Shirking and sorting in a political market with finite-lived politicians

This paper analyzes principal-agent slack in the context of a political market composed of voters, challengers, and incumbents. The introduction of a last period (via finite-livedness) in combination with voters' imperfect information about politicians' preferences causes time-varying shirking behavior on the part of politicians. Political markets eventually sort out those politicians with significantly deviant policy preferences, potentially providing a solution to the last period problem and enabling politicians to make credible commitments. In the extreme, sorting can insure that it is not worthwhile for potential shirkers to run for office. A systematic relationship between political shirking and number of terms in office may exist, and depends on how quickly sorting takes place. We show that evidence of little if any shirking is quite consistent with politicians having diverse and strongly held policy preferences. In addition, if sorting is a significant feature of political markets, cross-sectional studies will tend to oversample little- and non-shirking politicians compared to longitudinal studies. Reinterpretations of existing empirical work are also discussed.We wish to thank John Bond, Donald Deere, Gertrud Fremling, Tim Gronberg, Michael Munger, Russell Roberts, and the participants of workshops at Dartmouth College, Texas A&M University, University of Houston, University of Texas, Yale Law School, and the 1987 Public Choice Meetings for valuable discussions on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was issued as working paper E-87-34 by the Hoover Institution. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Sentencing Commission nor those of any of its Commissioners. Any remaining errors are of course our own.     

Whose wants in ‘needs-based planning’? Some examples of unwritten agendas from the provincial integrated rural development programmes of Papua New Guinea

The rhetoric of ‘needs’-based planning requires little refining. What must be questioned and recognized are the values of decision makers and the unwritten agendas of those involved in the planning process. Taking the example of some of the integrated rural development programmes (IRDPs) in Papua New Guinea, this paper looks at the way planners and others cast development and information ‘nets’. These nets abrogate indigenous development processes. The ‘nets’ make it easy for development professionals and others involved in planning to follow unwritten agendas and difficult for target groups to articulate their ‘needs’ and to understand what is going on. It is suggested that these problems are not unique to PNG and may well be relevant to ‘needs based planning’ in other situations.     

Differentiating specialists and generalists within college students' social support networks

In order to examine the relationships among social network structure, types of social support, and determinants of support satisfaction, an alternative method was used to score the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ). Factor analysis procedures suggested that college students' (N=198) social networks consisted of four groups: nuclear family, other family, friends, and others. Satisfaction with support was positively related to the proportion of the network occupied by nuclear family and negatively related to the proportion of friends in the network. Evidence was found for the presence of both support specialists and support generalists in the networks of the college students. These results are discussed from a developmental perspective with attention to the implications for interventions.     

Communication and connectedness in mother- and father-adolescent relationships

In Study 1, 605 adolescents estimated how well their parents knew them and said how much they cared what their parents thought about them. Sons and daughters judged that mothers knew them fairly well, but daughters judged that fathers did not know them so well. At the same time, statements of caring indicated high concern by sons and daughters for both parents. A supplemental result was that sons from white-collar families gave relatively low estimates of how much their mothers knew them and daughters from blue-collar families gave very low estimates of how much their fathers knew them. In Study 2, 52 adolescents from single-parent families and living with their mothers but not with their fathers also gave estimates for knowing and caring. Knowing followed the above pattern, with an expected lowering of estimates for fathers by sons and daughters. Further, estimates of caring declined especially for fathers by daughters. These results add to the growing literature that shows mother-adolescent and father-adolescent relationships contribute differentially to psychological development. The results seem especially relevant for adolescents' sex role development and constructed individuality as mediated through relationships with both parents.Received Ph.D. in experimental psychology from The Catholic University of America. Research interests are in social development, developmental theory, and the history of the concept of psychological development.Received Ph.D. in developmental psychology from The Catholic University of America. Research interests are in social development in adolescence and the effects of parental divorce on development.