A Simple Coase-Like Mechanism that Transfers Control of Government Spending Levels from Politicians to Voters

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary rules are seen as necessary to constrain politicians? tax and spending behavior. Popular among such constraints are various Balanced Budget Amendment proposals. These approaches, however, are shown here to have serious limitations, including failure to address the central concern of spending level. An alternative approach is advanced here that relies on a Coase-like mechanism that transfers control of government spending to the voter. Prisoner's dilemma incentives and political competition are seen to be critical to the superiority of the present mechanism to approaches requiring budget balance

Situating Speech: A Rhetorical Approach to Political Strategy

Ideas are increasingly acknowledged as factors in explaining political behaviour. But often they are treated as inert resources rather than dynamic instances of action in themselves. The latter, I propose, requires reflection on the character of speech – as the medium of ideas – in responding to and refiguring a prevailing situation. I undertake such reflection by setting out a rhetorical approach to political strategy. Building upon ‘interpretive’ advances in political science I shift the focus from stable cognitive frames to the dynamics of argumentation where ideas work expressively. I then explore the rhetorical aspect of strategising with attention to the way speech serves to orient audiences by creatively re-appropriating a situation. That approach is shown to be consistent with a ‘dialectical’ political sociology that emphasises the interaction of structure and agency. Finally, I sketch a method for undertaking rhetorical analysis and indicate how it might be applied to a concrete example

A survey of a personalised location-based service architecture for property hunting

Context-awareness in location-based service studies has attracted more and more attention. Awareness of a user’s location and the users themselves has become the centre of these services. This paper discusses a survey conducted for developing a personalised location-based property hunting system (LBSPH), and a personalised LBSPH architecture developed from the survey results. What users wanted in the way of essential property and neighbourhood information, the best way to display the information, and the common use cases of such a location-based service (LBS) were identified from the survey. The LBSPH architecture was designed to reflect these preferences