Do Remittances Diminish Social Violence?

This paper represents the first attempt to formalise the relationship between remittances and social violence by developing a model that predicts that migrants’ remittances lead to the reduction of social violence in the recipient economy under the condition that remittances increase the average product of labour. Using homicide data as an indicator of social violence, we tested our model’s prediction. Controlling for the endogeneity problem with appropriate instruments, we found that remittances tend to reduce social violence. We performed sensitivity analysis on remittances in the empirical specification and found it robust with an unchanged negative sign.     

Do Labour Parties Suffer from Declining Turnout? Evidence from Norwegian Local Elections

The argument that declining voter turnout harms social democratic parties has received little support in research on national elections, but partisan consequences of declining turnout in local elections has been less explored. Norwegian local elections – where both turnout and support for the Labour Party have declined since the early 1960s – are used as a test case. Analyses of aggregate data gave no systematic support for the hypothesis that Labour suffers from lower turnout. Declining turnout and declining Labour Party vote were not causally related, and the correlation between the two variables seemed to be the result of other long-term social changes. Analyses of survey data pointed to three flaws in the premises on which the hypothesis was based. First, the effect of declining turnout on the biased class composition of the abstainers was ambiguous. Second, the Norwegian Labour Party suffers less from differential turnout than before as a result of declining class voting. Third, the Labour Party may suffer from a demobilisation of the working class, but the party may also benefit from a demobilisation of the young.     

Terrorism: Review of 1988 and prospects for 1989

This article is the first to explore the Israel Defense Forces's official statistical data on Palestinian terrorism toward Israeli targets during the al-Aqsa intifada 2000–2004. Focusing the analysis on the logic of terrorist target choice, the article identifies two separate results: First, an unambiguous difference in the form of the attacks contingent on whether they are carried out in the state of Israel or in the Occupied Territories. Second, based on the same distinction, the analysis points out how the attacks are targeted toward distinctively different categories of the Israeli populace. Causes of the results are discussed.     

Social Norms and the Paradox of Elections’ Turnout

People vote although their marginal gain from voting is zero.We contribute to the resolution of this paradox by presentinga model for equilibrium configuration of attitudes regardingthe decision to vote. Each individual is seen as an element ofa social network, within which pairs of individuals expressideas and attitudes, exerting mutual influence. We model therole of such networks in propagating the mutual influenceacross pairs of individuals. We show that it may suffice thata small set of individuals have a strong feeling about showingup to vote to generate a significant turnout in elections.     

The European Union and gender mainstreaming: Constitutionally embedded or comprehensively marginalised?

This paper examines the extent to which gender mainstreaming is constitutionally embedded in the legal framework of the European Union. Within the framework of that broad question it examines three sub-questions concerning the robustness and constitutionalised nature of the E.U.'s `equality regime', the extent of adaptation to mainstreaming methodologies by supranational institutions such as the Court of Justice, and the extent of the gender dimension in the debates which are shaping the future of the European Union, especially the 2002–3Convention on the Future of the Union and the Commission's Governance White Paper of 2001.The E.U. is analysed in this article as an emergent, non-state, postnational constitutionalised polity. The first section presents this perspective, and the succeeding three sections engage with the three` sub-questions' outlined above. The conclusion suggests that as yet, while gender concerns maybe constitutionally embedded in the Treatyframe work, they are less prominent in the constitutional politics of the Convention and the Governance White Paper.