Congress and Reagan's New Federalism

This article analyzes the congressional response to the Reaganadministration's New Federalism proposals in terms of party,region, and constituency during Reagan's first term. While theCongress approved various spending cuts in grants to local andstate governments and in means-tested benefit programs to thepoor, even in 1981 when New Federalism initiatives enjoyed themost success, Congress terminated only one program, CETA publicservice jobs. A stalemate developed in 1982. The Reagan administrationand the congressional Republicans could not impose further majorspending cuts or program terminations, and the congressionalDemocrats could not restore the 1981 cuts or add new aid programs.Although the stalemate continued on New Federalism's dismantlingof aid programs as a grand scheme even into 1985, after PresidentReagan's reelection, Congress continued to approve incrementalcuts in overall spending, and the $200 billion budget deficitremained as a lever to force even greater cuts and program terminationsin the years ahead.     

The Many Meanings of Equality and Positive Action in Favour of Women under European Community Law - A Conceptual Analysis

Abstract: The principle of equality of men and women as understood by Community institutions covers four distinguishable aspects. The first is equal treatment, defined in Community texts as the absence of legal gender discrimination. This concept focuses on individual rights and does not take into account the social context in which rules function. Second, the Community seeks to realise equal opportunities, understood as factual equality of chances. Third, Community law displays a concern for factually equal outcomes. The institutions accept legally different treatment that seeks to equalise unequal living conditions and inversely admit that facially neutral rules can have discriminatory effects. Finally, various documents conceive of gender equality as equal representation of the sexes in professional and public life. In the Kalanke decision of October 1995, the Court for the first time dealt with quotas in favour of women. It held that a national provision granting female candidates an automatic preference is incompatible with the right to equal treatment. The Court failed to acknowledge the tensions that arise from the coexistence of paradigms. An awareness of the multiplicity of concepts of equality, exhibited in Community law and rooted in the common constitutional heritage of the Member States, is however a prerequisite for a more sophisticated discussion of the issue of positive action.     

Characteristics of married and unmarried adolescent mothers and their partners

In a middle-class, urban-clinic sample of 275, mostly Caucasian, adolescent mothers and their partners living in Utah, three groups were identified and their psychosocial characteristics were compared. Couples married at the time of conception (N=22) enjoyed more positive responses from prospective grandparents and earned more than couples not married at the time of conception. On the other hand, these initially married youths were much more likely to be high-school dropouts, which suggests limits in their lifetime earning capacities, and they were not more likely to identify one another as sources of emotional support. Couples who married between conception and delivery (N=110) reported that prospective grandparents responded less favorably to news of the pregnancy than did relatives of the initially married couples, but while their current salaries were lower, they were much more likely to be continuing with their education. Those who married after conception also had fewer antisocial and conduct disorders than young men and women who chose to continue in a dating relationship (N=29). Overall, the couples who married after conception appeared to face less severe problems than either the initially-married couples or the steady daters.This research was supported by grant number APR 000922-02-0 from the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs to Drs. Elster and Lamb.where he and Dr. Lamb conduct research on pregnant teens, teenaged parents, and their children. Ms. Peters and Mr. Kahn are graduate students in School of Education at the University of Utah, while Ms. Tavare is a biostatistician at the University of Utah Medical Center.     

Strategy-proof voting for single issues and cabinets

In a model with a continuum of voters with symmetric single-peaked preferences on the one-dimensional unit interval (representing the political spectrum) a voting rule assigns to each profile of votes a point in the interval. We characterize all voting rules that are strategy-proof, anonymous, Pareto optimal, and which satisfy a weak form of continuity. This result paves the way for studying cabinet formation rules. A cabinet is an interval which has obtained sufficiently many votes. The main result on cabinet formation is a characterization of all cabinet formation rules that are strategy-proof with respect to the endpoints of the cabinet, anonymous, Pareto optimal, and continuous.     

Feedback loops in a world of complexity: a cybernetic approach at the interface of foreign policy analysis and international relations theory

Feedback in foreign policy occurs when a state's foreign policy affects the international context of that state and those changes in context subsequently impact on the state's future foreign policy decisions. In this way, feedback loops can develop, which may become self-reinforcing and in which foreign policy and international context continuously affect each other. Even though such processes are ubiquitous especially in a globalized world, they have hitherto received little systematic attention. We introduce cybernetics as a perspective that puts such feedback effects at the centre of attention and provides an accessible sequential framework for analysing them. Such a cybernetic analysis not only demonstrates the significance of feedback processes in foreign policies but also speaks to several recent debates in international relations theory and foreign policy analysis. In particular, it highlights processes of learning and change, of non-linearity and indeterminacy, and enables the researcher to integrate insights from structure- and agency-based approaches. We outline the merits of a cybernetic analysis by discussing the effects of feedback in the United States' War on Terror.     

A step towards improving workflow practices for volume crime investigations: outcomes of a 90-day trial in South Australia

The provision of forensic science services in volume crime investigations works most successfully as a partnership between police agencies and external forensic laboratories as opposed to a client/provider model where unlimited demand ignores finite resources. The principles of Lean Six Sigma have been applied in various laboratories to improve workflow through identification of wasteful work practices. These strategies are aimed at process optimisation through the application of triaging, a concept that has rarely been studied yet referenced strongly in the literature. The South Australia End to End 90-Day Trial: facilitating quicker justice through timely evidence processing, is a collaborative approach between South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia. This trial applied evidence-based policing principles, a law enforcement philosophy that uses research undertaken with scientific processes to inform law-enforcement decision-making. The results demonstrate how a review of processes and the removal of non-value adding activities can improve service delivery while not exhausting those ‘finite resources’.