A minimax procedure for electing committees

A new voting procedure for electing committees, called the minimax procedure, is described. Based on approval balloting, it chooses the committee that minimizes the maximum Hamming distance to voters’ ballots, where these ballots are weighted by their proximity to other voters’ ballots. This minimax outcome may be diametrically opposed to the outcome obtained by aggregating approval votes in the usual manner, which minimizes the sum of the Hamming distances and is called the minisum outcome. The manipulability of these procedures, and their applicability when election outcomes are restricted in various ways, are also investigated. The minimax procedure is applied to the 2003 Game Theory Society election of a council of 12 new members from a list of 24 candidates. By rendering outlying voters less influential and not antagonizing any voters too much, it arguably would have produced a committee more representative of the interests of all voters than the minisum committee that was elected.     

Making economic adjustment work: The politics of policy implementation

This article identifies tentative lessons about successful political management of stabilization and structural adjustment policies in developing countries. It addresses three basic questions: 1) What is the purpose of stabilization and structural adjustment policies and what specific measures are usually undertaken? 2) Who, in theory, is supposed to benefit or lose from such policies and who, in actual practice, supports or opposes them? 3) How have governments in developing countries successfully managed the supporters and opponents of adjustment policies? The article concentrates in detail on how the governments of Panama, Costa Rica and Guatemala managed the actual supporters and opponents of these policies between 1982 and 1987, based on interviews with policy makers, official documents and content analysis of media sources, with the aim of determining what measures were implemented, who protested or supported them, and what the government did to build support or minimize opposition. The lessons from these three experiences are tied to the more general literature on successful political management of stabilization and structural adjustment.     

Budget makers as agents: A preliminar investigation of discretionary behavior under state-contingent rewards

An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the Public Choice Society Meeting, Tucson AZ, 27–29 March 1987. Our thanks to Laura Langbein, Steve Maser, Eugenia Froedge-Toma, and Gordon Tullock for helpful comments. Special thanks to George Racette.     

Budget Control in Virginia Public School Districts

This article examines the selection and use of a budget approval technique. Specifically, two research questions are addressed: (1) Does the use of a particular budget approval method by a governmental body impact the execution of the budget? (2) What characteristics of a local government are associated with its decision to use a particular budget approval method? Both research questions are addressed by analyzing data from public school systems in the Commonwealth of Virginia, specifically, whether using categorical budget approval differs in the accuracy of budgeting versus using a lump-sum approval method. Characteristics of Virginia school districts are also analyzed according to whether any of them are likely to be associated with school districts using a particular approval method. The remainder of this article is organized as follows: the next section describes the role of budgeting control in schools; subsequent sections review Virginia school district budgeting practices, develop the empirical model used to test the hypotheses, describe the sample, analyze the results of empirical tests and discuss implications of the findings.     

Does European Community Regional Policy Empower the Regions?

A central goal of the 1980s reforms of the European Community's regional development policy was to contribute to an increase in the discretionary authority of sub–national decision–makers in the Community's member states. This article assesses the degree to which this goal was attained through comparative studies of selected French and Italian regions. It concludes that only in those regions in which timely policy entrepreneurship on the part of regional–level elected leaders coincided with the pre–existence of a territorial policy Community for economic development did the transfer of resources from the Community contribute to regional empowerment.     

A Longitudinal Study of Self-Esteem: Implications for Adolescent Development

This study used a cluster analytic approach to identify self-esteem trajectories among adolescents over a four-year period from sixth to tenth grades (N = 1,160). Four self-esteem trajectories were identified that replicated previous research: (1) consistently high, (2) moderate and rising, (3) steadily decreasing, and (4) consistently low. Female adolescents were more likely to be in the steadily decreasing self-esteem group while male adolescents were more likely to be in the moderate and rising group. African American and white youth were equally distributed across groups. Using repeated measures analysis, we found that youth with consistently high and moderate and rising self-esteem reported developmentally healthier outcomes in Grade 10 than youth in the other two clusters. Outcomes included susceptibility to peer pressure, school grades, and alcohol use. Implications of these results for studying self-esteem and developmental change more generally are discussed.     

Disentangling the Weight of School Dropout Predictors: A Test on Two Longitudinal Samples

The aims of this study are to identify the most powerful predictors of school dropout and to determine how stable they are over time. Two generations of White French-speaking boys and girls from 12 to 16 years old (n = 791 in 1974, n = 791 in 1985) completed a self-administered questionnaire on their psychosocial adjustment at least one year before leaving school. As expected, the analyses showed that school, family, behavioral, social, and personality variables could all predict dropping out of school in the two samples. Furthermore, these predictors were quite stable over time. However, statistical improvement measures in logistic regression analyses indicated that school experience variables (i.e., grade retention, school achievement, school commitment) were the best screening variables for potential dropouts. The contribution of other psychosocial variables, even though significant, did not improve very much the capacity to identify who will drop out of school. The discussion highlights the implications of the findings for secondary prevention and screening practices.     

Suicide by electrocution with low-voltage current

Three cases of suicide by electrocution with low-voltage current were observed in five years (1994-1998) by medical clinical forensic examiners of an Emergency Forensic Unit of the Paris suburb among 2,000 external death examinations. The cases involved one woman, aged 72 and two men, aged 38 and 41. In the last two cases, electric burns were retrieved under bared electric wires, placed on the arms or fingers in order to realize a hand-to-hand electric circuit involving the heart muscle. In the other case, the electric circuit between mouth and foot also involved the heart muscle. Household low-voltage current delivered (220 V in France) had a sufficient strength to induce local muscular paralysis and heart fibrillation. In the three cases, blood samples taken have retrieved very high levels of muscular enzymes (CPK, LDH) correlated to the mechanism of electric death. The rareness of suicide by electrocution and its forensic characteristics are detailed in order to help the clinical forensic examiners, prosecutors, and police officers concerned by such death examinations.