Beyond Environmental Regulatory Fragmentation: Signs of Integration in the Case of the Great Lakes Basin

Environmental regulatory fragmentation along the medium boundaries of air, land, and water in Canada and the United States serves to skiff pollutants from medium to medium rather than contain or eliminate them. This pattern is particularly evident in the Great Lakes Basin where many of the most pressing environmental problems stem from pollutant transfer across medium or jurisdictional lines. The impediments to more integrated environmental regulation remain considerable in the Basin, and include the enduring single-medium orientation of federal programs and limitations of state, provincial, or regional innovation. Nonetheless, there is growing indication that regulatory integration need not be dismissed as a theoretical nicety but political impossibility. A series of recent developments indicate a shift toward greater integration in the Basin, prompted in large part by environmental policy professionals who increasingly recognize the limitations of current approaches and are willing to devise alternatives. These developments are occurring at the regional as well as state and provincial levels, and they give far greater definition than ever before to the idea of integrated environmental regulation.     

The Statistical Analysis Of Roll‐Call Data: A Cautionary Tale

Roll‐call voting and congressional procedures are two of the most heavily studied aspects of the U.S. Congress. To date, little work has focused on the effect of procedures on the composition of the roll‐call record. This article takes a step in this direction by demonstrating the effect of chamber rules and institutional constraints on House and Senate roll‐call data, as well as on the inferences that scholars have drawn from the roll‐call record. More specifically, I focus on recent efforts to measure party effects and ideological alignments, and I demonstrate that the composition of the roll‐call record can affect these measures.     

Minority Rights and Majority Power: Conditional Party Government and the Motion to Recommit in the House

Students of legislative politics have struggled to explain and measure party influence on voting and outcomes in Congress. Proponents of strong party effects point to the numerous procedural advantages enjoyed by the majority party as evidence of party effects, yet recent theoretical work by Krehbiel and Meirowitz (2002) argues that House rules guaranteeing the minority a motion to recommit with instructions effectively balances the procedural advantages enjoyed by the majority. This article identifies and tests the empirical implications of the Krehbiel and Meirowitz theory, using roll‐call data from the 61st to 107th Congresses (1909–2002). The results call into question the validity of Krehbiel and Meirowitz's conclusions about party government in the House and provide support for the theory of conditional party government.     

AUDIT OR EVALUATION? A NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE VFM STUDY

This article presents a case study of an important but relatively neglected aspect of the British policy process - the Value for Money (VIM) studies undertaken by the National Audit Office. It analyses in detail the conduct of one particular study, including the reactions of the audited bodies and the parliamentary activity which followed the publication of the NAO report. The case is then used to illuminate what appear to be some more general characteristics of the NAO's approach. It is concluded that NAO VFM work marks an important step beyond traditional audit for regularity and/or economy, and that it significantly enhances democratic accountability. Yet at the same time this work falls short of a full-blooded evaluation. Indeed, it appears to take place within quite prominent constraints, some of which were built into the legislation setting up the NAO but others of which could conceivably be eased, even without new statutory authority.     

Progressive Taxation,Fairness, and Compliance*

This paper examines the preferences for income tax progressivity, other tax fairness issues, and tax compliance of a national sample of nearly six hundred heads of U.S. households. The results reveal that mean public preferences for fair tax burdens are close to actual effective tax rates; however, the similarity between average preferred and actual effective tax rates masks an underlying schism between three groups: (I) those who believe tax rates should be higher for upper income persons (steep progressives), (2) those who prefer mildly progressive tax rates (mild progressives), and (3) those who believe tax rates should be flat (“flatraters). The analysis includes demographic and fairness profiles associated with tax rate preferences. Attitudes about the overall fairness of the income tax, exchange equity with the federal government, government spending, tax complexity, and tax compliance behavior are examined. In general, respondents' stated preferences for vertical equity approximate the current distribution of the income tax burden, yet there is a relatively high consensus that the income tax is unfair, especially with regard to the ability of wealthy taxpayers to exploit loopholes to avoid paying their fair share, and that respondents regard their own tax burdens as unfair. These results suggest that providing information to the public about the relative amount of income taxes paid by upper income individuals and the effects of recent limitations on “loopholes” could improve public attitudes about the fairness of the income tax and tax compliance.