Suchergebnisse

The scholarly traditions that explain the federal judicial state building in the United States are countered with a new theory of federal courts. A game theoretic Congressional centered account & a judicial court centered account are compared to the new approach of a jurisdiction game applied to the Fugitive Slave Act. The jurisdiction game puts the federalism back into federal court analysis by including the preferences of state voters, states rightists & moderns. The apparent preference reversals of antebellum abolitionists & slave holders, the passage of the Removal Act of 1875 & state sovereign immunity are integrated into the analysis. This model overcomes the current silence over the national versus state power in theories of federal courts. The integration of institutions & preferences is useful to explore the consequences for federal judicial power on deep preferences, although it says little about the origins of shifting passions & structure. Figures, Appendixes, References. J. Harwell

In 1978 Congress weakened several key provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which had been enacted only five years earlier. The objective is to compare alternative explanations for this policy reversal. Methods. Probit & multinomial logit models are used to explain empirically how senators voted in both 1973 & 1978, & to investigate why many senators switched their vote from supporting ESA to weakening it. Results. The findings here indicate that party affiliation & policy-maker preferences were not important to the 1973 vote, but they were key variables in the 1978 votes & the vote-switching decision. Proxies for unexpected economic impacts of ESA on individual states have little explanatory power. Conclusions. Ignorance, as measured here, does not appear to explain this policy reversal; rather, an influx of relatively conservative Democrats between 1973 & 1978 presents itself as the leading explanation. 5 Tables, 25 References. Adapted from the source document.

MOST MODELS OF CHOICE THREAT DECISIONS AS IF THEY OCCUR BUT ONCE. BUT PEOPLE ARE CONTINUALLY MAKING CHOICES, AND OFTEN THEY ARE ASKED TO MAKE SIMILAR CHOICES AT DIFFERENT TIMES. IT IS NOT UNUSUAL TO FIND CHOICE REVERSALS, IN WHICH A CHOICE MADE AT ONE TIME IS REVERSED AT ANOTHER. EVEN IF CHOICE REVERSALS DO NOT OCCUR, BECAUSE EXACTLY SIMILAR CHOICES SELDOM RECUR, GREAT INCONSISTENCIES IN CHOICE ACROSS TIME ARE READILY OBSERVABLE. TO EXPLAIN SUCH INCONSISTENCIES, IT SEEMS THAT ONE MUST POSTULATE EITHER A RAPID CHANGE IN PREFERENCES OR IRRATIONALITY (NOT MAKING A CHOICE BASED ON ONE'S PREFERENCES). THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES A ATTENTIVENESS TO PREFERENCES CAN SHIFT ABRUPTLY AS THE DECISIONAL CONTEXT CHANGES. SHIFTS IN ATTENTIVENESS, OFTEN ACCOUNT FOR CHOICE INCONSISTENCIES.

"We present a theory of choice among lotteries in which the decision maker's attention is drawn to (precisely defined) salient payoffs. This leads the decision maker to a context-dependent representation of lotteries in which true probabilities are replaced by decision weights distorted in favor of salient payoffs. By endogenizing decision weights as a function of payoffs, our model provides a novel and unified account of many empirical phenomena, including frequent risk-seeking behavior, invariance failures such as the Allais paradox, and preference reversals. It also yields new predictions, including some that distinguish it from Prospect Theory, which we test"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Using survey data from Bolivian trial courts, we explore the relationship between judicial decisions, career goals, & hierarchical pressures in continental legal systems. Based on a principal-agent approach, we hypothesize that inferior court judges are more likely to defer to superior courts when they share their interpretation of the law, when they anticipate reversals, & when they fear political manipulation of judicial careers. In turn, superior judges are likely to exercise informal pressures over inferior court judges who deviate from the former's legal views & do not anticipate their preferences. The conclusions emphasize the utility of survey research for the study of strategic compliance in judicial institutions. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.

"This insightful text rigorously examines and accounts for contemporary developments - and crucially a reversal of 'democraticness' - in democratic polities and related political processes comparing 38 democracies across the world. The focus is on contemporary developments and recent volatile levels of democraticness. Democracies in Peril? introduces theoretical backgrounds of what makes democracy tick and scrutinizes empirical trends and development in 'democraticness' in an accessible manner. It explores what 'democracy' as a political regime implies and how the liberal democratic model developed, as well as examining the present state of affairs in democracies, the challenges democracies encounter and the perils of democracy as a legitimate system of governance in the 21st century. The book provides a 'systemic' approach to adjudicate the effects of this assumed reversal in democratization in terms of popular preferences, party behaviour, institutional architecture and policy performance. The effects of public policy formation and the role of the state on actual democratic performance are also analysed. Finally, case studies on the Covid pandemic and the development of social welfare demonstrate the complex relationship between government capacities - under pressure - and the quality of democracy, approaching the question: How do 38 democratic states cope with societal problems, populist tendencies and a fast-changing world without degrading their institutional quality and legitimacy? This text will be of key interest to students, scholars, journalists and interested readers of comparative politics, democratization, public administration, political economy, constitutional law, and the social sciences in general"--