Leonard Ray

Reconsidering the Link between Incumbent Support and Pro-EU Opinion

According to some recent work on the attitudes towards European integration, supporters of incumbent parties are generally more pro-European than supporters of opposition parties. However, there are theoretical reasons to expect supporters of governing parties to be skeptical of European integration. Upon closer examination, the relationship between incumbent support and pro-European Union (EU) attitudes is a conditional one, which appears primarily when referendums are held on European topics or during European Parliament (EP) election years. At other times, there is a weak positive relationship between incumbent support and support for the current European Union, but a negative relationship with support for further unification. This suggests that supporters of incumbent parties are not natural advocates for reform of the institutions of the EU.

Taking on Tobacco: Policy Entrepreneurship and the Tobacco Litigation

The retrenchment of the federal government and the deregulation of many industries, beginning in the 1980s, afforded state elected officials opportunities for policy entrepreneurship. In particular, state attorneys general began to create policy The recent high profile tobacco litigation demonstrates the use of this oft-overlooked office for policy innovation. The legal effort initiated by the states against the tobacco industry sheds light on the role of the state attorney general in our federal system. While much of the literature on state politics continues to debate and examine the influence of the governor on policy innovation and diffusion, our study provides a clear example of policy innovation independent of the governor. Our event history analysis supports critiques of the field of state politics that note the lack of attention to other actors and the context surrounding state policy development. We find that the attorney general is an innovator in her own right, motivated by partisan self interest and working within the constraints of her role. Crises and events clearly mobilized activity among the attorneys general. The state attorneys general succeeded in creating a new national tobacco policy through litigation and these actors demand closer attention as policy entrepreneurs.

A simple “market value” bargaining model for weighted voting games: characterization and limit theorems

We offer a bargaining model for weighted voting games that is a close relative of the nucleolus and the kernel. We look for a set of weights that preserves winning coalitions that has the property of minimizing the difference between the weight of the smallest and the weight of the largest Minimum Winning Coalition. We claim that such a set of weights provides an a priori measure of a weighted voter’s bribeworthiness or market value. After introducing our model, we provide a characterization result for this model and show its links to other bargaining model approaches in the literature. Then we offer some limit results showing that, with certain reasonable conditions on the distributions of weights, as the size of the voting body increases, the values of bribeworthiness we calculate will approach both the weights themselves and the Banzhaf scores for the weighted voting game. We also show that, even for relatively small groups using weighted voting, such as the membership of the European Council of Ministers (and its predecessors) 1958–2003, similarities among the usual a priori power scores, bribeworthiness/market value, and the weights themselves, will be quite strong.