Performance Measurement in State Budgeting: Advancement and Backsliding from 1990 to 1995

Performance measurement has been one of the dominant themes of budget reform in the 1990s and has been prevalent in the mainstream of budgeting since the 1950s. Given the attention that performance measurement has had nationally, states might be expected to have made major strides in this arena in recent years. The article considers the current status of performance measurement practices, and identifies both advancement and backsliding made by states between 1990 and 1995. The discussion is based on data obtained from surveys of state budget offices in those two years. Indexes of performance measurement were constructed, and these became the bases of regression analyses using independent variables pertaining to state characteristics. Generally, these analyses were unsuccessful in explaining the variations among the states. The findings underscore the diversity among the states in their budgetary practices and the fact that budget reform, in the sense of increased use of performance measurement, is not necessarily achieved in a straight line of progression. The article considers possible explanations for the changes.     

Sabotage! The Origins,Development and Impact of the IRA's Infrastructural Bombing Campaigns 1939–1997

At various moments in the twentieth century the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in its various incarnations have used the tactic of infrastructural bombing, notably in their 1939 attacks in England on electricity pylons and in the summer of 1971 in Northern Ireland on its electrical distribution network. In 1996 the British Security Service (MI5) foiled an attack by the IRA aimed at causing a total electrical blackout of the greater London area, a plan that would have seen major disruption in the capital for many weeks or months. Using recently declassified material this paper seeks to re-evaluate the impact of these IRA infrastructural sabotage campaigns that have until now either been ignored or judged to have been derisory or incongruous failures. This paper demonstrates the historical development of this tactic from both the IRA's perspective, and that of those who were tasked with hindering it, highlighting the devastating potential of such tactics in the future.