Explaining variation in the competitiveness of U.S. Senate elections, 1922–2004

We develop and test predictions about the factors determining the competitiveness of elections to the U.S. Senate. To do so, we deliberately abstract away from candidate-specific conditions that have often been used to study political competitiveness in order to focus on basic structural features of the electoral landscape. In our framework, party-specific constraints on the ideological positioning of local candidates, linked to the national party organization and its contributors, interact with the heterogeneity of state electorates to determine the number of highly competitive Senate contests. Three hypotheses emerge from this model: (1) the greater the diversity of a party’s national legislative delegation, the more highly competitive Senate elections we will observe; (2) states in which the ideological heterogeneity of the electorate is relatively high will exhibit a greater number of highly competitive elections; and (3) highly competitive Senate contests will be more common in states with closed primaries than in states with open primaries. We provide strong evidence in support of the first two hypotheses and some evidence in support of the third.     

South Africa in a comparative study of industrialization

The peculiarities of South African society, where class, ethnic, linguistic and national cleavages overlap, tend to obscure the process which have led to industrialization. This is unfortunate because a study of South African social structures may shed light on the wider problems of development. An attempt is made in the article to compare political and economic developments in South Africa with similar developments in Tsarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the American South. It is suggested, for example, that the German ‘marriage of iron and rye’ has a counterpart in the relationship between maize and gold in South Africa and that similar political consequences follow. The organization of the South African mining compound is considered, in its formulating effect upon the peculiar process of urbanization in South Africa. This particular form of urbanization has resulted in the creation of a very considerable surplus for investment, the implications of which are discussed.     

The Purity Thesis

Hans Kelsen’s purity thesis is the basic methodological principle of the Pure Theory of Law. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that virtually everything that is peculiar to Kelsen’s legal theory stems from the purity thesis. This includes Kelsen’s normativism or non‐naturalism and his polemic against various dualisms in legal science. I set out Kelsen’s position on these issues after looking at the nomenclature of purity in his writings as well as the philosophical and contextual sources of purity as he understands them.     

Political Influence,Economic Interests and Endogenous Tax Structure in a Computable Equilibrium Framework: With Application to the United States, 1973 and 1983

We consider the properties of a computable equilibrium model ofa competitive political economy in which the economic interestsof groups of voters and their effective influence on equilibriumpolicy outcomes can be explicitely distinguished and computed.The model incorporates an amended version of the GEMTAP taxmodel, calibrated to data for the United States for 1973 and1983. Emphasis is placed on how the aggregation of GEMTAPhouseholds into homogeneous groups affects the numericalrepresentation of interests and influence for representativemembers of each group.     

Analyzing the Contracting-Out of Government Services: Relevant Cost-Benefit Considerations

This article reviews various approaches to analyzing the contracting-out decision and distills a set of cost/benefit considerations which each analysis must address in order to properly ascertain whether there is any advantage to contracting out as compared to performing the work in-house. The author describes an approach to analyzing the contracting-out decision that begins with an unambiguous, comprehensive statement of service goals to facilitate the measurement of outcomes and is followed by an examination of the other considerations on the cost side of the equation which are basic to the proper measurement of all direct costs, indirect costs, and social costs.     

Teenage kicks: Urban narratives of dissent not deviance

This article utilises contemporary social and cultural theory in an interrogation of the ideological construction of activities nominated as social problems. Specifically the article analyses the events of computer hacking, joyriding and raving, activities which are prevalent within youth culture. These activities have been subjected to criminal sanction and regulation and therefore bought within an arena of (governmental) surveillance. This article assesses these events not within the paradigms of criminology and deviancy but as examples of an affirmative cultural politics operative through the technologies of inversion and appropriation which are in excess. These subcultural events assume the status of resistant practices not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of alternative narratives of dissensus representing possible moments of community.     

Economic self-interest and the vote: Evidence and meaning

The issue of personal economic self-interest — people responding politically to changes in their financial well-being — has been a central focus in the economic voting literature. In a recent article, Kramer (1983) contended that people may be acting in a personally self-interested manner despite findings to the contrary from survey research analyses. In another article, Sears and Lau (1983) argued that findings of economic self-interest from survey data may be artifactual and that self-interested behavior may be even weaker than previously thought. In this paper I review the literature on economic self-interest and attempt to determine to what extent people do act on the basis of their financial well-being and under what conditions this is most likely.