Moving from national to international environmental policy

Environmental problems will increasingly spill over national boundaries. An effective and efficient response to these problems will require international solutions; relying purely on national regulatory mechanisms to address global issues will not suffice. To meet this need, better international environmental programs must be developed that maximize collective gain, enforce property rights, address the range of environmental values present in different countries, and fairly determine who should pay for global-scale pollution control.     

Predicting the institutional effects of term limits

In this paper we develop a model to predict the seniority turnover, and transition consequences of term limit reforms for any institution with a regularized procedure for rotating membership. With this model we can predict the number of members who will be serving in their last term at any given time once an institution reaches a stable state under term limit reforms. For example, our results show that for the U.S. Senate current term limit proposals will result in a substantial increase in the number of “lame duck” members and a significant reduction in average seniority. We make no claims as to the public policy effects of term limit proposals. However, our model can be used to design a proposal that will maximize any benefits or minimize any public policy effects found to be associated with term limit reforms.     

John Rawls and Policy Formation

Liberalism has bay far been the most appealing ideology in modern political thought, and considered by many as one of human kind's greatest inventions, product of our development as a race. However, new theories have threatened the philosophical foundations upon which liberalism itself stands. One of the most strongly criticized theories is that of the Original Position, developed by the political philosopher John Rawls, and which is itself a fundamental cornerstone in Rawls's Theory of Justice. In this article, I will focus on discussing the problems and questions that arise for policy formation when analyzing the Orginal Position.     

The New Europe: a Federal State or a Confederation of States?

In its search for new forms of federal arrangements appropriate to its contemporary situation, Europe is again at the cutting edge in developing new political arrangements for the postmodern epoch. With the collapse of Westphalian statism, those new arrangements are perforce federal, but not in the manner of modern federations. Instead they are postmodern confederations and various kinds of confederal arrangements. The European Union is rapidly becoming the model post-modern confederation, while other arrangements linking the states of contemporary Europe represent other forms of confederal arrangements. All fit into the spirit and form of globalization and are helping to provide economic globalization with a political and constitutional anchor. Several questions remain, however. How can the European Union become or remain federal rather than hierarchical in orientation, given the pulls of traditional European statism? How will the new confederalism accommodate the various arenas in existing European national state federations?