TURNOUT IN MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS

Turnout in municipal elections is even lower than that in presidential elections. Yet the problem has been largely ignored by academicians. In recent years, there have been court challenges under the 1982 Voting Rights Act to majority vote and other than single-member districting provisions as requirements that are believed to dilute the political impact of minorities. The present analysis presents an overview of our knowledge to date, relating electoral districting and majority vote arrangements to black patterns of participation. It reviews the available literature, traces the associations that exist, identifies the problems in data collection and analysis that are present and sets forth a propositional inventory and set of conclusions that can serve as the basis for future research. The analysis incorporates original data and insights from the author's research and from cities in which he has served as a consultant.     

IDENTIFYING HEALTH CARE COST CRISES IN OECD NATIONS

This study develops an empirical model for determining whether a nation's health care expenditures are experiencing a crisis based on the trend over time of the ratio of total health spending to total domestic expenditures. A dynamic regression model is applied to 22 OECD nations for the 1960–1994 period to estimate whether or not levels of health spending are converging towards a stable equilibrium and, if they are, what this equilibrium is and how long it will take to reach it. Crisis is defined as an empirically divergent process. The principal findings from this analysis are that: 1) three nations (France, Greece, and the United States) are experiencing a crisis according to this definition; 2) although the crisis potential is relatively high in all the OECD nations, there appears to be a critical region or threshold where the tendency towards crisis increases dramatically; 3) the time to reach equilibrium is generally quite long, indicating the opportunity for substantial policy intervention; and 4) Denmark stands out as a successful case where health costs have been contained.