Assessing policy stability in Iraq: a fuzzy approach to?modeling preferences

The first Council of Representatives elected under the new Iraqi Constitution was unable to pass legislation required to achieve the political benchmarks set by the government. We argue that the exercise of a qualified veto by the three-member Presidency Council essentially required near unanimity among the nine parties of the governing coalition. Given the policy positions of these parties, unanimity was not possible. Our analysis makes use of a fuzzy veto players model. The placement of the government parties along a single dimension based on fuzzy preference measures derived from party text data reveals no common area of agreement.     

‘“Keeping Tabs” on Coalition Partners’: a Theoretically Salient Case Study of Lithuanian Coalitional Governments

Portfolio allocation raises the potential for de facto abdication on a broad range of policy issues among coalition partners. Recent scholarship has addressed how parties in governing coalitions ‘keep tabs’ on each other in order to avoid such abdication. Two mechanisms have been identified: junior ministerial appointments and chairs of parliamentary oversight committees. We argue that the former is the most common method for intra-coalitional oversight in the Lithuanian parliament and that a combination of the two appears to be employed for monitoring the activities of the most important ministries. We conjecture that dependence on junior ministerial oversight is more likely among coalition partners in less institutionalised parliaments.     

Law as/of Property,Judgment as Dissension: Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions in the Networks

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

A community paradigm of organized crime

This article reviews the available empirical research on organized crime and suggests that an important dimension of that research is the close symbiosis between organized crime groups and the communities in which they operate. As such, it is hypothesized that the concept of community may be important to explaining the persistence and durability of organized crime. A community model proposed by Roland Warren, which seeks to integrate much of the sociological literature on the community, and which delineates the basic functions of the community is presented as a means of organizing the available date about organized crime and explaining organized crime’s functional and latent aspects.     

Justifications for the sharing of social science data

Starting with the premise that voluntary sharing of social science data is a desirable professional behavior, this article discusses a variety of justifications for data sharing. These justifications are found to be grounded in the scientific process itself—in the need for science that is more accurate, more open, more knowledgeable, and has more resources at its disposal. Although it is evident that the costs and benefits of data sharing are now unevenly distributed, and that primary researchers currently bear most of the burden and risks, it is argued that the adoption of a data-sharing norm in the social sciences would go a long way to remedy the imbalance. In this regard, the author supports the 1985 data-sharing recommendations put forth by the Committee on National Statistics.This article is based on a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 23, 1986.U.S. General Accounting Office. The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the GAO.