Up Against the Wall: Bare Life and Resistance in Australian Immigration Detention

This article is based on interviews with former Australian immigration detainees conducted by the author. The interviews explored the experience and understanding of resistance while in detention. The article calls into question Agamben’s twin conclusions that nothing short of a complete re-founding of ontology is required to liberate humanity from biopower and that this refoundation will spring from bare life. Contrary to Agamben’s depiction, the camp proves to be a place of determined and often successful defence of a relation of politics and life based not on the camp and biopower, but on solidarity and freedom. Detainees in Australian immigration detention, like prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps, refused to abandon their politics. Rather than seeking to transform bare life, they rejected it and made their own decision on life and politics.

Implementation of the Thompson mechanism

This paper reconsiders the largely overlooked Thompson insurance mechanism for public choice. The mechanism's apparent defects can be remedied by a multi-part mechanism that generates necessary information and corrects potential errors. The added parts are (a) a sample of the population of eligible voters, who prepare a program for all voters' approval, and (b) the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves pivot mechanism. One can use classical statistical methods to draw valid inferences from a population sample about the entire electorate, preserving incentive compatibility and permitting efficient outcomes.     

Some further evidence on imprisonment vs. the death penalty as a deterrent to murder

Law and Human Behavior - The research reported here extends an earlier investigation (Bailey, 1977) on the deterrent effect of imprisonment versus the death penalty for murder. As a result of some...     

Comparable Preference Estimates across Time and Institutions for the Court, Congress, and Presidency

Empirically oriented scholars often struggle with how to measure preferences across time and institutional contexts. This article characterizes these difficulties and provides a measurement approach that incorporates information that bridges time and institutions in a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach to ideal point measurement. The resulting preference estimates for presidents, senators, representatives, and Supreme Court justices are comparable across time and institutions. These estimates are useful in a variety of important research projects, including research on statutory interpretation, executive influence on the Supreme Court, and Senate influence on court appointments.