Nonpartisan Legislative Budget Offices: A Tentative Step toward Improving Legislative Oversight

Strengthening the budgetary powers of legislatures through nonpartisan budget offices adds to the capacity‐building repertoire of development donors. Budget offices are supposed to provide legislatures with information and analysis independent from the executive. The United States Agency for International Development believes that strengthening the legislature's power of the purse improves governance. We highlight USAID‐funded legislative strengthening projects implemented in Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, and Afghanistan to show how these budget offices function. There is a significant potential for these units to assist members of parliament in understanding the budget process, the broad fiscal challenges facing government, and expenditure control and budgetary trade‐offs that affect present and future spending. These cases demonstrate the challenges of creating and sustaining a parliamentary budget office. Finally, in an effort to make budget offices effective and sustainable, we outline several key steps that we believe are important both for donors and the legislative bodies.     

A local money to stabilize capitalism: the underestimated case of the WIR

As a result of the current financial crisis, economists have paid increased attention to local monies designed in an effort to create a new kind of economy, as well as new ways to develop social links. This paper seeks to shed light on the WIR money, a local money that has been in existence in Switzerland since the 1930s. We argue that it provides a shield against crises for two significant and connected reasons. First, from a ‘horizontal’ perspective, the WIR is a coherent economic, as well as social, project that relies on the ‘melting money’ principle. Second, from a ‘vertical’ perspective, it is based on a banking model that is anchored to a specific ‘attitude’ designed to manage the monetary common good. The mix between these ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ perspectives is likely to be insightful for other projects like the WIR.     

A petro-formula and its world: calculating profits,labour and production in the assembling of Anglo-Iranian oil

Abstract

The paper explores how the calculative work of three different formulas shaped the history of oil in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century. British investors, Iranian government officials, oil workers and other actors battled over the construction and employment of a formula during the course of three different but interconnected disputes over oil profits, labour and production rates. Opening up the dynamics of a petroleum formula exposes how, on each occasion, certain political possibilities were opened or closed in the co-assembling of the Iranian state and Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Scholarship on oil and Iran has not been able to account for the kinds of non-human actors, tools and machinery involved in the building of such a large-scale political project as an oil industry. Thus the paper draws on the current research on formulas and markets in science and technology studies but takes a different direction by looking at their political construction in the resolution of not just financial and economic problems, but social and political ones.     

State Constitutional Limits on Legislative Procedure: Legislative Compliance and Judicial Enforcement

Most state constitutions contain detailed restrictions on thelegislative process. Violations of some of these restrictions(e.g., single-subject requirements) are reflected on the faceof a final enactment. Other violations (e.g., alteration ofa bill to change its original purpose) are not evident in thefinal enactment, but require investigation of the legislativeprocess. State courts have developed a variety of approachesto these second types of violations, from excluding all evidencebeyond the enactment to permitting any evidence of constitutionalviolations. The Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act was passedin apparent violation of both types of constitutional restrictions.The legislative debates reflected legislators' attitudes aboutsuch restrictions, but the Pennsylvania courts refuse to enforcethem. After surveying other judicial approaches, the articlediscusses the legislative and executive obligation to followconstitutional restrictions, regardless of judicial enforcement.The article then advocates increased judicial enforcement, whilemaintaining proper deference to the legislature.     

Soft money and hard choices: Why political parties might legislate against soft money donations

In contrast to the bulk of the campaign finance literature that highlights political action committee (PAC) contributions and single donations, this paper emphasizes soft money and the rationale for dual contributions. Employing a formal model of unregulated contributions and political access, we show that donors will rationally choose to contribute to both political parties. While the parties accept these dual contributions, they lead to an imbalance between the benefits of contributions and the costs of providing access. This race to acquire unlimited soft money leads to a situation where the parties agree to campaign finance reform legislation.