When setting the stringency of environmental regulations of the intensive livestock industry, governments make a trade-off between rural economic development and environmental quality. This trade-off represents the weight the government places on social welfare relative to the profitability of the intensive livestock industry. The impact of the weight the government places on rural economic development on the formation of environmental regulations in the US intensive livestock industry is examined in this thesis. A political economy model explaining the formation of environmental regulations in the presence of a special interest lobby group is developed. The theoretical model finds that the incumbent government sets policy in response to the marginal disutility from pollution, the intensity of pollution damages, and according to the weight the government places on rural economic development. The theoretical model is tested using a cross-sectional analysis of 1997 intensive livestock industry environmental regulations across US states. Econometric results provide evidence that state governments implement more stringent regulations in response to the concerns of rural citizens and the intensity of pollution damages. The study finds that the pressure to pursue rural economic development has a positive relationship with the stringency of regulations.

The membership of the Group of 20 was selected without any official criteria. This paper investigates whether group membership can be explained through the consideration of several different factors that coincide with the mission of the organization. I found strong evidence that membership in the Group of 20 was based on some combination of land mass and economic output. The results demonstrate that these factors are highly predictive of group membership.

Coal mining carries significant impacts for surrounding livelihood practices. Yet, in order to explain how specific impacts become grounded within a particular community, attention must be given to the complex assemblage of socio-political and economic forces operating at the local scale. As such, this paper builds upon 3 months of field research in 2010 to describe the impact of decentralized extractive resource governance at coal mines near the rural coastal village of Sekerat, East Kalimantan. Employing evolutions in political ecology research, the analysis focuses on the evolving governance ‘space’ in order to explain how institutional analyses of resource extraction governance and livelihood governance can be integrated to understand how scalar processes construct a range of real and perceived impacts which condition the decision-making modalities of local villagers. A case is then made for giving greater consideration to the importance of temporality and materiality to explaining how land-based and wage-labour livelihood practices have become ‘reified’ within the local village.

“Heavy” file sharers’ and “heavy” activists’ values and attitudes toward file sharing and intellectual property rights are analyzed in this thesis, with a focus on the conflict between property owners and non-owners. The purpose of this MA thesis is to investigate the perception of file sharing and intellectual property rights on the Internet. The main research questions is: How do “heavy” file sharers and “heavy” activists perceive file sharing and intellectual property rights on the Internet?. For answering it, critical political economy and both qualitative and quantitative methods are used. Therefore, the paper consists of two major parts. In the first part, the theoretical framework is introduced. In the second part, empirical research is presented and the theoretical framework is applied to the analysis of the gathered data. Data were collected with the help of a survey. The main results of the study suggest that “heavy” file sharers and “heavy” activists tend to have left-wing values and a left-wing political agenda behind file sharing, and perceive culture, and information and knowledge as “public goods”. Furthermore, “heavy” file sharers and “heavy” activists tend to contribute to the Net gift economy and share their created content in a way that constitutes an alternative to intellectual property rights, which they see as out-of-date.

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This essay mainly utilize theoretical tool of ¡§State Centralism¡¨ to observe fixed network industry development history in Taiwan. After 1980s, based on characteristics of fixed network, state monopolizes the industry. However, digital techniques develop rapidly from last 1970s, the legitimacy of traditionally state monopoly model is gradually decrease. In the meantime, authoritatrian regime reform and economic liberalization in Taiwan start from 1980s to make state autonomy decreasing and launch liberalization of fixed network industry. Nevertheless, state role in industry didn¡¦t disappear after fixed network liberalization. In this research, author point out fixed network liberalization process in Taiwan is one kind of state centralism model. The liberalization is an ¡§instrument¡¨ but ¡§object¡¨ for state to accelerate development of information society and industrial structure reform in Taiwan. After fixed network market open in 2000, the market almost still monopolized by Chunghwa Telecom Co. It never achieves ¡§competitive development¡¨ environment planed by state. For fixed network industry of Taiwan, though state have outline regulatory policy, how to achieve a competitive environment after liberalization is the most important challenge to state to face new age of digital convergence.

Abstract Adam Smith is one of the mostly widely read eighteenth-century thinkers, enjoying a scholar reputation among economist, social scientists, political theorists, as well as philosophers. It is frequently believed that the great eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy Adam Smith was an extreme dogmatic defender of laissez-faire. It seems clear that Adam Smith has undergone an ideologically based reinterpretation. Smith¡¦s ¡¨invisible hand¡¨ , the most famous metaphor in economics and social science, has been identical with the automatic equilibrating mechanism of the competitive market. Free-market exchanges can unintentionally produce economic well-being, but only under certain specific conditions. Smith¡¦s thesis is that the invisible hand works because, and only when, people operate with restrains self-interest in cooperation with others under the precepts of justice. I found that public spirit, or civic virtue was, for Smith, a vitally important aspect of political economy. I noted that for Smith all constitutions must be judged by the happiness of the people who live under them. Thus, government plays the read role in securing the common good in society.

Liberalism can be generally characterized as a political ideology that assumes the rational, self-interested nature of human beings. However, two distinct strands of liberal theory have evolved from this shared construction of the human agent, namely state-oriented and market-oriented liberalism. It will be shown that state-oriented liberalism provides the theoretical core of liberal democratic states, whereas market-oriented liberalism provides the theoretical core for the globalized market economy. This thesis will uncover a profound tension through a discussion of the new constitutional effects of the investor-state regime. Furthermore, this thesis will show that the recent changes of the investor-state regime have failed to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal democracies and the investor-state regime. And finally, this thesis argues that the only way to resolve the tension between the two strands of liberalism is to incorporate liberal democratic principles into the investor-state regime. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / matt.stuckenberg@gmail.com

Cross-national comparative approaches have yielded a rich set of insights about the diversity of national forms of contemporary capitalism, including the ways in which the organization of work and employment differs across countries. At the same time, the cross-national framework has also functioned in certain respects as a conceptual straitjacket, preventing us from recognizing alternative structuring principles in the macro context, and the existence of patterns that cut across national boundaries. The five papers that comprise this dissertation together seek to advance a dual agenda for advancing the macro-comparative study of work and employment, one that recognizes both the strengths and limitations of the cross-national framework. Looking at different sets of high- and middle-income countries, the papers use various statistical methods (including OLS and cross-classified multilevel regression models) to consider outcomes ranging from union organization to unemployment to non-standard working arrangements. On the one hand, this project offers new insights into the cross-national diversity of systems of work and employment. For example, one paper adds to our understanding of why rates of temporary employment vary so widely across national varieties of capitalism, and the reasons why increases in temporary employment have been so high in Continental European countries. On the other hand, the project also shows that certain features of work organization are structured more by occupational as opposed national distinctions, with particular occupational patterns extending across countries. Indeed, one paper demonstrates that patterns of "voluntary" as well as "involuntary" part-time employment vary much more along occupational as opposed to national lines, and that rates of part-time employment are not just high but remarkably uniform across countries for certain kinds of service workers. These and other findings from this dissertation add to our understanding of how national boundaries structure the landscape of work and employment, while also being cross-cut in important ways by other types of organizing logics. More broadly, they contribute to the development of a productive middle ground between perspectives that emphasize the persistence of cross-national differences in the organization of contemporary capitalism, and those stress similarities and shared trends.

This dissertation consists of three essays on microeconomics. The first two are theoretical papers that address issues in collective decision-making. The last is an experimental paper that explores gender differences in test-taking strategies. In the first essay, we define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population’s preferences and on the probability distribution over the sets of feasible alternatives that the society will face. Our rules can be interpreted as distance-minimization – selecting the order closest to the population’s preferences, using a metric on the orders that reflects the distribution over the possible feasible sets. The distance is the probability that two orders will disagree about the optimal choice from a randomly-selected available set. In the second essay, we study representative democracy and contrast it with direct democracy. The key question is whether representative democracy, with its practical advantages, succeeds in implementing the choices that the group would make under the more normatively attractive direct democracy. We find that, in general, it does not. We analyze the theoretical setting in which the two methods are most likely to lead to the same choices, minimizing potential sources of distortion. We show that even in this case, where the normative recommendation of direct democracy is clear, representative democracy may not elect the candidate with this ordering. In the third essay, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men on multiple-choice tests. The experimental test consists of practice questions from SAT II subject tests; we vary the size of the penalty imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our experimental test, putting women and more risk averse test-takers at a disadvantage. / Economics