The Politics of Immigration: Introduction to a Special Issue on US Immigration

In reading this special issue we gain a remarkably insightful glimpse of the important role that immigration policy has played, and will continue to play, in several important aspects of contemporary American life.  After eight years of the Bush Administration, a new immigration policy is poised to rise again from the ashes of the infamous Sensenbrenner Bill.  A fresh political and economic context ensures this.

Designing Regulatory Governance Models for Managing Hydrocarbon Resources: Lessons Learned from Norway and the UK

While the ever-evolving nature of the global energy industry remains apparent particularly with a transition away from fossil fuel energy systems, the role of oil and gas particularly for emerging economies is undeniable. As new discoveries of oil and gas emerge in countries in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, the dominant question will be how to design robust regulatory governance regimes not just for the exploration of oil and gas but also for the management of these resources. As both the United Kingdom and Norway are described as mature oil and gas jurisdictions by virtue of their profound experience, there are valuable lessons to be drawn. Despite some remarkable differences in both the UK and Norwegian regimes, experience suggests that strategy, foresight, regulatory rigour, and political will are valuable to mitigating the consequences of the political economy of speed, which suggest the development of natural resources at the expense of everything else. This paper provides both a comprehensive and critical appraisal of both the UK and Norwegian regimes in a way that captures the complexity of divergent regulatory governance structures

Den nye oljen

I fremtiden vil Norges økonomi måtte bli mindre avhengig av petroleum både fordi det er en ikke-fornybar ressurs, og på grunn av at vi må slutte å bidra til klimaendringer. Norske myndigheter har derfor begynt å søke aktivt etter et grønnere grunnlag for vår økonomiske fremtid, og bioøkonomien og fornybar energi ansees å være attraktive alternativ. Denne artikkelen ser på hvordan forvaltningen av sentrale naturressurser påvirker mulighetene til å finansiere den fremtidige norske velferdsstaten. For å gjøre dette sammenligner vi forvaltningsregimet som brukes for olje med dem som brukes på vind- og vannkraft, havbruk og bioprospektering. De ulike regimene spiller en avgjørende rolle for størrelsen på og skattleggingen av grunnrenten som ressursene frembringer. Resultatet av vår kartlegging viser at det har vært et brudd i forvaltningstradisjonen for naturressurser. Myndigheten har valgt bort de suksessfulle forvaltningsregimene fra vannkraft og petroleum, og erstattet dem med regimer som verken kan sikre tilsvarende offentlig kontroll eller grunnrentebeskatning av vindkraft, havbruk og bioprospektering. Vi konkluderer med at dagens forvaltningsregime overfor disse sektorene ikke kan bidra til en offentlig rikdom som kan måle seg med den vi har blitt vant til fra oljen.publishedVersio

New approaches and technical considerations in detecting outlier measurements and trajectories in longitudinal children growth data

Background Growth studies rely on longitudinal measurements, typically represented as trajectories. However, anthropometry is prone to errors that can generate outliers. While various methods are available for detecting outlier measurements, a gold standard has yet to be identified, and there is no established method for outlying trajectories. Thus, outlier types and their effects on growth pattern detection still need to be investigated. This work aimed to assess the performance of six methods at detecting different types of outliers, propose two novel methods for outlier trajectory detection and evaluate how outliers affect growth pattern detection. Methods We included 393 healthy infants from The Applied Research Group for Kids (TARGet Kids!) cohort and 1651 children with severe malnutrition from the co-trimoxazole prophylaxis clinical trial. We injected outliers of three types and six intensities and applied four outlier detection methods for measurements (model-based and World Health Organization cut-offs-based) and two for trajectories. We also assessed growth pattern detection before and after outlier injection using time series clustering and latent class mixed models. Error type, intensity, and population affected method performance. Results Model-based outlier detection methods performed best for measurements with precision between 5.72-99.89%, especially for low and moderate error intensities. The clustering-based outlier trajectory method had high precision of 14.93-99.12%. Combining methods improved the detection rate to 21.82% in outlier measurements. Finally, when comparing growth groups with and without outliers, the outliers were shown to alter group membership by 57.9 -79.04%. Conclusions World Health Organization cut-off-based techniques were shown to perform well in few very particular cases (extreme errors of high intensity), while model-based techniques performed well, especially for moderate errors of low intensity. Clustering-based outlier trajectory detection performed exceptionally well across all types and intensities of errors, indicating a potential strategic change in how outliers in growth data are viewed. Finally, the importance of detecting outliers was shown, given its impact on children growth studies, as demonstrated by comparing results of growth group detection

"Rational choice? A two-level analysis of the Nordic EU referendums"

The impetus for this paper is an empirical puzzle. In a previous work, my co-author and I employed a single, fairly parsimonious, model to explain political behavior at two distinct levels of analysis: the individual and the country (i.e., a higher level of aggregation). The puzzle began here: the model did not fit comfortably at both levels of analysis. To overcome this lack of fit, I began a series of alterations. As will become more clear, my first response was to try again, with no luck. I then began to relax assumptions; this only introduced more problems. Finally, we are now trying to develop an even grander, more complex model. As work in the latter direction continues, I have begun a more radial (and speculative) query to the problem at hand. This paper airs that query with a hope at sparking a dialogue, and eventually (hopefully) reconciling the initial dilemma. The query (argument is too strong a word) contains two parts. In the first section I introduce some of the empirical results which initiated the problem. Here I present some data from Moses and Jenssen (1997) which show how a narrowly defined rational choice argument goes some distance in explaining county-level referendum outcomes, but finds very little support in the individual-level data. I refer to this explanatory gap as the inconsistency problem. Our empirical work studies variance in Nordic (Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian) referendum outcomes on EU membership in 1994. Our data are from cross-national polls and county-level aggregate data

Sparrows of Despair: Migration as a Signalling Device for Dysfunctional States in Europe

This article considers the utility of emigration figures for signalling political dysfunction in Europe. If given a choice, most people would prefer not to leave friends, family and homes in order to find work. By assuming that international migration is more of a burden than a freedom, international migration patterns can help us distinguish between politically successful and politically dysfunctional states. This approach is first applied to international refugees and migrants to the EU, then used to study internal EU migrant flows. In doing this, it creates two sets of rankings (in overall and per capita terms) for Europe’s most and least successful states. Included among the most dysfunctional states in Europe are Romania, Lithuania, Ireland, Croatia and Latvia. It would seem as though policymakers in these states are unable to satisfy their constituents’ needs