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Rational choice accounts of political participation identify two major solutions to 'the paradox of participation': collective incentives and selective incentives. Prior findings regarding the viability of these solutions are seemingly inconclusive and contradictory. One important reason for this could be that the applicability of these solutions varies across participatory modes. In this article, a first attempt is made to develop a theoretical answer to the question of why this may be the case. The predictions are then tested across four different modes of participation, using longitudinal data that eliminate or reduce the biases inherent in cross‐sectional designs. The results show different types of incentives to strike with distinctly variable force across different modes of participation. Most importantly, whereas electoral modes of participation (voting and party activity) are affected by selective incentives only, the non‐electoral modes (contacting and manifestations) are the consequence of both collective and selective incentives.

Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) represents one of the EU's largest waste streams. Eurostat (2010) estimates a C&DW generation of 970 Mton/year in the EU-27 (±2 ton/inhabitant), with an average recovery rate of 47% [1]. To reach a higher recycling rate, higher-purity material streams from C&D works are required. These can be obtained by a better sorting at the source, i.e. selective demolition. We performed 5 demolition case studies in Flanders to assess the opportunities and challenges of selective demolition processes, both on industrial and residential buildings. Furthermore, a new quality management and traceability system, developed by Flemish construction confederation VCB, was tested in 3 of these case studies. This monitoring system aims at the certification of waste streams that originate from selective demolition. For the different case studies, different bottlenecks and best practices were defined. In these case studies, the selectivity of the demolition is driven by the economic incentives of the Flemish market (high landfill fees and differential gate fees at recycling plants) and obligations from Flemish/Belgian legislation (e.g. mandatory elimination of asbestos and other hazardous materials). These incentives make "semi-selective demolition" current practice in the Flemish region. We define semi-selective demolition as a demolition work where the demolition company selectively collects all hazardous substances and that part of the non-hazardous substances that would overly reduce the quality of the stony fraction. The selective collection of the latter is determined by their value, the acceptance policy of the crushing installations of the stony fraction and by the time consumed for selective removal.

Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) represents one of the EU's largest waste streams. Eurostat (2010) estimates a C&DW generation of 970 Mton/year in the EU-27 (±2 ton/inhabitant), with an average recovery rate of 47% [1]. To reach a higher recycling rate, higher-purity material streams from C&D works are required. These can be obtained by a better sorting at the source, i.e. selective demolition. We performed 5 demolition case studies in Flanders to assess the opportunities and challenges of selective demolition processes, both on industrial and residential buildings. Furthermore, a new quality management and traceability system, developed by Flemish construction confederation VCB, was tested in 3 of these case studies. This monitoring system aims at the certification of waste streams that originate from selective demolition. For the different case studies, different bottlenecks and best practices were defined. In these case studies, the selectivity of the demolition is driven by the economic incentives of the Flemish market (high landfill fees and differential gate fees at recycling plants) and obligations from Flemish/Belgian legislation (e.g. mandatory elimination of asbestos and other hazardous materials). These incentives make "semi-selective demolition" current practice in the Flemish region. We define semi-selective demolition as a demolition work where the demolition company selectively collects all hazardous substances and that part of the non-hazardous substances that would overly reduce the quality of the stony fraction. The selective collection of the latter is determined by their value, the acceptance policy of the crushing installations of the stony fraction and by the time consumed for selective removal.

Democracy and women's rights are integrally "bundled" by the international community. This means that dictatorships can signal adherence to international norms by demonstrating progress on gender equality, often in a manner that is consistent with the perpetuation of authoritarian rule. Using a new dataset of de jure advances in women's rights, we show that dictatorships have vigorously enacted gender-related legislation, at a rate that surpasses democracies in the developing world. This pattern is shaped by international (Western) pressure: Among autocracies, foreign aid dependence and international nongovernmental organization shaming are associated with legal advances in women's rights, but not with reforms in other, more politically costly areas related to elections, political competition, and repression. Our account therefore highlights selective compliance as a form of adaptation to international pressure and underscores the role of international incentives as a complement to domestic "bottom-up" pressure for women's rights in dictatorships.

The last two decades have witnessed an extensive growth and an ever-increasing competition in foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to the developing countries. This has resulted in higher investment incentives offered by the host governments and an increase in the number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and regional agreements on investments. This research addresses the effectiveness of selective government policies and investment agreements in attracting FDI flows in developing countries. To achieve this, the impact of economic variables such as presence of infrastructure, cost of labor, annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth, real effective exchange rate, and tax incentives as well as bilateral investment treaties on the inflows of foreign direct investment within a 30-year span in Ghana was examined. The paper employed a regression analysis with the dependent and independent variables being FDI inflows and the listed variables respectively. Additionally, analytical techniques such as heteroskedasticity and Chou test were conducted. From the study, it is observed that inflows of FDI vary within the structural break analyzed and a low percentage of BITs reflect as a contributing factor of FDI. However, national policies proved to play a significant role in attracting FDI into Ghana.

This article explores the strategic motivations for insurgent violence against civilians. It argues that violence is a function of insurgent capacity and views violence and security as selective benefits that insurgents manipulate to encourage support. Weak insurgent groups facing collective action problems have an incentive to target civilians because they lack the capacity to provide sufficient benefits to entice loyalty. By contrast, stronger rebels can more easily offer a mix of selective incentives and selective repression to compel support. This relationship is conditioned by the counterinsurgency strategies employed by the government. Indiscriminate regime violence can effectively reduce the level of selective incentives necessary for insurgents to recruit support, thus reducing their reliance on violence as a mobilization tool. However, this relationship only holds when rebels are sufficiently capable of credibly providing security and other incentives to civilian supporters. These hypotheses are tested using data on one-sided violence from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The statistical analysis supports the hypothesis that comparatively capable insurgents kill fewer civilians than their weaker counterparts. The results also suggest a complex interaction between insurgent capability and government strategies in shaping insurgent violence. While weaker insurgents sharply escalate violence in the face of indiscriminate regime counterinsurgency tactics, stronger groups employ comparatively less violence against civilians as regime violence escalates. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Previous research has given scant attention to the issue of how and when ex-combatants resort to organized violence. This article fills this research gap by comparing ex-fighters in the Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. It holds that ex-combatant violence is the result of interaction between entrepreneurs of violence, military affinities, intermediaries, and selective incentives. Ex-combatants take to arms when they have access to entrepreneurs of violence. By offering selective incentives and utilizing existing military affinities, entrepreneurs can generate the enticements and trust needed to convince ex-combatants to resort to arms. However, as entrepreneurs have limited contact with ex-fighters, they are dependent on intermediaries to do the actual recruiting for them. Contrary to previous assumptions, this article finds that ex-fighters are largely risk-averse individuals and that ex-combatant violence is seldom triggered by the mere presence of small arms, lack of economic opportunities, or experiences of insecurity. Adapted from the source document.

Analysing the lobbying situation of social movements and groups advocating for public interests, it can be seen that a majority of actors lack necessary financial resources, the capability to mobilise a sufficient number of contributors in relation to the society they aim to represent, and experience low levels of responsiveness by the contacted decision makers and politicians. Compared with narrow interest groups representing industry sectors or professions, public interest groups face competitive disadvantages or even discrimination which causes underrepresentation of relevant social, ecological, and humanitarian issues. As this situation has already been present throughout the last decades and does barely differ within different countries, the question needs to be raised, whether the application of current lobbying strategies is the best way to overcome this unfavourable setup or if there are more promising means to do so. In this thesis, the author will develop and establish a new lobbying approach labelled 'second-stage lobbyism'. The main idea of this strategy is to 'lobby the lobbyist' (second stage) instead of focusing on political decision makers (first stage). This enables even small interest groups to use the resources and political power of the target – the actor to be lobbied – to promote their own agenda. The elaborated model is based on simple spatial analyses and considers a variety of features of relevant theories and works within the fields of lobbying, collective action, and game theory. Key elements to successful second-stage measures are changing preferences on topics throughout time within a society. They allow interest groups to attract their potential second-stage targets by presenting (un)favourable potential scenarios such as market outcomes and thereby influencing their future lobbying activities. To illustrate the relevance of these changes of preferences for the developed model, empirical data compiled by the World Values Surveys from 1981 until 2014 on six selected countries will be analysed and interpreted with regards to 'second-stage lobbyism'. The overall results underline that an enhancement of public interest groups' strategy repertory is needed to gain more political influence and public attention. If applied correctly, 'second-stage lobbyism' is a valuable and powerful tool which can help to trigger and achieve the transformation of the currently unfavourable lobbying situation of social movements. Nonetheless, this lobbying strategy is still in its early stages of development and requires further research – theoretical and empirical.

This paper studies the relationship between fiscal decentralization and electoral accountability, by analyzing how decentralization impacts upon incentive and selection effects, and thus on voter welfare. The model abstracts from features such as public good spillovers or economies of scale, so that absent elections, voters are indifferent about the fiscal regime. The effect of fiscal centralization on voter welfare works through two channels: (i) via its effect on the probability of pooling by the bad incumbent; (ii) conditional on the probability of pooling, the extent to which, with centralization, the incumbent can divert rents in some regions without this being detected by voters in other regions (selective rent diversion). Both these effects depend on the information structure: whether voters only observe fiscal policy in their own region, in all regions, or an intermediate case with a uniform tax across all regions. More voter information does not necessarily raise voter welfare, and under some conditions, voters would choose uniform over differentiated taxes ex ante to constrain selective rent diversion.

A significant majority of the world's constitutional courts publicize their decisions through direct contact with the national media. This interest in public information is puzzling in so far as constitutional judges are not directly accountable to voters. I argue that the promotion of case results is consistent with a theory of judicial behavior in which public support for courts can undermine incentives for insincere decision making. In this article, I develop a simple game theory model that identifies how case promotion is linked to judicial choice. Results of a simultaneous equations model estimating the Mexican Supreme Court's merits decisions and its choices to publicize those decisions by issuing press releases to national media outlets support an account of constitutional review in which judges believe they can influence their authority through case promotion.

On-line discussion, while promising in theory, often turns out to be disappointing in application. Low levels of student participation are a particularly vexing and common problem. I argue that to overcome these chronic problems, instructors must recognize the collective action problems inherent in on-line discussion and address them, primarily through the use of selective incentives. I test this contention using on-line experiments conducted on undergraduate political science students. The results of the experiments provide evidence of an underlying free-rider problem and support for the contention that selective incentives are an effective means of overcoming this problem. In another level of analysis, the experiment also shows that even basic student-to-student on-line discussion can be an effective teaching tool, rivaling the effectiveness of more costly traditional web sites.