The politics and economics of pork barrel spending: The case of federal financing of water resources development

This paper empirically investigates the economic and political factors that have influenced annual Corps of Engineers water resource spending. Despite the common view that “pork barrel” spending is economically unjustified and purely politically motivated, economic factors have been important in determining water resource spending. From 1865–1920, economic development and industrialization increase spending, and from 1921–1988, spending appears to be counter-cyclical. There is also evidence that majority parties control spending levels in the post-Civil war period, while in recent times, legislators act under a norm of “constrained universalism” and are influenced by the costs to their constituents of increased spending.     

The Second Wave of Incorporation in Latin America: A Conceptualization of the Quest for Inclusion Applied to Argentina

Between 1996 and 2009, a process of struggle for and (after 2002) partial achievement of the second incorporation of the popular sectors took place in Argentina. This process involved a combination of routine and contentious political dynamics that reformulated state‐society relations in the postcorporatist period. As a continuation of the first incorporation (1943–55), the second incorporation displayed some similar features; other attributes were specific to this second process, mainly that it was not corporatist but territorial and that the central agents of transformation were not trade unions but the disincorporated popular sectors, which were territorially organized into a “reincorporation movement.” This article conceptualizes these dynamics and analyzes the role played by the main political actor related to this historical process, the piquetero (picketer) movement.     

Just punishments: Guideline sentences and normative consensus

The federal sentencing guidelines prescribe ranges of sentences to be given to persons convicted of felonies in the federal criminal courts. The U.S. Sentencing Commission wrote the guidelines attempting to make sentences conform to community views of appropriate punishments, along with several other criteria. Employing data from a 1994 national sample of adult Americans, designed as a factorial survey, the degree of correspondence is shown between guidelines sentences and those desired by the American public. Although at the individual level only a modest degree of concordance was found, the central tendencies of public opinion (median sentences) were found to correspond quite closely to the guidelines sentences. The major points of disagreement centered around drug trafficking crimes: the guidelines prescribed very long sentences for those crimes and distinguished sharply among trafficking in heroin, powder cocaine, and crack, whereas median sentences desired by the public were much lower and did not distinguish sharply among trafficking in those drugs. We interpret the findings as indicating that the guidelines sentences conform reasonably closely to American normative consensus concerning the sentencing of federal felons.The research reported in this article was commissioned by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily endorsed by the Commission. Full expositions of the findings from the national survey used are given by Rossi and Berk (1995, 1997).     

The Bookman

正There is a bookman here in Beijing.You will find him every day in the same location,sitting outside Tim's Texas Barbeque near Beijing's Silk Market He does not have a store.He does not sell from a street kiosk.Instead he spreads out his blanket on the street and sets up his shop.     

Trigemino‐Cardiac Reflex as Lethal Mechanism in a Suicidal Fire Death Case

In the vast majority of immediate fire deaths, the mechanism of death is inhalation of toxic gases (especially carbon monoxide), direct thermal injury, or neurogenic shock due to the redistribution of the body's blood volume produced by surface heat on the skin. We present a suicidal case that is unusual because the mechanism of immediate fire death could arguably be explained in terms of a primitive autonomic reflex/the trigemino‐cardiac reflex. Although this reflex is well known to surgeons and anesthetists, with possible lethal consequences in the course of invasive surgical procedures on the head and neck region, it is much less familiar to forensic pathologists.     

Conceptualising and tracing the increased territorialisation of politics: insights from Argentina

The territorialisation of politics is a crucial transformation in state–society relations that has implications on how contemporary politics works. Defined here as the dispute for the physical control of space, be it a municipality, province or portion of land, within one or more politically constituted entities. It does not mean the emergence of a new regime type, but the process through which the territory re-emerges as a new cleavage after neoliberal reforms and authoritarian regimes have weakened/dissolved neo-corporatist arrangements for the resolution of socio-political conflicts in society. It is a cleavage because central political divisions are produced as a result of the physical encounter of or distance between political actors and of the dispute for the control of a territory for sociopolitical goals and causes that are not always territorially defined. Departing from this definition, I also raise potential explanatory hypotheses for the transformations that favoured this transformation in Argentina.