Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: Over one-fifth of the counties in the United States experienced population decline between 1990 and 2000. Many of the individuals in those counties in 2000, however, would have correctly described the place where they lived as having grown in population size during the 1990s. This apparent contradiction arises from the fact that population patterns are not uniform within a county. Some places within a county may be experiencing net in-migration while others within the same county are marked by net out-migration. Some areas within a county may have younger populations resulting in more births than deaths while other areas with older populations may have an excess of deaths over births. It is an ecological fallacy too-often-made to assume that population changes at the macro-level must necessarily result in similar changes at the micro-level. Indeed, in some counties with declining populations the majority of the residents were living in places that had grown during the decade. This poster presentation will summarize the population changes at the local level that took place in the 677 U.S. counties that lost population during the 1990s. In doing so, it will explain why population experiences at the local level may so often contradict patterns occurring at the regional level.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The statistical modelers are back. The presidential election forecasting errors of 2000 did not repeat themselves in 2004. On the contrary, the forecasts, from at least seven different teams, were generally quite accurate (Campbell 2004; Lewis-Beck 2005). Encouragingly, their prowess is receiving attention from forecasters outside the social sciences, in fields such as engineering and commerce. Noteworthy here is the recent special issue on U.S. presidential election forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting, containing some 10 different papers (Campbell and Lewis-Beck 2008). Our contribution in that special issue explored the question of whether our Jobs Model, off by only 1 percentage point in its 2004 forecast, was a simple product of data-mining (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008).
To examine the possibility of such curve-fitting, we carried out a series of tests, including step ahead forecasts for each election from 1984 through 2004. We found that the median out-of-sample error was small, less than 1 percentage point (at .87). Further, this compared favorably to the median out-of-sample error on the same elections of 1.53, from a theoretically impregnable core model. Finally, we entertained other specifications of the Jobs Model, in particular one that separates out “open-seat” races such as 2008, when no president is running. Again, the original Jobs Model was statistically more secure than these alternatives. Thus, we have considerable confidence in the Jobs Model specification, at least as far as it goes. Below, we offer the Jobs Model forecast for 2008, which designates Senator Barack Obama as the winner. Then, we examine how that forecast might be modified, in light of the “new data” of a Black presidential candidate.

Publication Type: Poster Paper
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Commentators have been troubled by the extent to which economic principles seem to dominate the theory and practice of Law and Development in recent years. They have queried, for example, the tendency to deify market forces, to rely on a narrow set of evaluative criteria such as efficiency, to mathematize social problems and to promote homogenization. Non-economic approaches to Law and Development, including work critical of the economic approach, is disjointed, lacking in common points of positive and normative reference. If the well-oiled machine of the economic approach to law and development is to be fairly evaluated, let alone supplanted, a rigorous theoretical framework must be applied.
This poster documents the early stages of a British Academy-funded project exploring the principles, defects and effects of the economic approach to law and development through Roger Cotterrell’s 'law and community’ approach.
The poster considers:
What values and interests are central to, and privileged by, the theory and practice of development economics?
How does development economics address law, positively and normatively?
What effect does the economic approach to law and development have upon law’s ability to act as a communal resource?

Publication Type: Informal Discussion Roundtable
Abstract: How could a social group of people sustain their self-esteem when suffering a stark decline in status? This paper attempts to answer this question by elaborating strategies of self-esteem maintenance devised by laid-off and unemployed workers employed by the state-owned enterprises in the past, the former quasi-middle class and the current underclass. The data were collected from field work with in-depth interviews with fourteen laid-off workers and second-hand interviews with forty laid-off workers. A variety of strategies devised by these people to retain their dignity are articulated, involving social comparison and social memory at the intergroup level, intragroup comparison and personal memory at the intragroup level, as well as information control, distancing, accounts and occupational rhetorics at the interpersonal level. In the last chapter, this thesis indicates that in different phases of post-layoff period, the workers employ distinct techniques to cope with their threatened dignity; besides, it also points out diversity in strategy adoption among workers in different situations. Finally, the article put forward some factors affecting the strategy’s effectiveness, like family support, mattering, and gender.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Recently, a television commentator discounted women’s potential support for a woman President by asking, “shouldn’t you be past all that?” Can we be “past all that” before diversity in the Oval Office is achieved? Moreover, can we be “past all that”—that is, race and gender as social and political issues—even if we push past our past history of white, male presidents? Practically speaking, can we be “past all that” in sufficient numbers to elect a black man or white woman to the office of president?
To address these issues, this paper examines a most unconventional site of political rhetoric: The editorial cartoon. Cartoons, in their picturing habits, often express the national imaginary. Like contemporary politics in general, cartoons focus on issues as personified through actual leaders or stock characters. Through uses of stereotypes and metaphor about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other current or recent political figures in the news, cartoonists signal the relative visibility or invisibility of gender and race in the 2008 campaign. Gender and race cannot be rendered invisible in a cartoon. How cartoonists delineate, describe, and define these qualities sheds light on the latent dynamics of these factors of identity in a campaign where identity politics occupies a conflicted and contradictory place.