Fuller on legal fictions

What are legal fictions? Professor Lon Fuller discussed the matter at some length. One interpretation of his answer is this: they are lies that are not intended to deceive. This solution fails, in the end, to be convincing. But some remarks of Fuller provide the clue to another way of looking at the problem: fictions are means of changing the application of the law by relying on a tension between two classifications of fact.     

Acts of Faith: Churches and Political Engagement

Many observers suggest that white evangelical Protestant churches serve to mobilize their members into politics, while others argue that they encourage withdrawal from political life. This paper reconciles these two claims. I hypothesize that the time members of evangelical Protestant denominations spend in service to their church comes at the expense of participation in the wider community, contrary to the way mainline Protestant and Catholic churches foster civic activity among their members. However, I further hypothesize that the tight social networks formed through this intensive church activity can at times facilitate rapid and intense political mobilization. Data from the Citizen Participation Study supports the first hypothesis, while applying King's method of ecological inference to two elections in Alabama supports the second.     

Leviathan and Fiscal Illusion in Local Government Overlapping Jurisdictions

This paper integrates twomodels of local government behavior,leviathan and fiscal illusion, into theframework of overlapping jurisdictions.Estimation of the leviathan and fiscalillusion variables without accounting forvertical effects between overlappingjurisdictions results in overestimation ofthe horizontal effects. Using a medianvoter model and municipal and county datawe find support for the leviathan modelusing traditional tests. These effects arelargely offset, however, when the test isset within the context of the verticalrelationship. We find that municipal percapita expenditures and county per capitaexpenditures are symmetricallycomplementary.     

Issue competition in the 1993 Norwegian national election

Public Choice - We investigate the role of issues in the 1993 Norwegian election. We are interested in comparing two spatial models of issue evaluation, the directional model and the familiar...     

Taking the Keys from Grandpa

Recent highly publicized traffic accidents involving older drivers have led to renewed interest in state policies and administrative practices that award and renew drivers’ licenses in the American states. Because the probability of traffic accidents is linked to the medical conditions that are more prevalent among the elderly, and because the number of older drivers is expected to rise over the next several decades, one might expect that this will be an increasingly important policy issue. This article discusses variations that are observed across states in law and administrative practice. A longitudinal analysis of data on crashes involving elderly drivers in fifteen states indicates that crash rates are directly related to the length of the renewal cycle for older drivers and inversely related to the stringency of testing at renewal. It is also likely that states requiring physicians to report conditions that would impair driving will experience lower crash rates. A secondary analysis of policy impacts on the licensing rates is not conclusive, a finding that is attributable to inaccuracies in the reported numbers of licensed drivers.     

Labour Migration and Health of Left-Behind Children in China

With rapid urbanisation, millions of people from rural areas have migrated to major cities for employment, leaving their young children at home. This labour migration creates substantial mental and physical challenges for these left-behind children. This study establishes two empirical models for comparing the health status of left-behind children with that of children in rural areas without migrant parents and with that of migrant children in urban areas. Our empirical findings reveal that parental migration negatively affects the height and weight indices of left-behind children. The effects are particularly prominent for younger children, when both parents migrate or when parents migrate out of province.