On democracy and debt

As we explained there is really little a priori reasoning for a clear prediction that authoritarian regimes will incur more foreign debt. In fact, some other empirical literature reveals that such regimes will face a higher supply price for such debt. Anderson presents a study of a single year using an admittedly crude measure of authoritarianism that finds that such regimes do issue more debt.This study provides a fuller examination of the empirical relationship between foreign debt and the nature of the polity's regime. Utilizing a continuous democracy variable and a continuous political liberty variable, it tests the relationship between debt and political variables. It finds little empirical support for the thesis that democracy or autocracy influence foreign debt levels. Generally the continuous variables are not significant if we use a linear in the logs specification. While a linear specification obtains results more consistent with the idea that level of democracy decreases debt, it also obtains results even less favorable to the idea that extreme forms of autocracy increase debt.     

Preparing members of congress to make binary decisions on complex policy issues: The 1986 tax reform bill

Throughout 1985 and 1986, the House Committee on Ways and Means undertook a major revision of the federal income tax law. The product was the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986. Because of the magnitude of the changes contained in this bill, the committee sought new ways of obtaining and disseminating necessary information. This article discusses the congressional policy-making process, the different kinds of information used in congressional decision making, and some new procedures employed by the committee during House action on the 1986 tax reform legislation.     

Perceived fairness of drug-testing policies: An application of Leventhal’s principles of procedural justice

Employees rate the fairness of organizational policies by applying principles of distributive and procedural justice. Using Leventhal’s (1980) Principles of Procedural Justice, the current study surveyed 279 upper-level college and graduate students to determine the impact each principle has on support for drugtesting policies. The results support the hypothesis that drug-testing programs that violate these principles are viewed as unfair.     

China's Unbalanced Economic Growth

This paper summarizes empirical findings and results from the author's most recent research publication in Chinese: China's Unbalanced Economic Growth. It studies China's economic growth with a special emphasis on its regional disparities. It provides an analysis of China's overall economic landscape as well as an empirical study of China's unbalanced regional development. Based on its quantitative findings and results, the author predicts the emergence of ten Chinese metropolitan economies in the early twenty-first century and recommends a regional development strategy as well as implementation policies for China's future development. The major empirical findings, results and conclusions of this research are outlined in three sections: the first describes China's economic future—the emergence of ten regional metropolitan economies, the second reports the empirical findings of China's national and regional economic disparities and discusses policy implications, and the third investigates China's future economic growth and discusses its growth limitations.     

苏格兰警务工作改革的八个热点问题

警务工作必须随着社会的发展变化而不断进行调整和改良。进入21世纪后,苏格兰社会发生了许多深刻的变化,与之相适应,苏格兰警察正面临着一系列挑战和问题。未来苏格兰警务工作改革包括八个热点问题,即社区警务、警察的领导与管理、打击犯罪工作、毒品问题、青少年问题、警察在整个刑事司法体系中的角色转变、警察责任与警察投诉以及中央警务与地方警务两种模式之间的选择。     

Sovereignty, Augusto Pinochet, and legal positivism

The imperativist strand of positivism derives law from an actual person or set of persons wielding a monopoly of force. The rule-based positivism of H.L.A. Hart has more sublty identified a matter-of-fact rule of recognition in place of such a sovereign one or many. But sovereignty is not a matter-of-fact of any kind; rather it is partly the product of what I call qua arguments. I reconstruct the reasoning, in the extradition case of Augusto Pinochet in the British House of Lords, providing a focus for an account of the limits of legal positivism in the application of the principle par in parem non habet imperium. Sovereign power is interpreted through reasoning that is at its margin more moral than technically legal.     

The Role of Management and Representation in Improving Performance of Disadvantaged Students: An Application of Bum Phillips's “Don Shula Rule”1

Scholars and practitioners within the U.S. education system have focused considerable attention on developing new programs aimed at raising educational achievement for disadvantaged students. New programs are only one way to improve student performance, however; recent work in public administration suggests that public management and implementation practices might also have a large impact on student performance. Existing research shows that managerial networking, managerial quality, and effective personnel management can significantly improve the quality of the education received by disadvantaged students. Additional work highlights the contribution of representative bureaucracy. Because these research agendas have targeted the public administration literature rather than the education policy literature, this article seeks to bring this research back to education policy. Using data from several hundred Texas public school districts, spanning 1995 to 2002, and focusing on disadvantaged student performance (Latinos, blacks, and low‐income students), this article illustrates how both management and processes to enhance the representativeness of teaching faculty produce benefits for disadvantaged students.     

American Public Administration and Impacts of International Governance

Increasingly, public administration in the United States operates in a densely interconnected international system in which local decisions and actions may trigger global repercussions—and vice versa—and the fate of communities in one region is bound to the choices of decision makers elsewhere. Administrative actors have become enmeshed in a complicated, interwoven pattern of governance in ways that shape actions, issues, and opportunities for influencing administrative agencies at national, state, and local levels. These developments call for a critical reappraisal of our inherited notions of governance, management, and accountability. Terrorist tragedy and responses to it call attention to these themes, but they apply broadly across the spectrum of governance challenges. To demonstrate this point, we analyze some implications of transnational governance for the institutions and practices of U.S. public management, with particular attention to another subject: environmental policy and management. A conclusion is that the public administration community must adjust traditional practices to facilitate the effective management of the global processes that, in turn, reshape the world.     

Building majority coalitions for sub-majority benefit distributions

Public Choice - This paper poses a deceptively simple question. It asks, how can a program or group of programs that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative...