Stability of the Federal System in Nigeria: Elite Attitudes at the Constituent Assembly Toward the Creation of New States

The Constituent Assembly which approved the constitution forNigeria's Second Republic (1979–1983) decided that nonew states should be created at that time and adopted proceduresmaking state creation in the future virtually impossible. TheAssembly's action implied that elite consensus had been achievedon the existing territorial configuration of the federation.Yet events during the Second Republic seemed to belie such aninterpretation. To resolve the contradiction a content analysisof the Constituent Assembly debates was undertaken. It showedwidespread dissatisfaction with the existing nineteen-statestructure. The study concludes that the Constituent Assembly'sdecisions on state creation did not reflect an elite consensus.Instead, the period of relative stability in federal territorialconfiguration, which elsewhere seems to follow early years ofinstability, had not yet been reached in Nigeria.     

Buried Alive

Indigenous peoples struggle to survive the policies of the colonial states and their ability to annihilate, make invisible, destroy and re-construct our ancient identities. This is my story. I am an Indigenous women to the country known now as Australia. I write from the inside, about our law and life ways which hare buried alive by a dominant colonizing culture. The tale of terra nullius, its capacity to bury us and its own capacity to survive and go on burying us is told. It is a story which has a resonance beyond Australia, one that can be found throughout the world wherever there is struggle for the future of the planet, wherever there is struggle for diversity, and resistance to being consumed by corporate greed and complicit states. It is finally a story about hope for a way forward, and moving in a clear direction. A direction without illusion, one that braves the truth as to our future as diverse peoples of colour, laws and cultures, the bearers of generations to come. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Long–Serving City Managers: Practical Application of the Academic Literature

The authors identified 146 city managers who have served in the same city for the past 20 years and asked them to complete a survey to determine the factors leading to their long service. As a part of the survey, the city managers were invited to express, in their own words, the reasons they had stayed in the same city for such an extended time compared to the average tenure for city managers. In the article that follows, the authors quote from the academic literature statements pertaining to practical issues of concern to city managers and the elected officials for whom they work, giving credence to the applicability of the academic literature to today's city management profession. Following the quotations from the literature, the authors present the heartfelt reflections of these senior city managers on their long careers in public service.     

The Forward Specialization Coefficient: Distributional Properties and Subgroup Differences

For both public policy and theoretical reasons, criminologists have been interested in the degree to which criminal offenders specialize in particular crimes. Traditionally, offense specialization has been measured with the forward specialization coefficient (FSC). Recently, the FSC has been criticized for being interpretationally obtuse and having no known sampling distribution. In this paper we examine both the interpretational and the statistical properties of the FSC. We conclude that (1) it has an intuitive interpretation that is no less useful than either a standard correlation coefficient or its competitors, (2) its sampling distribution is approximately normal, and (3) the conventional formula for the estimated standard error of the FSC may underestimate the true standard error in some circumstances. With these results behind us, we propose and illustrate both a parametric statistical test for the difference between two independent FSCs and two nonparametric alternatives.     

INTRODUCTION: WATER RESOURCES AND PUBLIC POLICY

Research in water resource policy historically has reflected more general trends in public policy analysis. This symposium focuses more narrowly upon a sample of some contemporary issues.