Unintended Institutional Interactions: Presidential Coattails and Gender Parity Quotas

Democratic institutions provide incentives for voters and candidates. When reformers tinker with multiple institutions, the likely effect of each individual change may be well understood, but their potential interaction may go unanticipated. Prior to elections in 2002, the French legislature adopted a gender parity candidate quota for parties participating in parliamentary elections. In addition, voters ratified a constitutional referendum making the president’s term match that of parliament, and presidential elections were set to be held immediately prior to parliamentary ones. We show that the unanticipated consequence of these separate institutional reforms was to make the fate of female candidates for parliament very much a function of presidential coattails. When the party of the president failed to fulfill the candidate quota, the number of women in parliament showed little change. Conversely, in years when the party of the president took the candidate quota seriously, the number of women in parliament increased.

“All Will Be Forgiven”

Chapter 10 addresses “redefection,” or the movement of Russian exiles back across the Iron Curtain from West to East. In mid-decade, in part as a reaction to Amcomlib’s emergence as a viable sponsor of psychological-warfare programs, the Kremlin launched a massive campaign to convince Soviet exiles to relocate to the USSR. The chapter depicts the return campaign, pursued through a KGB-front organization called the Committee for Return to the Homeland, as an effective tool for destabilizing and demoralizing the Russian anti-communists in Germany. While the return campaign damaged the émigré anti-communist camp badly, it also had the unanticipated consequence of encouraging American cold warriors and Russian anti-communists to bury their differences after the fiasco of the united-front campaign. In this way, the return campaign demonstrated the difficulty both superpowers experienced in influencing the Russian émigré milieu, as each step by one side produced a countermove by the other.

Builders and Dissectors

This chapter examines a series of meetings of anti-communist organizations in West Germany from 1951 to 1953 devoted to creating a united-front organization of Soviet exiles. The project, supported by a CIA front organization called the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, Inc. (Amcomlib), had the unanticipated consequence of launching a many-sided debate about national identities. Inadvertently, the Americans spearheaded a virtual dismemberment of Russian nationhood, as ethnic Russians promoted a conception of Russia as a multiethnic nation and non-Russian exile groups invited to take part defended national self-determination for their peoples.

Before and After Auschwitz: Korngold and the Art and Politics of the Twentieth Century

This chapter discusses Erich Korngold's changing status as a composer in the twentieth century. Since the early 1970s, spurred by popular modern recordings of Korngold's film music and the embrace of the Violin Concerto as a favored vehicle by a new generation of aspiring violinists, both Korngold's career as a composer and his output have gained in currency and respectability. Korngold's posthumous good fortune is the unanticipated consequence of the return to legitimacy, at the end of the twentieth century, of an aesthetic eclecticism regarding contemporary music. The belief in the exclusive legitimacy of an aesthetics of a radical modernism—justified by history, for the postwar world—has vanished. Minimalism, a new Romanticism, the integration with forms of popular music, and the blurring of genre distinctions all can be found in the music composed during the last forty years. These have turned Korngold from marginal figure into a prominent representative of the twentieth century, alongside other unjustly forgotten composers of a more “conservative” character.

Defining the physiological role of SRP in protein-targeting efficiency and specificity

The signal recognition particle (SRP) enables cotranslational delivery of proteins for translocation into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), but its full in vivo role remains incompletely explored. We combined rapid auxin-induced SRP degradation with proximity-specific ribosome profiling to define SRP’s in vivo function in yeast. Despite the classic view that SRP recognizes amino-terminal signal sequences, we show that SRP was generally essential for targeting transmembrane domains regardless of their position relative to the amino terminus. By contrast, many proteins containing cleavable amino-terminal signal peptides were efficiently cotranslationally targeted in SRP’s absence. We also reveal an unanticipated consequence of SRP loss: Transcripts normally targeted to the ER were mistargeted to mitochondria, leading to mitochondrial defects. These results elucidate SRP’s essential roles in maintaining the efficiency and specificity of protein targeting.

The SO2 Allowance Trading System: The Ironic History of a Grand Policy Experiment

Two decades have passed since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 launched a grand experiment in market-based environmental policy: the SO2 cap-and-trade system. That system performed well but created four striking ironies: First, by creating this system to reduce SO2 emissions to curb acid rain, the government did the right thing for the wrong reason. Second, a substantial source of this system's cost-effectiveness was an unanticipated consequence of earlier railroad deregulation. Third, it is ironic that cap-and-trade has come to be demonized by conservative politicians in recent years, as this market-based, cost-effective policy innovation was initially championed and implemented by Republican administrations. Fourth, court decisions and subsequent regulatory responses have led to the collapse of the SO2 market, demonstrating that what the government gives, the government can take away.