Incrementalism before the Storm: Network Performance for the Evacuation of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of preparedness in disaster management networks covering the New Orleans area. This paper focuses on the operation of networks in preparing to evacuate residents in advance of a major disaster. There are two cases: the relatively successful evacuation of residents who left by private conveyance and the widely publicized failure to provide for those who could not or would not leave on their own. We trace the actions and inactions of various players to reach conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of networks in the special circumstances of disaster preparation.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

Dead Heat: The 2006 Public Choice Society Election

In 2006, the Public Choice Society chose a new president using approval voting. There were five candidates, and the election was extremely close. We indicate the sources of support of the different candidates, based in part on spectral analysis, by voters who cast between one and five votes. Using preference information that was also gathered, we show that two candidates different from the approval voting winner, including the apparent Condorcet winner, might have won under different voting systems. Because most voters did not indicate their complete preference rankings, however, these differences are hardly robust, especially since the outcome was essentially a dead heat.     

Besprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The Determinants of Political Knowledge in Comparative Perspective

Political knowledge is a powerful predictor of political participation. Moreover, what citizens know about the political system and its actors is a central aspect of informed voting. This article investigates how and why political knowledge varies between citizens. The analysis is comparative and based on data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. At the micro level, the results confirm results from national surveys – specifically that education explains what citizens know about politics. It is found in a contextualized analysis, however, that the effect of education varies with the country's degree of economic redistribution. In more egalitarian countries, political knowledge is less contingent on education attained than in more inegalitarian countries. Similarly, education seems to have a stronger effect in countries with majoritarian electoral systems compared to countries with proportional systems.     

Explaining individual-level support for privatization in European post-Soviet economies

Abstract. This article explores the sources of individual-level variation in support economic privatization in seven European post-Soviet countries. It tests economic utilitarian and psychological explanations of variations in support for economic privatization. The economic utilitarian explanation posits that individuals seek to maximize their potential material gains from economic liberalization. The psychological explanation posits that if individuals are generally risk averse, they are not likely to support economic privatization. These hypotheses are then tested using two separate regression models. The first model estimates pooled data from across all seven European post-Soviet economies. The second model is a pooled analysis that interacts country-specific dummy variables with each of the independent variables in order to examine the country-specific effects of the responses. The results show that the economic utilitarian and psychological explanations are both strong predictors of why some support and others oppose privatization in the seven European post-Soviet countries.