Toxic waste as public business

Abstract: That there is some public responsibility for toxic waste management is a point widely taken for granted. However, there has been controversy over whether toxic waste management should become the responsibility primarily of a public corporation. Proposals for a public corporation to assume such responsibility have been advanced in Canada at the provincial level with widely varying outcomes. Through a comparison of three cases – British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario – this article examines the salient issues in this policy debate and questions the prevailing mode of problem definition in order to propose a contrasting approach to public responsibility. Sommaire: On s'accorde généralement pour dire qu'il existe une certaine responsabilité publique face à la gestion des déchets toxiques. Par contre, la question de savoir si la responsabilité de gérer ces déchets devrait incomber surtout à une société d'État a fait, elle, l'objet de controverses. Dans les provinces où on a proposé qu'une société d'État prenne en charge cette responsabilité les résultats ont été fort variés. En comparant trois cas, ceux de la Colombie-Britannique, de l'Alberta et de l'Ontario, cet article examine les principales questions de ce débat et met en doute la façon actuelle de définir le problème, afin de proposer une approche différente en ce qui concerne la responsabilité publique.     

ISTEA: A New Direction for Transportation Policy

The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA)of 1991 is likely to be remembered as one of President Bush'smost significant contributions to government decentralizationand the ideals of New Federalism. It is a landmark piece oflegislation that makes wholesale revisions in the federal government'srole in transportation policy, providing state and, especially,local policymakers with an unprecedented opportunity to determinethe future direction of the nation's surface transportationprograms. However, at the same time it decentralized authorityover project selection, it continued to expandthe number ofcrossover sanctions attached to federal transportation fundingand preempted state authority over truck weights and lengths.This underscores recent research findings that suggest thatfederalism principles are important to federal policymakersbut not necessarily more important than other competing valuesthat emanate from different political, social, and economicviews.     

The good society redux

He is coeditor (with Kenneth W. Thompson) of Truth and Tragedy: A Festschrift for Hans J. Morgenthau,and editor of The Political Morality of the IMF.He is currently writing a book on U.S. foreign policy.     

Do bonus offers shorten unemployment insurance spells? results from the washington experiment

Unemployment insurance is intended to reduce hardship by providing labor force members with partial wage replacement during periods of involuntary unemployment. However, in performing this income maintenance function, unemployment insurance may prolong spells of unemployment. Evidence from a field experiment conducted in Illinois in 1984 suggested that offering unemployment insurance claimants a modest cash bonus for rapid reemployment would increase the speed of return to work and reduce program costs. In 1988 a similar experiment, examining several different bonus offers, was conducted in the state of Washington. Evidence from the Washington experiment indicates that bonus offers do change job seeking behavior, but that only relatively generous bonus offers—about six times the weekly benefit amount—should be expected to significantly change the behavior of people eligible for unemployment benefits.     

PREDICTING STATE ABORTION LEGISLATION FROM U.S. SENATE VOTES: THE EFFECTS OF APPARENT IDEOLOGICAL SHIRKING

The recent Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services giving more discretion to states to regulate abortion has led to speculation concerning which states might move to limit abortions. Medoff (1989) attempts to predict how state legislatures might vote on state-level abortion legislation by examining the 1983 Senate vote on the Hatch/Eagleton Amendment. We expand upon Medoff's analysis by incor- porating recent developments in agency theory as it applies to the political agents (i.e., Senators) in the empirical model. The results demonstrate that accounting for Senatorial "shirking" and state ideology substantially im- proves the predictive ability of the model for the Senate abortion vote. The predicted votes of the state's Senators, after eliminating the effects of apparent Senatorial shirking, are used to infer the likelihood of state-level legislation substantially restricting abortion. We compare these results to a base model that ignores the issue of shirking and find increased predict- ability and several differing results.