Putting the Brakes on the Rush to Spend Down End‐of‐Year Balances: Carryover Money in Oklahoma State Agencies

End‐of‐the‐year spending sprees by government agencies are viewed generally as an example of government wastefulness. Agency personnel, however, rationalize the practice as a means for protecting their budgets from inexpedient cuts. In Oklahoma, a policy has been adopted that allows agencies to carry over and reprogram year‐end surpluses as long as the reprogrammed funds are spent within 16.5 months of the end of the fiscal year. Using agency theory as a theoretical lens, we show that this policy restructures the contract between the principal (legislature) and its agents (state agencies) so that their interests are better aligned, regarding end‐of‐the‐year surpluses.     

Appearance Without Counsel: Self-Representation in the Criminal Courts of the United States and Canada

Previous attempts to ground structural effects have averaged the responses of individuals in survey research and consequently equate properties of the respondent with attributes of the system itself. This technique (Blau, 1960; 1974) generates philosophical controversy which can only be avoided by measuring properties of criminal justice agencies having no counterpart at the individual level (offenders, police, correctional workers) of analysis. Sampling designs must subsume both organizations and individuals to formulate generalizations about interorganizational processes. Applying conventional multivariate statistical models, we are able to examine one type of characteristic while simultaneously adjusting for the effects of the other.