EP-EE Paper To Be Published

An article I have written with Nils Ringe has been accepted and will be published in European Union Politics‘ September 2006 issue. We will present this paper in Atlanta, Ga., for the 2006 SPSA conference and incorporating any changes (limiting them to extremely small changes, however) before the final draft of the manuscript is due at the end of January.

Here is the abstract:

On 1 May 2004, the European Union (EU) welcomed its new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. This paper considers to what extent one of the most widely tested and supported theories of voting behavior in Western Europe, the second-order election model, applies in the enlarged EU. We test the model using election data from the new member states and find that voters do not cast protest votes against their incumbent national governments in second-order elections, that is, elections where voters believe little to be at stake. This finding contradicts one of the model’s basic propositions and runs counter to the empirical reality in the old member states, with potentially significant implications for inter- and intra-institutional politics in the EU.

Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is something that concerns me greatly. Allowing ISPs to manipulate the data sent between our homes and offices and the rest of the Internet is disconcerting. I’ve written up a few articles, some from a reporter’s perspective and others from an advocates’ perspective, on this issues and other related regulatory issues.

Here are two of those articles, both of which are from By George, a daily journal written by Neil George:

Sony’s Rootkit Foul-Up

With all the hubbub regarding Sony’s DRM CDs and rootkit, I thought I’d post a link to an article I wrote when the CDs were first released. Oddly, few people covered the initial story.

As an aside, music will be free in five to 10 years. Albums are a promotional vehicle for concert ticket sales and merchandise. Once musicians take advantage of this, they’ll start dumping most of the major labels or force a radical restructuring of the standard contracts.