going on’, but also in: 2) the provision of the historically developed socio-ontological resources required for their realization. Civil society thus contains the ‘seeds’ of future possibilities. Taking activity in this realm seriously means that our current task in social studies, is not the scientific one of discoveringan already existing order, but that of enabling the reinstitution of what, traditionally, was the task of rhetoric: to explicate, in a non-eliminative form of competition involving rival formulations, the implications of different accounts of the nature of our social lives together.     

The Rise of Gulf War Paradigm 2.0

The adage that “it is always easier to fight the last war” is one that readily can be applied to the United States and its armed forces for not predicting the scale and type of operations encountered in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This article argues that the lack of preparation in the post-invasion phases arose from an institutional attachment to a preferred paradigm of warfare, as exemplified by the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This paradigm, though, has been substantially resurrected and re-configured to suit the fighting preferences of the American armed forces in its protracted encounters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from re-orienting its organization and mindset to meet the challenges of so-called counterinsurgency campaigns, as much current advocacy maintains, the military has reverted to the form of warfare it knows best.     

The fairness of sanctions: some implications for optimal enforcement policy

In this article we incorporate notions of the fairness of sanctionsinto the standard model of public enforcement. When both theprobability and magnitude of sanctions may be varied, the usualsolution involves a very high sanction and a relatively lowprobability of enforcement if individuals are risk neutral.When the issue of fairness is added to the analysis, the optimalsanction generally is not extremely high because such a sanctionwould be seen as unfair. The optimal probability of imposingsanctions may be higher than in the usual case (to offset thelower sanction) or lower than in the usual case (because thelower sanction reduces the effectiveness of enforcement).     

The Bosman Ruling and the Emergence of a Single Market in Soccer Talent

This paper discusses the effect of the ruling by the European Court of Justice in the Bosman case which delivered freedom of contract to professional soccer players. The result is examined in the context of modern investment theory where contracts between club and player are considered as options to renegotiate the contract or to sell the player to another party. The effects of the ruling are reconsidered in this light and the reaction of the soccer world to these effects are discussed.     

J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations: Part 2

The second part of this article shows that John Maynard Keynes worked closely with the German Finance and Foreign ministries as a supposed neutral expert in October 1922. He supported passive resistance to the French in the Ruhr without regard to its effects on the currency, secretly collaborated in writing the German reparations note of June 1923, and then praised his own work in a weekly that he controlled. Keynes opposed the 1929 Young Plan that re-scheduled the German debt and declined to accept modern thinking on overcoming the transfer problem.