Venality of public office was a widespread form of rent-seeking in pre-revolutionary France. Successive legal adjustments converted venal offices into a regular form of property. Though legitimized, the practice became increasingly indefensible as a public vice for private benefit. This paper concentrates on the impact of a tax experiment on the institution twenty years prior to the Revolution....

The factors most often cited as the causes of the California crisis are the scarcity of generation capacity, a flawed market design, and the venality of electricity producers. However, many of these attributes were present in other electricity markets, none of which have suffered through anything like the California crisis. The only factor not seen in other markets in the world is the lack of c...

The factors most often cited as the causes of the California crisis are the scarcity of generation capacity, a flawed market design, and the venality of electricity producers. However, many of these attributes were present in other electricity markets, none of which have suffered through anything like the California crisis. The only factor not seen in other markets in the world is the lack of c...

We .live ,in a world that is morally hor­rific by almost anyone's standards. In the Third World millions of people suffer from malnutrition, and due to inefficiency, stu­pidity, or venality many of them will liter­ally starve to death. Even those of us for­tunate ,enough to live in affluent countries are threatened daily with annihilation. Through madness or miscalculation, Reagan or Gorbachev ...

As Hammond has argued, traditional explanations for disagreement among experts (incompetence, venality, and ideology) are inadequate. The character and fallibilities of the human judgement process itself lead to persistent disagreements even among competent, honest, and disinterested experts. Social Judgement Theory provides powerful methods for analysing such judgementally based disagreements ...

There is considerable irony in the current search for the causes of the rapid political changes sweeping the communist world after 1988. In retrospect, it is not hard to single out a number of macrosocietal trends that led eventually to regime change: economic stagnation and consumer deprivation, deeply eroded commitment to official ideology and the growth of widespread cynicism, the corruption...

A large literature has described the years after independence from colonial rule as a period of ‘departicipation’. Africa’s new rulers – whether driven by personal venality or sincere commitment to nation-building swiftly gave up on elections, at best held elections that, denying choice, left violence central dynamic African politics. This article draws cases Kenya, Ghana and Uganda in late 196...

espanolEste articulo reconstruye el transito que sufrio la poblacion aymara desde su incorporacion a Chile particularmente en dos ambitos. Por una parte, explora los conflictos locales entre propios aymaras y capacidad de resolverlos un contexto surgimiento tanto intereses personales como estructuras familiares tendieron reemplazar las autoridades tradicionales indigenas. Y otra, aquellos invol...

Abstract Much has been made of the ideological connection between mental world servitors in Elizabethan Ireland and origins early English colonial endeavor North America. In this vein, case Sir Ralph Lane, first governor Roanoke colony and, later, muster-master general Ireland, would seem to present a historiographically promising test case, one that might not only link Colony but also could sh...