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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: Entry -- Chapter Two: The Constraints of Prison Life: An Overview -- Material Constraints -- Administrative Constraints -- Subcultural Constraints: A Glimpse at the World of Grypsmen -- Note on Importation versus Deprivation -- Chapter Three: Becoming a Grypsman -- Initiation Tests -- First Screening: Fag-Making and Baptism -- Little Games -- Hidden Tests -- Prison University -- Chapter Four: Prison Code of Behavior -- The Semi-Secret Code -- The Secret Code -- Sanctions and Intercaste Mobility -- Chapter Five: Argot -- Argot Vocabulary -- Argot Roles -- Secret Argot Grammar -- Language Games -- Chapter Six: Everyday Life -- Random Walk through the Cell Archipelago -- Information and Trade Markets -- Coalitional Structures and Resource-Sharing -- Arenas of Art and Entertainment -- Fights and Exploitation -- Chapter Seven: Sex, Flirtation, Love -- Masturbation -- Fags -- Women -- Chapter Eight: Strategic Ailment -- Goals of Strategic Ailment -- Techniques of Strategic Ailment -- Cases of Self-Injury -- Cases of Faking -- Chapter Nine: Exit -- Postscriptum: Variants and Evolution of Grypsmen Subculture -- Local Variants and Modifications -- The Evolution of Grypsmen Subculture -- Appendix Prison Playground: Games and Decisions -- Glossary Essential Argot -- Notes -- References -- Index

Abstract
I analyze institutions of prison subculture that mitigate potential violent confrontations among inmates, in contrast to Hobbesian-Zimbardo default spontaneous violence. The games that are relatively rarely played in prison are Chicken and other violent confrontation games. Incoming rookie inmates are subject to initiation tests that allocate them into different subcultural groups, which signals their toughness and disincentivizes fighting. Most experienced inmates develop the eristic skills utilizing prison argot, use informal conflict adjudicators, and fake aggression toward rookies. All inmates form defensive coalitions. Finally, when inmates commit self-injuries, they follow well-rehearsed protocols to minimize the damage to their bodies and to maximize the impression made on the authorities. The secret knowledge of the associated rules, tricks, and cons is passed down over generations of prisoners through informal schooling. The material for this study comes from two Polish prisons, where the author spent 5 months as a political prisoner in 1985.

Electoral reforms had profound political consequences for post-communist Poland. The majoritarian system helped to accelerate the fall of communism, while later changes to the electoral law helped the former communists reclaim power. Despite the high stakes and top priority given to electoral design by political players, their efforts at manipulation were hardly rewarded. Although the political parties were ex ante seat-maximizers, they supported the electoral law that ex post would have given them the most seats about as frequently as they supported its closest competitor. The reasons for their miscalculations included a lack of methodological expertise, unexpected shifts in voter preferences, transition-specific poll biases and new entrants and coalitions that emerged in the period between the introduction of the new electoral law and elections. No significant differences among the various kinds of parties were found. The results do show that the effectiveness of manipulation increased strongly over time.

The electoral law & voter preferences are modeled as a partition function form game that represents payoffs of electoral coalitions in a multiparty system. Three empirical hypotheses are formulated under the assumption that seat-maximizing parties modify coalitional structures to extract gains from coalescing. The hypotheses say that party systems under stable voter preferences & electoral law tend to stability with respect to splits & coalescing. The partition function is estimated for various coalitional structures for the Polish party system with simulation based on district-level election results & survey data. The estimates show that the Polish party system is split stable. While the opportunities for gains from coalitions on the Right were exhausted between the years of 1993 & 1997, some opportunities for such gains emerged on the Left. 5 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 55 References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWe study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties' positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position "bonus" from a party's normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.

Neither the "Transitional Justice" literature or literatures in post-communist politics have examined post-communist "self lustrations." Our goal is to explain why Post-communists "punish themselves." We argue that Post-communists act under constraints of legislative institutions. We formalize our argument with a game-theoretic model of agenda-setting.

Truth revelation procedures are evaluated according to various normative criteria. The authors find the concepts of false conviction and false acquittal more adequate for such evaluation than the conformity with the rule of law and apply a useful classification of truth revelation procedures into incentive-based (ITRs) and evidence-based ones (ETRs). ITRs induce perpetrators and secret agents of the authoritarian regime to reveal the truth about their past, while ETRs rely exclusively on preserved evidence and victims' testimonies. Using a simple decision-making model, the authors show that while both procedures are sensitive to the problem of falsified evidence, ITRs perform better with respect to revealing the identity of collaborators whose files were destroyed. Finally, they discuss the connection between ITRs and two modes of coming to terms with the past, endogenous and exogenous.