Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: While it is widely recognized that electoral competition can have a major influence on public spending decisions, there has been little effort to consider whether the move to multiparty elections in African countries in recent years has led to a redistribution of public expenditures between social groups. This is a question relevant both for debates about African politics and for broader discussions about the effect of democratic institutions on policy outcomes. I develop a hypothesis, illustrated with a simple game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to devote greater resources to primary schools. I test this proposition using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in thirty-five African countries. The results show that democratization has indeed been associated with greater spending on primary education, and that governments subject to electoral competition have shifted resources towards primary schools, away from other items in the education budget. These findings are robust to controls for unobserved country effects, and they are also supported by evidence from recent country cases.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Few public decisions stir more controversy than siting nuclear power plants and other “local public bads.” How democratic governments overcome citizen opposition reveals the flexibility demonstrated by states under pressure along with the evolutionary nature of democracy in industrialized nations. Employing a historical-institutional approach to facility siting in Japan, this paper finds that bureaucracies with clearly defined goals facing sustained public opposition are more likely to engage in adaptive, flexible responses. Under these conditions, agencies depart from the use of “core” tools such as policing and coercion which have more guaranteed outcomes but short term impacts and move toward “peripheral” ones which seek to alter citizen preferences about these facilities. States innovate in confrontation with social movements and do not require large crises or shocks to initiate radical policy change. Furthermore, states are not swayed by public opinion to the degree imagined by democratic theorists, but often play a significant role in shaping it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There has been significant recent scholarly interest in reading the Collège de Sociologie of the French inter-war years (and especially its leading figure, Georges Bataille) as an important intellectual point of connection between the Durkheimian school of the pre-WWI period and the post-‘68 generation of poststructuralists (see e.g., Gane 1991a and b; Richman 2002). This work, though useful and often ground-breaking, largely concentrates itself in a history of ideas tradition that is centered on texts. I propose that a full understanding of the intellectual genealogy necessitates an interpretive framework more attentive to the sociology of knowledge; that is, a framework sensitive to the actual institutional and other social sites in which the melding of Durkheimian and other (especially Nietzschean) ideas could take place in such a way as to clearly inform subsequent generations of thinkers with a kind of intellectual Zeitgeist that has both textual and lived, experiential, social elements. The journal Critique (which was founded by Bataille in 1946 and later edited by Jean Piel, brother-in-law to both Bataille and Jacques Lacan) serves as one such institutional (if in many ways ‘outsider’) site. Here, and in a few other sites I examine, the conditions were present for the creation of interaction rituals and the production of a kind of collective memory that linked thinkers of Bataille’s generation influenced by Durkheimian thought via Marcel Mauss to thinkers of the post-’68 generation (e.g., Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) who would absorb these Durkheimian/Maussian elements often without explicitly realizing it.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There is a gaping hole in the sociology of family about upper-income families, despite the fact that they are the group that has benefited most during the rise of the new economy. This talk, based on interviews and ethnographic work with eleven upper-income families in Silicon Valley, is designed to close this gap. My analysis of these families finds that their cultural and familial practices, which center on the themes of uniqueness and customization, mirror the underlying features of the new high-value economy, leading me to argue that these social practices and economic features are mutually constitutive. I go on to argue that while most people’s economic security and sense of control is undermined by the volatile nature of the new-economy, upper-income families’ structural position enables them to retain their economic security and thus their sense of control. Consequently, assumptions commonly held during the old economy continue to live on among upper-income families in the new economy, engendering psychic orientations and emotional senses of self, or “structures of feeling,” that form the basis of new class divisions in the twenty first century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Extant research on the media coverage of the Gulf War demonstrates that the media tend to reflect the political ideologies of the mother nation, actively participating in the generation of political support for national policy. A large number of studies on news reports of the Gulf War pointed out that the media constructed the war as a military operation, highlighting military strategies and the triumph of technology, whereas the casualties of the war were omitted. More than a decade after the Gulf War, the United States and Iraq engaged again as key stakeholders in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This article examines the frames present in the media coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of the war coverage on CNN and Fox. Hypotheses also are tested regarding the favorability of specific frames toward key stakeholders.