Searching for Symptoms of Political Shirking: Congressional Foreign Travel

Despite the hypothesized propensity for shirking to marklegislative institutions, the evidence is rather equivocal;moreover, most of the research has focused exclusively onlegislator voting, thereby constraining whatevergeneralizations might emerge. The purpose of this paper is tocontribute to the debate over the question of politicalshirking by extending the range of phenomena examined toinclude congressional foreign travel. Our analysis providesevidence that opportunism is a problem in Congress. We findthat last-period problems have arisen in the area of foreigntravel, and that increased scrutiny to the problem on the partof Congress only shifted consumption patterns, i.e.,legislators began taking foreign junkets near, but not at theend of, their legislative careers. Not all foreign travelshould be construed as worthless junketing since there isstrong evidence that some foreign travel is related tomembers' responsibilities on congressional committees.     

Welfare Receipt and Private Charity

In the wake of welfare reform efforts, alliances between governments and charities, and public preoccupation with “social capital,” it is useful to understand how welfare payments interact with charitable giving. Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data from the first quarter of 1999, this article estimates the impacts on charitable giving by individuals from receipt of welfare payments, as well as income, wealth, and a number of demographic variables. The data analysis suggests that charity is negatively associated with welfare receipt, while wealth, income, and age have positive impacts on giving. These findings have significant implications for public policy and nonprofit management.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ansgar Klein,Ruud Koopmans,Heiko Geiling</Emphasis> (Hg.): Globalisierung,Partizipation, Protest

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Constitutions for new democracies: Reflections of turmoil or agents of stability?

Despite the widely held view in newly emerging democracies that constitutions are mere words on paper or that parchment barriers cannot render a state stable or democratic, those who draft such documents commonly act as if words ARE of consequence. The difficulty, however, is that contemporaneous conflicts too easily intervene so as to corrupt the drafting process and to preclude optimal constitutional design. The specific principle of design most likely to be violated is the proposition that we treat all parts of the constitution as an interconnected whole and that we not try to assess the consequences of one part without appreciating the full meaning of all other parts. This essay illustrates this violation by looking at the new Russian constitution, ratified by direct popular vote in December 1993, with special attention paid to that document's treatment of federalism. We offer the additional argument, however, that even contemporary research in political institutional design pays insufficient heed to this principle.