Assessing the Proposed IAM, UAW, and USW Merger: Critical Issues and Potential Outcomes

[Excerpt] We examine the many difficult issues facing the IAM, UAW, and USW as they move toward the creation of a single organization. In order to place this merger in con- text, the larger issue of mergers in the American labor movement will be addressed, as will the origins and history of each of the three unions. The specific issues confronting the unions will be examined in three categories — structure, administration, and functions and services. We conclude with an assessment of the current status of the unification effort and the prospects for its realization

Extreme Candidates as the Beneficent Spoiler? Range Effect in the Plurality Voting System

How does the entrance of radical candidates influence election results? Conventional wisdom suggests that extreme candidates merely split the votes. Based on the range effect theory in cognitive psychology, we hypothesize that the entrance of an extreme candidate reframes the endpoints of the ideological spectrum among available candidates, which makes the moderate one on the same side to be perceived by the voters as even more moderate. Through two survey experiments in the United States and Taiwan, we provide empirical support for range effect in the vote choice in the plurality system. The results imply that a mainstream party can, even without changing its own manifesto, benefit from the entrance of its radical counterpart; it explains why the mainstream party may choose cooperation strategically. Our findings also challenge the assumption in regression models that the perceived ideological positions of candidates are independent of each other

Post-Soviet Belarus: The Transformation of National Identity

The paper deals with the formation of a new national identity in Belarus under conditions of post-Soviet transformation. Under the term of "national identity" the author means the identity of the population of the Republic of Belarus that will be adequate to its status of a newly independent state acquired after 1991. Special attention is paid to the existing major research approaches to the problem of constructing this national identity. According to the author's view, both major approaches are inadequate; the author puts forward a new (third) approach that goes beyond discussions on language and national culture, and corresponds to the concept of plurality of identities. The author describes some paradoxes of national identity based on the opposition of "nation" and "people". These correspond to the Western model of the "creation of modern nations", which is not fully applicable to post-Soviet Belarus. All attempts to apply this model to contemporary Belarus lead scholars to several "cultural paradoxes" that can, however, be explained within a new approach

Resilience and unemployment: A case study of East German women

This is the author's PDF version of an article published in German politics ©2005. The definitive version is available at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/gpThis article discusses unemployment in the former East Germany and the impact that exceptionally high unemployment in the new German states has had on East German women since reunification. It reflects, in particular, on the potential influence of their experience of life in the GDR in developing coping strategies to deal with the effects of unemployment, an ongoing resistance to unemployment and, most significantly, to a male-breadwinner ethos

Yugoslavism between the World Wars: indecisive nation-building

This article examines Yugoslav national programs of ruling political elites and its concrete implementation in education policy in interwar Yugoslavia. It is argued that at the beginning of the period Yugoslavism was not inherently incompatible with or subordinate to Serbian, Croatian or to a lesser degree Slovenian national ideas. However, the concrete ways in which Yugoslavism was formulated and adopted by ruling elites discredited the Yugoslav national idea and resulted in increasing delineation and polarization in the continuum of national ideas available in Yugoslavia. Throughout the three consecutive periods of political rule under scrutiny, ruling elites failed to reach a wider consensus regarding the Yugoslav national idea or to create a framework within which a constructive elaboration of Yugoslav national identity could take place. By the end of the interwar period, the Yugoslav national idea had become linked exclusively to conservatism, centralism, authoritarianism and, for non-Serbian elites at least, Serbian hegemony. Other national ideas gained significance as ideas providing viable alternatives for the regime’s Yugoslavism

The integrative framework for the behavioural sciences has already been discovered, and it is the adaptationist approach

The adaptationist framework is necessary and sufficient for unifying the social and natural sciences. Gintis’s “beliefs, preferences, and constraints” (BPC) model compares unfavorably to this framework because it lacks criteria for determining special design, incorrectly assumes that standard evolutionary theory predicts individual rationality maximisation, does not adequately recognize the impact of psychological mechanisms on culture, and is mute on the behavioural implications of intragenomic conflict