The social logic of political choice: Picking a political party in the context of immediate social circles

The Social Logic of Politics places social learning at the center of political choice. People develop their political preferences, knowledge, values, perceptions of ability, and decisions about political behavior in interactions with others, usually members of their social circles. Political attitudes and goals are not derivatives of exogenous economic preferences. They are not the results of careful calculations, in which optimization of personal needs guides the mode of reasoning. This theoretical stance draws sustenance from recent work across the social science, even as it harkens back to established, if neglected principles of political analysis. My thanks to Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck for his encouragement and for the critical comments of several anonymous referees and to Josip Dasović and Jennifer Fitzgerald, my co-authors of Partisan Families: the Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (Zuckerman et al. 2007). Material from that book appears in this essay.     

Campaign resources and electoral success: Evidence from the 2002 French parliamentary elections

We examine the factors that improve the candidates’ likelihood of winning an election by drawing on information from campaign resources used by candidates running in the 2002 French parliamentary election. The main effects that we wish to analyze are the candidates’ gender, political affiliation and possible incumbency. We find that the contributions the candidates received and their political affiliations determine their acceding to the second round of the elections. But surprisingly once they make it to the second round, the contributions cease to be relevant; only the candidates’ gender, incumbency and the actual spending rather than the contribution levels matter.     

Understanding the development of fundamentalism

We use economic theory to examine the intensity of fundamentalist sects in which leaders work to enhance their followers’ observance level. We model three stylized situations under which fundamentalist groups function, examining the intensity of observance in each. We find that, under reasonable conditions, rivalry among fundamentalists makes them more extreme.     

Social Democracy or Social Liberalism? Ideological Sources of Liberal Democrat Policy

Liberal Democrat policy has been labelled as social democratic, yet the party has been reluctant to so describe itself. Taking Crosland's The Future of Socialism as a reference point, there appears to be much shared ground between social democracy and Liberal Democrat policy. Meanwhile, the party's tax policy adopted in 2006 takes the Croslandite approach of taxing wealth rather than income. Despite this, the article argues that the party is a social liberal rather than a social democratic one. These two political philosophies have so much in common that it is understandable that some commentators see the influence of social democracy where they might instead perceive social liberalism. Yet the two differ in their attitudes to the state. Both see a positive role for the state in furthering social goods. However, social liberalism shares classical liberal concerns about the dangers of an over-mighty state. This approach underpins Liberal Democrat policy.     

The Revenue Impact of Repeated Tax Amnesties

Proponents argue that tax amnesties raise revenue both in the short and long run, by bringing former nonfilers back into the tax system. Opponents contend that amnesties produce little short‐run revenue and weaken incentives for long‐run tax compliance. However, over the last 21 years, 27 states offered tax amnesties for a second or third time. While previous research has estimated the impact of specific tax amnesties, none have estimated how the impact changes when offered repeatedly. We find that these additional tax amnesties generate less short‐run revenue than predecessors and tend to magnify revenue losses associated with disincentives for long‐run tax compliance.     

The impact of child support enforcement policy on nonmarital childbearing

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women with a significant chance of needing public assistance in the event of a nonmarital birth and their male partners. We investigate this hypothesis with a sample of women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to which we add information on state child support enforcement. We examine childbearing behavior between the ages of 15 and 44 before marriage and during periods of non‐marriage following divorce or widowhood. The estimates indicate that women living in states with more effective child support enforcement are less likely to bear children when unmarried, especially if they are young, never‐married, or black. The findings suggest that improved child support enforcement may be a potent intervention for reducing nonmarital childbearing. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Embeddedness and the Articulation of Capital Interests in Norway

This article focuses on organization of capital interests comparatively across sectors and does so by developing an explanatory framework linking organizational patterns to incentives for individual strategies. The key argument is that variations in the political organization of capital interests across sectors, and the linkages between state and capital interests, reflect different degrees of embeddedness. Underlying the embeddedness hypothesis is the notion that the organization of capital can be seen as an alternative to governance through market processes. Organization may replace market governance either by constituting an alternative to internal self-regulation or by channelling regulatory functions through cooperation with public authorities. A set of hypotheses are developed concerning the relationship between degree of embeddedness on the one hand, and organization of capital interest organization and the interface between state-industry, on the other. The overall picture is that we find support for the crux of our argument, but there are important modifications. As for functional differentiation of capital interests we find, in accordance with OUT hypothesis, that highly embedded capital is associated with organizations that have a broad set of functions. Transient capital, on the other hand, has comparatively less stable ties to production systems as well as other social relations, and is thus more difficult to control organizationally. Concerning vertical integration, our hypotheses is only partially supported Looking at the interface between state and economic organizations in the primary sectors and non-embedded sectors such as finance and insurance, we find the data quite in accordance with our hypotheses. Cases with a medium level of embeddedness do not, however, fit our hypotheses as well as the sectors at the two extreme ends.