Fat Cats and Thin Kittens: Are People Who Make Large Campaign Contributions Different?

Critics of campaign finance in the United States often direct their fire toward contributors who make large donations. Critics charge that large contributions are unfair, unrepresentative, and undemocratic. Accordingly, they push for "reforms" that would favor small contributions over large, and public money over private donations. Survey data on contributors contradict that stereotype of contributors of large amounts and their effects on American politics. Overall, "fat cats" differ less from contributors of smaller amounts than critics have alleged. The differences that do exist are mostly unsurprising and generally small in magnitude. Survey results show that both policy liberalism and Democratic partisanship are well represented among contributors of large sums.The supporters of McCain-Feingold argue that new restrictions on large contributions will profoundly alter American politics for the better. Their claims have no basis in fact. New laws aimed at restricting large donations in favor of smaller ones will have little effect on practical politics

The Macro-Social Benefits of Education, Training and Skills in Comparative Perspective [Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No. 9]

This report, the second from the Centre's strand of comparative research, complements an earlier WBL research report (Education, Equity and Social Cohesion: A Distributional Model) in exploring further themes of societal comparison and the distributional effects of education systems. Despite generally high levels of educational attainment there is huge diversity amongst Western Societies in terms of crime, tolerance, trust and social cohesion. In this report, we take a comparative approach to investigating relationships between education and these outcomes at a societal level. Through an interdisciplinary review of literatures from sociology, history, economics and psychology we examine the role of education systems from a number of countries in influencing trends in, and levels of, these variables. Whilst the importance of country and historical context is stressed throughout we arrive at some general conclusions concerning the role of education systems in the development of various forms of social cohesion. This report will be of interest to policy makers, researchers and practitioners who are interested in the social impact of education systems. In particular, we examine implications for current UK policy targeted at increasing national educational attainment

Education and Social Cohesion: Re-Centering the Debate

Social Capital theory has tended to treat social cohesion as a mere aggregation of individual and community level characteristics, ignoring the long tradition of theory on social solidarity and social cohesion at the societal level. However, the key indicators of social capital – associational membership and social trust – do not co-vary cross nationally and societies rich in community level social capital are not always cohesive societies. Social capital and societal cohesion are not necessarily the same thing and education may have different effects on each. This article seeks to put the analysis of education and societal cohesion back in the centre of the picture. We do this firstly through a critical review of some of the existing literature on education and social capital which points to the limitations of individual level analysis of what are fundamentally societal issues. Secondly, we outline some alternative models for understanding how education impacts on social cohesion in different societies, drawing on an analysis of some of the aggregated cross-national data on skills, income distribution and various indicators of social cohesion. The argument suggests some causal mechanisms for the social impacts of education that are quite different from those which normally underpin arguments about human and social capital

The geometry of thresholdless active flow in nematic microfluidics

"Active nematics" are orientationally ordered but apolar fluids composed of interacting constituents individually powered by an internal source of energy. When activity exceeds a system-size dependent threshold, spatially uniform active apolar fluids undergo a hydrodynamic instability leading to spontaneous macroscopic fluid flow. Here, we show that a special class of spatially non-uniform configurations of such active apolar fluids display laminar (i.e., time-independent) flow even for arbitrarily small activity. We also show that two-dimensional active nematics confined on a surface of non-vanishing Gaussian curvature must necessarily experience a non-vanishing active force. This general conclusion follows from a key result of differential geometry: geodesics must converge or diverge on surfaces with non-zero Gaussian curvature. We derive the conditions under which such curvature-induced active forces generate "thresholdless flow" for two-dimensional curved shells. We then extend our analysis to bulk systems and show how to induce thresholdless active flow by controlling the curvature of confining surfaces, external fields, or both. The resulting laminar flow fields are determined analytically in three experimentally realizable configurations that exemplify this general phenomenon: i) toroidal shells with planar alignment, ii) a cylinder with non-planar boundary conditions, and iii) a "Frederiks cell" that functions like a pump without moving parts. Our work suggests a robust design strategy for active microfluidic chips and could be tested with the recently discovered "living liquid crystals".Comment: The rewritten paper has several changes, principally: 1. A separate section III for two-dimensional curved systems, illustrated with an new example. 2. Remarks about the relevance of the frozen director approximation in the case of weak nematic order; and 3. A separate Supplemental Material document, containing material previously in the Appendix, along with additional materia

Consideration of landscape in the framework documentation during the evolution of the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS) in the Republic of Ireland.

working paperThis paper looks at the changing concept of landscape during the evolution of REPS. It reviews and groups definitions of landscape and identifies their agri-environmental relevance. Descriptions were devised to amplify each grouping with reference to an Irish context and were used as an analytical framework to categorise each landscape reference in REPS documentation. There was an increase in the use of the term landscape with each version of the scheme and expansion in the range of different landscape categories to which this apparently applied. However there has been no coherence in its use. This paper makes recommendations to improve the framework for the treatment of landscape issues in REPS and its future evolution

Education, Equity and Social Cohesion : A Distributional Model [Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No. 7]

This report - the first from the Centre’s comparative strand of research - focuses on the effects of education on social cohesion at the societal level. The research involved two elements. The first was a theoretical analysis and critique of models in the existing international and comparative literature on education, social capital and social cohesion. This led to the development of a new hypothetical model relating skills distribution to social cohesion. The second part of the research used cross-national, quantitative techniques to test the model on aggregated data for 15 countries. The analysis suggests that educational distribution may be a very significant influence on societal cohesion in certain contexts. Improving levels of education alone may not foster social solidarity if inequalities of skill and income persist. The findings here have important policy implications. Existing policies focus on developing the individual resources and competences which will help to build social capital and community cohesion. However, these will not necessarily impact on cohesion at the societal level. Creating a more cohesive society is likely to require policies that are also designed to increase equality through narrowing educational outcomes