Search results for "Positive economics"

The role of 'the resources of the power hypothesis' in explaining the Spanish welfare state between 1975-1995

2000

There are two clearly differentiated parts to thiswork. The first consists of areview of the theoretical arguments that underliethe so-called `resourcesof power hypothesis'. That theory has beenused to explain the growth anddevelopment of the Welfare State in severalEuropean countries. The findingsof a number of empirical works backing up thattheory have also been includedin this review. The intention of the second partis to check the theory against theSpanish case between 1975 and 1995. The conclusionof this work is that if, besidesconsidering the ideological persuasion of theparty controlling the government, wetake into account the other relevant factorsencompassed by the theory, then the…

The Context(s) of Precaution: Ideological and Instrumental Appeals to the Precautionary Principle

2009

This article contributes to the clarification of the concept of precaution and its function in social debate. The authors compare the uses of precaution in science and technology—related conflicts (as indicated by an analysis of media reports on precaution) with data from a survey on precaution and the role of science in decision making. While the survey data confirm the existence of opposing “idealized” or “ideological” conceptualizations of the role of science in regulatory decisions, the analyzed media reports show an added degree of complexity on the level of social dynamics. The media analysis identifies an instrumental use of the concept of precaution in social debate, which is indep…

English and French Modes of Regulation of the Education System : a comparison

2003

03069; International audience; This paper describes English and French modes of regulation of the educational system, stressing the contrast between them (regulation by process versus regulation by outcomes), while their goals and organisation prove rather more convergent over the last 30 years. It tries to assess the correspondence between those two ways of operating and what we know about the functioning of organisations like schools. From that point of view, the French system fits the economic theory of organisation less well than the English one, so that some contradictions and tensions are predictable. Last, it looks for some relationhip with indicators of effectiveness, equity and soc…

Book review: Social Inequality

2020

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Quality of Democracy: The Citizens' Perspective

2018

In recent years, several measurements of the quality of democracy have been developed (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy Project). These objective measurements focus on institutional and procedural characteristics of democracy. This article starts from the premise that in order to fully understand the quality of democracy such objective measurements have to be complemented by subjective measurements based on the perspective of citizens. The aim of the article is to conceptualize and measure the subjective quality of democracy. First, a conceptualization of the subjective quality of democracy is developed consisting of citizens’ support for three normative models of democracy …

A partial micro-foundation for the ‘two-worlds’ theory of morality policymaking: Evidence from Germany

2020

The two-worlds framework is currently the most important account of morality policymaking in Europe. For this theory of elite behaviour to be valid, a number of implicit assumptions about political belief systems at the mass level must hold. This contribution spells out these assumptions and tests them within a structural equation modelling framework, using original survey data from Germany, a country that constitutes a crucial case for the two-worlds theory. The results showed that the implicit individual-level preconditions of the two-worlds framework were fulfilled. Political secularism and partisanship were strongly associated. Political secularism also had strong effects on morality p…

Minding morality : ethical artificial societies for public policy modeling

2020

AbstractPublic policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally sal…

Explaining Electoral Support for the Radical Right

2018

The literature on the radical right’s electorate offers a plethora of potential explanations as to why people vote for the radical right. This chapter organizes the presumptive causes of right-wing voting along the lines of the familiar micro-meso-macro scheme, focusing both on a number of landmark studies and on some of the latest research. In doing so, it weighs the evidence in favor of and against some prominent hypotheses about the conditions for radical right party success, including the pure-protest hypothesis, the charismatic-leader hypothesis, and the silent-counterrevolution hypothesis. It also discusses the existing knowledge on the effects of a host of meso- and macro-level facto…

Ethics and economics, friends or foes? An educational debate

2004

This paper reviews an ongoing debate about moral standards for vocational education in German speaking countries. At the centre of the controversy is the question of universalistic versus domain‐specific moral orientations, namely the question of whether business people ought to develop different moral points of view in different situations (such as ‘private’ versus ‘professional’). Of pivotal importance in this context is also a prominent ethical approach (by Karl Homann, a philosopher in the tradition of liberal economists) which serves as a foundation for those who advocate domain specificity and which is strongly criticized by their counterparts. This approach is also presented, since t…

Materialistic values impact on pro-environmental behavior: The case of transition country as Lithuania

2020

Abstract Materialism is becoming a global phenomenon and is increasing exponentially. Lithuania, which has survived a long period of occupation, experienced privatization and goods’ famine is attributed to the transition countries. In terms of materialistic values, Lithuania is not an exception, as material wealth and image are also very important. Thus, the main question of this paper was whether materialistic values could be reconciled with the pro-environmental behavior, which can be considered as one of the main aspects seeking sustainability. According to the Lithuanian representative survey and by applying the approach of structural equation modeling, the results showed that materiali…