Suchergebnisse

A simple prospective model of voting & party identification is proposed that subsumes much of the social-psychological & retrospective voting literatures. Its eleven major propositions are validated here, & its implications for conventional statistical specifications in voting research are assessed, including: (1) linear models would be discarded in favor of a particular nonlinear specifications, & (2) demographics should be dropped from the list of independent variables. Adapted from the source document.

November and December were a whirlwind for the Congressional Fellows as they attended back-to-back orientation sessions and interviewed for positions on the Hill. Now that they have secured full-time assignments as legislative aides, they have begun turning their attention to the yearly Canadian Parliamentary Exchange. Hardly had a description left Program Director Jeff Biggs' mouth before emails were flying on how best to plan the Canadians' visit to Washington. True to form, the political scientists established steering committees with names like "The Political Scientist Committee," "The Federal Committee," "The Journalist Committee," "The Entertainment Committee," and "The Miscellaneous Committee." Meanwhile, the journalists began to brainstorm and sketch out a draft schedule—four months in advance. Clearly, they were enthused.

AbstractThe International Atomic Energy Agency asserts that the regulation of the safety of civil nuclear power requires national regulatory agencies to be effectively independent. However, in the early years of national civil nuclear power programs national nuclear industries were dominated by iron triangles or subgovernments of powerful actors with an interest in promoting the industry. The creation of an independent safety regulator requires a radical restructuring of the national governance framework. Windows of opportunity or critical junctures for such reform occur only occasionally. This paper examines the cases of France, Japan, and India to identify the factors that determine the degree of success in attempts to break the power of nuclear iron triangles or subgovernments and create an effectively independent regulator. This analysis shows a serious nuclear accident can create the opportunity to dismantle an iron triangle. The extent and speed with which reforms can be implemented depend greatly on pre‐existing and prevailing conditions. Key determinants include the power structures and attitudes toward nuclear power in elite politics, the degree of engagement of civil society, and pressures from international organizations. Of these, the first, elite politics, appears to be the most important in these three cases.

Many natural resources have degraded and collapsed despite being managed under rigorous institutional frameworks set up to ensure rational exploitation. Path dependency of dysfunction institutions has been suggested as an explanation for such undesired outcomes. We explore the role of path dependency in natural resource management by studying a 100-year evolution of Swedish fisheries. We rely on three main types of original longitudinal data collected for the period 1914–2016: (A) policy documents, (B) government spending on management and subsidies, and (C) catch and fleet data. Our analysis contrasts the periods before and after the Swedish entrance into the European Union (1995) because this marks the year when fisheries policy became beyond the direct influence of the Swedish government. We uncover four pieces of evidence suggesting the existence of a path dependent dynamic in the pre-EU period: (1) despite increasing insights on the vulnerability of fish stocks to overexploitation, national policy goals in relation to fisheries continuously promoted incompatible goals of social and economic growth but without any reference to the sustainability of the biological resources; (2) the same policy instruments were used over long periods; (3) actor constellations within the fisheries policy subsystem were stable over time; (4) neither political regime nor macroeconomic variables and fisheries performance (industry production, oil price, landing values) could explain observed temporal variation in subsidies. We conclude that key policy actors in the pre-EU period formed an "iron triangle" and thereby prevented necessary policy changes. These national reinforcing feedbacks have been weakened since EU entrance, and the indicators for path dependency show broader involvement of stakeholders, a shift in spending, and policy goals that now explicitly address ecological sustainability.