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Part of a 2002 panel debate on a book by Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader's Digest and American Identity (2000), which is praised for its insightful & original contributions to popular geopolitics. Though Sharp's arguments concerning the uniqueness of the Reader's Digest in disseminating geopolitical knowledge to the US population are clear, she devotes little attention to the interrelationships between that periodical & other forms of popular media, particularly Cold War-era films & TV. Further research is also needed on the interactions between such discourses & their audiences, as well as on ways that the "nexus of values" identified by Sharp as comprising a unique form of citizenship in the US impacted popular understandings of Cold War geopolitics. K. Hyatt Stewart

This article reviews recent attempts to create integrated pan-European stock markets and draws on extensive qualitative research carried out on London-based financial services firms and institutions between 1996 and 2000. The article uses the example of stock market integration and the creation of electronic trading platforms to examine the question of why it is that despite advances in technology and telecommunications financial agglomerations in inner urban areas continue to dominate financial markets. It is suggested that a variety of explanations hold the key to this question but that in terms of European stock market integration the agency on the part of institutional players, in particular the larger exchanges, is setting the pace for change but that technology issues are the framework within which they work as well as often the battlefield upon which they compete. Despite the prevalence of technologies capable of producing geographically disaggregated markets, it is shown that in order to best work these markets there are still advantages to be had from locating finance firms'trading operations in the midst of financial agglomerations. It is concluded that as the future of market structures and operation are the result of embedded human and institutional agency, inter-urban rivalries will continue to be crucial to the shape and location of European financial markets and activities.

We study voting rules with respect to how they allow or limit a majority from dominating minorities: whether a voting rule makes a majority powerful and whether minorities can veto the candidates they do not prefer. For a given voting rule, the minimal share of voters that guarantees a victory to one of the majority's most preferred candidates is the measure of majority power; and the minimal share of voters that allows the minority to veto each of their least preferred candidates is the measure of veto power. We find tight bounds on such minimal shares for voting rules that are popular in the literature and used in real elections. We order the rules according to majority power and veto power. Instant-runoff voting has both the highest majority power and the highest veto power; plurality rule has the lowest. In general, the greater is the majority power of a voting rule, the greater its veto power. The three exceptions are: voting with proportional veto power, Black's rule and Borda's rule, which have relatively weak majority power and strong veto power, thus providing minority protection. Our results can shed light on how voting rules provide different incentives for voter participation and candidate nomination.