Yamada, Tomoaki—A politically feasible social security reform with a two-tier structure This paper investigates the welfare implications and political feasibility of social security reforms with a two-tier structure in Japan. We evaluate social security reforms from two points of view: (i) the ex-ante expected value of future generations, and (ii) whether current generations prefer reform to th...

The GSM network, commonly called 2G, was designed during the 1980s when the Cold War was still on. Due to political pressure from European governments, the security of GSM was deliberately made weak to allow easy interception by law enforcement agencies. Despite strengthened security in subsequent mobile network technologies of 3G and 4G, the weak security of 2G represents the ‘weakest link’ an...

An unfunded social security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute as much as expected. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy th...

An unfunded Social Security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy that is subject to mac...

The new media situation gives fuel to increased competition between narratives. In the sphere of security this poses challenges to government strategic narratives. Scholars, drawing on findings from the Anglo-Saxon sphere, suggest that the new media activism gives rise to counter-hegemonic narratives that thrive on and through social media sites. We argue that the emergence of counter-narrative...

Medicare’s salience to health policy and American politics is suffi ciently obvious that it needs no explanation. Yet scholarly attention to Medicare has never matched its fi scal and political signifi cance. Medicare has long been on the margins of political science, while book-length treatments of Medicare policy have been rare. That relative obscurity, though, is about to end. To date, atten...

The question of the aggregation and disaggregation of political actors is essential for the understanding of the future of global politics, both in terms of international security affairs and international political economy. A model based upon tribute is presented to show how new political actors can emerge from an aggregation of smaller political actors. The tribute model provides an existence...