Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators

Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that same payoff results from a procedure based on chance or on desert. Moreover, subjects react less favorably to outcomes rendered by decision makers who want to be decision makers than they do to identical outcomes selected by reluctant decision makers. Our results are consistent with increasingly prominent theories of behavior emphasizing people's aversion to being played for a “sucker,” an attitude that makes perfect sense if people's main goal is not to acquire as many tangible goods as possible but to make sure they are a valued part of a viable group composed of cooperative individuals.     

Representational roles and representative/constituency agreement: The democratic national party convention of 1976

Representational Role Theory is applied to presidential nominating conventions. Delegates to the 1976 Democratic convention are compared to the voters who selected their slates in 10 key presidential preference primaries. Because of party rule restrictions on delegates' behavior, representational roles are not pertinent to what is typically the most important decision of the convention, the first ballet vote for the party's presidential nominee. However, role orientations appear to be useful in understanding two other sets of decisions: (1) the creation of the party platform and (2) voting for the party's presidential nominee in the event that the nomination requires more than one ballot. Other than the first ballot, the Delegate role is not very popular among convention delegates.     

A Decision Analysis Approach to Policy Issues: The NAFTA Case

This article presents decision analysis concepts and tools that can help scholars and decision makers to get a better understanding of policy issues. It describes the structure of knowledge maps for representing uncertain elements in policy issues, and decision frames for uncovering the information elements behind conflicting positions and helps participants find a common ground for agreement. The article also presents the application of these techniques to issues arising from the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).     

Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties

How much will people sacrifice to support or oppose political parties? Extending previous work on the psychology of interpersonal cooperation, we propose that people’s minds compute a distinct cost–benefit ratio—a welfare tradeoff ratio—that regulates their choices to help or hurt political parties. In two experiments, participants decide whether to financially help and hurt the inparty and outparty. The results show that participants were extremely consistent (>?90%) while making dozens of decisions in a randomized order, providing evidence for tradeoff ratios toward parties. Moreover, participants’ ratios correlated in the expected directions with partisanship, political ideology, and feelings of enthusiasm and anger toward each party, corroborating that these ratios are politically meaningful. Generally, most participants were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty and hurt the outparty. At the same time, a sizable minority hurt their inparty and helped their outparty. Welfare tradeoff ratios push our understanding of partisanship beyond the classic debate about whether voters are rational or irrational. Underneath the turbulent surface of partisan passions hide precise calculations that proportion our altruism and spite toward parties.

     

The Base Closure and Realignment Commission: A Rational or Political Decision Process?

This article examines the Base Closure and Realignment Commission's (BRAC) decision process. It uses as a case study the BRAC's reversal of the Defense Department's recommendation concerning the east coast air mobility wing. The analysis reviews decision theory, the rational and political decision models, and the financial implications of the reversal decision.     

危害药品安全犯罪的罪名确定

危害药品安全犯罪涉及生产、销售假药罪,生产、销售劣药罪,生产、销售伪劣产品罪,非法经营罪,诈骗罪,以危险方法危害公共安全罪等多个罪名。实施生产、销售假药、劣药犯罪,同时构成生产、销售伪劣产品,侵犯知识产权,非法经营等犯罪的,应按照处罚较重的规定定罪处罚。对于以销售假药、劣药为名行骗取他人财物之实,数额较大的,应以诈骗罪定罪处罚。生产、销售假药、劣药罪与以危险方法危害公共安全罪的界限,关键在于把握犯罪构成的主观方面。     

Chief Justice Roberts's Health Care Decision Disrobed: The Microfoundations of the Supreme Court's Legitimacy

The 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act was an unusual opportunity for people to form or reassess opinions about the Supreme Court. We utilize panel data coupled with as‐if random assignment to reports that Chief Justice Roberts's decision was politically motivated to investigate the microfoundations of the Court's legitimacy. Specifically, we test the effects of changes in individuals' ideological congruence with the Court and exposure to the nonlegalistic account of the decision. We find that both affect perceptions of the Court's legitimacy. Moreover, we show that these mechanisms interact in important ways and that prior beliefs that the Court is a legalistic institution magnify the effect of updating one's ideological proximity to the Court. While we demonstrate that individuals can and did update their views for multiple reasons, we also highlight constraints that allow for aggregate stability in spite of individual‐level change.     

Decision costs in legislative bargaining: an experimental analysis

We conduct an experiment to assess the effects of different decision rules on the costs of decision making in a multilateral bargaining situation. Specifically, we compare the amount of costly delay observed in an experimental bargaining game under majority and unanimity rule. Our main finding is that individual subjects are more likely to reject offers under unanimity rule. This higher rejection rate, as well as the requirement that all subjects agree, leads to more costly delay. This result provides empirical support for a classic argument in favor of less-than-unanimity decision rules put forth by Buchanan and Tullock (The calculus of consent: logical foundations of constitutional democracy, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1962).     

The President as Institution Builder: The Reagan Case

Every president bestows upon his successors a "legacy" that will have an impact on both policy issues and institutional operations. Although attention is commonly focused on the president's role as a policymaker, he serves as an institution builder, as well, leaving a legacy that is manifested in long-term developments, in technical details of managing the job, and in patterns of interaction with other actors in the political environment. Reagan's institutional legacy has been the subject of intense debate and is addressed here in relation to five vantage points as they were employed during his eight years in office: personnel, structure, standard operating procedures, modes of exercising influence, and norms. These dimensions are examined in relation to the presidency, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the judiciary.
Reagan's departures in the selection and management of executive and judicial branch personnel were the most distinctive features of his legacy. Important changes were also made in the regulatory review and budgetary processes. Politicization and centralization, two long-term developments in the presidential office, gained renewed vigor, and Reagan elaborated a judicial strategy for achieving policy goals while refining the administrative strategy pioneered earlier by Nixon. Serious damage may well have been done to the norms of public service and justice under the rule of law. The framework introduced here promises to help scholars deal more systematically with the institutional impacts of both past and future presidents.     

Frank Meyer: The Fusionist as Federalist

Frank S. Meyer played a central role in defining the post-warAmerican conservative movement by defining and defending anideological "fusion" of traditional conservative principlesand libertarian political beliefs. While concerned with maintenanceof an objective moral order and the pursuit of virtue in theindividual, Meyer argued that the freedom of the person is thecentral and primary end of political society. The American systemof government, with its horizontal and vertical separationsof power, came closer than any political system in history toproviding the protection for individual liberties necessaryfor the effective pursuit of virtue. Federalism was particularlyimportant as it could forestall the centralization of governmentpower. Virtue, to have any meaning, had to be chosen freely,but providing for individual freedom provided no guarantee thatindividuals would pursue virtuous ends. By the same token, federalismand the separation of powers did not guarantee that state governmentswould adopt wise or moral policies, as the history of the civilrights struggle attests. Nonetheless, Meyer believed federalismwas essential if individual freedom was to endure.     

European Union Decision Making: the Role of Sub-national Authorities

This article assesses how and to what extent sub-national authorities (SNAs) are represented in EU decision making. In particular, we compare the European goals and strategies of British sub-national authorities with those of their counterparts in Germany. Our central argument is that SNAs starting from very different positions face many of the same challenges and problems, even if their domestic constitutional positions remain the most important determinant of their influence at the EU level. Influence in EU decision making derives largely from effective coalition building, both with other like-minded actors but also, inevitably in the case of sub-national authorities, with central governments. Our case study highlights the enormous diversity of relationships between central governments and 'their' SNAs across the Union. It thus encourages scepticism about the feasibility of a 'Europe of the Regions'.     

Franz Boas: The Anthropologist as Public Intellectual

Franz Boas is among the most important public intellectuals in American history because the authority of his expertise was joined with the purposes to which he applied his citizenship. His contributions to the discipline of anthropology were as towering as anyone has ever made; he also tapped his scholarly credentials to fight for good causes, such as civil rights and civil liberties. His origins as a Jewish immigrant and his political ideals as a cosmopolitan liberal predisposed him to reject the racialism that dominated late-nineteenth-century thought, and to advance an alternative social science that would be unpolluted by condescension towards lesser breeds. So persuasive was his research that a paradigm shift occurred; and buttressed with the authority of scholarship, Boas was decisive in changing public discourse on the often radioactive subject of race. He honored the ideal of the scholar as activist and as social conscience, and virtually no one in modern American history came closer to satisfying that standard.     

The Accursed Share: Bataille as Historical Thinker

Abstract

This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his master-work. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Bataille's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grappling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's oeuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading. The aim of the paper is to offer a sense, on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as important for the irruption of post-structural thought specifically, and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole.