The War on Terrorism and the Administration of the American State

Conditions of war lead to a style of teleocratic governance and administration that is at odds with the idea of civil association reflected in the American constitutional state. As a result, war can put our traditional notions of humanity, pluralism, and limited government at risk. In order to defend the values of civil association, public administrators should understand and appreciate the principles undergirding our constitutional system of governance and administration.     

Pricing Outputs: A Case Study in Law Enforcement

This paper discusses the advantages and limitations of economic evaluation as a measurement methodology within the Australian government's outcome and output framework including preliminary benefit–cost analysis of Australian Federal Police investigations. The results suggest that the Australian Federal Police is returning over $5 to the community for every dollar invested in fraud and drug investigations. It is concluded that benefit–cost analysis is a useful tool for comparing the price of an output to the value of an outcome. The method has limitations. Not all outcomes will admit of easy assessment and the information may be difficult to collect. However, the use of surrogate measures and extrapolation of results may overcome most of these limitations.     

Municipal Capital Spending during the "Boom"

This article analyzes municipal governments, capital spending, and revenue-raising decisions between 1993 and 2000, an era of unprecedented economic growth. It finds that, as anticipated, greater-than-expected revenues allowed many cities to advance projects from their capital improvement plans to their capital budgets. Moreover, the article concludes that growth in cities' own-source-revenue-generating capacity and transfers from carryover or ending balances from earlier years, rather than debt issuances and intergovernmental aid, seem to be the most important fuel for the remarkable growth rate in capital spending.     

The prohibition-repeal amendments: A natural experiment in interest group influence

The pattern of state support for Prohibition (18th Amendment, 1919) and Repeal (21st Amendment, 1933) is analyzed and compared. This comparison is important because Prohibition is the only amendment ever to be repealed. The main thesis is that there was no wholesale change in preferences of citizens. Instead, producer interests failed to mobilize effectively in 1919, and the coupling of moral and economic arguments that worked in 1919 broke apart in 1933. Regression analysis is conducted on state legislatures (for Prohibition) and state referenda on convention delegates (for Repeal), so states are observations in the cross-sectional regression analysis. The results broadly support the main thesis.     

The State-Local Nexus in Policy Innovation Diffusion: The Case of School Choice

Our knowledge of how policy innovations diffuse in federal systemscould be enhanced by paying greater attention to the behaviorof policy entrepreneurs. This study shows how policy entrepreneurshelped stimulate the diffusion of state school-choice plansby collecting and generating evidence of workability of thisinnovation. Importantly, these policy entrepreneurs have oftenused evidence from local experiments to promote state policychange. Thus, a state-local nexus exists in the diffusion schoolchoice. This analysis suggests that there is value in conceptualizingpolicy innovation diffusion a federal system as both a horizontal(that is, state to state) and a vertical (that is, state andlocal) phenomenon.