Israel and Palestine: the slow road to peace or the fast track to mutual annihilation?

This paper outlines the nature of the post World War II conflict between Israel and Palestine over land and borders. It demonstrates the weaknesses in the political systems of both countries that make it difficult to resolve outstanding differences. It examines the nature of bargaining costs, distinguishing clearly between the Coase and the Machiavelli theorem. It uses the hawk–dove game model to explain war and peace relationships between Israel and Palestine evident over the period 1948–2007. It evaluates the implications for the peace process of some future proliferation of nuclear arms that breaks Israeli nuclear hegemony in the Middle East.     

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.     

Use of Force

This issue of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, isdevoted principally to the use of force, a topic that has dominatedacademic debate and preoccupied practitioners. For academics,the question is: what distinguishes police officers and theorganisations in which they operate from others, particularlythose growing legions of private security operatives, un-swornpolice auxiliaries, and sundry officials with law enforcementpowers? The orthodox answer is that the police enjoy a ‘monopolyof legitimate force’ over their fellow citizens (a viewthat has its origins in the pioneering work of Bittner, 1970).That orthodoxy has increasingly been criticised in the faceof the obvious fact that bouncers, store detectives, securityguards of all kinds, and many others also exercise ‘legitimateforce’ in ejecting drunken customers from pubs and clubs,apprehending shoplifters, and defending     

Workers, worries and welfare states: Social protection and job insecurity in 15 OECD countries

Abstract.  This article examines a model of the domestic political economy of subjective employment insecurity in advanced industrial societies. Based on data on people's attitudes toward their job as well as levels of and kinds of social protection collected in 15 OECD countries, it shows that there are distinct manifestations of job insecurity that are affected differently by distinct aspects of social protection programs. While the analysis shows that social protection measures reduce employment insecurity, it also reveals that overall levels welfare state generosity do not have any systematic effect on whether workers feel secure. The article's findings suggest the need to decompose the different components of employment insecurity as well as disaggregate national systems of social protection when examining the impact of welfare states on job insecurity.     

Detectives Stories and City Life

Detective stories take place mainly in two settings, constantly changing, many faceted big cities filled with strangers, and stable, fairly homogeneous, innocent small towns whose members know one another. The differences in each clarify the qualities of the other. In solving the mystery of the small town, the detective provides moral instruction and restores the town’s innocence. In solving the mystery in the big city the detective reveals the city as part of the mystery and provides the reader with temporary orientation to the city. Mysteries have grown with the growth of the cities and now appear in every country of the world. Harold J. Bershady is an emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, edited with Renée Fox and Victor Lidz, is After Parson: A Theory of Action for the 21st Century, published by Russell Sage Press, 2005.     

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? The Impact of Information on Mass Attitudes toward Congress

Two features of citizen response to Congress can be taken as grounds for concern. First, Americans know relatively little about Congress, and especially about congressional procedures and policy output. Second, Congress typically emerges as the least respected political institution. Although these matters are troubling when viewed individually, more disturbing is the dilemma posed when knowledge and attitudes toward Congress are viewed in tandem. It appears that citizens who know Congress the best like Congress the least. Consequently, a sophisticated polity and a well-respected legislature seem fundamentally incompatible. This article seeks to resolve this dilemma, contending that there is nothing about knowledge per se that leads citizens to view Congress unfavorably. Rather, differences in knowledge levels alter the considerations citizens bring to bear when evaluating Congress, with the best-informed individuals constructing judgments on the basis of the most relevant Congress-specific criteria while less knowledgeable citizens employ readily available but more peripheral criteria.     

Strategic Party Government: Party Influence in Congress, 1789–2000

Why does the influence of Congressional parties fluctuate over time? Building on prevailing answers, we develop a model, Strategic Party Government, which highlights the electoral motives of legislative parties and the strategic interaction between parties. We test this theory using the entire range of House and Senate party behavior from 1789 to 2000 and find that the strategic behavior of parties complements members' preferences as an explanation for variation in party influence. Specifically, the strongest predictors of one party's voting unity are the unity of the opposing party and the difference between the parties in the preceding year. Moreover, we find strong links between party behavior in Congress and electoral outcomes: an increase in partisan influence on legislative voting has adverse electoral costs, while winning contested votes has electoral benefits.     

Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court

Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion-writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court's median justice effectively dictates the content of the majority opinion: whatever policy the median justice most wants, she can get. We test these competing models with data on Supreme Court decision making during the Burger Court (1969–86). While we find substantial evidence for both models, the agenda control model gains greater support. This suggests that opinions on the Court on each case are driven, in general, by the interaction of three key variables: the policy preferences of the majority opinion author, the policy preferences of the median justice, and the location of the legal status quo .     

Factors in successful program implementation in Russia during the transition: pilot programs as a guide

While much of the implementation literature over the past several decades has recognised the importance of context (e.g. in issues of institutional culture, degree of hierarchy), little of the literature comparing the results of numerous program implementation experiences examines the experience of non‐Western contexts. This study seeks to partially fill this gap by applying the ‘conventional wisdom’ of implementation theory to program implementation experience in Russia. We analyse the implementation of 18 demonstration projects in Russia against 9 success factors identified in the implementation literature. Most of the pilots involved multiple cities; so there are a total of 48 city‐case observations to study. Overall, the findings are that the factors associated with successful program implementation among OECD countries are also those at work in Russia's transitional economy. The weights associated with the various factors may differ, however. One could imagine, for example, that political support counts for more in Russia than in the western local governments. One might also believe that opportunities for learning from other implementers could be more important in the West, where professional associations are more highly developed. The core finding of consistency should be valuable to administrators across transitional economies who can now refer to the rich findings of implementation research with greater confidence of its applicability to their programs. Perhaps equally important is the finding that some of the same factors predominantly associated with successful or troubled implementation in Russia have similar effects in implementation examples drawn from transition and developing nations; there are, however, some important differences. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.