State Rainy Day Funds and Fiscal Crises: Rainy Day Funds and the 1990–1991 Recession Revisited

The recession of the early 1980s prompted many states to establish budget stabilization (rainy day) funds. Initial examinations of rainy day funds find a limited impact by the funds in alleviating fiscal stress. In this article, we propose an enhanced model of rainy day fund impact. Using data from 48 states for the 1990–1991 recession, our analysis indicates that the presence of a number of structural factors and the maintenance of generally large balances in other funds entering recession helps to alleviate fiscal stress when a state's economy is in recession.     

Rational Choice and Community Power Structures1

The community power debate concluded with each side believing they had won. Political theorists have generalized power, making empirical investigation very difficult; urban scholars have turned their attention to more manageable empirical problems. Rational choice advances the debate, exposing the errors of all sides and facilitating a new approach which transcends structural versus individualist methods. By separating various aspects of power in urban contexts, complementary techniques such as network analysis in a bargaining framework, semi-structured interviewing and the use of text databases permits a comprehensive investigation of agenda-setting and the mobilization of bias. The paper demonstrates the utility of this approach by comparing it to 'regime theory', the latest paradigm of urban research.     

God's bullies: attacks on abortion.

National politics in the US, Poland, and Ireland have in recent years been afire with debate over abortion. Conflicting abortion laws almost scuttled the reunification of Germany. This paper describes how the abortion debate took hold in post-Communist Poland and how the issue came to be so entrenched in US politics in the wake of the US Supreme Court's 1973 decision on abortion in the case of Roe vs. Wade. It focuses upon abortion mainly as a method of birth control which women have always sought when needed regardless of the procedure's legal status. The controversies and campaigns recorded and the ideas offered focus upon women's access to affordable, safe, and legal abortion. The author argues that Poland is no place to be a woman and presents sections on the country's church, government, and medical profession; Roe vs. Wade; who opposes abortion rights and their broad success; the 1992 US presidential election; Bill Clinton's presidency; why the abortion debate has been different in Britain; and new issues on abortion.     

Nietzsche on Autonomy and Morality: the Challenge to Political Theory

Nietzsche's challenge to political theory can be located in his claim that autonomy and morality are mutually exclusive. In this paper an examination of Kant's attempt to ground a notion of autonomy through constructing a metaphysic of morals is followed by a consideration of Nietzsche's understanding of autonomy in terms of a notion of supra-moral sovereign individuality. A genealogy of morals represents an attempt to historicize the key notions of moral and political theory. Nietzsche's aristocratic conception of sovereign individuality is seen in terms of the value-basis on which sovereign individuals are to construct a common ethical and political identity and enter into social relationships. Foucaultian and feminist attempts to construct an ethics and politics of difference and a recent attempt to construct a post-modern conception of agency based on a synthesis of Nietzsche's philosophy of power and Kant's ethics are examined.     

The Geography of Empire

Abstract

Wealth and poverty, overdevelopment and underdevelopment, are sides of the same coin; in a capitalist system the one cannot exist without the other. This is as true at the global level as at the national level, and the U.S. Empire consists of both external and internal colonies (e.g. the ghettoes or the Indian and Chicano communities of the Southwest).