Collaboration,information, and preservation: The role of expertise in farmland preservation task forces

Collaboration between agencies, private groups, and citizens in the field of natural resource management is generally seen as a productive strategy in challenging management situations. Collaborative management is particularly appealing in efforts like farmland preservation, which depend for their success on local initiative and support. However, such partnerships may create new dilemmas about the appropriate use of information in management. This paper analyzes the use of information by 15 county-wide Farmland Preservation task forces in the state of Ohio, U.S.A.     

Grant Levels and Debt Issuance: Is There a Relationship? Is There Symmetry?

Although previous work on fiscal federalism and grants has focused on the effects of grants on expenditures, no published research examines the impact of decreasing grants on state financing. This research addresses how decreasing levels of federal grant money to states affect states' long-term debt issuance, and whether the relationship is symmetric for increasing and decreasing grants. The model is tested with time series, cross-sectional data from 1984 to 1999. The results show that grants affect debt issuance, the effect is asymmetric, and direction of the effect differs for different types of debt issuance.     

Peeling Away the Populist Rhetoric: Toward a Taxonomy of Anti-Tax Ballot Initiatives

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to both the fiscal and policy impact of tax and expenditure limitation ballot initiatives. This article instead examines how statewide anti-tax measures come to be placed before the general public for popular votes. It critically assesses six anti-tax measures on statewide ballots in 1996, questioning the wisdom that they were populist undertakings. While tax crusaders continue to draw on grassroots themes and use populist rhetoric, there are important differences across the groups sponsoring the six anti-tax measures, including their organizational history, professionalization, membership, and sources of financial support.     

A Spatial Model of U.S. Senate Elections

The importance of primaryelections is considered within the contextof U.S. Senate elections where senatorsserve overlapping terms and voters areassumed to balance their two senatorsagainst each other. Voters behavestrategically in the primaries butconvergence to the median position is notachieved except as a knife-edge result.More generally, constraints in the partyspace prevent the party of the sittingsenator from obtaining the median'spreference allowing the opposition party tonominate a candidate further away from themedian while still capturing the medianvoter. Empirical evidence supports thenotion that senate divergence is a functionof the state primary system.     

Minority rights and the dialectics of the nation: Otto Bauer’s theory of the nation and its contributions to multicultural theory and globalization

Conclusion This article analyzed Otto’s Bauer idea of the nation and assessed its meaning and significance qua liberal nationalism and the expansion of national minority rights in Europe. It argued that Bauer's formulation of the same rights for all minorities exposed certain limitations of multicultural theory, namely the failure of liberal multicultural theorists to adequately address the consequences of special minority rights and the potentially transformative role of labor in liberal societies that necessarily seek to be inclusive. Further, Bauer's idea of cultural autonomy raised important and relevant implications for advancing national minority rights in Europe. In particular, his initiative exposed possible ways to promote the social of cultural rights of EU Charter on Fundamental Rights. Given this and the EU's commitment to labor rights, it is curious that Bauer’s theory has not received the attention it deserves. Indeed, even if Bauer's ideas prove somewhat non-conventional by liberal standards, it is still important that we see his ideas as serving some elemental purpose in linking the advancement of national values and sentiment with the EU goal of integration.