Coming to Terms with Intramural Differences Over Policy Frameworks: How Policy Researchers Accommodate Rival Claims Among their Peers

Although we readily scrutinize conflicts among political stakeholders, similar attention is seldom paid to how we deal with contestable understandings within our own field of inquiry. Debates over competing scholarly perspectives and contested models are rarely subject to any systematic postmortem or attempts to account for differential survival. Given the indeterminacy of many of our conceptual schemes, empirical data seldom carry the day to a resolution all can accept. Accordingly, there are eventually many different versions of any given dispute, each offering a different path to resolution or equanimity. Disputants retire and conflicts fade, providing a demographic resolution of sorts, but not a scientific or a conceptual one. The work presented here claims that there is much to be gained from systematic scrutiny of our conceptual disputes, especially as a means to access the different perspectives we assume to handle them. We argue that there is an internal logic to the different perspectives on any given dispute. It is not the dispute per se that draws our interest; but rather, how any given dispute generates multiple interpretations and reconstructed versions. We propose and illustrate an approach to analyzing disputes that makes their internal logic more transparent and attends to the pathways that emerge for resolution. We will find, in the process, that there are some reliable routes to conciliation and some fault lines that remain unstable.     

THE STATE SOCIALIST WELFARE SYSTEM and the POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC HOUSING REFORM IN URBAN CHINA

This aticle analyses China's housing reform against the background that a new housing policy has been implemented since 1988. The crucial point of the 1998 housing policy package is to stop the allocation system of state‐subsidized public housing. By changing this rule of the game, a major institutional obstacle to housing reform will be removed, and some unfeasible policy measures become feasible within the new institutional context.     

Self-imposed term limits

In “Reconciling voters' behavior with legislative term limits,” Dick and Lott argue that since more senior representatives are better at rent-seeking, there is an inefficient tendency to re-elect incumbents. In their model, term limits are preferred collectively by constituencies, even though no constituency would independently oust its incumbent representative. However, many term limits are unilaterally self-imposed (in particular the 22nd amendment limiting presidents' terms to two), and their model cannot explain these limits. In this comment, I suggest that term limits may be self-imposed by risk-averse voters, who prefer cycling between left and right wing candidates to a once-and-for-all election that imposes a candidate of a single ideology on the entre electorate. The market failure that makes term limits helpful is that out of power minorities cannot bribe the median voter.     

Chinese nationalism,Taiwan autonomy and the prospects of a larger war

In contrast to the belief that the 1995–1996 Taiwan Straits crisis was caused by the visit of the President of Taiwan to Cornell University, in fact, the post‐Mao ruling groups in Beijing made forcing early reunification with mainland China on Taiwan a top priority soon after assuming power in 1978. This new focus on Taiwan's reunification reflects a policy switch. It is not a continuation of Mao era policies. The switch is basic. It involves a profound change in the content of Chinese nationalism from Mao era nationalism, which is seen by its critics in China as insufficiently promoting the national interests of the Chinese people. The new, post‐Mao nationalism in China not only challenges Taiwan's autonomy, it also could endanger peace in the Pacific‐Asia region. Consequently, it is important to rethink the political dynamics at work in China and in the region if the parties involved hope to avoid a larger war.     

A Classification Tree Approach to the Development of Actuarial Violence Risk Assessment Tools

Since the 1970s, a wide body of research has suggested that the accuracy of clinical risk assessments of violence might be increased if clinicians used actuarial tools. Despite considerable progress in recent years in the development of such tools for violence risk assessment, they remain primarily research instruments, largely ignored in daily clinical practice. We argue that because most existing actuarial tools are based on a main effects regression approach, they do not adequately reflect the contingent nature of the clinical assessment processes. To enhance the use of actuarial violence risk assessment tools, we propose a classification tree rather than a main effects regression approach. In addition, we suggest that by employing two decision thresholds for identifying high- and low-risk cases--instead of the standard single threshold--the use of actuarial tools to make dichotomous risk classification decisions may be further enhanced. These claims are supported with empirical data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study.     

Potential role of the MNC as an agent of technology transfer for economic development

There is evidence that the multinational corporation (MNC) and a developing nation may have a set of mutually beneficial goals. This article investigates the goals of the multinational corporation and the goals of a developing nation. It then illustrates the mutual benefits in terms of resource identification, and technology selection and development. A planning mechanism is suggested. Finally, some guide lines are offered that should enhance the probability of cooperation.