compiled by Jeremy Lewis, PhD,
revised 22 Dec 2003 with APSA links.
Abstracts of Papers relating to Freedom
of Information or Privacy
prepared for delivery at the 2002
Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association,
Boston, August 29-September 1, 2002.
From http://apsaproceedings.cup.org/
1.Dan Lindley.'The Concert of Europe, Transparency,
and Crisis Management
2.Adam Cureton.'Privacy as Autonomous Control of
Personal Information
3.Dorothee Heisenberg, Marie-Helene Fandel.'Projecting
EU Regimes Abroad:
The EU Data Protection Directive as Global Standard
4.Norman Nie, Ken Prewitt, Sunshine Hillygus.'Participation
in Census 2000:
Conducting the U.S. Census in a Society of Declining Cooperation and Political
Polarization
5.David Stasavage.'Communication, Coordination and Common Knowledge in
Monetary Policy: Implications for the Euro Zone
6.Melissa Lane.'Accountability, Transparency, Legitimacy:
the new staples of
democratic discourse and their implications for non-elected institutions
7.Kevin R. den Dulk.'The Organized Politics of Faith-Based Social Services
8.Cecilia G. Manrique, Ph.D..'THE INTERNET AND
WORLD POLITICS IN
AN AGE OF TERROR
9.Brian Potter.'Divergent paths: institutional structure and optimal fisheries
policy.
10.Kenneth Rogerson, Wei Wu.'Frontier for Freedom
or Ripe for Regulation?
U.S. Congressional Attempts at Internet Regulation
11.David Leonard Downie.'Lessons of the 2001 Stockholm Convention: A
Preliminary Examination of Causal Factors
12.Cillian McBride.'Authoritative Self-Interpretation and Deliberative
Politics
13.Eric M. Uslaner.'Trust and Corruption
14.Paul M Heywood.'Political Corruption, Democracy and Governance in Spain
15.Tomas Larsson.'Political corruption and varieties of capitalism
16.Sarah Oates.''No Better Heroes': Political Images, Elections and Russian
Viewers
17.Paul Ferber, Franz Foltz, Rudy Pugliese.'The Politics
of State Legislature
Websites: An Evaluation of Content and Design
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: Internet, Information Technology, Globalization, Netwars, Steganography,
Terrorism, Techno-capitalism, Techno-colonialism, Techno-imperialism
Abstract:
After September 11 there has been much speculation about the Internet as
a tool that terrorists
have used to disseminate and propagate their cause. With the increase in
the usage of the
Internet worldwide, it would be interesting to determine how it has affected
politics in selected
countries, especially those that have been designated as being friendly
to terrorists. Encouraged
by feedback from the paper presented at the American Political Science
Association meeting
three years ago, I have embarked on research about the use of the Internet
in several countries
representative of those in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East,
as well as those
which have been tagged as friendly to the terrorist cause. The focus of
attention is on how the
net is being used by governments, by interest groups, by grassroots organizations
and by
individual citizens to enhance their knowledge of what is going on in their
countries and in the
world. It also takes a look at how it has become an instrument of information
dissemination and
at times used to move people to action against existing regimes. Commonalities
and differences
in country approaches to the use of the Internet in terms of maintaining
order, sustaining
freedom and widening equality will be analyzed as well so that patterns
and conclusions about
the political uses of the Internet in Third World countries can be drawn.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: Internet, Legislation, Bipartisanship
Abstract:
Though the Internet has been envisioned as a frontier for free speech,
attempts to regulate this
channel of communication not only exist, but are increasing around the
world. While not many
would dispute that the Internet has had at least some impact on society
in general, empirical
evidence would contribute to understanding the nature and extent of this
impact and could lend
support to the competing claims that this impact is positive or negative.
Given its potential for both good and bad, the Internet has proven to be
a volatile subject for
policy makers. Initial research indicates that, in the United States, Congressional
discussions
about possible Internet regulations have been fairly bipartisan. While
much has been written
about U.S. party politics, Congressional voting patterns, divided vs. united
governments, and
party polarization B of which bipartisanship is a part B many of the scholarly
discussions on the
general concept of bipartisanship focus on foreign policymaking.
Bipartisanship is manifest is two different ways: 1) between the legislative
and executive
branches and 2) within the legislative branch. In this paper, we propose
to examine
bipartisanship within the legislative branch and in the context of policymaking
on the subject of
the Internet. David Mayhew (ADivided We Govern, 1991) has argued that whether
the
policymaking process is partisan or bipartisan makes no negligible difference
in policymaking
processes. If the subject of the policy is Internet-related, this axiom
could change since the
Internet is unique in that it, like other communications channels and processes,
underlies and
connects many other substantive policy categories (See Joseph Klapper,
The Effects of Mass
Communication, 1960). Any empirical findings could be helpful in understanding
the relationship
between two concurrent trends: 1) the growth and expansion of the Internet
and 2) the impact
of this growth on policymaking processes.
We have catalogued proposed Internet regulation from the 104th, 105th,
106th and 107th U.S.
Congresses. According to our assessment, the number of Internet-related
bills grew from 24 in
the 104th Congress to 57 in the 105th, soared to 130 in the 106th, and
has reached at least
121 in the current 107th congress.
We have coded these bills by sponsor, sponsor=s party affiliation, timetable
(when proposed
and how long it stayed in committee or in which committee it died), and
content or subject
matter, which are then placed into ten categories: child protection, content
issues, copyright,
e-commerce, education, privacy, security, tax, equal access, and omnibus
bills. We propose to
examine the effectiveness of these categories and the degree to which they
overlap and to
analyze the bills, a few of which have been signed into law, in order to
provide a framework for
patterns of sponsorship and levels of partisanship and bipartisanship.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: state legislatures, websites, communication, design, cyberdeomocracy,
digital divide
Abstract:
Websites of the 50 state legislatures were evaluated on five criteria:
Content, Usability,
Interactivity, Transparency, and Audience. An overall quality score for
each state was
computed. The states with the highest quality websites were New Jersey,
Minnesota, Alaska,
Hawaii, Oregon and Connecticut. The index of the 50 state scores was found
to be correlated
with various political and demographic characteristics of the states. The
strongest relationships
were with internet access, education, income, voting participation, and
legislative staff.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: trust corruption social capital
Abstract:
Trust and corruption are opposites. In societies with high levels of trust,
there is little corruption
and societies with lots of corruption have low levels of interpersonal
trust. Which comes first? I
estimate simultaneous equation models using estimates of trust from the
World Values Surveys
and corruption indices from Transparency International. It is difficult
to sort out a causal
ordering from static measures. However, measures of change in trust and
change in corruption
suggest that trust comes first. I also provide estimates of the effects
of trust and corruption in the
quality of governments and in governmental policies and attempt to sort
out a causal ordering.
Check author's web site for an updated version of the paper.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: Concert of Europe, crisis management, institutions, security,
regimes,
diplomacy, transparency, forum, security regimes, diplomatic history
Abstract:
The Concert of Europe was the first peacetime multilateral crisis management
forum in
history. States before the Concert were limited to bilateral diplomacy,
and never met altogether
to manage crises. Compared to prior pre-forum diplomatic practice, the
chief benefit of meeting
together was the quicker exchange of information. In theoretical terms,
a greater flow of
information means increased transparency. This paper assesses the extent
to which the Concert
increased transparency, and the effects of any transparency provided.
I find that transparency facilitated realpolitik, and this in turn helped
resolve four of the
Concert’s early crises. Increased transparency made coercive bargaining
easier and clarified the
existence of internal schisms. This helped bring peaceful endings to two
crises, and led to
peaceful standoffs in the other two cases. An example is the Poland/Saxony
crisis when three
states made a ‘secret alliance’ and revealed it the next day to successfully
coerce two other
states into backing down. I argue that this quick exchange of information
was impossible prior
to the forum. With transparency, the Concert made power politics work more
quickly and
peacefully.
Although coercion worked in the Concert cases, the cases reveal dark sides
of transparency
that contrast with the conventional wisdom that transparency is an ‘elixir
of peace.’ Because the
great powers of the Concert period used coercion and realpolitik so frequently,
this examination
of transparency also makes a prima facie case against the normative transformation
arguments
of many of “Concert optimists.”
Check author's web site for
an updated version of the paper.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: privacy, autonomy, personal information
Abstract:
Most of us have little trouble identifying cases in which we take our privacy
to have been
violated. Privacy violations seem to be clear-cut, and we consider other
people as morally
wrong if they participate in such actions. Once we examine our intuitions
more closely, we find
that our concept of privacy seems to be intimately connected with individual
autonomy.
Understood in this way, privacy interests are the range of autonomous actions
an individual
takes which concern the protection of self-regarding information. A violation
of a person’s
privacy therefore amounts to a failure to respect that person’s autonomy.
Since most attribute a
great deal of moral value to autonomy, analyzing privacy in terms of autonomy
helps ground the
moral value that most attribute to privacy, and thereby helps to justify
the status of privacy as a
moral right rather than merely an interest.
Contact the author regarding the paper.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: US-EU relations, Regulatory competition, Data privacy protection,
gaiatsu,
preference aggregation failure
Abstract:
The paper aims to understand under what conditions the EU can set an international
standard. It
details the 1995 EU Data Privacy Directive and the reaction of the United
States to it. The
Directive has now become the de facto international privacy regime, binding
US companies that
do business with Europe. It thus becomes the first global standard that
the US has been
impacted by without having had input into its content. Given that the EU
aspires to a greater
role in transnational governance (White Paper on European Governance, 2001),
what were the
important factors necessary for the EU’s success in this issue? This paper
analyzes three
different hypotheses that exist in the literature: 1) US government officials
readjusting their views
about the need for a comprehensive privacy policy after “communicative
action” with the EU,
2) the successful threat of EU market exclusion backed up by the “shield”
of the WTO
exemption for privacy, and 3) US domestic interest groups trying to use
the EU directive
(gaiatsu) to accomplish a domestic agenda that they could not push through
alone because of
US domestic preference aggregation failure. The paper finds support for
the third interpretation
of the EU’s success. For this reason, there may not be many other areas
in which the EU can
successfully project its regime preferences internationally.
Contact the author regarding the paper.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: census, media, participation,mobilization
Abstract:
Census 2000 was conducted in a social and political context that impacted
the design,
collection, and use of the decennial count of the U.S. population. Sparked
by an unprecedented
partisan battle in the legislature and courts about how census methods
would affect census
results, and fueled by accusations of deliberate undercounting of racial
minorities during the last
count, Census 2000 became the center of a heated political debate, particularly
over the issue
of privacy. The tension between privacy and the insatiable demand for information
in American
society is evident in the declining response rates to previous data counts
and to all surveys.
The Census Bureau initiated an ambitious plan to increase the voluntary
return of Census 2000
questionnaires. These efforts included the first-ever paid advertising
campaign in the mass
media, as well as community-based mobilization. Using a Census Monitoring
Survey conducted
between February and April 2000 by Knowledge Networks, we look at the effects
of the
mobilization campaign and the privacy debate on census knowledge, opinions,
and cooperation.
We find that although the privacy debate was simultaneously demobilizing
portions of the
election (especially attentive, conservative Republicans), the mobilization
campaign was
successful at increasing participation in Census 2002.
Contact the author regarding the paper.
Paper (requires Acrobat Reader)
Keywords: Accountability, Transparency, Legitimacy
Abstract:
The paper argues that the fundamental assumption that 'elected organizations
are (therefore)
accountable' does not -- as is often assumed by both anti-globalizers and
their critics --
necessarily entail the converse claim that 'unelected organizations are
(therefore)
unaccountable'. The category of the 'unelected' is in fact much broader
than anti-globalizers
often assume: it includes many public bodies alongside both corporations
and NGOs. To
explore what accountability might mean for non-elected organizations, I
begin by parsing it in
the classic electoral case into two elements: responsiveness (to interests/needs/preferences)
and
responsibility (for decisions taken).
I argue that delegation is an inadequate theory of accountability for non-elected
public bodies. I
then turn to the case of corporations, considering three different theories
of the ideal role of
corporations in society, and the implications of each one for the question
of whether
corporations should obey the laws or carry out moral duties beyond merely
obeying the law,
and to whom they should be accountable in either case. I conclude that
while it is not difficult to
make corporations more responsive, the difficulty lies in holding them
adequately responsible
for some of the ways in which they choose to be responsive.
Contact the author regarding the paper.