State budget support to local government

The principle of self-government is essentially a new phenomena in the Czech Republic. Under the previous regime, almost everything was ruled by the central government. At the present time, the major constraint to local budget reform is primarily from the local authorities’ lack of experience. While on one hand, this gives the Czech Republic a challenge to avoid some of the mistakes made in several developed countries, it is, on the other hand, difficult to make estimates of the possible responses to any change. Next to the lack of experience, there is a strong feeling both at the local and the central levels of government that the self-government bodies should have almost no regulation from the central government. The current opinion is that their control should be left only to the respective electorate. There is also the belief that self-government units should become increasing financed by tax revenues derived from within their own area. An additional complication is the lack of common non-governmental institutions (different associations and others) which usually smooth the the relationship between local and central governments. The changes in the Czech Republic are not yet complete. After the changes in the legal framework, the complete reform of the tax and social systems were to follow. While the essentials of tax reform were introduced in January 1993, the changes in the social systems are still under consideration. In spite of the relatively short history of having true local authorities functioning in the Czech Republic, the establishment of an additional level of government is being proposed. This issue is reopening some already closed matters and will bring a change to the whole system. As in many other countries, the division of responsibilities between different levels of government will probably continue to be discussed until the end of time.     

Corsica: France's Petite Security Problem

The island of Corsica has experienced for the past thirty years a wave of low-scale terrorism. Self-declared Corsican nationalists fight for their homeland to become independent from mainland France, without much success, and with diminishing support from the island's population. Even though the level of violence has never reached the levels of destruction and casualties as in other European homegrown-terrorist groups, it is important for the Nikolas Sarkozy administration to deal with Corsican pseudo-separatism once and for all. This movement (whether criminal in nature or truly nationalistic) has proven to be long-lasting, resourceful, and deadly, thus it should not be underestimated.     

Trade openness and public expenditure. The Spanish case, 1960–2000

The empirical link between the post-WWII expansion of international market integration and the growth of national public expenditure has been widely noted, with no consensus as yet regarding the interpretation of this correlation. We posit that a likely link between increased openness and public spending is the use of the latter to offset changes in the distribution of income that result from increased openness. To explore this potential link, we study time series data from Spain in 1960–2000, a period of major changes in political organization as well as in both fiscal and trade policy. We find evidence that democracy reinforced the causal relation from increased openness to greater public expenditure. Thus, the paper contributes to the literature that emphasizes that changes in political regimes are potentially important determinants of the observed international patterns of openness and government size.     

The Politics of the Lisbon Strategy: The Changing Role of the Commission

This article examines the politics of the Lisbon strategy before and after its major watershed reform in 2005, with particular attention to the role of the European Commission. Operating in an ambiguous partial delegation of power, the Commission changed from performing a strong administrative role in the 2000–04 period to performing a political role after 2005. The institutional analysis of this article combines contextual factors and internal factors for explaining this variation. The findings reveal that although internal factors play an important part in explaining change, they are highly related to contextual factors. More precisely, the ability of the Commission to unfold actively its ideological and normative leverage and unfold specific forms of procedural leverage after 2005 is highly related to the member states' decision to clarify the formal division of tasks between them and the Commission. In other words, situations of procedural ambiguity are not necessarily to the advantage of the Commission, since it does not invariably have the ability to use this ambiguity in its favour.     

Housing Subsidies and Early Childhood Development: A Comprehensive Review of Policies and Demonstration Projects

ABSTRACT

In this article, we ask how housing subsidies might influence young children. We examine two national housing policies – public housing assistance and the Section 8 vouchers program – and two demonstration projects that aimed to improve the administration of providing housing subsidies – HOPE (Homeownership Opportunities for People Everywhere) VI and Moving to Opportunity. This article is a critical examination of these policies and demonstration projects in relation to the following housing dimensions that promote the healthy development of young children: income supplements residential stability, physical environment, access to services and amenities, housing choice, neighborhood safety, and social capital. We compared advantages and limitations of each of these national housing policies and demonstration projects and examined ways in which they might influence children in these housing dimensions. The article concludes with implications and future research directions for U.S. housing policy by discussing its most recent U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) initiative, Rental Assistance Demonstration, in addressing limitations of housing policies and demonstration projects we examined.     

Liberal Democracy and Neoliberalism: A Critical Juxtaposition

In this essay I argue that neoliberalism is both an economic and a political doctrine and that its historical trajectory, both conceptual and political, especially in the United States, is better understood in relation to its complex relationship of affinity with liberal democracy. The intersection between liberal democracy and neoliberalism is thus better apprehended from the perspective of the separation of the economic and the political in capitalism and the relative autonomy that it structurally grants to each field of power. Liberal democracy has provided a depoliticized framework that nurtures neoliberalism, while providing it with a cloak of legitimacy. Stated somewhat differently, the historical trajectory of liberal democracy, as a theory and as a practice of power, betrays an anti-democratic tendency that leads to depoliticization and has quelled the democratic politics that once gave credence to it, thus paving the way for the rise of neoliberalism.