E-mail has changed the policy process in state legislatures because political actors now have a new way to present their message to state legislators. What little research has been conducted on this topic examines e-mail communication generally and does not compare results by policy actor. Using an original survey of state legislators in eight states, we test for systematic effects of variables...

The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, w...

Often a bargainer can use some form of power—legal, military, or political—to impose a settlement. How does the “outside” option of being able to impose a settlement, albeit at some cost, affect the bargaining? And, how does the probability that the bargaining will break down vary with the distribution of power between the bargainers? These questions are examined by adding the option of imposin...

ions for these system behaviors; this enables us to conceal the dynamicity and scale of the ODE environment. In addition to representing abstractions for the properties of the system behaviors, roles also are responsible for actively coordinating their players to achieve coordination requirements. Roles serve as an abstraction by specifying membership criteria, i.e., a static specification of f...

Automatic garbage collection (GC) gives abstraction to distributed application development, promoting code quality and improving resource management. Unreachability of active objects or actors from the root set is not a sufficient condition to collect actor garbage, making passive object GC algorithms unsafe when directly used on actor systems. In practical actor languages, all actors have refe...

This article argues for a historical-structural approach to explaining conflict and settlement. It argues that the manner in which institutions function and actors pursue their ends is in part determined by slow-moving inter-linked structural relationships whose logic, trajectory and effects can only be identified historically. In complex conflicts such structural configurations generate tenden...

Although no significant changes in the tuberculosis indicators have been registered in Brazil in recent years, there is a clear shift in the political scenario regarding the manner this disease has been tackled, with the appearance of civil society standing out. Considerations about the conditions that contributed to its emergence are made, such as the origin, composition, actions, partners and...

OLKC possesses three unevenly developed tributaries. The most dominant are intraorganizational and inter-organizational. We contribute to the urban-regional political economy of OLKC. Regional knowledge places are multilayered interconnected locations of possibility. Understanding their evolution and future requires analytic resources which draw from critical realism, comparative historicized s...

The paper uses and extends upon a sociomaterial view of organizational IS by relating this to modalities of sensemaking across boundaries and levels of framing in managing the meaning of IS performativity. Data from a field study of Enterprise IS redesign at a US University are analyzed from an actor-network perspective to reveal a genealogy of IS design evolution. Three modalities of sociomate...

ions for these system behaviors; this enables us to conceal the dynamicity and scale of the ODE environment. In addition to representing abstractions for the properties of the system behaviors, roles also are responsible for actively coordinating their players to achieve coordination requirements. Roles serve as an abstraction by specifying membership criteria, i.e., a static specification of f...