Lobbying when the decisionmaker can acquire independent information

Politicians trade off the cost of acquiring and processing information against the benefit of being re-elected. Lobbyists may possess private information upon which politicians would like to rely without the effort of verification. If the politician does not try to verify, however, the lobbyist has no incentive to be truthful. This is modelled as a game in which the lobbyist lobbies to show his conviction that the electorate is on his side. In equilibrium, sometimes the politician investigates, and sometimes the information is false. The lobbyists and the electorate benefit from the possibility of lobbying when the politician would otherwise vote in ignorance, but not when he would otherwise acquire his own information. The politician benefits in either case. Lobbying is most socially useful when the politician's investigation costs are high, when he is more certain of the electorate's views, and when the issue is less important.     

La nacionalización del hogar en España

The nationalization of the domestic sphere in Spain is a topic that has been largely ignored. Recently, the interest in the study of banal nationalism and the impact of nationalism on everyday life has been on the rise, particularly for the Francoist and democratic era; however, its origins are not clear at all. An examination of developments in domestic architecture, interior decoration, and even gardening shows that the domestic sphere was nationalized during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Regionalist architecture was in vogue for villas and country-houses and furniture was increasingly modeled after local artisanal traditions. Domestic practices such as cooking, consuming, and cleaning were also increasingly connected with supposedly “national” traditions. During this period Spanish cuisine and many of its regional dishes were “invented”. The first phase of the nationalization of the domestic sphere in Spain is analyzed using a wide array of primary sources (press, manuals, speeches, etc.), thus contributing to the history of nationalism, gender studies, the history of architecture, and food studies, which by focusing on modernization processes largely disregarded this profound nationalization of the private sphere.     

Status and practices of the legal text

Translated by Isabelle Llasera from Statut et pratiques du texte juridique, in D. Bourcier and P. Mackay (eds.),Lire le droit. Langue, texte, cognition (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1992).     

Lessons from the Gang Lu Murders

This paper offers a critical review and reflection of the 1991 University of Iowa shootings. Gang Lu, a disgruntled Iowa graduate student, was initially angered over perceived slights he was receiving from his academic department. When he felt that his concerns were left unanswered by the University, he decided to seek revenge on those whom he felt were responsible. In doing so, he murdered five individuals and paralyzed another before taking his own life. This paper seeks to reflect on these shootings twenty years after the occurrence and to offer a discussion of some of the larger societal themes raised by this tragedy.     

Irreplaceable Legislators? Rethinking Minority Representatives in the New Century

We use state legislator ideology estimates (standardized W‐nominate values) to examine whether Latino and African American legislator ideological differences can be explained away by traditional constituency characteristics like partisanship and demographics. We find instead that both Black and Latino legislators are unique “types.” Our evidence supports the theoretical presumption that there is a minority dimension to legislative voting and that it is uniquely personified by minority officeholders. White, Black, Latino, Democrat, and Republican representatives are all examined for responsiveness to different partisan and racial/ethnic populations. The dataset includes all 50 state legislatures from the 1999–2000 legislative sessions, including information from the U.S. Census, NALEO, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Gerald Wright's Representation in the American Legislature Project, and CQ Press's Almanac of State Legislative Elections.