Is ABCM Destined for Success or Failure in the Federal Government?

The days of ballooning federal budgets are over. Today, both the president and Congress continue to strive for a balanced budget, while encouraging federal agencies to improve service delivery of the various programs and entitlement benefits provided to their customers. Stakeholder involvement and public opinion about how agencies run their "businesses" are increasingly scrutinized. Trends such as competition for service delivery through franchizing, privatization, and outsourcing are causing an entirely new way of looking at how support and program services are managed. This article explains how the success or failure of activity-based costing management (ABCM) is dependent upon its ability to link the resolution of these external factors with internal business needs, while providing government managers with a better understanding of how to use ABCM to steer their organizations into the future. We also describe the current and future status of ABCM installations at various federal entities where ABCM was recently introduced and where interviews, conducted a year ago, were updated to describe how ABCM is helping these entities align external factors to internal needs. These federal entities are the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Financial Management Service, and the Veterans Benefits Administration.     

Predictive Efficacy and the Preventive Detention of Dangerous Sexual Offenders: Contributions from Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory

Behavioral scientists are regularly summoned by the legal system to make predictions about the likelihood of future dangerous behavior (i.e., violence prediction/risk assessment). In recent years, such efforts have been subjected to considerable scrutiny as, despite the evolution of risk assessment instruments, social scientists have yet to demonstrate the ability to predict violence with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Yet concerns with predictive efficacy may be rooted in the limitations of prediction itself. Nonlinear dynamical systems theory (i.e., chaos theory) and quantum physics jointly paint a picture of human behavior as fundamentally unpredictable; in their light, we are asked to question whether future violence can ever be predicted with a tolerable level of error. In this article, I provisionally explore this very issue, particularly as it appears in the context of decisions concerning the disposition of criminal sexual offenders.     

Representation,neighboring districts,and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress

Legislative scholars often assume that legislators are motivated by concerns over re-election. This assumption implies that legislators are forward-looking and are motivated by a concern over what their re-election constituency will look like during their next electoral cycle. In this research, we show how the forward-looking nature of legislators motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to represent both their home district and their neighboring districts in their choices regarding when to support their own party. Using survey responses to the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study to construct measures of Congressional District ideology, empirical analysis is strongly supportive of our claims. Legislators’ choices are strongly influenced both by the ideology of their home district and that of the districts that neighbor their home district. Thus, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives extends beyond a legislator’s own constituents to include the constituents in neighboring districts.     

Dodging Dodd‐Frank: Excessive Speculation,Commodities Markets,and the Burden of Proof

Inspired by the wave of regulatory rulemaking, which followed the 2008 financial crisis and the passage of the Dodd‐Frank Act, this article examines the efforts of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to implement one such rule: Rule 76 FR 4752. Born of concerns with the impact of financial speculators on commodities prices, the rule calls for the expanded use of position limits to control “excessive speculation” in US commodities markets. In documenting the political and legal life of this rule from its roots in policy reports through to its suspension by a federal judge, the article explores the place of “evidence” in the rulemaking process. Particular attention is devoted to the growing evidentiary burden placed on financial regulators who are expected to frame market problems in terms of quantitative, price‐based forms of harm. In the case of position limits, this has involved statistical analyses of the causal connections between excessive speculation and commodities prices and the use of a single statistical test: Granger causality. By examining the parameters and limitations of this test, the article offers a valuable window into the unique challenges of financial regulation and their roots in questions of knowledge, evidence, and proof.     

The business of bribery: Globalization, economic liberalization, and the “problem” of corruption

This paper is intended as a critical response to the emerging consensus within both academic and policy literatures that we are currently facing an epidemic of corruption which threatens to undermine the stability of economic and political development on both a national and global scale, and which requires both immediate and wide-ranging policy interventions. Based on a review of the publications and policy statements of the leading anti-corruption crusaders — namely the OECD, the IMF, and the World Bank — it will be argued that the recent concern with corruption is attributable, not to any substantive increase incorrupt practices, but rather, to the re-framing of corruption in light of broader shifts and transformations within the global economy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

East German Intelligence and Ireland, 1949–90: Espionage,Terrorism and Diplomacy

This article analyses the writings of a prominent German social and political theorist ‐ Jürgen Habermas ‐ on the process of (reunification in Germany and examines responses to his interventions by right‐wing thinkers opposed to his views. (Re)unification is a setting of rapidly developing and changing events which present a challenge to Habermas’ thinking. Put simply, Habermas is highly critical of the ‘rush towards (re)unification’ and the process which has followed it. In particular, he objects to attempts by right‐wing thinkers, predominantly historians, to rewrite German history and which elude German responsibility in respect of the horrors of the Holocaust. Equally, he has explicitly shown the links between questions of German identity and the rewriting of German history and argues that the only viable identity for Germany post‐(re)Unification is that of ‘constitutional identity’ and not national identity. His writings have, however, been the subject of sometimes vehement and vitriolic critiques and this article seeks not only to engage with these but also to examine the interventions of Habermas in relation to his earlier more theoretical writings.