Joseph A. Aistrup

Opinion: Endogenizing culture in sustainability science research and policy

Integrating the analysis of natural and social systems to achieve sustainability has been an international scientific goal for years (1, 2). However, full integration has proven challenging, especially in regard to the role of culture (3), which is often missing from the complex sustainability equation. To enact policies and practices that can achieve sustainability, researchers and policymakers must do a better job of accounting for culture, difficult though this task may be.

Constituency Diversity and Party Competition: A County and State Level Analysis

One of the staples of American politics is the theory that party competition is a function of constituency diversity. In Federalist #10 (see Rae and Taylor 1970: 7; Fiorina 1974: 89-119; Sullivan 1973) Madison emphasizes that increased constituency diversity facilitates factional dispute. As diversity increases, it weakens the ability of any single faction to represent the multifarious demands of people in a geographic area (The Federalist Papers 1961: 77-83). Despite this relatively simple and normatively pleasing explanatory perspective, and despite this theory’s broad acceptance in political science, the study of the relationship between constituency diversity and party competition has been one of the more elusive and sometimes contradictory research topics of the past 30 years. This article analyzes county level data from the 1970s and 1980s—the period that forms the basis of much of this literature—to assess the theoretical and empirical purchase of three of the dominant operational definitions for constituency diversity and then compares these county level findings with parallel state level analyses. I find that reformulated Lieberson/Sullivan social diversity indexes and Koetzle’s political diversity index produce similar results at the state and county levels of analysis. Moreover, these results are consistent with the theory that constituency diversity has a strong influence on the level of party competition.

State Legislative Party Competition: A County-Level Measure

This note develops a county-level measure of state legislative party competition for the periods between 1968-73, 1974-79, and 1980-85. The validity of the measure is evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis, a comparison to Ranneys state-level measure, and through an examination of the county-level data. In all cases, the county-level measure shows it is a valid indicator of party competition at the state legislative level.

Defining the Available Labor Pool: The Kansas Labor Force Survey

One of the key questions for employers seeking to locate or expand their operations is whether a prospective community has an available and affordable labor force with the prerequisite skills. This study outlines an applied theoretical perspective and a set of survey methods to move beyond the inherent limitations of unemployment rates and other census data used to infer availability and prevailing wage rates of a communitys workforce. Applying these methods to Kansas in 2001, the authors found more than 7% of Kansans of working age, or about 110,000 potential workers, were unemployed in some manner but were available for job opportunities. Another 12.6% of the Kansas labor force, or just more than 159,000 people, were employed (full- and part-time) and were actively seeking new employment opportunities. A total of 43.7% of the Kansas labor force, or about 651,000 people, would consider a new employment opportunity given the right circumstances.