A political economic analysis of congressional voting patterns on NAFTA

This paper delves into the question of the determinants of Congressional voting on NAFTA. It uses a logit model to examine both House and Senate votes and is able to use district specific estimates in the former. It finds only very limited support for the thesis that narrowly defined employment gainers and losers were important determinants of Congressional voting patterns, though some substantial support that districts that were highly agricultural or already possessed a substantial Hispanic population and skilled labor force and had the most to gain from the general effects of NAFTA lead to a positive effect on the probability that a member of the House would vote affirmatively. Contributions from labor unions lowered the likelihood of affirmative votes. Political partisanship and ideological positions apparently had little effect on the votes. A Representative's political capital had a marginally significant effect on the probability on an affirmative vote, but it performed positively in the Senate and negatively in the House.     

Obstacles to desegregating public housing: Lessons learned from implementing eight consent decrees

Between 1992 and 1996 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settled a number of legal cases involving housing authorities and agreed to take remedial action as part of court‐enforced consent decrees entered into with plaintiffs. These housing authorities faced significant obstacles that impaired their ability to comply swiftly and fully with all of the elements in the desegregation consent decrees. The obstacles fell into two broad categories: contextual obstacles (racial composition of waiting lists and resident populations, lack of affordable rental housing, and inadequate public transportation), and capacity and coordination obstacles (conflict among implementing agencies and ineffective monitoring by HUD). Findings presented here highlight the sizable potential delay between the time a legal remedy is imposed and when plaintiffs in public housing segregation disputes realize any benefits. They also reinforce the argument that implementation problems will be legion when policies impose a significant scope of required changes on a large number of actors who must collaborate, yet are not uniformly capable or sympathetic to the goals being promoted. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Finland: Marginal Case of Bicommunalism?

Finland is officially bilingual but is deficient in some ofthe structural, attitudinal, and institutional factors conduciveto the maintenance of a stable bicommunal political system.The system is in no sense a federal one. At the level of socialstructure, the Swedish-speaking minority is relatively small,proportionally decreasing, territorially divided, and increasinglybilingual as urbanization continues. In terms of attitudes,the existence of a distinctive Finlandssvensk cultural inheritanceis much debated, one view holding that the Swedish culturaltradition is an inheritance of the country as a whole and notjust of the linguistic minority. Many in both groups emphasizethe extent of common values across the linguistic division,and since 1939 external crises have strongly reinforced internalcohesion. In public institutions, Finnish and Swedish have virtuallyequal legal status but at the practical level Swedish is lessfully utilized. One factor for instability is that Finland'slanguage legislation, unlike that of Belgium or Switzerland,is based on flexible rather than fixed linguistic territoriality,except in the Åland islands, where Swedish enjoys a permanentlyprotected special status.     

Orchestrating Anti-Dispossession Politics: Caste and Movement Leadership in Rural West Bengal

ABSTRACT

This article uses the concepts of orchestration and spectacle to analyse the work of leaders of an anti-dispossession movement in rural West Bengal. It examines what being a movement leader entails and argues for the importance of connections and social relations in the production of both movement leadership and movement spectacles. By introducing a Dalit perspective on a movement that was otherwise led by the local middle-caste peasantry, the article shows how local caste and class relations have been important in defining access to positions of movement leadership; in disconnecting specific Dalit interests from the movement’s larger political agenda; and in giving rise to certain forms of internal policing of caste boundaries within the movement. The fact that the ability to cultivate and “connect” to the new political spaces opened by the anti-dispossession movement correlates strongly with historically produced caste and class inequalities calls for greater attention to the internal caste politics of anti-dispossession movements.     

If Extremists Vote How do They Express Themselves? An Empirical Test of an Expressive Theory of Voting

The expressive theory of voting needs more specification of the motives for expression if it is not merely to be a theory of non-instrumental voting. Brennan and Hamlin provide such a specification. Unfortunately, using individual U.S. data from the General Social Surveys we find their predictions are contradicted. Nor if other evidence in the literature purported to be evidence of expressive voting actually implied by it. We believe that this is because the reason people express themselves in voting is to signal others.     

Public management and organizational performance: The effect of managerial quality

This paper presents the first large study of public management quality and its effect on program performance. Using 5 years of data from more than 1000 Texas school districts, the authors measure quality as the additional salary paid to school superintendents over and above the normal determinants of salary. This measure of managerial quality is positively correlated with 10 of 11 performance indicators covering organizational goals ranging from standardized tests to school attendance. These relationships hold even in the presence of controls for other determinants of program success. The measure has the potential to be used in tests of existing management theories, thus moving the literature beyond case studies to more systematic research involving many subjects. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy and Analysis and Management.