Are Campaign Contributions a Form of Speech? Evidence from Recent US House Elections

This paper investigates the effects of the sources ofcandidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, withparticular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrowbase of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. Anextensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions toHouse candidates in elections from 1980 to 1992 is used. Theresults reveal a negative relationship between theconcentration of contributions and voteshare for open seatcandidates and challengers. This finding appears to havesignificant implications for some of the empirical premisesunderlying the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Buckley v.Valeo decision. At the very least, it represents an importantstylized fact about US elections that is robust over 1980–1992 period.     

Land and grievances in post-conflict Sri Lanka: exploring the role of corruption complaints

There is a growing academic literature on both land and corruption in relation to post-conflict peace building. This paper aims to understand what role corruption complaints play in the nexus between land and grievances in post-conflict societies. Drawing on field material collected in Sri Lanka, the paper interrogates the role of corruption complaints in relation to a number of highly politicised and ethnicised post-conflict land issues, ranging from the return of idps and alleged new resettlement schemes to land grabbing for military, ‘development’ and/or commercial purposes. The comparatively high visibility of land use, and the fact that land-related corruption is likely to affect a specific set of people who lay claim to the land, makes it a particularly important area to address in research on corruption and post-conflict peace building.     

Development Discourse of the Globalists and Dependency Theorists: do the globalisation theorists rephrase and reword the central concepts of the dependency school?

This paper discusses the discourses of the globalisation theorists and dependency scholars in respect of their views on development and underdevelopment. The paper argues that there are underlying similarities between the central concepts of the dependency approach and globalisation theories. Some of the globalisation theorists come remarkably close to the central concepts of the dependency theories by rewording and rephrasing the same concepts but colouring them with different ideological hues. Neither classic development theory nor dependency theories have full explanatory power with respect to the current order of global economic relations. The branch of globalisation theories which has historical roots in classical development theory has shown resilience, while dependency theories have not totally lost their significance.     

The Discourse of Development: has it reached maturity?

Like most other concepts in the social sciences, ‘development’ does not entail a commonly agreed upon meaning, context or programme of action. It is defined in different ways depending on the time, space, context, professional and organisational interests of the one who does the business of defining. The meaning of development has also undergone a remarkable transformation over the course of history from the Enlightenment concept of ‘Progress’ to encompass a great variety of human needs. This paper analyses how the contemporary discourse of development has reached a mature state and how it enables us to understand development in context- and culture-sensitive ways. It is now possible to determine what development means in different settings, and how to bring in material and non-material prosperity to people living in different contexts and cultures. After a theoretical discussion an empirical study in Sri Lanka is presented which attempts to arrive at a more refined context- and culture-sensitive definition of development. The paper argues that, in order to understand development at micro-settings, it is better to construct our own indexes of development rather than using global measures. It shows how the current state of the discourse of development can lend insights into construction of a development index.     

Budgetary Policy With Unified and Decentralized Appropriations Authority

The divestiture of the House Appropriations Committee in the1880's has received considerable attention of an empiricalnature. This paper presents a formal model of legislativedecisionmaking, using a common agency formulation to representinterest group lobbying of legislators. This framework is usedto analyze the effects of decentralizing appropriationsauthority. The conditions under which decentralization leadsto higher spending are characterized. It is argued that theconventional view that divestiture caused higher levels ofspending only holds if decentralization created barriers tolobbying and political bargaining across different committees.In addition, the role of specialized committee knowledge isexamined.     

The Condorcet Jury Theorem and the Expressive Function of Law: A Theory of Informative Law

We argue that legislation can generate compliance expressively,independently of deterrence. The Condorcet jury theorem impliesthat, in certain circumstances, the legislative process aggregatesthe private information of legislators to reach a decision superiorto that of any individual legislator. Citizens may update theirbeliefs about issues the legislation addresses even though individuallegislators are no better informed than individual citizens,and change their behavior in the direction of greater compliance.We first use a model with sincere voting and then consider strategicvoting, position-taking preferences, lobbying, and legislativeinstitutions. We use a public smoking ban for illustration,and propose an experimental test.     

Penalty Enhancement for Hate Crimes: An Economic Analysis

This article develops an economic analysis of penalty enhancementsfor bias-motivated (or "hate") crimes. Our model allows potentialoffenders' benefits from a crime to depend on the victim's groupidentity, and assumes that potential victims have the opportunityto undertake socially costly victimization avoidance activities.We derive the result that a pattern of crimes disproportionatelytargeting an identifiable group leads to greater social harm(even when the harm to an individual victim from a bias-motivatedcrime is identical to that from an equivalent non–hatecrime). In addition, we consider a number of other issues relatedto hate crime laws.