Party Strength,the Personal Vote,and Government Spending

“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are strong, then legislators will demand less distributive spending because of a decreased incentive to secure a “personal vote” via local projects. We estimate that spending in states with strong party organizations is at least 4% smaller than in states where parties are weak. We also find evidence that strong party states receive less federal aid than states with weak organizations, and we theorize that this is because members of Congress from strong party states feel less compelled to secure aid than members from weak party states.     

Ethnic and religious variations in the reporting of racist victimization in Britain: 2000 and 2008/2009

The role of victimization in the generation of ethnic inequalities is increasingly acknowledged yet its impact on the lives of people with different religious affiliations remains underexplored. This is despite evidence of the importance of religion for forms of group identification and social mobilization. An exploration of the particular impact of religion as a focus for experiences of victimization may be particularly pertinent given the increasingly negative treatment of Muslim people since the riots in Britain of 2001, the terrorist incidents of 2001, 2004 and 2005 and the political and military responses to them. Cross-sectional analyses of data collected in 2000 and 2008/2009 explore whether there is evidence that the ethnic/religious patterning of reports of different forms of victimization have varied over time, after adjusting for the impact of age, gender, migration and socioeconomic differences between the groups. In 2000 Muslim people with different ethnic backgrounds were less likely, but by 2008/2009 were more likely, to report experiences of victimization than Caribbean Christians. However, the ethnic/religious patterning of perceptions of Britain as a ‘racist society’ were more consistent over time. This may suggest that, despite their increased exposure to victimization over the period, Muslim people in the United Kingdom have yet to experience the racialization characteristic of the treatment of Caribbean Christians, which requires a more prolonged exposure to racist negative attitudes. But this may be only a matter of time. The persistent expectation of poor treatment described by Caribbean Christians is testament to the difficulties of addressing these negative perceptions once racialized identities are embedded. Immediate action must be taken to prevent this occurring among other ethnic/religious minorities.     

An analysis of contributions and contributors to Public Choice and the Journal of Law and Economics; 1973–1987

Several conclusions may be drawn from the information we have presented here. First and without doubt, the University of Chicago is by far the most dominant force overall, and is particularly so with respect to the production of pages and papers published in the Journal of Law and Economics. The George Mason-Virginia Tech influence is strong with respect to Public Choice, but is not, in our opinion, dominant.One does not necessarily need to be located at a large, research-oriented school in order to publish in either journal, but these schools are the source of most contributions. This is particularly true of the JLE but significantly less so for PC. The source of contributions is very broad, but top 50 institutions account for the lion's share. Contributions by persons employed at foreign institutions are important, particularly for PC.     

Cycle avoiding trajectories,strategic agendas,and the duality of memory and foresight: An informal exposition

This paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes. The set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance. It may be dubbed the Banks set, in recognition of the important paper by Banks (1985) that first made use of this set. The purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the Banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting. In addition, we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another — embodying respectively, “dmemory” and “foresight.” We also show how to develop the idea of a “sophisticated agenda,” one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation.