The Authority–Identity Relation: Symbolic References and Interpretative Authority in Postwar Kosovo

In postwar Kosovo, international and Kosovar political actors claiming authority in the democratization and statebuilding process lacked a long-standing ‘authoritative relation’ with each other and the citizenry. To analyse the structural conditions for the emergence of political authority, the article suggests applying the analytical framework of ‘interpretative authority’, which captures the relational character and simultaneity of authority generation by international and Kosovar actors. Given that Kosovo had unsecured symbolic conditions for authority – no commonly shared symbols of unity for all communities and no commonly agreed interpreter of symbols of unity – political actors were competing intensely for the identity and symbolizations of the ‘new’ Kosovo in their attempts to gain authority in various institutional opportunity structures. The competition over authority and the attempts to denationalize public communications made by the international administration, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), led to the reimbursement of particularistic symbolic references of Kosovar actors, thereby keeping the unsecured symbolic conditions and the weakness of interpretative political authority in Kosovo stable.     

Bargaining and Fighting: The Impact of Regime Type on War Onset, Duration, and Outcomes

Recent research suggests that democracies have advantages and disadvantages in wars. Democracies are more likely to win the wars they initiate and the ones in which they are targeted. Wars initiated by democracies are also uniformly shorter and less costly than wars initiated by nondemocracies. However, democracies are also less likely to continue fighting and less likely to win as war drags on. Democracies are also particularly likely to be targeted. We present a bargaining model that reconciles these divergent findings. The model explains why democracies are more likely to win but are also more likely to settle and more likely to be targeted than other types of regimes. The model's explanation of these facts differs in important ways from existing explanations. The model also suggests several new hypotheses relating regime type to the terms of settlement and the onset of war .     

Canada's voluntary ARET program: Limited success despite industry cosponsorship

The Accelerated Reduction/Elimination of Toxins (ARET) Challenge was a voluntary program initiated in 1994 by the Government of Canada. Unlike the U.S. 33/50 Program, ARET involved industry partners in negotiation and cosponsorship of the program, with the intention that early involvement would yield stronger commitment to voluntary reductions. We review the program's self‐reported success in delivering emissions reductions. For 17 ARET substances that were also covered by Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory, we employ treatment effects regressions to control for self‐selection bias. We find evidence that ARET accelerated emission reductions in five cases, slowed reductions in two cases, and had no discernible effect in ten cases. Industry cosponsorship apparently did not have the intended effect and instead resulted in program features such as data confidentiality that significantly undermined the program's credibility. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Estimating voter migration in Canada using generalized maximum entropy

As voters switch political preferences from election to election, understanding the magnitude of voter flows among parties and transitions between voters and non-voters is an essential element of political analysis. As exit polls are uncommon in Canada, voter migration can also be estimated using suitable statistical techniques. Backing out micro-level voter migration probabilities from macro-level election data is a problem of ‘ecological inference.’ This paper uses the method of generalized maximum entropy (GME) to estimate voter migration patterns for the two most recent Canadian federal elections (2004 and 2006) and two most recent provincial elections in British Columbia (2001 and 2005). The estimation results answer important questions about voter behaviour in Canada. These results will be of interest to political scientists, historians, and politicians, as well as econometric practitioners who wish to estimate voter migration.     

Evaluation of haplotype discrimination capacity of 35 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat loci

The haplotype discrimination capacity of the 9 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat (Y-STR) loci comprising the so called minimal haplotype together with additional 26 recently described single-copy Y-STRs was evaluated within 391 males from Germany, The Netherlands, and Turkey. The aim of this study was to identify the minimum number of Y-STRs needed in addition to the recommended 9 minimal haplotype loci or the 11 SWGDAM loci for individualizing male lineages. Highest gene diversities were shown for DYS385 loci, DYS449, DYS481, DYS570, DYS447, DYS576, DYS389-II, and DYS390 (D=0.7518-0.8746). The five Y-STRs DYS447, DYS449, DYS481, DYS570, and DYS576 comprised the smallest set of loci in addition to the previously recommended standard Y-STRs leading to the individualization of all males from each single population group. Complete resolution of the pooled population was achieved by the additional genotyping of two further loci, DYS446 or DYS505 and DYF406S1 or DYS522.     

Tax rates, tax administration and income tax evasion in Switzerland

This paper contains an empirical analysis of income tax noncompliance in Switzerland, based on the standard model of tax evasion. Noncompliance is found to be positively related to the marginal tax burden and negatively to the probability of audit, though the latter impact is only weak. There is no evidence of a significant deterrent effect of the penalty tax. The extended model reveals that noncompliance is positively related to inflation. Finally, noncompliance is significantly lower when citizens/taxpayers have direct control over government budgets, whereas the opposite holds when there is no such control.