Suchergebnisse

From the liberal largesse of George Soros to the big-spending ways of Republican financiers like Sheldon Adelson, the 2012 U.S. presidential election is being shaped almost as much by billionaire backers as by the voters and candidates themselves. America's permissive campaign finance laws give these political sugar daddies unique clout, but it's not a purely American phenomenon. When it comes to behind-the-scenes moneymen, it's a global bull market. This article details billionaire backers in other countries. Adapted from the source document.

Why did the European Union (EU) attempt yet fail to reform its anti-dumping legislation between 2006 and 2008? We analyse this attempt to reform a legislative act regulating interest groups' access to public decision-makers by relying on collective action and principal-agent theory. Contrary to approaches assuming that the European Commission enjoys a large degree of agent autonomy to implement a more liberal EU trade policy than most member state principals would want, we conceive of principals and their agents as actors responding to the relative balance between interest groups mobilizing for and against reform. Tracing interest group collective action advantages back to industry consolidation and the certainty of future losses, we argue that concentrated producer groups mobilize most intensively and persistently and successfully influence policy outcomes. On the losing side, importers and retailers, joined by producers having outsourced parts of their production, let alone consumers, fail to counter this mobilization effort. Adapted from the source document.

Despite the negative rhetoric surrounding the immigration issue, recent policy in many states has provided significant benefits to both legal and undocumented immigrants. Previous scholarship on state-level immigrant policy suggests that differences in the degree of public animosity toward this group may help to explain variation in state policy, but that work largely neglects the influence that industries that employ immigrants may have on state policy decisions. This essay develops the argument that industries that employ immigrants have a substantial impact on policy decisions in some states. It also suggests that the response of state policy makers to public pressure for more restrictive immigrant policy may be moderated by the political and economic importance of those industries. The authors test specific assertions drawn from this argument in an analysis of immigrant policy making in the American states between 2005 and 2007.

In this paper we develop a common agency model to analyze the problem of pirates entering the market, in which the incumbent and the consumers form pressure groups to lobby the government on policies to prevent piracy while the pirates try to avoid being stopped. We show that a monopoly is not an equilibrium when both the incumbent and consumers lobby the government, and that the cost of monitoring commercial piracy is very important in determining (truthful) equilibria, as is the case where there is no lobby competition. However, it is now more difficult getting the pirate to enter the market.

On the eve of the midterm elections, congressional candidates' stances on middle east policy and connections to Israeli lobbyists are listed in this report. With the possibility that the Republicans may retake control of the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate, the 2010 U.S. elections are getting significant attention.