Using Organizational Collaboration and Community Partnerships to Transition Families from Homelessness to Home Ownership: The HomeBuy5 Program

For more than a decade, the HomeBuy5 Program has successfully helped families who were homeless find an apartment, while working with them to develop a plan to move from homelessness to homeownership. This article provides an historical overview of how the program developed and evolved, a detailed discussion of the program's process and structure, the role of organizational collaboration and community partners, and demographic information on the families that have been served. It is argued that this program can be a prototype for other communities as they increase their efforts to eliminate homelessness.     

Adjudication and the Law

It can be compatible with justice and the rule of law for acourt to impose new legal liabilities retrospectively on a defendant.But judges do not need to distinguish between imposing a newliability, and giving effect to a liability that the defendanthad at the time of the events in dispute. The distinction isto be drawn by asking which of the court's reasons for decisionthe institutions of the legal system had already committed thecourts to act upon, before the time of decision. I explain theseconclusions through an assessment of the last episode in thedebate between H.L.A.Hart and Ronald Dworkin.     

Terrorist Finance: Asking the Right Questions

An emerging critical literature from within and outside academia argues that existing understandings of the financing of terrorism are at best severely dysfunctional, and at worst malignantly so. This article argues that at the root of this dysfunction is a failure to ask the 'right' questions about terrorist financing. The right questions, the article finds, are only tangentially related to the supposed mystery of 'who finances and how they do it', and instead revolve around, first, specifying how financial activity influences terrorist behaviour and, second, assessing what such activity tells us about the place terrorists truly occupy in today's global system.     

法治不可能性辨析

没有哪个共同体已经完全实现了“法治”理想。对这一理想的内涵的困惑 ,似乎使得这一理想必然遥不可及 (亦即一个“含糊不清的理想”)。法律体系必定包括一些模糊的法律 ,它们典型地允许着法律中的权变 ,典型地支持着许多无法审查的官方决定 ,并且从来就不会对一个共同体生活的每一方面都加以详尽规范。法治理想似乎永远无法实现 ,正是由法律实践活动的这些特征决定的。在这里 ,我要追问的是 ,究竟是什么造成了法治中的“欠缺”( deficit) ;我将证明 :法律实践活动的这些特征并不一定导致“法治欠缺”的产生。我的结论是 ,共同体之所以不能实现法治 ,仅仅是因为政府对法治信仰的不忠 ,以及立法者没有真心追求法治理想 (或者说 ,他们制定的规则没有追求法治 )。法治并非必然难以实现。     

On the Public Choice Critique of Welfare Economics

The public choice literature urges the welfare economist toanticipate how political forces will shape the levels of newpolicy instruments when government intervenes in a new way.This paper argues that the welfare economist should alsorecognize that new interventions may impact the politicallydetermined levels of existing policy instruments. It shows howthe introduction of a new instrument can lead to shifts inpolitical coalitions or compromises in existing areas ofconflict that can produce significant changes in existingpolicies. Such spillover effects can provide new arguments forintroducing particular policy interventions. Even a policyinstrument without an obvious welfare economic rationale canchange voter coalitions and shift the policy equilibrium in awelfare improving direction.     

Duverger's Law in mixed legislative systems: The impact of national electoral rules on district competition

How do institutional factors shape district competition in mixed legislative systems? Preliminary evidence suggests the distinction between sub‐types of mixed systems alone poorly explains variation in district results. Consistent with the contamination thesis, this analysis suggests three additional national‐level factors at play: fused ballots, the electoral threshold for proportional representation seats, and the existence of compulsory voting laws. Regression analysis on an original dataset covering 90 mixed system elections in 23 countries (1990–2012) finds that while mixed member majoritarian systems correlate with fewer district candidates, these three often overlooked factors are also statistically significant. This analysis highlights the complexity of mixed systems and suggests why many of them diverge from Duverger's Law.     

The Electoral Salience of Trade Policy: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Welfare and Complexity

Why do some trade policies become electorally salient while others do not? While much of the literature argues that citizens act as a domestic constraint in the formation of trade policy, a general consensus has emerged that trade is most often a nonsalient issue among voters. This poses a paradox. On the one hand, trade models hinge upon voters’ rational self-interest and preferences for varying levels of protectionism to keep their governments accountable. On the other hand, the conditions by which trade becomes salient to these very voters in the first place are both undertheorized and untested. Using experimental evidence, I argue that two dimensions of a trade policy affect the likelihood of that issue becoming electorally salient. First, policies with large welfare effects should be more salient. Second, more complex issues should be less salient because such agreements are more likely to obfuscate an individual’s ability to discern its effects. I find support for my hypotheses that a trade policy’s salience tends to increase with the magnitude of its welfare effects and decrease with its complexity.