Labour and the Culture Wars of Modern Politics

Anyone who attempts to understand and reverse the major defeat suffered by Labour in the December 2019 general election needs first to appreciate why comparisons with the defeats of the 1980s are so unhelpful. In 1983 Labour was all but wiped out across southern England, but held on comfortably across the ‘red wall’. By contrast, in 2019 Labour did well in cities and university towns across the south, and appears to have solved its historic problem with the southern, educated middle class. However, this has been at the expense of alienating working class voters across the country, not just in its former industrial heartlands. But this is not inevitable. A reanalysis of testimony from hundreds of interviews with working people across England from the 1940s onwards allows insights into attitudes and values that are often obscured by survey techniques. Crucially, it points to a broad-based vernacular liberalism at odds with the culture wars model of a terminal crisis for social democracy.     

The political economy of labor market deregulation during IMF interventions

This study examines the relationship between policy interventions by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and de jure labor rights. Combining two novel data sets with unprecedented country-year coverage – leximetric data on labor laws and disaggregated data on IMF conditionality – our analysis of up to 70 developing countries from 1980 to 2014 demonstrates that IMF-mandated labor market policy measures significantly reduce both individual and collective labor rights. Once we control for the effect of labor market policy measures, however, we find that collective labor rights increase in the wake of IMF programs. We argue that this result is explained by the impact of union pressure on governments which, in such a context, are imbued with the policy space to respond to domestic interest groups. The study has broader theoretical implications as to when international organizations are effective in constraining governments’ choices.     

Flexibility or Stability? Analyzing Proposals to Reform the Separation of Powers

The social welfare effects of legislatures in presidential systems, such as the U.S. Congress, are frequently lamented. In response, there are proposals to reform the separation of powers system by giving presidents control of the legislative agenda and weakening rules such as the filibuster. We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the policy and social welfare consequences of a more executive-centric system. Integrating standard assumptions about legislative and executive incentives into a dynamic model of decision making with private investment, we show there are a variety of conditions under which stronger executives do not produce better outcomes. Moreover, we characterize how these conditions depend on factors such as the stability of the policymaking environment or investment fundamentals. Our findings are robust and consistent with empirical observations that U.S. policy outputs are not necessarily worse than those of nations with stronger executives, which more closely approximate prominent proposals by populist-oriented reformers.     

Institutional features of congressional decisions: The fight to prohibit smoking on airlines

A pervasive theme of the congressional politics literature is that the committee system is fundamental in determining the policy status quo. Such an assertion hinges crucially upon committees controlling their jurisdictions; congressional delegation is undermined if a committee can assert authority over any issue domain at any time. Yet, representatives may possess an incentive to support a policy proposal that would change the status quo, even if it entails disregarding procedures. Indeed, standard conceptualizations of how members of Congress make their voting choices assume that only the benefits and costs associated with a policy matter, and they do not consider institutional factors such as whether a bill emerged from the correct committee.This analysis examines whether representatives will sacrifice policy interests to preserve institutional features of the legislature. The effort in 1987 to curb smoking on airplanes — which became embroiled in a difficult-to-resolve jurisdictional dispute — serves as a vehicle to analyze how sensitive members are to such features. The results demonstrate that a sizable number put aside their [generally moderate] policy preferences and voted against limits on smoking for institutional reasons. These findings have important implications both for specifying the determinants of policy change and for understanding institutional stability.     

Information and party voting in “semipartisan” judicial elections

Research on the relationship between the quantity of information that voters possess and their party voting behavior in partisan elections has produced mixed and confusing empirical results. In an effort to provide a broader perspective, this paper explores that relationship in nonpartisan elections contested by candidates of opposing parties. The paper analyzes survey data on two 1984 contests for seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, using the presidential race for comparison. Despite a highly partisan campaign, party defections by voters were far more common in the supreme court races than in the presidential race, reflecting the importance of party designations on the ballot as a source of information on candidates' party affiliations. At the individual level, levels of information had differing effects in the two supreme court races and for Democratic and Republican voters; this finding suggests that the impact of imformation levels on voters' choices is conditioned by the content of information in particular campaigns.     

Ideological sources of American movements

He is retired and lives in Hawaii.     

An improved method for post-PCR purification for mtDNA sequence analysis

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis of forensic samples typically is performed when the quantity and quality of DNA are insufficient for nuclear DNA analysis or when maternal relatives may be the only reference source. Many of the steps required in the analytical process are both lengthy and labor intensive. Therefore, improvements in the process that reduce labor without compromising the quality of the data are desirable. The current procedure requires purification of the amplicons by centrifugal filtration after PCR and prior to cycle sequencing. Because this method requires several manipulations to perform, alternate cleanup procedures were investigated. These include the use of 1) Qiagen QlAquick PCR Purification columns, 2) Concert Rapid PCR Purification columns, and 3) ExoSAP-IT reagent. When the yield of purified amplicons, quality of the sequence profile, and ease of assay were evaluated, the use of ExoSAP-IT reagent for post-amplification purification was chosen to replace the filtration method.