Rail Safety: Targeting Oversight and Assessing Results

Rail safety has emerged as a significant issue in the past two years as a result of two major factors: a statistical lack of improvement in rail safety in the past decade, and a catalytic event in the form of a major derailment involving loss of life at Graniteville, South Carolina, in January 2005. The convergence of long-term leveling of rail safety indicators and the shock of a major rail accident prompted the Senate Appropriations Committee to ask the Government Accountability Office to assess the oversight role of the Federal Railroad Administration, the modal agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation charged with overseeing rail safety. The report is a reminder of the continuing importance of regulatory activities and the general movement in federal management toward greater use of data and performance measures since the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.     

Disarming Somalia: lessons in stabilisation from a collapsed state

International efforts to resolve the Somali crisis have foundered on one central paradox: the restoration of state institutions is both an apparent solution to the conflict and its most important underlying cause. Somalis tend to approach disarmament and demobilisation—two central pillars of the ‘state-building’ process—with the fundamental question: who is disarming whom? If the answer threatens to entrench unbalanced and unstable power relations, then it may also exacerbate and prolong the conflict. In this paper, the authors examine disarmament and demobilisation initiatives from southern Somalia, Puntland and Somaliland. In southern Somalia, externally-driven disarmament and demobilisation initiatives in support of successive interim ‘governments’ have been widely viewed with suspicion and alarm. In Somaliland and Puntland, Somali-led, locally owned efforts have achieved a degree of success that can be instructive elsewhere. The authors conclude that conventional international approaches to ‘state-building’ in Somalia must be reassessed—notably that security sector issues must be treated not as a purely ‘technical’ issue, but as an integral part of the political process.     

The Opportunistic President: How US Presidents Determine Their Legislative Programs

The president is the most influential policy actor in US politics, and his legislative program greatly influences Congress's agenda. Yet little research has focused on what factors affect the president's choices when constructing his agenda. We develop a theory that determines when a president will include an issue in his program. We hypothesize that presidents structure their agendas around the congressional calendar for consideration of expiring laws and salient issues. Using data over 28 years and across 12 policy areas, we find presidents build their programs around these policymaking opportunities. We assert that presidential agendas are less driven by individual priorities than previous accounts have concluded.