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From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ‘electoral engineering’. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. This study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contrasting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define the electoral incentives facing parties, politicians, and citizens. By changing the rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior among politicians and citizens. Reformers believe that electoral engineering can solve multiple social problems, whether by mitigating ethnic conflict, strengthening voter-party bonds, generating democratic accountability, or boosting women’s representation. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior. To consider these issues, this paper sets out the theoretical framework, derived from the introduction to a new book ‘Electoral Engineering’ forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, New York in Spring 2004. The book compares the consequences of electoral rules and cultural modernization for many dimensions of political representation and voting behavior, including issues of electoral behavior in patterns of party competition, the strength of social cleavages and party loyalties, and levels of turnout, and questions of political representation in the gender and ethnic diversity of parliaments, and the provision of constituency service. Systematic evidence is drawn the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems based on surveys of parliamentary and presidential contests held in over thirty countries ranging from the United States, Australia and Switzerland to Peru, Taiwan and Ukraine. The book concludes that formal rules do matter, with important implications for the choice of electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and toxicology -- recently conceptualized as "Toxicogenomics" - has extremely important implications for understanding human behavior and improving public policies. After indicating the conceptual changes in social science that this approach requires, I summarize two research projects that illustrate the relevance of toxicogenomics to policy issues: first, the chemical compounds (silicofluorides) used for over 90% of water fluoridation in the United States; second, the assessment of superfund sites needs to consider multiple toxins (both determining their presence and measuring their uptake) as well as behavioral and health effects (understood from the perspective of toxicogenomics). Both examples reveal enormous potential benefits of this approach (including lower rates of learning disabilities, substance abuse and violent crime) and indicate sources of disproportionate harm for minorities that conventional social scientists do not identify. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a survey-based method for conducting inference into the determinants of sensitive political behavior. The approach combines two well established literatures in statistical methods in the social sciences: the randomized response (RR) methodology utilized to reduce evasive answer bias and the generalized propensity score (GPS) methodology utilized to draw inferences about the causal effects in observational studies. The approach permits one to correctly estimate the causal impact of a multi-valued predictor variable of interest on a given sensitive behavior in the face of unknown interaction effects between the predictor and confounders as well as non-linearities in the relationship between the confounders and the sensitive behavior. Simulation results point to the superior performance of the RR relative to direct survey questioning using this method for samples of moderate to large size (N=1,000 or above). The utility of the approach is illustrated through an application to corruption in the public bureaucracy in three countries in South America. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]