Fear and loathing in Kansas City: Political harassment and the making of moderates in America's abortion wars (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The pro‐life movement regularly employs tactics of political harassment in its campaign against abortion. As the murder of the controversial abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, demonstrated last year, such tactics often betray a potential for violence. This paper explores how the militant tactics of the pro‐life movement in the 1990s have contributed to the formation of a ‘new’ political identity in Kansas politics: that of the moderate Republican. But for those that seek to counter‐mobilize against the Christian right, the political stakes remain high.     

Minimum-Cost Distances in Spatial Analysis

An axiomatic approach to distance is developed which focuses on those behavioral concepts of distance related to movement in space. In particular, spatial movement by behaving units is postulated to involve a choice from among some set of abstract trips in space, and implicitly, to involve the minimization of some relevant notion of trip costs. In this context, the relevant behavioral notion of distance in space is taken to be the minimum-cost distance generated by this choice process. These trip-cost concepts extend the classical notions of paths, path lengths, and shortest paths in metric spaces. Hence many of the analytical results of the paper involve extensions of classical shortest-path distance properties to minimum-cost distances. In addition to these extensions, a characterization theorem is given which specifies the possible functional relationships between trip costs and their associated path lengths. These relationships include most functional forms which are commonly employed in the literature.     

Reviews

Australian

Bateman W. R. G. and Ward M. W. (eds), Australia's Offshore Maritime Interests, Canberra, Australian Centre for Maritime Studies, 1985, pp. 122. $15.00 (paper)

Stephen Castles, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope and Michael Morrissey, Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia, Sydney, Pluto Press, 1988, pp.152. $14.95 (paper)

Roger Gibbins, Federalism in the Northern Territory; Statehood and Aboriginal Political Development, Darwin, North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1988, pp. 148. $14.00 (paper)

Dean Jaensch and Peter Loveday (eds), Challenge From The Nationals: The Territory Election 1987, Darwin, North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1987, pp. 226. $20.00 (paper)

Constance Lever‐Tracy and Michael Quinlan, A Divided Working Class, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988, pp. 338. $29.95 (paper)

Peter Loveday and Peter McNab (eds), Australia's Seventh State, Darwin, The Law Society of the Northern Territory and the North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1988, pp.322. $24.00 (paper)

Geoffrey Skene, Specialities of the House, Department of the Parliamentary Library/Australasian Political Studies Association, 1988, pp.59. $10.00 (paper)

Comparative and international

Chris Bellamy, The Future of Land Warfare, London and Sydney, Croom Helm, 1987, pp.302. £29.95 (cloth)

Cathy Downes Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Research School of Pacific Studies The Australian National University

Melanie Beresford, Vietnam: Politics, Economics and Society, London, Frances Pinter, 1988, pp.242. $19.95 (paper)

Vernon Bogdanor (ed.) Constitutions in Democratic Politics, Gower, for the Policy Studies Institute, Aldershot, 1988, pp.395. $59.00 (cloth)

Barry Coldrey, Faith and Fatherland: The Christian Brothers and the Development of Irish Nationalism 1838–1921, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1988, pp. 338. £27.50

John Connell, New Caledonia or Kanaky? The Political History of a French Colony, Canberra, Australian National University, National Centre for Development Studies, Pacific Research Monograph No. 16,1987, pp.493. $25.00 (paper)

Michael Spencer, Alan Ward and John Connell (eds), New Caledonia: Essays in Nationalism and Dependency, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1988, pp.253. $ 19.95 (paper)

Leon Epstein Political Parties in the American Mold, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, pp. 440. $US27.00 (cloth).

Keith Ewing, The Funding of Political Parties in Britain, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 264. $70.00 (cloth)

Richard Higgott (ed.), New Directions in International Relations? Australian Perspectives, Canberra, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, 1988, pp. 223. $10.00 (paper)

Michael J Sheehan, Arms Control; Theory and Practice, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 188. $34.95 (paper)

Political theory and methodology

Boris Frankel, The Post‐Industrial Utopians, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987, pp. 303. $29.95 (paper)

P. Gottfried and T. Fleming The Conservative Movement. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1988, pp.125. US$7.95 (paper)

Peter C. Ordeshook, Game Theory and Politics: An Introduction, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp.511. $47.00 (paper)

A. Teichova, M. Levy‐Leboyer & H. Nussbaum (eds), Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 396. $107.00 (cloth).     

PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY UNCERTAINTY AND THE OPTIMAL LOCATION OF THE FIRM*

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the implication of production-technology uncertainty for the exclusion theorem. The paper presents the result that the risk-averse firm facing production technology uncertainty prefers an intermediate location to avoid risk under certain conditions. The firm chooses an intermediate location (over a corner location) particularly if its degree of risk aversion overwhelms the inherent convexity of profit with respect to location. The latter depends, in turn, on the structure of production technology characterized by the elasticity of substitution and returns to scale parameters.