The editors of the hamburg review of social sciences are glad to present the third issue of volume 4 which again deals with a wide range of topics.
The issue opens with a paper by Claudia Landwehr on deliberation, voting, and truth. In her article, the author identifies two different strands of epistemic democracy: aggregative epistemic democracy and deliberative epistemic democracy. Landwehr questions the Condorcet jury theorem’s application to political decision-making by addressing its three premises – independence of individual judgments, voter competence, and the idea that the point in majority rule is to track the truth – from a deliberative perspective. It is argued that epistemic hopes should better concentrate on the discursive processes preceding majority vote and that voting and deliberation complement rather than substitute each other.
Our second article from Nana Seidel, Steffen Mau and Roland Verwiebe deals with migration of Germans with medial qualifications in Europe and the question whether there is a connection between unemployment and migration. The analysis is based on 40 interviews conducted in 2006 and 2007 in Northern Germany. The main conclusion of the study is that migration may be a strategy of individual handling of unemployment and may therefore lead to an amelioration of the individual's situation.
The third article from Asma Hyder and Maqsood Sadiq tackles aspects of poverty dynamics in Pakistan. First, the study divides the population of Pakistan into four categories: non-poor, vulnerable, poor, and extremely poor. The individuals’ demographics, household composition, and residential characteristics within each economic category are discussed. The second part of the paper identifies the characteristics and determinants of these four categories of poverty status. A multinomial logit model is estimated for this purpose. The results of the study tend to be helpful for a fuller characterization of poverty dynamics and for informing policy formulation to reduce poverty.