bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Decomposition of Electoral Bias in a Plurality Election
Authors: Gudgin G. , Taylor P. J. 
Published: January 2009

This paper describes an empirical procedure for analysing the difference between the proportion of votes a major party attracts and the proportion of seats it subsequently wins in a plurality election. This difference will be referred to as theelectoral biaswith respect to that particular party at the election being analysed:B = S — V, (1)whereSis the seat proportion andVthe vote proportion gained by the party. This bias is the basic concept underlying much of the debate about electoral reform but curiously it has been an under-researched topic in political science literature. Apart from a small continuing debate over the cubic law of seat proportions and some analyses of Australian and New Zealand elections most attention in election studies has been concerned with determining the proportion of votes rather than the subsequent proportion of seats.
Markets and Politics: The Human Product
Authors: Lane Robert E. 
Published: January 2009

What values should a society seek to maximize? Religious values, as in Calvin's Geneva or Khomeini's Iran? Power and Glory? The Wealth of Nations, the Gross National Product? The greatest happiness for the greatest number? Or, in Humboldt's phrase, ‘the highest and most harmonious development of [man's] powers to a complete and consistent whole?’There is much to be said for wealth. Quite recently it has been discovered that the pursuit of wealth is a game against nature not a war game, a zero-sum game, with booty as its prize. The distribution of increments of wealth can, under these circumstances, be Pareto optimal. As Marx pointed out, winning the struggle against scarcity is a condition for everything else: men must eat before they can think. Similarly, in ordering a hierarchy of needs, the contemporary humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow, makes the same obvious point: the satisfaction of physiological needs is a condition for the satisfaction of higher needs, in the end for self-fulfilment – for Humboldt's ‘harmonious development of man's powers’. Wealth gives satisfaction; Bentham believed it was the prime source of happiness. Adam Smith argued that ‘the desire of bettering our condition…[through] an augmentation of fortune’ was the most powerful (and vulgar) of motives, but it was often a mask for a concern for the good opinions of others. So strong a motive lends itself to social control: ‘the steadiest motive in ordinary business work is the desire for pay which is the material reward for work’. Like B. F. Skinner, Marshall held that money is a general reinforcer because of its universal appeal. And it is the foundation of civilization, not only because surplus value may be devoted to cathedrals, but, following Schumpeter, because a society guided by the rationalism of the market's manner of pursuing wealth, is reflected in the high art and science of the West. In the process of maximizing wealth, therefore, a society motivates its members, satisfies them, and provides the basis for high civilization.
Must Radicals be Marxists? Lukes on Power, Contestability and Alienation
Authors: Smith G. W. 
Published: January 2009

According to Steven Lukes ‘A exercises power over B when A affects A in a manner contrary to B's interests’. Although he is not willing to contend that this general concept of power is altogether beyond reasonable dispute Lukes argues that it is the specific conceptions of power to which this more general concept gives rise when we fill in what is to count as B's interests that pose the fundamental problem for social and political science. For, although the conceptions are, to some degree, assessable in terms of their descriptive accuracy and explanatory scope, they are also ‘ineradicably evaluative’ and ‘essentially contested’. Three important ‘normatively specific conceptions of interests’, implying three corresponding conceptions of power, particularly concern him:(1) the liberal conception, which relates men's interests to what they actually want or prefer, to their policy preferences as manifested by their political participation; (2) the reformist conception, which, deploring that not all men's wants are given equal weight within the political system, also relates their interests to what they actually want and prefer, but allows that this may be revealed in the form of deflected, submerged, or concealed wants and preferences; and (3) the radical conception, which maintains that men's wants may themselves be a product of a system which works against their interests and, in such cases, relates the latter to what men would want and prefer, were they able to make the choice.
Manipulating Manipulation
Authors: Morriss Peter 
Published: January 2009

In a recent article, Alan Ware argues the following:(1) Manipulation is important to liberals because governments and law courts are justified in overriding some person's wants, when determining his interests, only when his wants have been manipulated (pp. 175, 177). (I shall call this person ‘B’.)(2) Manipulation only occurs when some specified person (A) is both morally and causally responsible for the change in B's wants (pp. 165–6 and sec. III).Therefore(3) Liberals can override B's wants, when determining his interests, only when B's wants have been determined by some specified A who is both morally and causally responsible for the change in B's wants (pp. 176–7).
Bureaucrats, Budgets and the Growth of the State: Reconstructing an Instrumental Model
Authors: Dunleavy Patrick 
Published: January 2009

This article forms part of a longer-term project dealing with the impact of public choice theories in political science. The focus here is on economic models of bureaucracy, which despite their increasing theoretical significance and influence on practical politics have heretofore been little analysed, except by their exponents. I have argued elsewhere that amongst existing public choice accounts there are two seminal works, Antony Downs's pluralist treatment inInside Bureaucracyand William Niskanen's new right thesis inBureaucracy and Representative Government. The central innovation of economic approaches is their stress on rational officials' attachment to budget maximization strategies. In Downs's case this is a finite maximand limited by bureaucrats' conservatism and other motivations. But in Niskanen's case budget maximization is an open-ended process, constrained only by external limits on agencies' abilities to push up their budgets. None the less, despite their disparate approaches and conclusions, both these books share four failings common to almost all other public choice work in the field:(1) They operate with vague and ill-defined definitions of bureaucrats' utility functions.(2) They assume that all bureaucracies are hierarchical line agencies.
A Paradigm of ‘Crisis’ Decision Making: The Case of Synfuels Policy
Authors: Ahrari Mohammed E. 
Published: January 2009

In explaining the making and unravelling of the synfuels policy in the United States, a new approach—the ambivalent-majoritarian paradigm—is presented in this article. This paradigm fills a significant conceptual gap for the study of domestic policy formulated under crisis conditions.It is argued that the self-imposed necessity to respond to a crisis condition involving a policy decision is likely to force legislators to adopt a policy option that they would not adopt under normal conditions. The crisis response is likely to be passed by a ‘majoritarian’ crisis coalition which would also include a significant number of ‘ambivalents’, i.e., those legislators who have serious misgivings about the correctness or feasibility of the policy. In order for such a policy response to survive, it must withstand the scrutiny of ‘normal’ conditions involving that policy.
Political Science and the Study of Corporate Power: A Dissent from the New Conventional Wisdom
Authors: Vogel David 
Published: January 2009

Over the last fifteen years political scientists have become much more critical of the role that business plays in American politics. Two decades ago business was primarily regarded as another interest group; now many scholars perceive a tension between the large business corporation and the principles and practices of pluralist democracy.This article challenges this new ‘conventional wisdom’ by critically examining the recent writings of Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom. Dahl regards the corporation as undemocratic because its managers are not accountable to its employees. Yet, the corporation is hardly unique in this regard: not one single institution in our society – including the government itself – is governed by those who work for it. Lindblom contends that business occupies a privileged position in capitalist democracies. But he exaggerates the role investment decisions play in the performance of the economy, underestimates the options available to politicians to manipulate business decisions and fails to appreciate that businessmen are not unique in requiring inducements to perform their social role. The article concludes by suggesting that while corporations do exercise considerable political power, both its scope and magnitude can be satisfactorily analysed within the framework of interest-group politics.
Nested Games: The Cohesion of French Electoral Coalitions
Authors: Tsebelis George 
Published: January 2009

This article introduces a theory of Nested Games which accounts for the cohesion of coalitions. The parties in a coalition are considered to be playing a game with variable payoffs. The payoffs depend on a higher-order game between the coalition and its opponents. Several political situations approximate to this conceptualization, such as Government and Opposition coalitions, factions inside parties, international coalitions, class conflict. The theory of Nested Games predicts the cohesion of coalitions as a function of the relative size of both the coalitions and the partners within each coalition.The test case of the theory is the cohesion of French electoral coalitions in 1978. Empirical results corroborate the theory. All parties behave according to its predictions. Moreover, a difference in the way parties behave, according to whether the game is visible (by the electorate) or invisible, is discovered and explained.
Attitudinal Tolerance and Political Freedom in Britain
Authors: Barnum David G. , Sullivan John L. 
Published: January 2009

Tolerance is an important concept in democratic theory and a recurring issue in British history. With rare exceptions, however, conclusions about tolerance in Britain have been based on impressionistic rather than empirical evidence. Only a few research studies have addressed the subject of tolerance in Britain, and none has collected nationwide data on attitudinal tolerance among the British.This Note examines patterns of attitudinal tolerance in Britain and speculates about the impact of those patterns on the status of political freedom in Britain. The analysis is based on recently collected survey data on attitudinal tolerance among members of the public and Members of Parliament in Britain.
Marxism–Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind
Authors: Walker Rachel 
Published: January 2009

This article employs a semiotic approach to investigate the meaning of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ with a view to clarifying our understanding of this term. Contrary to conventional interpretations it demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is an empty signifier which is subject to definition on a contemporary basis by the CPSU itself. However, it also demonstrates that ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is the central element in a mechanism of control which bears all the hallmarks of a classic linguistic double bind. It therefore concludes that while ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is referentially open to re-definition it is connotatively attached to the practices of the CPSU. It is both fixed and not fixed in meaning.The resulting analysis leads to a critique of terms which are conventionally taken for granted by Sovietologists and introduces a new methodological approach to the study of ‘Marxism-Leninism’.
The Politics of the Political Business Cycle
Authors: Schultz Kenneth A. 
Published: January 2009

Existing models of the political business cycle have performed poorly in empirical tests because they have misspecified the interests of their primary actors – the incumbent politicians. While these models assume that governments face similar incentives to manipulate the economy at each election, governments' incentives can in fact vary from election to election depending upon their political needs at the time. The more likely the government is to be re-elected, the less it can gain by inducing cycles that are costly because of their impact on both the government's reputation and future macroeconomic performance. The degree to which the government manipulates the economy should thus be negatively correlated with its political security going into the election.This prediction is tested by examining transfer payments in Great Britain, 1961–92. While a traditional model that is insensitive to the government's political needs finds no evidence of politically-motivated manipulations, a model which takes these factors into account reveals a robust, and at times sizeable, electoral-economic cycle.
Two Comments on ‘Two Conceptions of Liberalism’
Authors: Steiner Hillel 
Published: January 2009

No one who has read either Rawls's Political Liberalism or my An Essay on Rights can fail to profit from the penetrating analysis to which Peter Jones has subjected them.Disposed to agree with most of what he says about the former, I am also inclined – but as yet unable – to disagree with much of what he says about the latter. However, alongside his many acute criticisms on which I'll need to reflect further, Jones's report of two key moves in my argument requires some revision and may, therefore, warrant this brief early response.
The Future as Arbiter of Theoretical Controversies: Predictions, Explanations and the End of the Cold War
Authors: Ray James Lee , Russett Bruce 
Published: January 2009

Some analysts assert that a failure by the discipline of international relations to predict the end of the Cold War reinforces their conviction that predominant theories as well as systematic empirical analyses of international politics have proved fruitless. Accurate predictions are an important product of useful theory, partly because predictions cannot be modified in order to accommodate the events upon which they focus, since the outcomes to be accounted for are unknown. But predictions are contingent statements about the future, not unconditional assertions, which might more accurately be labelled prophecies.Three related streams of work - a political forecasting model that relies on rational choice theory, insights and information provided by traditional area specialists, and democratic peace theory - together constitute an emerging basis for making accurate predictions about the political future, and deserve attention in any evaluation of the utility of systematic empirical analyses of politics. Moreover, the systematic empirical approach is not entirely bereft of potential to provide a better understanding of the end of the Cold War. The democratic peace proposition suggests that if the autocratic protagonist in a confrontation becomes more democratic, tensions should be significantly reduced. This implication of democratic peace did not go unnoticed in the years before the Cold War ended.
Party Identification and Party Stability
Authors: Goot Murray 
Published: January 2009

'Party identification’ has been variously described: as an anchor; as constituting ‘psychological membership’ of, or ‘psychological identification’ with the party; and so on. The compilers of a recent collection of political attitude measures, published under the auspices of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (where most of the election analyses since 1952 have pivoted about the concept), even describe party identification as ‘probably the most important attitude variable in the field of political behavior’.² But the term itself and its connotations are misleading. Even where they do not suggest a borrowing from the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysisγ they tend to define away a set of questions that need to be answered: a preference for one party compared to what?; an intense preference, in what sense and compared to whom?4In 1955 Professor H. L. A. Hart put forward the claim that ‘if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free’, and this thesis and the arguments he adduces in its support have been thought sufficiently important for the article to be reprinted in a recent book of readings on political philosophy for students and general readers. The truth of Hart's thesis as stated is clearly meant to be independent of the moral stance of the asserter. Yet to my mind it is untenable as it stands, and could be modified only at the expense of taking up a particular moral position.
Some Social and Political Correlates of County Borough Expenditures: A Comment
Authors: Brown Jonnathan F. 
Published: January 2009

James E. Alt ('Some Social and Political Correlates of County Borough Expenditures’ in British Journal of Political Science No. I, pp. 49–62) gives as his reasons for choosing to study county boroughs, ‘not only because of the fact that they are urban centres, the uniformity of their electoral procedure, the high level of competition (on terms of contested seats), their financial independence from other local authorities, and their service omnicompetence’. This is a standard explanation for the predominance in research on local government of the county borough to the neglect of other authorities. One positive gain of re-organization may be that future research will give a more rounded picture of local government performance and practice.I am grateful to Mr. Brown for quoting enough of my correspondence to necessitate my writing rather little at this point. A great deal of research done on the American states suggests that such variables as party control of legislatures do not explain variations in spending very well. In Britain the assumption is frequently made that each local authority has so many unique features that to attempt to make broad-scale comparisons is either useless or impossible. My article was written to suggest that neither of these notions should be applied uncritically, at least to some services provided by English and Welsh county boroughs.
Rejoinder
Authors: Newton K. 
Published: January 2009

I shall deal with the points made by Denver and Hands in the order in which they raise them.(1) Since my article tries to show that the relationship between marginality and both turnout and changes in turnout is, at best, a faint one, the assumption that ‘parties are more efficient in, or put greater effort into, marginal wards’ is in no way necessary to the argument. On the contrary, the assumption seems to be characteristic of those who claim a relationship between marginality and high turnout.Denver and Hands point to accumulated evidence that concentrated efforts can have a dramatic effect on turnout. It would be foolish to deny that this can be the case or has, indeed, been the case, but the figures seem to suggest that the effect is usually small to insignificant. Most of their British evidence is based upon general not local election results. While there is clear evidence to show that turnout increases when a constituency becomes marginal (Brighton, Kemptown in 1966 is the classic case), the evidence about local elections is muddled and inconclusive, and has often been used to support conclusions which do not follow.
Differential frontal–striatal and paralimbic activity during reversal learning in major depressive disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder
Authors: Remijnse P. L. , Nielen M. M. A. , van Balkom A. J. L. M. , Hendriks G.-J. , Hoogendijk W. J. , Uylings H. B. M. , Veltman D. J. 
Published: January 2009

BackgroundSeveral lines of research suggest a disturbance of reversal learning (reward and punishment processing, and affective switching) in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is also characterized by abnormal reversal learning, and is often co-morbid with MDD. However, neurobiological distinctions between the disorders are unclear. Functional neuroimaging (activation) studies comparing MDD and OCD directly are lacking.MethodTwenty non-medicated OCD-free patients with MDD, 20 non-medicated MDD-free patients with OCD, and 27 healthy controls performed a self-paced reversal learning task in an event-related design during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).ResultsCompared with healthy controls, both MDD and OCD patients displayed prolonged mean reaction times (RTs) but normal accuracy. In MDD subjects, mean RTs were correlated with disease severity. Imaging results showed MDD-specific hyperactivity in the anterior insula during punishment processing and in the putamen during reward processing. Moreover, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the anterior PFC during affective switching showed a linear decrease across controls, MDD and OCD. Finally, the OCD group showed blunted responsiveness of the orbitofrontal (OFC)–striatal loop during reward, and in the OFC and anterior insula during affective switching.ConclusionsThis study shows frontal–striatal and (para)limbic functional abnormalities during reversal learning in MDD, in the context of generic psychomotor slowing. These data converge with currently influential models on the neuropathophysiology of MDD. Moreover, this study reports differential neural patterns in frontal–striatal and paralimbic structures on this task between MDD and OCD, confirming previous findings regarding the neural correlates of deficient reversal learning in OCD.
Effects of induced anger in patients with antisocial personality disorder
Authors: Lobbestael J. , Arntz A. , Cima M. , Chakhssi F. 
Published: January 2009

BackgroundAnger is the main deregulated emotion in patients with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). The aim of this study was to examine emotional, cognitive and physiological correlates of anger and compare these between ASPD patients with varying degree of psychopathy (PP) and control groups.MethodAssessment of the effect of anger induction on self-reported emotions and schema modes, psychophysiology and implicit reaction-time tasks measuring self-anger and aggressor–swearword associations. Participants (n=147) were patients with DSM-IV antisocial (n=21), borderline (n=45) and cluster C personality disorder (n=46) and non-patient controls (n=35).ResultsGroups did not differ in self-reported anger. ASPD patients displayed a decrease in heart rate and systolic blood pressure (SBP) and stronger implicit self-anger associations. ASPD patients scoring low on affective PP reported less negative emotions and displayed a greater decrease in diastolic blood pressure (DBP).ConclusionsASPD patients did not display a deviant self-reported anger but physiological hyporesponsivity and cognitive hyper-responsivity. This ASPD anger response might reflect a controlled predatory-like fight preparation.