Ideological Incentives Research Articles

Nonspatial Candidate Characteristics and Electoral Competition

BASIC TO MODELS of electoral competition is the assumption that candidates adopt positions on policy issues as a means of attracting votes. However, candidates are also judged on the basis of human qualities and other attributes not related to the policies they espouse in a campaign. The spatial theory of electoral competition has, in the past, treated such attributes as part of the policy space over which candidates compete. However, certain difficulties attend such an interpretation. For example, it is difficult to view a candidate's personality as something which can be altered to please the voters. The mistakes that an incumbent has committed in office are not things he can erase to compete more effectively for votes. A candidate's religion cannot be abandoned because it is a political liability. In short, there are nonspatial attributes that affect voter evaluations of each candidate, which are beyond that candidate's immediate control. It is the purpose of this paper to incorporate these nonspatial attributes into the spatial model of electoral competition to show how the policy outcome of two candidate electoral competition is af-

Incentive Mechanisms and Remuneration in China: Policies of the Eleventh Central Committee

Research Article| September 01 1981 Incentive Mechanisms and Remuneration in China: Policies of the Eleventh Central Committee Larry M. Wortzel Larry M. Wortzel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1952) 21 (9): 961–976. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643825 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Larry M. Wortzel; Incentive Mechanisms and Remuneration in China: Policies of the Eleventh Central Committee. Far Eastern Survey 4 June 1952; 21 (9): 961–976. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2643825 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1981 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Asymmetry in the Political System: Occasional Activists in the Republican and Democratic Parties, 1956–1964

By means of the Survey Research Center's national public opinion polls of the electorate during the 1956, 1960, and 1964 elections, the opinions of volunteer activists in the Republican and Democratic Parties were compared to those of rank and file members. On issues that divided rank and file Republicans from rank and file Democrats, Republican activists were found to be far more conservative than ordinary Republicans. Democratic activists, however, had about the same distribution of opinion as rank and file members of their party. Moreover, Republicans were proportionately far more active than Democrats. It was inferred from these findings that the two parties were different kinds of organizations. The Republican Party, it was argued, was a high participation party with an amateur base composed of right wing ideologues, while the Democratic Party was a low participation party with a professionalized base not dependent on ideological incentives to activism.

Arms and the Men

I T is a great pity that the war is so affected by these human considerations, but there it is . . . ' The quotation is from a letter by Sir Henry Tizard in 1941 to Sir Edward Appleton: the occasion, an attempt to exclude Watson-Watt from the Policy Committee which dealt with our development *of radar. It could well be a translation from Thucydides. Thucydides might also have provided the first text for another of Tizard's observations, about 'that peculiar business called war, which is as old as agriculture, which is subject to the most violent booms and slumps, the cause of which we do not understand, and in which the incentive to succeed is greater than any profit or ideological incentive in civilian life'. The histories of this antique and peculiar business contain millions upon millions of words about 'the human factor', but they have normally been words about how the gamut of men, from the General down to the Other Rank, has behaved in the actual conflict of the battlefield. The Second World War and its antecedent years generated another form of conflict, for which the evidence has been only gradually made availablethe disputes of men in what Churchill once called the Wizard War. Progressively, in fact, the study is becoming possible of the battles which preceded the battlefield: of the 'human factor' which was an inescapable element in the devising and making of armaments. Several recent official or otherwise authoritative surveys or biographies, especially, have seemed to me to provide an opportunity to bring 'these human considerations' into focus. Churchill took one of his characteristic imaginative flights when he evoked Merlin, for though, like some other wars, the last was a materialenschlacht on the battlefield, it was unique in that never before had scientists been so mobilised in the support of military operations, never before had science been so fertile in the provision of material for the conduct of campaigns. And though a study of the way some of the scientists behaved in this process reminds one of Pontecorvo's remark about atomic energy' toute l'affaire ne cessera jamais d'etre a' la fois passionante et de'plaisante'nevertheless, to achieve an appreciation of their conduct in the battles before the battlefields is perhaps more relevant to our circumstances today than a minute examination of Operation Barbarossa or the splitting of the minefields at El Alamein.