Legal Reasoning and the Separation of Powers: A State-Level Analysis of Disputes Involving Federal Funds Appropriations*

This article investigates the influence of judicial decisions on state legislative oversight of federal funds. A systematic analysis of judicial decisions is undertaken in an effort to reveal (a) the extent to which such activity on the part of legislatures is permitted or denied by courts, and (b) the nature of legal reasoning that determines differential outcomes. The analysis reveals, among other things, that there are two divergent paths of law: one upholding the legislative prerogative to exercise the power of the purse, and the other upholding the executive function of governors to act as custodians and executors of federal funds and programs. The delegation of legislative powers to interim committees is likewise investigated.     

Alternatives To Population-Based Crime Rates

This paper examines several alternatives to standard, population-based crime rates. These alternatives include rates standardized according to a variable other than population, and rates calculated by statistically standardizing for a number of variables simultaneously. Augmenting traditional crime rates with alternative types of rates can provide more information about the prevalence of crime, can help avoid the limitations of traditional rates, and can enhance analysts' flexibility in choosing crime rates appropriate to their analytical purpose.     

Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's Liberation and James Baldwin's Early Essays

Since a gender‐free society has never existed historically, feminist thinking that posits the equality of the sexes is inherently Utopian. Feminist Utopian writers, working within the traditional genre of science‐fiction, a genre particularly well‐suited to revolutionary theoretical discussions, have explored three types of feminist utopias: all‐female societies, biological androgyny, and genuinely egalitarian two‐sex societies. This essay examines examples of feminist utopias in each of these three paradigms to determine to what extent they are “abstract” (in Ernst Bloch's terminology), ie. merely wish‐fulfillment fantasies, and to what extent “concrete” and thus viable blue‐prints for future political and social organization.     

The party road to representation: Unequal responsiveness in party platforms

This paper explores a major road to substantive representation in democracies, by clarifying whether demands of rich and poor citizens are taken up in the electoral platforms of political parties. Doing so constitutes a substantial broadening and deepening of our understanding of substantive representation – broadening the countries, issue-areas and years that form the empirical basis for judging whether democracies manifest unequal representation; and deepening the process of representation by clarifying a key pathway connecting societal demands to policy outcomes. The paper hypothesises that party systems in general will respond more strongly to wealthy than to poor segments of a polity. It also hypothesises that left parties will more faithfully represent poorer and less significantly represent richer citizens than do right parties. We find substantial support for these expectations in a new dataset that combines multi-country, multi-issue-area, multi-wave survey data with data on party platforms for 39 democracies.     

Tactical and Contextual Determinants of U.S. Senators' Approval Ratings

This paper focuses on U.S. senators and their home‐state approval ratings from 1981 to 1997. We examine these ratings to assess the relative impacts of tactical factors, such as the senators' bill sponsorship and media activity, and contextual influences, such as economic performance, state population size, and the evaluations and behavior of other elected officials. We find that the senators' own tactical behavior affects the approval ratings, but a stronger influence is the context in which the senators operate.     

Rhetoric,Harm, and the Personification of Progress in Mill's On Liberty

Abstract. On Liberty was written to influence the future of democratic government. To that end Mill employed rhetoric, particularly through the use of personifications, to persuade the mid‐nineteenth century British electorate to embrace the cause of civil liberty. His more subtle argumentation was directed to the intelligentsia (both his contemporaries and subsequent generations). Mill's harm principle, perhaps the most influential idea in On Liberty, undergoes a significant qualification in the scope of its application in the last chapter because of the dual argumentative strategy. This has been overlooked by Mill's American interpreters who use the harm principle to justify the judicial activism of the American Supreme Court. Further, the judicial restraint of recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions can be reaffirmed through a scrutiny of Mill's rhetorical agenda.