Correction to: Crafting anti-corruption agencies’ bureaucratic reputation: an uphill battle

Crime, Law and Social Change - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-021-09948-z     

Closeness matters: monotonicity failure in IRV elections with three candidates

A striking attribute of instant runoff voting (IRV) is that it is subject to monotonicity failure—that is, getting more (first-preference) votes may result in defeat for a candidate who would otherwise have won and getting fewer votes may result in victory for a candidate who otherwise would have lost. Proponents of IRV have argued that monotonicity failure, while a mathematical possibility, is highly unlikely to occur in practice. This paper specifies the precise conditions under which this phenomenon arises in three-candidate elections and applies them to a number of large simulated data sets in order to get a sense of the likelihood of IRV’s monotonicity problem in varying circumstances. The basic finding is that the problem is significant in many circumstances and very substantial when IRV elections are closely contested by three candidates.     

The Alternative Vote and Coombs Rule versus First-Past-the-Post: a social choice analysis of simulated data based on English elections, 1992–2010

This paper presents a social choice analysis, using simulated data based on English general elections from 1992 through 2010, of the properties of three voting rules: First-Past-the-Post, the Alternative Vote, and the Coombs Rule. More specifically, the paper examines (1) the plurality, anti-plurality, and Condorcet status of candidates in each election and the interrelationships among these statuses, (2) the effects of strict and partial single-peakedness of voter preferences, and (3) the identity of winners, Condorcet efficiency, and the relationship between votes and seats under the three voting rules. The analysis considers only the case of three candidates and, in the manner of basic social choice theory, the set of candidates and voter preferences over them are taken to be fixed.     

Widowhood Effects in Voter Participation

Past research suggests that spouses influence one another to vote, but it relies almost exclusively on correlation in turnout. It is therefore difficult to establish whether spouses mobilize each other or tend to marry similar others. Here, we test the dependency hypothesis by examining voting behavior before and after the death of a spouse. We link nearly six million California voter records to Social Security death records and use both coarsened exact matching and multiple cohort comparison to estimate the effects of spousal loss. The results show that after turnout rates stabilize, widowed individuals vote nine percentage points fewer than they would had their spouse still been living; the results also suggest that this change may persist indefinitely. Variations in this “widowhood effect” on voting support a social‐isolation explanation for the drop in turnout.     

The nature of economic perceptions in mass publics

Voters who believe that the nation's economy has been worsening are more inclined to vote against the incumbent president than are those who believe it has not been getting worse. This relationship could be present because voters condition their support for the incumbents upon their perceptions of the economy, or, alternatively, because they condition their perceptions of the economy upon their underlying, partisan-based support of the incumbents.     

The phenomenology of sharing: social media networking,asserting, and telling

This article takes up the current promise of computer‐aided social networks as mechanisms for sharing in experiences. The author examines social networks phenomenologically, not merely as a tool for providing information and shaping what we think but as a social construct for what can be shared, how we think, and what can be known. The analysis identifies a connection between social networks and artificial intelligence systems, while also suggesting that significant experiential gaps built into the systems can lead to distortions in the ontology of shared experiences. The author argues, by applying concepts from Kant, Arendt, Schutz, and Heidegger, that computerized social networks offer an unparalleled opportunity for public administrators to discover and learn about social conditions, but these networks are not without significant limitations. An appreciation for the limits to sharing implicit in computerized social networks and artificial intelligence systems can be made explicit by applying concepts from phenomenology. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Coalitions: Beyond the Politics of Centrality?

This article examines the character of oppositional movements in the GDR in the light of post‐Wende revelations of Stasi infiltration. We look at responses by members of the alternative culture to accusations that their work during the GDR was rendered ineffective by the Stasi and is consequently of little importance to a historical reappraisal of the GDR. Whilst they were clearly aware of the Stasi, whose influence did have an effect, our evidence suggests that this influence was not total. Current debates about the Stasi are creating an unbalanced view of the actual situation in the GDR before 1989 in that the Stasi is being portrayed as an organisation of almost Orwellian Big Brother proportions. Our article attempts to deconstruct this paradigm and argues that the complicity of the few with the MfS should not invalidate the activities of the majority of those involved in the alternative culture.     

Inventing Egypt for the Emerging British Travel Class: Amelia Edwards' A Thousand Miles up the Nile

In 1877, the Victorian-era writer Amelia Edwards published a travelogue of her first excursion to Egypt. By placing her work within the context of British–Egyptian relations during the late nineteenth century, this article argues that works like hers created a romantic notion of ancient Egypt for the English middle class, and helped spawn English tourism to Egypt. Travel to Egypt encouraged popular support for Egyptology that ultimately helped the field to develop into a celebrated discipline. A variety of unpublished, archival material from the British National Archives and a collection of Amelia Edwards' private papers support these conclusions.