Prayer in public schools, abortion, gay and lesbian rights—these bitterly divisive issues dominate American politics today, revealing deep disagreements over basic moral values. In a highly readable account that draws on legal arguments, political theory, and philosophy, Ronald F. Thiemann explores the proper role of religious convictions in American public life. He proposes that religion can and should play an active, positive part in our society even as it maintains a fundamental commitment to pluralist, democratic values.
Arguing that both increased secularism and growing religious diversity since the 1960s have fragmented commonly held values, Thiemann observes that there has been an historical ambivalence in American attitudes towards religion in public life. He proposes abandoning the idea of an absolute wall between church and state and all the conceptual framework built around that concept in interpreting the first amendment. He returns instead to James Madison's views and the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, and toleration. Refuting both political liberalism (as too secular) and communitarianism (as failing to meet the challenge of pluralism), Thiemann offers a new definition of liberalism that gives religions a voice in the public sphere as long as they heed the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, and toleration or mutual respect.
The American republic, Thiemann notes, is a constantly evolving experiment in constructing a pluralistic society from its many particular communities. Religion can act as a positive force in its moral renewal, by helping to shape common cultural values.
All those interested in finding solutions to today's divisive political discord, in finding ways to disagree civilly in a democracy, and in exploring the extent to which religious convictions should shape the development of public policies will find that this book offers an important new direction for religion and the nation.
This paper demonstrates that the introduction of imperfect competition into the labor market can solve the problem isolated by Jones and Manuelli (Journal of Economic Theory, 1992, 58, 171–197), and Boldrin (Journal of Economic Theory, 1992, 58, 198–218), that in economies with convex technologies and finitely lived agents, real wages may not grow fast enough for unbounded growth to be sustained. I show that if wages are determined by a bargaining solution, and if the bargaining power of the workforce is sufficiently high (if they appropriate a sufficiently large proportion of rents), then growth is unbounded. Moreover, the growth path generated by such an economy may improve the welfare of all generation apart from the initial old.
Since 1989, Germany's domestic and international environments have experienced significant changes. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that the country's long–standing foreign and domestic policies will adapt to novel challenges and pressures. This article examines the case of eastern trade policy, and area in which one might expect to observe a greater degree of government intervention post–unification. In fact, no such adaptation has taken place in the six years since the beginning of the unification process. This empirical puzzle lends itself to an analysis based on the interaction of interests, institutions, and ideas. Unification altered the prevailing constellation of material economic interests in Germany, as well as parliamentary–electoral institutions. However, the events of 1989–90 left untouched the dominant ideas (or models) that shaped the West German political economy in the postwar period, as well as crucial sets of institutions — some lodged within the federal bureaucracy and others at the international level — linked to those ideas. Drawing on a detailed case study, including extensive interviews with German and Russian policymakers, we conclude that the lack of an interventionist trade response is a function of continuity at the nexus of ideas and institutions in the unified German.
Working Paper 96–03, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1996.
For its speed, scope, and openness, the Czechoslovak mass privatization program is considered the model to be followed by economies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere grappling with stalled or tentative public–sector reform programs. Yet there are two unexpected developments in the Czech economy that warrant explanation. First, despite fears that voucher–based privatization of state enterprises would produce a system of diffuse ownership, ownership in the Czech economy is actually heavily concetrated in the hands of a few large, formerly state–owned financial institutions.. Second, contrary to the belief of privatization authorities that universal banks would form the crux of an efficient, German–style system of corporate governance, banks and bank–owned investement funds have proven to be poor enterprise monitors. This paper examines and interprets this evidence, arguing that the present bank–centered system of enterprise ownership in the Czech Republic has its origins in a political compromise reached between reformist politicians and state–owned banks between 1990 and 1991. By this compromise, large–bank "loyalty" to the voucher schemem was assured in exchange for banking and securities legislation that left the financial sector largely unreformed.
Working Paper 96–02, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1996.
Domestic agricultural subsidy policies, both in the U.S. and in the European Union, underwent modest liberal reforms early in the decade of the 1990s. Such reforms had been one key objective sought by negotiators (especially U.S. negotiators) in the 1986–93 Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. Two-level game theory suggests that a prior agreement abroad can speed the pace of reform at home. Yet a close examination of the timing and content of the 1993 GATT agreement on agriculture indicates that the international negotiation added little to the pace or content of reform, and in the U.S. may have even slowed reform. In the EU, internal policy reform was triggered more by the binding effects of a much earlier (Dillon Round) international agreement, than by the two–level game dynamic of the Uruguay Round. U.S. and EU farm sector reform policies were little altered by the Uruguay Round, while the Round itself was slowed down by agriculture, with adverse effects for other sectors.
Working Paper 96–01, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, January 30, 1996.
Download PDFThis paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the strongest, and French civil law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German and Scandinavian civil law countries located in the middle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protections, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified shareholders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights.
This paper is about new information technology (IT): the integration of information processing and global communications – "a marriage between microprocessors and the telephone" (as the Swedish IT–Commission puts it) – and how it can be used by a foreign service.
Imagine a scene in which United States military engineers—the wartime builders of command bunkers, field hospitals, and runways for jet fighters—brought their skills to the poorest reaches of the Third World to construct schools, clinics, and access roads at no cost to the local populace. This scenario, part of the Defense Department?s Humanitarian and Civic Assistance (HCA) program, exists under United States law in the form of military exercises sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in Latin America, by the United States Southern Command (SouthCom). If it falls short of the biblical peace ideal of beating swords into plowshares, it comes close, hitching the Army mule to plow nonetheless. More difficult to imagine might be the fact that Army engineers did such a thing in the Republic of Colombia, in cooperation with the Colombian government, and that their help was overwhelmingly rejected, in disbelief and scandal, by the people of Colombia.
A rapid move to currency convertibility by the transforming countries of eastern Europe does not seem to have hurt those countries that undertook it compared to those that moved more gradually. Indeed, on balance they seem to have performed better. Yet the evidence is not conclusive, and the number of observations too few to make strong conclusions, after allowance is made for other differentiating features among countries.
Western European countries almost surely could have moved to currency convertibility more rapidly than they did in the 1950s, especially if arrangements had been made for partial funding of the sterling balances held by Commonwealth countries, but the intellectual climate and political consensus were not present for making the move.
The experience of the eastern European countries in the early 1990s, although admittedly embedded in special circumstances, at least raises strong doubts about the justification for preserving exchange controls in many developing countries. A much heavier burden of proof should be levied on those countries by the international community and in particular by the International Monetary Fund, whose Articles of Agreement call for convertibility as a basic condition for membership.
Working Paper 96–05, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, December 1996.
Download PDFThis paper provides a formal model of endogenous border formation and of choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict. The model is consistent with three observations. First, break–up of countries should follow a reduction in the likelihood of international conflicts. Second, the number of regional conflicts between smaller countries may increase as a result of the break–up of larger countries. Third, the size of the peace dividend — i.e., the reduction in the defense spending in a more peaceful world — is limited by the process of country break–up.
426_conflict.pdfSince the publication of Robert Putnam's "Making Democracy Work," the concept of social capital has achieved a new prominence in the social science community. This essay explores the causal linkages among the key analytical concepts presented in Robert Putnam's "Making Democracy Work" in an effort to further the social capital research agenda that the book initiates. We show why different kinds of associations can be expected to have different social capital–building capacities and different implications for cooperation within the larger community. We suggest that the microlinkages between social capital and good government in "Making Democracy Work" are underspecified and we present four models of how social cooperation at the level of the community translates into good performance at the level of political institutions. We identify the absence of political conflict as a peculiar feature of Putnam's account of Italian politics and history, and we explore the implications of its absence for the theoretical conclusions Putnam reaches and the generalizability of the findings he presents. We examine the relationship between social capital and economic performance and show why Putnam's work has important contributions to make to this field. Finally, we explain why Putnam's findings may not travel well outside of the Italian regions he studies.
Download PDFWorking Paper 96–04, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1996.
The recent experience of the European Monetary System has once again brought the problem of international monetary instability to scholars’ and policymakers’ attention.
In 1992, German interest rate hikes meant to address growing inflationary pressures within Germany sparked speculation against the pound and lira that eventually led England and Italy to devalue their currencies and to leave the European Monetary System’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). A year later, the fluctuation bands linking the participating currencies of Europe were widened from 2.5 percent to 15 percent, rendering the system almost as loose as floating exchange rates.
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