Two Cheers for Paperwork: The Value and Burden of Federal Reporting

In principle, reporting by state and local governments to thefederal government is essential to the design and implementationof national policy. In practice, reporting often engenders resentmentof federal intrusion and is often dismissed as a waste of stateand local resources. Is reporting useless? Does it strengthenthe federal government at the expense of state and local governments?We asked federal, state, local, and site officials about thevalue and burden of five specific reporting systems in elementaryand secondary education. Common assumptions about reportingdid not correspond to respondent reactions. Both value and burdencascade through the intergovernmental system, reaching policymakersin all governments. Although critics seldom discriminate betweentypes of reporting, we found that reporting designed to improvecompliance with federal standards evoked different judgmentsof value and burden than reporting designed for assistance.These results suggest some new approaches to federal policygoverning the collection of information and to the design ofindividual reporting systems.     

Ausfallshaftung und Kaduzierung

Eine jüngst ergangene Entscheidung des OGH (6 Ob 204/11k wbl 2012, 291) bietet Anlass, über das Verh?ltnis der Ausfallshaftung (§ 70 GmbHG) zum Kaduzierungsverfahren (§ 66 GmbHG) nachzudenken. Die Rechtsfrage lautet: Bedarf die Geltendmachung der Ausfallshaftung der vorherigen Durchführung eines Kaduzierungsverfahrens?     

The patriarchy index: a comparative study of power relations across historical Europe

This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. The index combines all these items, with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in different societal and familial settings. In order to explore the comparative advantages of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91 regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index allows the authors to identify regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. The unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories of family organization across the European landmass.     

Mosaic: recovering surviving census records and reconstructing the familial history of Europe

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infrastructural projects in the history of historical demography and family sociology. The article provides a brief history of the project, a discussion of the main issues involved in creating the database (including sampling and representativeness), and Mosaic's data structure and coverage. In the remainder of the article, the authors provide an overview of methodological and research opportunities that the project can offer to scholars, showing how the most pertinent problems of historical family demography can be tackled in more systematic ways than previously.     

Democracy and bureaucracy

The issue in bureaucracy and democracy is one of control. This paper calls for greater control resources for elected officials whereby they can overcome the abundant power resources of bureaucrats. A process of exchange as against a process of authority is suggested as a strategic means of democratic control over bureaucracy.

Successfully meeting the challenge of reconciling deeply cherished norms of popular control with dependence on appointed administrators requires acknowledgement not only of the rights of the controllers but also of the powers of the controlled.⁽¹⁾ It requires thinking strategically about creating and marshaling alternative resources to counteract the abundant resources bureaucrats have, to circumvent control for both selfish and public spirited reasons. Such a focus on resources suggests the fruitfulness of conceptualizing democratic control more as a process of exchange than as an exercise of authority.