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During long decades of PRI dominance, opposition parties labored and failed to generate substantial electoral support. They were outspent by an incumbent with a virtually bottomless war chest derived largely from public funds, their programmatic appeals were outflanked by the PRI's vote buying machine, and they were occasionally repressed by a regime that was not unwilling to use threats and violence as a last resort. These mechanisms minimized opposition parties' electoral fortunes because they affected the type of party elites they were able to attract. The PRI's advantages discouraged all but the most anti-status quo citizens from serving as candidates and activists in the opposition. These comparatively extremist party elites endorsed building niche parties that appealed to smaller electoral constituencies. It was only as economic restructuring reduced the incumbent's resource advantages and leveled the partisan playing field that moderates who supported centrist catchall strategies were willing to join the opposition. This chapter tests the predictions about recruitment dynamics that were generated from the formal model of elite activist affiliation developed in Chapter 4. Using individual-level data from the Mexico Party Personnel Surveys, I demonstrate that opposition party elites' policy extremism with respect to the status quo increases with the dominant party's resource advantages and use of repression. However, office-seekers and message-seekers respond differently to changes in the political environment. Office-seekers who join when the probability of opposition victory is low will be more extreme than message-seekers who join at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his influential study, T. J. Pempel wrote that successful dominant parties create a “virtuous cycle of dominance” to reinforce their rule (1990: 16). But, once established, how is this cycle sustained? What are the mechanisms that reproduce the dominant party equilibrium and how is the cycle eventually broken? In this chapter, I develop a theory of dominant party persistence and failure. At root, this is a question about the transformation of undercompetitive party systems into fully competitive democracies. Since the electoral arena remains open in dominant party systems, explaining equilibrium dominance requires a theory of party competition. Yet the standard theories assume an unbiased or fair electoral market for votes and are thus inappropriate for studying dominant party systems where the incumbent's advantages systematically bias electoral competition in its favor. I theorize how these advantages help dominant parties virtually win elections before election day by forcing opposition parties, if they form, to compete with policy appeals that are extremist relative to the preference of the average voter. As a result, challenger parties seek both personnel and votes from among the most anti-status quo constituencies. A crucial question is not just how systematic disadvantages affect challengers, but also how the cycle of dominance is sustained. I argue that dominant parties rise and fall primarily with the state's control over the economy. As long as the federal public bureaucracy is politically controlled, incumbent dominant parties can divert resources from the public budget, especially from state-owned enterprises, to partisan coffers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexico was just one of 16 dominant party systems, albeit the longest lasting to date. Other dominant parties have existed in Asia, Europe, and Africa. To this point, I have shown that the predictions derived from my resource theory of dominance hold up when tested with an abundance of quantitative and qualitative data about Mexico under PRI dominance during most of the 20th century. I have also shown that my explanation performs better than existing approaches that either overpredict or underpredict opposition party formation and success. But how generalizable is the theory? Can it account for single-party dominance in other countries with different cultural norms and political institutions? Does it make sense both for presidential systems like Mexico and for parliamentary ones? Do the dynamics of partisan competition that sustain the dominant party equilibrium result from particular electoral systems? Can the theory be extended not only to account for dominant party persistence in other authoritarian regimes but also to understand the dynamics of dominant party rule where the surrounding regime is democratic? In this chapter, I show that my resource theory of dominance is surprisingly generalizable and that the unique features of dominance mute the effects of other variables thought to affect partisan dynamics. I do this by examining the dynamics of dominant party rule and opposition party building in Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, and Italy. In extending the argument to these cases, I have two goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant party systems present two major puzzles. If dominant party advantages are overwhelming, then why do opposition parties form at all? On the other hand, if opposition parties compete in genuine elections, then why does single-party dominance persist? Despite the predictions of existing theory, 16 countries on four continents had dominant parties during the 20th century and, by century's end, 11 had transformed into fully competitive democracies with turnover. This book offered a theory to explain both equilibrium dominance and its breakdown; that is, a theory to account for both stable long-term single-party dominance and the incumbent party's eventual loss at the polls. I argued that hyper-incumbency advantages deeply affect partisan competition and help sustain dominance. In particular, dominant parties' monopoly or near monopoly access to public resources allows them to outspend challengers at every turn, saturate the media, pay armies of canvassers, blanket the national territory with their logo, and generally speak to voters through a megaphone while opposition parties speak with a whisper. Most importantly, dominant parties' hyper-incumbency advantages allow them to bribe voters with patronage goods. Dominant parties also raise the costs of participating in the opposition by imposing opportunity costs for not joining the incumbent and, in some systems, by targeting repression against opposition forces when patronage fails. Identifying that dominant parties use resources and sometimes use repression to sustain their rule is not particularly surprising or innovative; however, prior research has been largely descriptive and has not incorporated these elements into a complete theory of single-party dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the mid-1980s, the PRI should have experienced a double threat. First, economic crisis beginning in 1982 caused declining real wages, increasing poverty, and faltering growth. As a result, voters increasingly lost faith in the PRI's “performance legitimacy.” In a 1986 poll, 89% of respondents rated the national economy as bad or very bad and in a 1988 poll, fully 76% said that the opposition would handle the economy as well or better than the PRI. Second, the government's response to the economic crisis deepened the PRI's predicament by instituting market-oriented reforms that included downsizing the public bureaucracy and selling off state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Using the previous presidential election in 1982 as a benchmark, SOEs accounted for 20% less of the economy by the 1988 presidential election, 37% less by the 1991 midterms, and 60% less by the 1994 presidential race. Thus, not only did voters begin to lose faith in the PRI's ability to direct the economy, but privatization increasingly deprived the PRI of the resources it might have used to buy back their loyalty. As a result of these pressures, voters began to turn away from the PRI. Its solid support among identified voters fell from 60% of the electorate in 1983 to just 32% in the late 1990s; however, voters did not turn entirely toward the opposition and instead the proportion of independents soared to over 35%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All political parties rely on citizens to serve as candidates that run for office and activists that mobilize voters; however, because opposition parties in dominant party systems are resource-poor, they rise or fall based on their ability to attract volunteers to fill these posts. But if prospective candidates and national-level activists (a group I refer to collectively as party elites or elite activists) know that challenger parties are at a competitive disadvantage, why would they join them instead of joining the dominant party or simply abstaining? How do changes in the competitive environment, such as decreases in the dominant party's resource advantages and its use of repression, affect the profile of citizens willing to join a challenger? This brief chapter addresses these questions by supplying a theory of elite activist party affiliation that is appropriate for studying dominant party systems. My concern here is not with the visionaries or charismatics that form parties, but with the candidates and activists who decide to support them and thus provide fuel for the entrepreneur's spark. The affiliation model takes for granted that a founder has formed an opposition party and that prospective party elites know that the dominant party benefits from hyper-incumbency advantages, thus distorting competitive dynamics as depicted in Chapter 2. The payoff for constructing a separate model of party affiliation is that it allows us to generate very specific hypotheses about the sincere policy preferences of party elites that the challenger can attract as political conditions change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficiency analyses provide a framework for relating program costs to outcomes. Whereas cost-benefit analyses directly compare benefits to costs in commensurable (monetary) terms, cost-effectiveness analyses relate costs expressed in monetary terms to units of substantive results achieved. Efficiency analyses can require considerable technical sophistication and the use of consultants. As a way of thinking about program results, however, they direct attention to costs as well as benefits and have great value for the evaluation field. Efficiency analyses can be useful at all stages of a program, from planning through implementation and modification. Currently, ex post analyses are more commonplace than ex ante analyses in the social program arena because reasonably sound estimates of costs and benefits prior to program implementation are often lacking. Nevertheless, ex ante analyses should be undertaken more often than they are, particularly for programs that are expensive either to implement or to evaluate. Different sets of assumptions can create a range of analyses; one thing these analyses may reveal is the improbability of achieving the desired net benefits under any sensible set of assumptions. Efficiency analyses use different assumptions and may produce correspondingly different results depending on which accounting perspective is taken: that of individual targets or participants, program sponsors, or the community or society. Which perspective should be taken depends on the intended consumers of the analysis and thus involves political choice. Cost-benefit analysis requires that program costs and benefits be known, quantified, and transformed to a common measurement unit. Options for monetizing outcomes or benefits include money measurements, market valuation, econometric estimation, hypothetical questions asked of participants, and observation of political choices. Shadow, or accounting, prices are used for costs and benefits when market prices are... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses link between moral emotions and crime. A lot of juvenile forms of violent crime and an important segment of serious adult crime do not fit the sentimentality of materialism. Neither does the central thrust that guides men and women to righteous slaughters, nor the project of primordial evil that makes "senseless killings" compellingly sensible to their killers, nor the tactics and reverberations of sneaky thrills. The aims are specifically unconventional: to go beyond the established moral definitions of the situation as it visibly obtains here and now. It is not inconsequential that major forms of contemporary criminality cannot simply be fit within the dominant sentimentality for understanding deviance. If it were recognized that changes in material circumstance affect the form more than the drive toward deviance, it would be more difficult to promote publicly financed programs to increase benefits or opportunities where they are most lacking. Whether their policy implications point toward increasing penalties to decrease crime or toward increasing legitimate opportunities or "opportunity costs" to decrease crime, modern causal theories have obliterated a natural fascination to follow in detail the lived contours of crime.

The article reports on the status of women managers in international business. Transnational corporations are more likely to hire women executives because prejudice has an opportunity cost and the transnational corporate culture is not restricted by the local culture. The Equity Approach Contribution, the Complementary Approach, and assumptions about women's role in management are discussed. The three myths about women in international management are mentioned, including an example of why companies refuse to send women abroad. The advantages and disadvantages of being a female expatriate manager and recommendations to companies that are considering women for international assignments are also mentioned.

An interpretive problem arises in the search for causes of the regional agricultural divergence. High autumn indices of marriages are ambivalent. They could have resulted from high employment in grain production for integrated markets and extralocal consumption, or from a lack of market integration between places, necessitating the subsistence production of grain. Parishes might have been producing grain, no matter what other additional employments were practised, because grain, the main foodstuff, was not being obtained from more distant suppliers. They would have been ‘bound and localized’ economies, with grain as the subsistence crop. Low autumn seasonality, in contrast, is prima facie evidence for market orientation; it can only mean that the area is dependent on interregional trade for its supply of breadstuffs. The observed shift away from autumn seasonality in some regions, and its retention in others, is therefore subject to multiple constructions, not always mutually exclusive: thoroughly integrated regions could have been readjusting their market-oriented specializations in response to changes in relative prices; or regions could have been becoming better integrated into supraregional or international markets, dropping their dependence on local grain supplies; or households in areas less suited to growing grain could have been becoming better integrated into market production, dropping the subsistence output of grain in favour of other products, Tawney's peasantry yielding to capitalist agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world with unlimited resources, it would be unnecessary to have methods to determine the best way to allocate those resources among alternative uses. But resources are limited: in 1994, U.S. health spending will exceed $1 trillion for the first time and spending is projected to grow 50 percent faster than gross domestic product for the remainder of the decade (Burner, McKusick, and Waldo 1992). Similar trends are evident in other countries (Schieber, Poullier, and Greenwald 1993). Throughout the world, there are pressures on public budgets. Policymakers and the public have begun to recognize that every dollar spent on health care is no longer available for spending on education, crime control, or infrastructure improvement. Further, much of what we now spend is wasted on care that does not improve our health or yields small improvements in health at exorbitant cost (Siu et al. 1986; Winslow et al. 1988; Enthoven and Kronick 1989; CBO 1992a). In the public sector, even in the face of mounting cost pressures, the balancing of benefits and costs has typically not been a criterion in deciding whether medical services should be made available or should be covered under public insurance. At one extreme, policymakers have focused exclusively on costs, rejecting higher cost alternatives without any consideration of their potential benefits (e.g., some state Medicaid programs in the United States). Others have focused exclusively on benefits while ignoring the costs of achieving these benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideals and realities in cost measurement Medical treatment involving pharmaceuticals usually requires a substantial number and variety of additional medical resources. During a patient's hospital stay, for example, personnel, including nurses, technicians, therapists, and orderlies, will allocate some of their time to caring for and attending to the patient's many needs. In addition to these labor inputs, the attending physician may order the use of expensive equipment for diagnosis and treatment. Other medical supplies must be obtained and administered. Pharmaceutical treatment in other settings involves a similarly wide anay of medical resources. The other principal resource used in the medical process is the time of the patient and his or her family. When resources are used to provide medical care for one patient, they are unavailable for other patients and other societal uses. Thus, one cannot judge the merits of a medical intervention without understanding what one is giving up to provide that intervention. What providers and society give up to provide treatment for an individual is called the cost of the treatment. This chapter presents a series of conceptual guidelines to help the researcher measure the costs of medical treatment. The fundamental economic concept of opportunity cost is introduced first. This concept is essential to understanding the importance of perspective, which is discussed in the next section. These points are then used to show how the analyst can determine which costs should be included in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an encyclopedia entry for opportunity cost. The term is defined as the cost associated with opportunity or the money or other value sacrificed through the selection of a nonoptimal course of action. Opportunity cost is the reduced cost of a variable in linear programming and not in the optimal basic solution.