State Poverty Rates: Do the New Welfare Policies Make a Difference?

This article uses four models to identify the best predictors of state poverty levels and changes in state poverty rates since the implementation of welfare reform. The policy decisions based on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) by the states are tested along with more traditional variables identified in the literature. Using several measures of state poverty, the analysis finds that those states with the lowest poverty rates are those with the healthiest economies, and the most generous state spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). States with the highest percentage of their TANF rolls made up of black citizens tend to have the highest rates of poverty. Initial poverty rates are found to be important in that states with higher initial poverty levels are capable of generating a larger reduction in poverty than states with lower initial rates. With the exception of limited evidence on sanctions, none of the PRWORA–based policies were found to have any effect on poverty rates.     

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.     

Development of Local Government Debt Financing Markets: Application of a Market‐Based Framework

Needed is clear guidance on how to develop market‐based debt financing systems in transitional and developing countries. We propose an analytical framework useful for identifying constraints to financial development and providing recommendations to overcome constraints to develop municipal financing capacity. The proposed framework is applied to five country case studies: Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, and South Africa. The thesis of this paper is that municipal credit market development is related to improvements in the legal/regulatory framework governing local borrowing, the capacity of financial institutions to assess risk, and borrower capacity to support and manage debt.     

Performance‐Based Budgeting: The Contribution of the Program Assessment Rating Tool

Under the President's Management Agenda for performance and budget integration, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) designed the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to breath new life into performance‐based budgeting as envisioned by the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). This article discusses what PART is designed to do and how the PART process works. Based on recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports addressing implementation of PART in the last four fiscal years, the article answers such questions as: Has PART made a difference in program operations? What is the relationship between PART and GPRA? Has progress been made in improving the evidence base for PART assessments? How well does PART assess programs related to a common goal? What has been congressional reaction to the PART process? Are PART and performance budgeting making a difference in government?     

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.     

The Supply of University Enrollments: University Administrators as Utility Maximizing Bureaucrats

The supply of enrollments in higher education has receivedrelatively little attention in both theoretical and empiricaleconomic research. To address this, we formulate and test amodel of the supply of enrollments in higher education inwhich administrators are modeled as utility maximizingbureaucrats. We find evidence that individual presidents andprovosts have a significant effect on enrollment supply andfaculty demand in a panel of eleven public colleges anduniversities in Maryland from 1988 to 1996, implying thatinstitutions have enough market power to permit thepreferences of administrators to influence enrollment supplyand faculty demand.     

Expressiveness and Voting

It has been suggested that voting may be an ``expressive''action taken without regard to any hope of actuallyinfluencing election outcomes on the margin. However, therehas been no real-world evidence brought to bear on thequestion of whether the propensity of an individual to voteand the propensity of that same individual to engage in otherforms of ``expressive'' behavior are correlated in anystatistically meaningful sense. Drawing from longitudinal datafound in the National Election Surveys we report compellingevidence of a strong, positive relationship between what weterm ``political expressiveness'' and the act of voting.     

A Tale of Two Towns: Assessing the Role of Political Resources in a Community Electronic Network

In this study we examine responses to the recent expansion of information technology in two rural Minnesota towns. One of these towns took a cooperative approach to technology access, developing a community electronic network, while the other town relied on a more individualistic, entrepreneurial model. The present study examines citizens' attitudes concerning social, political, and technological issues in these two communities, with the goal of uncovering what kinds of attitudes and resources citizens need to have in order to help support and sustain a community electronic network. Structural equation modeling is used to specify the relationships among individuals' economic, political, and social resources, technology ownership and use, and awareness of and support for the community network. Drawing on a theory of social capital, we consider the relative importance of privately- oriented social engagement versus publicly- oriented political engagement in relation to collective outcomes. Our analysis shows that in the town with the broadly- based community electronic network, individuals' political as well as economic resources are linked to knowledge and use of computer resources, whereas in the comparison community, economic stratification alone drives computer access. The implications of these findings for issues of equity, access to technology, and the development of strong community ties are discussed.