The impact of equal offortunity compliance laws in government contrgcting: the shelby county,tennessee experience

Abstract

Very few researchers have addressed the long‐term financing arrangements of municipal governments in developing countries. No research has evaluated empirically either the elements that affect municipal borrowing in developing countries or what those elements reveal about the municipal credit system. Analyzing Brazilian municipal loan and financial data with a series of simultaneous equations, this paper addresses the following questions: What factors determine municipal government investment levels, borrowing levels, and borrowing prices? What do empirical data reveal about the character of the Brazilian municipal credit system? The results show that investment, borrowing, and borrowing prices are interconnected. Furthermore, while some signs of a market‐based system exist, there is evidence that investment and borrowing decisions are made within an administered market.     

Autorität: Herrschaft ohne Zwang – Anerkennung ohne Deliberation

Alongside with democracy and justice, authority is one of the most important concepts of political thought. As authority is often understood as the unconstrained but also unquestionable acceptance of hierarchy, the relationship between authority and democracy has always been marked by tensions. Following four different chains of argument addressing authority, this article shows that this core concept is in danger of losing its precision in the attempt of dissolving those tensions in recent debates in political sciences. Either the term is used in such a broad sense that anyone can have or be assigned authority or it is identified with power in general or the legitimate power of command so that only and all the people in power have authority. Both strategies of dissolving the tensions between authority and democracy render the concept at best ambiguous and at worst diffuse or even dispensable. On the contrary, the aim of the paper is to argue for authority to be a political core category which can only maintain this position when it means something other than democratic power to act on the one hand and legitimate rule or decision-making competence, respectively, on the other.     

Diego Garcia and the United States' Emerging Indian Ocean Strategy

Abstract

As the world's economic and strategic “center of gravity” shifts from the Euro-Atlantic area to the Asia-Pacific, the Indian Ocean is emerging as an increasingly critical trade and energy conduit. This region has long been a strategic backwater for the United States. Moreover, unlike in other critical subregions of Asia, the United States lacks significant host-nation bases and is unlikely to acquire them. The British territory of Diego Garcia, whose location and political reliability give it significant strategic utility, is thus central to US power projection in the Indian Ocean littoral region. The US military's approach to Diego Garcia reflects an implicit Indian Ocean strategy that seeks to establish a flexible and enduring presence within a critical and contested space. However, Washington needs to move toward an explicit Indian Ocean policy that views the region holistically rather than narrowly viewing separate US Pacific Command, US Central Command, and US Africa Command theaters.     

Context Matters: Violence Against Women and Reporting to Police in Rural, Suburban and Urban Areas

Despite plentiful efforts to identify perpetrator, victim, and incident characteristics correlated with reporting violence against women to police, few studies have addressed the contexts that shape such reporting. Even fewer have examined variations in these contexts across geographic areas. Drawing upon National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1992 through 2009, this paper uses conjunctive analysis of case configurations to identify and investigate the dominant situational contexts of reporting of violence against women to police across rural, suburban, and urban areas. Our findings show that context matters and the importance of incident, perpetrator, and victim characteristics vary across geographic areas.     

A peculiar institution? Greco–Roman monogamy in global context

In what sense were the ancient Greeks and Romans monogamous, and why does it matter? This paper addresses this question from a transdisciplinary and global cross-cultural perspective. It considers the physical and anthropological record of polygyny, delineates the historical expansion of formal monogamy, and critiques complementary social science models of mate choice. This approach allows us to situate Greco–Roman practice on a spectrum from traditional polygamy to more recent forms of normative monogyny. Whilst Greco–Roman legal and social norms stressed the nexus between monogamous unions and legitimate reproduction, they accommodated a variety of men's polygynous relationships outside the nuclear family. Greco–Roman monogamy's historically most significant consequence was its role in shaping Christian and later ‘Western’ marital norms that eventually gained global influence.     

Challenging the boundaries of democratic inclusion? Young people's attitudes about the distribution of voting rights

In theoretical debates about the quality of democratic rule, the core question concerns membership, and the adequate constitution of the demos: who is entitled to participate in choosing political representatives? This article enhances the predominantly normative debates on democratic inclusion and boundary making by taking an empirical perspective and analysing attitudes of 16–18-year-old teenagers regarding preconditions for the distribution of voting rights. Based on data stemming from 13 focus groups conducted in three Austrian cities in spring 2010, our findings show that principles related to both competence (autonomy, knowledge) and community (showing concern, being subjected to the law) matter when it comes to democratic boundary making. Furthermore, the study reveals that, in trying to explain the formation of juvenile attitudes about boundary issues, institutions are relevant when related to the conjunctive experiences manifested in the group-specific habitus: while young immigrants argue more inclusionarily than natives in terms of community-related preconditions, especially as far as the roles of language and citizenship are concerned, students argue more exclusionarily than apprentices when it comes to competence-related preconditions, especially civic education. Boundary making affects social groups independent of national origin or citizenship and can therefore be considered a permanent process beyond international migration.     

The urbanisation of justice movements? Possibilities and constraints for the city as a space of contentious struggle

Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urban inequalities, increased political opportunities resulting from the devolution of state capacities to sub‐national levels of government and new actors interested in pursuing innovative strategies and tactics. This hypothesis is tested through a comparison of movements in three different cities: Los Angeles, USA; Rotterdam, Holland; and Toulouse, France. The findings show that, despite the fact that new actors have begun to mobilise in these three cities around justice issues, they have experienced different degrees of territorialisation. The divergent outcomes are explained by the particular state–civil society power relations found in each of the cities. Thus, the paper concludes that, though the factors in our hypothesis may encourage actors to initiate urban justice movements, the degree of their territorialisation ultimately depends on local state–civil society power relations.