Information,access, and contributions: A signaling model of lobbying

Interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker. If their interests are aligned with those of the policymaker's constituency, they have costless access and report their private information truthfully. If their interests conflict, they are forced to pay a strictly positive contribution in order to enhance the credibility of their reports. The policymaker bases her policy decision on the competing reports and the size of the contributions accompanying these reports. The interest groups' contribution decisions are plagued by a free rider problem. I derive the implications of this problem for the size and pattern of contributions and for the degree of information aggregation.     

The ignoble savage in urban Yerevan

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a recent development in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, described by its urban population as a ruralization process. I explore what it means to call something or someone ‘rural’ or ‘urban’, and I compare the social category of ‘rural people’ with the social category of the (old) urban intelligentsia. This includes an analysis and reconsideration of the traditional ‘nature–culture dichotomy’ and its meaning for the architecture and urban planning of Yerevan. It also interrogates the classification of people into newcomers from the countryside, urban dwellers, new elites, and young men called rabiz.     

Ist die Vergangenheit nicht mehr zu bewältigen?

Graf vertritt eine Auslegung des Begriffes der "extremen Ungerechtigkeit", die eine Berücksichtigung der normativen Vorgaben des Entsch?digungsfondsgesetzes vermissen l?sst. Der von ihm gemachte Rückgriff auf die laesio-enormis-Regelung im ABGB vermag aus dogmatischen Gründen nicht zu überzeugen. Die von Graf zur Untermauerung seiner Auslegungsvariante herangezogenen historischen Tatsachen werden ebenfalls einer kritischen Würdigung unterzogen. Der Beitrag über Liegenschaftsbewertungen zeigt die Probleme bei der Durchführung retrospektiver Wertermittlungen auf, die von Graf zur Beurteilung von Rückstellungsvergleichen eingefordert werden. Auch daher kann mit einem rein rechnerischen Zugang bei der Entscheidungsfindung der Schiedsinstanz nicht das Auslangen gefunden werden.     

Zur Bedeutung „transnationalen Sozialkapitals“: Sind Grenzgebiete Laboratorien sozialer Integration in Europa?

The article focuses on transnational relations in border regions. Social capital theory assumes that in border regions special opportunity structures exist for the social integration of the population of old and new member states of the European Union based on the specific possibilities for cross-border cooperation. Border regions may be seen as “laboratories of social integration”. The article discusses whether “transnational social capital” actually develops and to what extent it adds to the social integration of the regions and of Europe. Representative survey data from the German-Polish, German-Czech, and German-French border regions – gathered on both sides of the border – serve as the basis of the analysis. Results show that currently – especially on the old outer borders of the EU – the accumulated transnational social capital adds very little to social integration at the regional and European level.     

Introduction

Amongst recent debates about whether it is preferable to campaign for gender mainstreaming or diversity mainstreaming this paper makes the case that both proposals involve fields of contestation. Either reform, it argues, could be taken in anti‐progressive directions. Hence, we redirect attention to the processes and practices that give an initiative content and shape, which we call the politics of “doing”. The argument here is that the actual “doings” involved in producing reform initiatives are key sites for social change. Hence, in order to produce reforms responsive to the needs and wishes of diverse groups of women, attention ought to be directed to ways of making those “doings” inclusive and democratic. Specifically we highlight the importance of privileging the views of marginalized women in any such policy deliberations and respecting their perspectives on the usefulness of appeals to identity. We introduce the concepts of “coalitions of engagement” and “deep listening” to generate discussion around these contentious issues.     

Predictive Soil Provenancing (PSP): An Innovative Forensic Soil Provenance Analysis Tool

Soil is a common evidence type used in forensic and intelligence operations. Where soil composition databases are lacking or inadequate, we propose to use publicly available soil attribute rasters to reduce forensic search areas. Soil attribute rasters, which have recently become widely available at high spatial resolutions, typically three arc‐seconds (~90 m), are predictive models of the distribution of soil properties (with confidence limits) derived from data mining the inter‐relationships between these properties and several environmental covariates. Each soil attribute raster is searched for pixels that satisfy the compositional conditions of the evidentiary soil sample (target value ± confidence limits). We show through an example that the search area for an evidentiary soil sample can be reduced to <10% of the original investigation area. This Predictive Soil Provenancing (PSP) approach is a transparent, reproducible, and objective method of efficiently and effectively reducing the likely provenance area of forensic soil samples.