Proportional Representation and the Framers

Techniques for conducting elections developed since 1800 have raised a question about the soundness of the American framers’ majoritarianism. John Stuart Mill notably argued that the framers’ desire to reward merit, as opposed to party loyalty, would be better served by a system of proportional representation that gave deserving minorities a voice. This article considers the likelihood that a system such as Mill proposed would have the results he hoped for; it concludes that such a system is more likely to worsen problems with the existing system of representation than to solve them.     

Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.     

Representing China in the South Pacific

Chinese diplomacy, aid, economic interactions and manifestations of soft power have increased the country??s influence in the South Pacific region. By some accounts, China??s influence is already approaching that of traditional stakeholders Australia and New Zealand. In Africa and other regions state-led and private activities in established powers?? perceived spheres of influence has caused concern and inspired particular narratives about China??s motivations. In this article we examine how media discourses in Australia and New Zealand have represented China??s role in the South Pacific. We find that China??s role has been constructed using multiple negative frames, which seek to establish China as unequivocally ??different??. More than being unencumbered by the constraints of public opinion and a free press, China is portrayed as operating in a different moral universe, in which the cold hearted exploitation of vulnerable island nations (often in cahoots with venal island elites) is entirely normal. The article shows how such constructions reveal some of the complex issues involved in Australia and New Zealand??s relationships both with China and other South Pacific nations.     

The Mixed Blessings of National Integration: New Perspectives on Development in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

The ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia’s uplands, including those of Vietnam, tend to be portrayed as excluded from national society and locked into poverty, environmental degradation and positions of subjugation. Recent debates about Southeast Asian uplands-lowlands relations have questioned this discourse by highlighting the diversity of experiences, the agency of ethnic minority groups, and uplanders’ strategies of state evasion. This article finds that the integration of the uplands into the Vietnamese polity should be understood as an ongoing struggle between nation-building and state expansion characterised by grand visions on the one hand, and incomplete policy implementation and uplanders’ ambiguous stance towards integration on the other.     

Social disorganization, Latinos and juvenile crime in the Texas borderlands

Purpose

Using a time-series cross-sectional design, we estimated the effects of social disorganization on juvenile property crime rates in a predominately Latino, Texas-Mexico border region.

Methods

Eighteen years of data from seven independent sources (Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Texas State Demographer, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, and Uniform Crime Reports) were examined. Counties were utilized as the unit of analysis, and time-series cross-sectional regression models were estimated.

Results

The analysis showed that per capita income was negatively related to juvenile crime in both rural and urban counties. Ethnic heterogeneity was positively related to the outcome in rural, but not urban, counties; while percent foreign-born was negatively related to juvenile crime in urban, but not rural, counties.

Conclusions

The Latino experience, both native- and foreign-born, is important for improving our understanding how economic and social conditions relate to crime. Comparative analyses between distinct geographical environments, such as rural and urban counties, can yield insight how the local context interacts with social disorganization processes.     

Die Interzedentenwarnung nach § 25c KSchG

§ 25c KSchG legt in Satz 1 eine Informationsobliegenheit des Unternehmers gegenüber dem Verbraucher im Fall einer Interzession fest. Danach hat der Unternehmer den interzedierenden Verbraucher auf die wirtschaftliche Lage des Schuldners hinzuweisen, wenn er erkennt oder erkennen muss, dass der Schuldner seine Verbindlichkeit voraussichtlich nicht oder nicht vollst?ndig erfüllen wird. Unterl?sst der Unternehmer diese Information, haftet der Interzedent nur, wenn er seine Verpflichtung trotz einer solchen Information übernommen h?tte (§ 25c S 2 KSchG). Der folgende Beitrag besch?ftigt sich unter intensiver Berücksichtigung der jüngeren Judikatur mit den vielf?ltigen Aspekten der Interzedentenschutzvorschrift des § 25c KSchG, nicht zuletzt auch mit dem Mysterium der "echten Mitschuld".