Herbert,Hercules and the Plural Society: A “Knot” in the Social Bond

“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.”     

Coping with the demographic challenge: fewer children and living longer

Due to demographic changes, the U.S. Social Security system will face financial challenges in the near future. Declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancies are causing the U.S. population to age. Today 12 percent of the total population is aged 65 or older, but by 2080, it will be 23 percent. At the same time, the working-age population is shrinking from 60 percent today to a projected 54 percent in 2080. Consequently, the Social Security system is experiencing a declining worker-to-beneficiary ratio, which will fall from 3.3 in 2005 to 2.1 in 2040 (the year in which the Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted). This presents a significant challenge to policymakers. One policy option that could help keep the Social Security system solvent is to reduce retirement benefits, either by raising the normal retirement age or through life expectancy indexing, to reflect the fact that people are living longer. However, these reductions in benefits have the potential to harm economically vulnerable retirees. Other options, such as progressive price indexing proposals, explicitly protect the retirement benefits of low lifetime earners. Still other options would seek to raise additional revenue for the system. Since individuals will be living longer in retirement, many policymakers believe it is important to encourage older workers to delay retirement so that they can maintain a quality standard of living throughout their retirement. One proposal to encourage continued work would be to increase the early eligibility age for Social Security benefits from age 62 to age 65. This could possibly hurt individuals who need to retire from physically demanding jobs but would ensure that people receive higher benefit amounts once they were able to fully retire. Other proposals that could promote more work at older ages include expanding phased retirement options and reforming pension and defined contribution systems to create incentives to work and save.     

When Policies Undo Themselves: Self‐Undermining Feedback as a Source of Policy Change

Most studies of policy feedback have focused on processes of self‐reinforcement through which programs bolster their own bases of political support and endure or expand over time. This article develops a theoretical framework for identifying feedback mechanisms through which policies can become self‐undermining over time, increasing the likelihood of a major change in policy orientation. We conceptualize and illustrate three types of self‐undermining feedback mechanisms that we expect to operate in democratic politics: the emergence of unanticipated losses for mobilized social interests, interactions between strategic elites and loss‐averse voters, and expansions of the menu of policy alternatives. We also advance hypotheses about the conditions under which each mechanism is likeliest to unfold. In illuminating endogenous sources of policy change, the analysis builds on efforts by both historically oriented and rationalist scholars to understand how institutions change and seeks to expand political scientists’ theoretical toolkit for explaining policy development over time.     

Highway Robbery: Testing the Impact of Interstate Highways on Robbery

Research has shown that the occurrence of crime is based on multiple factors including a variety of geographical characteristics. Previous researchers have suggested that the environmental feature of the interstate system has an influence on crime. For this study, we test for a relationship between interstate presence and robbery at the county-level in Georgia. Additionally, we test whether or not urban/rural differences affect this relationship. Findings are consistent with previous research showing that the number of interstate exits in a county significantly increases crime; in this case the robbery rate.     

Setting political priorities: What role for the press?

This article reviews briefly the relationship between the press and politics in the United States, using one influential press lord, Roy W. Howard, as a case study. It also reviews the results of social science research on media effects, with an emphasis on studies of agenda‐setting, and raises questions about who sets the media agenda in light of the 1988 U.S. presidential election. Finally, it draws some conclusions about the influence of the news media in setting political priorities and, thus, influencing the political process in the United States.     

Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: examining anti-black jokes on the Internet

Racist humour is frequently the subject of media and public debate in relation to issues of offence and acceptability. Despite this, little has been done to analyse it or its relationship to other forms of racism. I argue that an analysis of racist humour needs to account for the rhetorical structures of humour – to consider humour as a rhetorical device similar to metaphor or metonym – that has a persuasive potential. Using jokes from four US websites, the rhetorical aspects of humour are unpacked through the use of rhetorical discourse analysis and semiotic theories of humour. I then identify an important effect of racist humour. Zygmunt Bauman's ideas on the problem of ambivalence for dichotomous discourse and category formation are employed to argue that racist humour expresses racist dichotomies and has the potential, among others, to “hide” the ambivalence to which such dichotomies are prone. The article then considers the meaning and ambivalence of less severe racist joking.