State transitions in Polish agriculture

Poland's imminent entry into the EU re-emphasises the long-standing need for the restructuring of the country's agricultural sector and the associated re-allocation of its bloated workforce. The transition matrix of net flows derived from an annual panel of micro-data taken from the LFS confirms the impression of the stagnation that is conveyed by gross movements that are computable from the published statistics. Multinomial logit estimation of the probabilities of exit from Polish farming lend weight to the conclusion that radical policy innovations are required if many of Europe's ambitions and targets are to remain credible in the years to come.

Labour flows into and out of Polish agriculture: a micro-level analysis

Notwithstanding its admission to the EU, agricultural restructuring and sustainable rural development remain as major transition challenges confronting Poland. Achieving these joint goals will necessitate major labour flows from farming into other occupations and sectors. This paper employs a multinomial logit model on Labour Force Survey data to analyse mobility in the agricultural labour market. Its major finding is that of a largely stagnant pool of farm workers into and out of which are small flows that are insufficient to bring about the requisite change without explicit, perhaps radical policy intervention.

Temporary Work in Poland: Who Gets the Jobs?

In recent years, Poland witnessed a dramatic decline in its unemployment rate and, from having had one of the worst jobless records in the EU-27, the country now posts a figure below the Union average. However, this remarkable turnaround has apparently been driven by amendments to the country's Labour Code, which have generated an enormous increase in temporary working. On the basis of gross flow data from five consecutive annual panels from the Labour Force Survey, the paper identifies a strong link between this growth and the fall in unemployment. A multinomial logit model then reveals the flows were most heavily concentrated among males and the less well educated. There was also some evidence that fixed-term work lured previously discouraged, inactive individuals back into the labour market. However, the requirement that Poland aligns its temporary employment legislation with that of the EU could conceivable lead to at least a partial reversal of these developments.

Poland''s Jobless Growth: A Temporary Cure?

Poland's post-communist economic performance has been generally good. However, for many years its growth was jobless, it exhibited very high unemployment rates and concomitantly made little progress in approaching the targets set for EU Member States under the Lisbon Strategy. Unexpectedly, in 2003 the country's labour market began to exhibit a new dynamism, with employment growing strongly and unemployment tumbling. This apparent improvement coincided with a liberalisation of its Labour Code. Unfortunately, the measures introduced to increase flexibility are seemingly at variance with the EU's Fixed-Term Work Directive and might need to be modified.

Popular Rule in Schumpeter's Democracy

In this article, it is argued that existing democracies might establish popular rule even if Joseph Schumpeter’s notoriously unflattering picture of ordinary citizens is accurate. Some degree of popular rule is in principle compatible with apathetic, ignorant and suggestible citizens, contrary to what Schumpeter and others have maintained. The people may have control over policy, and their control may constitute popular rule, even if citizens lack definite policy opinions and even if their opinions result in part from elites’ efforts to manipulate these opinions. Thus, even a purely descriptive, ‘realist’ account of democracy of the kind that Schumpeter professed to offer may need to concede that there is no democracy without some degree of popular rule

Why do Local Unemployment Rates in Poland Vary so Much?

Unemployment continues to bedevil Poland, albeit with striking sub-national differences, which this paper seeks to explain using random effects error component two-stage estimation for the country's NUTS 4 level powiats. Given the economy's peculiar configuration under communism, with its large private agricultural sector, emphasis is placed on rural-urban differences. While less densely populated areas do suffer higher unemployment rates, the effect is moderated by hidden unemployment in farming. On the other hand, powiats that housed the ex-state farms suffer a negative long-term legacy. Other notable results include an evident positive impact of foreign capital on local labour market fortunes.

Social Choice and Popular Control

In democracies citizens are supposed to have some control over the general direction of policy. According to a pretheoretical interpretation of this idea, the people have control if elections and other democratic institutions compel officials to do what the people want, or what the majority want. This interpretation of popular control fits uncomfortably with insights from social choice theory; some commentators—Riker, most famously—have argued that these insights should make us abandon the idea of popular rule as traditionally understood. This article presents a formal theory of popular control that responds to the challenge from social choice theory. It makes precise a sense in which majorities may be said to have control even if the majority preference relation has an empty core. And it presents a simple game-theoretic model to illustrate how majorities can exercise control in this specified sense, even when incumbents are engaged in purely re-distributive policymaking and the majority rule core is empty

Ars magna lucis et umbrae

120 modern day ‘magic lanterns’ grouped in a series of narrative sequences and photographic tableaux are distributed unevenly throughout the cavernous space of the former church. Two types of images are projected. The first type are from the collection of images that Mark Ingham has been using for the past few years in his research. These images will occupy the smaller rectangular space at the end of the church. The second type of image will use photographs taken over recent months of the inside and outside of Dilston Grove and its locale. These latter images will create a site specific installation that will attempt to deconstruct the physical and political dimensions of the space and will be sited in the main body of the building. 'The Great Art of Light and Darkness' is the title of a work on optics and the phases of the moon by Athanasius Kircher. Kircher was a leading scholar in his time of natural sciences and mathematics. In 1646 he published the first edition of this book and in it he described a projecting device, equipped with a focusing lens and a mirror, either flat or parabolic. Kircher described the construction of this ‘magic lantern’ by writing: "Make ... a wooden box and put on it a chimney, so that the smoke of the lamp in the box is on a level with the opening, and insert in the opening a pipe or tube. The tube must contain a very good lens, but at the end of the tube...fasten the small glass plate, on which is painted an image in transparent water colours. Then the light of the lamp, penetrating through the lens and through the image on the glass (which is to be inserted... upside down) will throw an upright, enlarged coloured image on the white wall opposite.” When Mark Ingham started to use SLR film cameras as projection devices he wrote: ‘In a blackened out room light from a torch shines through a slide and on through the back of a backless old camera. A transparent, fleeting image captured by this same camera many years ago projects outwards from it. A white wall intervenes, to reveal a glowing circle of dappled coloured light. The lens of the camera/projector focuses the image.’ He sees his camera projectors as the direct descendant of those early ‘magic lanterns’, but instead of a wooden box and a lens he uses an SLR film camera. Replacing the smoky lamp he has cool running Light Emitting Diode spotlights and the ‘transparent water colours’ are replaced by photographic transparencies. The transparency is still inserted upside down in the device and enlarged colour images will be projected on to the walls of the Dilston Grove exhibition space in May-June 2008

Why Arrow's Theorem Matters for Political Theory Even If Preference Cycles Never Occur

Riker (1982) famously argued that Arrow’s impossibility theorem undermined the logical foundations of “populism”, the view that in a democracy, laws and policies ought to express “the will of the people”. In response, his critics have questioned the use of Arrow’s theorem on the grounds that not all configurations of preferences are likely to occur in practice; the critics allege, in particular, that majority preference cycles, whose possibility the theorem exploits, rarely happen. In this essay, I argue that the critics’ rejoinder to Riker misses the mark even if its factual claim about preferences is correct: Arrow’s theorem and related results threaten the populist’s principle of democratic legitimacy even if majority preference cycles never occur. In this particular context, the assumption of an unrestricted domain is justified irrespective of the preferences citizens are likely to have