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Each year, around 10,000 foreigners obtain a U.S. residence visa after investing half a million dollars or more. Who are the millionaires that acquire these visas and what motivates them to leave their home countries? To answer this question, I analyzed an original data set that combines U.S. visa statistics with data on global millionaire populations. The analysis produced three key findings. First, demand for investor visas was led by millionaires from countries that ranked lower in the global hierarchy of citizenship value. Second, most of the visas were acquired by Chinese millionaires, who recorded the world's highest application rate. Third, when the quality of democracy in a country declined, visa applications surged. These findings suggest that investor visas are used by elites in less developed countries to hedge against the risks associated with authoritarian rule. Such elites perceive investor visas as a foothold in a stable and democratic country that can provide an insurance policy or exit option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization poses many challenges for national cultural unity, especially in Europe. Some doubt whether national cultures will be able to survive, but there are many counter‐trends pushing to maintain national cultural unity. I analyse the dual trends of global diversity and maintaining unity through an everyday manifestation of French culture: elementary school lunches. French school lunch programmes are part of the nation‐building process because they are designed to teach students how to eat, which is especially important in France where the art of gastronomy is a key source of identity and pride. I analyse cultural influences on over 11,000 school lunch menu items from eight municipalities across two French regions. I also conduct in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with the people who design and approve school lunch menus. My inquiry is guided by three key questions. First, to what extent are foreign influences included? Second, does openness to foreign influences vary across different parts of France? Finally, how are foreign cultures represented? My results suggest that foreign cultures are deployed to nationalize difference. The limited foreign influences that appear in school lunches are strategically chosen to appeal to and to educate students, but in a way that reinforces the centrality of traditional French cultural norms. This article contributes to our understanding of the tension between national culture and a globalizing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an age of expertise, where knowledge ostensibly reigns, global governance not infrequently settles for ignorance. To understand this puzzle, this article draws upon extensive empirical research on two sites within the global governance of finance. One is directed to the suppression of money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism by the Financial Action Task Force and International Monetary Fund. Another intends to stimulate the supply of otherwise scarce money to financial markets through global lawmaking by the UN Commission on International Trade Law. In both cases vast enterprises of global regulation and lawmaking proceed on weakly founded justificatory rhetorics designated here as 'plausible folk theories.' Six properties make a folk theory plausible: parsimony, face validity, rhetorical compactness, ambiguity, affinity with extant beliefs, and unexamined premises and logics. Plausible folk theories offer organizational benefits to IOs. They also allow a politics of temporality that may shorten temporal horizons, or weaken and eliminate IO accountability. Finally, three variants of ignorance contribute to choices by international organizations not to get beyond plausible folk theories to justify their regulatory and lawmaking initiatives: inadvertent ignorance, willful ignorance, and strategic or rational ignorance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]