Containing Contagious Financial Crises: The Political Economy of Joint Intervention into the Asian Crisis

The notion of contagion has changed the wayscientists perceive financial crises,causing heated debate on the politicaleconomy of crisis intervention. Based on aformal model that shows how a financialcrisis can escalate and spread contagiously,this article analyzes game-theoreticallyhow a financial market crisis can becontained through intervention. The centralfocus is the role that internationalorganizations play in overcoming thecollective action problem of jointintervention. It is argued that the IMFsupport programs were helpful, and probablynecessary in a class of cases we analyzemore carefully, in surpassing the thresholdlevel of collective action.     

To Give or Not to Give: Modeling Individuals' Contribution Decisions

Employing data from a recent national survey on campaign finance, we examine the contribution behavior of individual citizens in the 2000 election. By disaggregating types of contributions, our model enables us to observe potential heterogeneity in the determinants of giving money to parties and candidates. We find that for both types of contributions, the effects of informational resources and solicitation on the decision to contribute outweigh those of financial resources. In addition, we propose both a theoretical and an empirical distinction between the selection effects of solicitation and the stimulus effects of solicitation. By distinguishing between these dual dimensions of solicitation, our analysis provides new insight into the causal linkages between income, solicitation, and contributions. We find that while solicitation increases the likelihood of contributing through selective targeting or rational prospecting, it also does so through a stimulus mechanism.     

Gubernatorial Use of the Item Veto for Narrative Deletion

Legislative use of narrative, such as conditions and riders, in appropriations bills has become common and has had negative consequences for the executive budget and veto, as well as for the legislative process. Some governors have used the item veto as a remedy. While they have not necessarily diminished the amount of narrative, they have achieved some protection of the executive budget and veto power. Their success depends greatly on the type of legal authority embodied in this constitutional power.     

A Strategy to Prevent Losses in Local Government Investment Pools

In the first half of the 1990s, some local government investment pools (LGIPs) suffered losses from derivatives investments. Although the losses came from derivatives, the actual cause of the losses was the violation of public-fund prudent investment practices. This article provides a strategy to prevent future losses for LGIPs' participants by looking at the pattern of return on investment of the pools. Our proposal is that rates of return on state pools that co-move with market rates are generally an indication of adherence to prudent investment practices. We demonstrate the viability of this proposal by using co-integration methodology. The implication is that if rates of return on a state pool do not co-move with market rates, they may indicate the violation of prudent investment practices.     

New Labour and Government in Britain: Change or Continuity?

The 1997 British election marks a major change in British government. Eighteen years of Conservative rule had brought about growing inequality and social division and have generated powerful demands for new directions in public policy, especially in the areas of welfare and public administration. On welfare state reform Labour is constrained by election promises to restrain taxation and public expenditure. New Labour ministers influenced by the New Right have in any case largely rejected traditional social democratic redistributive strategies and are seeking instead new ways of reducing welfare dependency.
The virulent spread of quangos at all levels of government and a marked increase in the centralisation of power in Whitehall have given a new impetus to demands for constitutional reform. Labour's response to these demands is a major program of regional devolution, House of Lords reform and open government measures.
This article explains what 'New Labour' means and discusses New Labour policies on welfare and constitutional reform and their implications for the future of public administration in Britain.     

An integrated perspective on the three potential sources of partisan bias: Malapportionment, turnout differences, and the geographic distribution of party vote shares

Partisan bias refers to an asymmetry in the way party vote share is translated into seats, i.e., a situation where some parties are able to win a given share of seats with a lesser (share of the) vote than is true for other parties. Any districted system is potentially subject to partisan biases. We show that there are three potential sources of partisan bias: (1) differences in the nature of the vote shares of the winning candidates of different parties that give rise to differences in the proportion of each party's votes that come to be ‘wasted’—differences which arise because of the nature of the geographic distribution of partisan support; (2) turnout rate differences across districts that are linked to the partisan vote shares in those districts, such that certain parties are more likely to have ‘cheap seats’ vis-à-vis turnout; and (3) malapportionment. In the context of two-party competition over single-member districts we provide a simple formulation to calculate the independent effect of each of these three factors. We illustrate our analysis with a calculation of the magnitude and direction of effects of the three determinants of partisan bias in elections to the US House and the US Senate in 1984, 1986 and 1988; then we consider how to extend the approach to a system with a mix of single- and multi-member districts or to a weighted voting system such as the US electoral college. We then apply the method to calculate the nature and sources of partisan bias in the 1984 and 1988 US presidential elections.     

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.