Consequences Of Dissent Research Articles

The Duty of Diplomatic Dissent

AbstractThe poor outcome of the Iraq War has highlighted the usefulness of 'reality-based' foreign policy. Yet the personal and professional consequences of dissent remain high in the US (and every other) diplomatic service. The Dissent Channel, currently underutilized, was designed to protect both the US State Department and its employees from bureaucratic retaliation for unwelcome real-world expertise. It should be reinvigorated. However, the unimpressive policy impact of dissent, whether through institutional channels or public resignations, makes it clear that effective dissent requires mobilizing the domestic political process as a force multiplier. Good dissent raises the political price of foreign policy blunders, and only through turning a bureaucratic system painfully against itself can blunders actually be prevented.

The consequences of dissent: sociological reflections on the controversy of the low dose effects

The design of strategic rent-extracting trade policies requires information that may be private, such as the cost structure of an industry or parameters of the demand function. As a consequence, under asymmetric information, the design of these policies is problematic. We propose screening menus consisting of different instruments (tariff vs. quota) designed to solve this informational issue. We first use a simple model that examines a Cournot duopoly between a domestic firm and a foreign firm with linear demand and cost functions, with both firms supplying a homogeneous good on the domestic market. In this scenario, if the government does not have information regarding the demand parameter, which is known by both firms, a menu consisting of a rent-extracting tariff for a low demand parameter and a rent-extracting quota for a high demand parameter maximizes the government's objective function. This menu leads the domestic firm to reveal private information. We then generalize this framework to a scenario with imperfect information regarding the firms' marginal cost. Finally, we discuss the issue of quotas generating public revenues and study the case of a menu consisting of a tariff and a free quota.

The consequences of dissent: Sociological reflections on the controversy of the low dose effects

The controversy of the low dose effects, i.e. health effects of small amounts of ionizing radiation on human beings which do not produce any short-term effects, can serve as exemplification of (a) the existing trend of growing political integration of science and the resulting conflicts and dilemmas for the scientists involved; (b) the intricate nature of the relationship between political and scientific elements in controversies of this kind which defy attempts of any clear separation of the underlying issues in terms of conventional categories; (c) the sociological nature of a conflict over ‘boundaries’ and its social implications. What follows is a description of the case study and the arguments presented as well as action taken by the main protagonists of dissent, Gofman and Tamplin, and their counterparts within governmental and industrial nuclear agencies. The first phase of the low dose effects controversy coincided with and partly triggered off a wider debate on the hazards of nuclear power and strongly mirrors the political objectives held by both sides In the sociological analysis the focus lies on an interpretation of the phenomenon of dissenting scientists entangled - by push and pull factors - in a public controversy and the social sanctions following the breaking of taboos by them. In the conclusions the institutionalization of a kind of ecological niche for dissenting scientists is envisaged, which is however not a wholly unproblematic development.