Under Two Flags: Symbolic Voting in the State of Mississippi

Participants in a specialelection held in the State of Mississippion April 17, 2001, voted overwhelminglyagainst changing the design of the state'sflag, which incorporates a symbol of theConfederacy. The determinants of voting onthe flag are analyzed and turnout rates inApril 2001 are compared with those forrecent gubernatorial and presidentialelections. We find that the flag votedivided Mississippians sharply along linesof race, class and political ideology. Akey empirical implication is that voterpositions in issue space tend to be morepolarized when political choices haveexpressive as opposed to instrumentalconsequences.     

The Federal Line Item Veto Experiment: After the Supreme Court Ruling,What's Next?

The federal line item veto has ceased to exist, thanks to the Supreme Court's June 1998 ruling invalidating the expansion of the president's rescission authority that was contained in the Line Item Veto Act. This article reviews the application of the Act during 1997, its effect on spending and the deficit, the judicial reaction to its use, and the prospects for the restoration of some version of the power. President Clinton was quite restrained in the use of his new power, with the exception of his cancellations in the Military Construction appropriation bill; these were ultimately restored by the Congress. Because of the president's restraint, the Line Item Veto Act had a miniscule affect on spending and the deficit; total cancellations represented less than .04 percent of FY98 discretionary budget authority. Ultimately, the Supreme Court held that the Act violated Article I, Section 7 because it created a Constituionally impermissable way for the president to change laws. There is no clear fallback position for supporters of the Act; alternatives are either difficult to enact, hard to administer, or too weak to be considered an effective substitute. Given the problems in enacting any alternative, it may be that the federal line item veto will end up only as a historical anomaly.     

Federal Budgeting After September 11th: A Whole New Ballgame,or Is It Déjà Vu All Over Again?

Federal budgeting has undergone some profound changes since the tragic events of September 11th, 2001. Large surpluses that existed prior to September 11th and were forecast to continue have been replaced by equally large and intractable deficits. The consensus around a macro‐level norm for federal budgeting has completely broken down. In other ways, the federal budget process has not changed at all. Despite the emphasis on defense and homeland security, domestic discretionary spending is still continuing unabated, as it has since the late 1980s. Further, the federal government continues to have chronic difficulty adopting its budget in a timely fashion.     

The China–asean Free Trade Agreement And Taiwan

While China's move toward a FTA with ASEAN reflects Beijing's most recent foreign economic policy adjustment and represents a new stage in the nation's open-door policy, it inevitably produces significant impact on cross-Taiwan Straits relations. This recent development in China's foreign economic relations brings not only substantial psychological and real effects and pressure on Taiwan for its possible isolation and marginalization from the ongoing process of regional integration in East Asia, but also growing pressure exerted by the island's business community that fears being pushed into a disadvantageous position in competition with ASEAN companies in the ever expanding and lucrative market of the mainland. For strategic, diplomatic, and economic considerations in the face of this new challenge, Taiwan is pursuing counter-measures by searching for its own FTAs with other countries within and beyond the region.     

Measuring Street Cleanliness: A Comparison of New York City's Scorecard and Results from a Citizen Survey

Public administrators at the local level often rely on citizen surveys to measure the outcomes or accomplishments of their service delivery efforts. However, many remain skeptical about the value of survey-based measures of local government performance, in large part because of the low empirical correlation between objective and subjective performance measures reported in the literature. Using data from New York City's street cleanliness scorecard, a well-established outcome measure, combined with responses from more than 4,000 respondents to a citizen survey, the authors find a clear and consistent correlation between the scorecard and citizen ratings of street cleanliness in their neighborhoods. Moreover, the street cleanliness scorecard is a much stronger predictor of citizen ratings than demographic factors, trust in government, or contextual effects. These results demonstrate that citizen judgments about government performance can correspond closely with more objectively measured outcomes—and that citizen surveys can provide valid and useful performance measures, at least for some local government services.     

Personnel Reform in the States: A Look at Progress Fifteen Years after the Winter Commission

Trends in states’ civil service reforms since the Winter Commission’s report was published in 1993 are described and evaluated in the context of its recommendations. The authors argue that the commission’s reform agenda relies on a public service bargain that requires public employees, elected officials, and other stakeholders to respect, trust, and support each other’s efforts to serve the public interest. Its recommendations for modernizing state and local personnel systems are discussed and related to the “reinvention” and New Public Management initiatives of the past 20 years. Many of these ideas have been adopted by state governments, but there is no single reform model that has been followed across the states. Some states, such as Georgia and Florida, have engaged in radical reforms that include replacing traditional merit systems with at‐will employment models. The general pattern involves decentralization, deregulation, and limitation of employee protections. While many of the management‐oriented changes advocated by the Winter Commission are staples of states’ civil service reforms, its emphasis on a “trust and lead” strategy based on public service values, partnership, and leadership in the public interest has not received much attention. In general, objective evaluations of states’ reforms are needed to determine whether their purposes are being achieved.     

Debt,democratization, and development in Latin America: How policy can affect global warming

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis conjectures a nonlinear relationship between pollution and economic growth, such that pollution per capita initially increases as countries economically develop, but then reaches a maximum point before ultimately declining. Much of the EKC literature has focused on testing this basic hypothesis and, in studies that find evidence of an EKC, estimating the “turning point” level of development at which the per capita pollution‐growth relationship changes sign. This approach has not emphasized the policy relevance of specification issues or the potential role of policy variables. This research explores a modified EKC specification which conditions the pollution‐growth relationship on a country's level of debt and degree of democratization. These variables turn out to be significant, implying that different political and economic contexts can shift EKCs and their turning points. These findings suggest that policies to relieve debt burdens and institute political reform, in addition to their usual justifications, also could be used as a strategy to reduce carbon emissions from developing countries. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Saving the league: V.K. Wellington Koo, the league of nations and Sino-Japanese conflict, 1931-39

In 1919, VK. Wellington Koo, the most famous Chinese diplomat of the early twentieth century, participated in the creation of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference. Little over a decade later, as Japanese forces expanded into Manchuria and North China, Koo struggled to save the League he had helped found. He argued that inability or refusal to brand Japan as an aggressor would sound the League's death knell. In vain, Koo tried to convince European statesmen that the Far Eastern Crisis was a litmus test of the League's viability as a collective security organization. From 1936 on, League inaction in the face of Japanese, German and Italian expansion left Koo thoroughly disillusioned. The lessons of the League were not forgotten during World War II, when Koo argued that a more effective collective security organization, in the form of the United Nations, be created on a basis similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Policemen concept.