Promise and peril

The size of the federal budget tells only one part of the tale of government's presence in the market economy. The enormous amounts of non-tax dollars government requires to be spent on regulation – estimated at $647 billion per year – powerfully argue for some sort of regulatory scorekeeping. Regulatory costs are equivalent to over one-third of the level of government spending. A regulatory budget can be an effective tool both for spurring reform and monitoring regulatory activity.At bottom, today's rulemaking process is plagued by the fact that agency bureaucrats are not accountable to voters. And Congress – though responsible for the underlying statutes that usually propel those unanswerable agencies – nevertheless can conveniently blame agencies for regulatory excesses. Indeed, Americans live under a regime of Regulation Without Representation.A regulatory budget could promote greater accountability by limiting the regulatory costs agencies could impose on the private sector. Congress could either specify a limit on compliance costs for each newly enacted law or reauthorization of existing law, or Congress could enact a more ambitious full-scale budget paralleling the fiscal budget, a riskier approach. A comprehensive budget would require Congress to divide to a total budget among agencies. Agencies' responsibility would be to rank hazards serially, from most to least severe, and address them within their budget constraint. In either version of a regulatory budget, any agency desiring to exceed its budget would need to seek congressional approval.Regulatory costs imposed on the private sector by federal agencies can never be precisely measured, and a budget cannot achieve absolute precision. Nonetheless, a regulatory budget is a valuable tool. The real innovation of regulatory budgeting is its potential to impose the consequences of regulatory decisionmaking on agencies rather than on the regulated parties alone. Agencies that today rarely admit a rule provides negligible benefit would be forced to compete for the right to regulate. While agencies would be free to regulate as unwisely as they do now, the consequences could be transfer of the squandered budgetary allocation to a rival agency that saves more lives.Budgeting could fundamentally change incentives. Under a budget, adopting a costly, but marginally beneficial, regulation will suddenly be irrational. Congress would weigh an agency's claimed benefits against alternative means of protecting public health and safety, giving agencies incentives to compete and expose one another's bogus benefits. Budgeting could encourage greater recognition of the fact that some risks are far more remote than those we undertake daily. In the long run, a regulatory budget would force agencies to compete with one another on the most important bottom line of all: that their least-effective rules save more lives per dollar spent (or correct some alleged market imperfection better) than those of other agencies.There are clear benefits to regulatory budgeting, but there are also pitfalls. For instance, under a budget, agencies have incentives to underestimate compliance costs while regulated parties have the opposite incentive. Self-correcting techniques that may force opposing cost calculations to converge are only at the thought- experiment stage. However, limitations on the delegation of regulatory power and enhancing congressional accountability can help.Certain principles and antecedents can help ensure that a regulatory budgeting effort succeeds. Explicitly recognizing that an agency's basic impulse is to overstate the benefits of its activities, a budget would relieve agencies of benefit calculation responsibilities altogether. Agencies would concentrate on properly assessing only the costs of their initiatives. Since an agency must try to maximize benefits within its budget constraint or risk losing its budget allocation, it would be rational for agencies to monitor benefits, but Congress need not require it.Other ways to promote the success of a budget are to: establish an incremental rather than total budget; collect and summarize annual report card data on the numbers of regulations in each agency; establish a regulatory cost freeze; implement a Regulatory Reduction Commission; employ separate budgets for economic and environmental/social regulation; and control indirect costs by limiting the regulatory methods that most often generate them.A regulatory budget is not a magic device alone capable of reducing the current $647 billion regulatory burden. Yet a cautious one deserve consideration. Having good information is an aid in grappling with the regulatory state just as compiling the federal fiscal budget is indispensable to any effort to plan and control government spending.     

The Gender Gap in Ideology

Over the past few decades, a gender gap has emerged in the mass public in ideological self-placement. While most men and women moved in the conservative direction, another segment of women retained their liberal self-identifications. A gender gap also exists in how men and women define their ideology. Which issues are linked to ideological identities is conditioned by gender and time period. Finally, ideological identities are structure by nonpolitical values as well as political issues. Religiosity and religious beliefs have come to increasingly shape Americans’ ideological identities, with some differences across the two sexes.

A conceptual framework for studying complex decision processes

Decision making stituations, particularly those involving societal issues, can pose very complex problems for practitioners and investigators from a broad spectrum of disciplines. In this paper, we present theoretical constructs and an organized general framework for studying such complex decision processes. The postulated facets are used in the construction of several hypotheses. Empirical evidence is presented which supports the hypotheses and argues for the viability of the proposed conceptual framework.Supported in part by OWRT Grant No. 8933-55-13645.     

Local government revenue policies in new Mexico

This examination of the revenue patterns of local governments in New Mexico finds that communities with the greatest social needs for public services-- small population rural areas, less affluent communities, and rapidly growing districts-- are precisely those that have the weakest revenue bases. Moreover, none of these types of disadvantaged jurisdictions receives above-average redistributive assistance from the federal government.Variations in revenue effort, especially among municipalities, exacerbate this problem because certain communities gain huge revenue windfalls which bear little relationship to either their social needs or taxing efforts but stem, rather, from fortuitous geographic positions. This advantage works its way through the entire revenue system, directly because state transfers are linked to place of collection and indirectly because of the overwhelming effect of revenue effort on revenue sharing allocations in the state. The local revenue system in New Mexico, therefore, works against the communities that have the greatest need for government services. Most of these inequities, however, do not appear to be the explicit goal of economic or political policy. Instead, they are the unintended consequences of a supposedly “neutral” allocation formula. This state of affairs certainly argues for policymakers paying more attention to the actual results of their policies.     

The Return of the State: Globalization,State Theory,and the New Imperialism *

The interest in state theory that swept academic circles following the Miliband–Poulantzas debate waned considerably in the late 1980s and 1990s so that much of the last decade was notable for the impoverishment of state theory. Indeed, during this time, there was a never ending litany of books and articles on the crisis of the nation-state, the eclipse of the state, the retreat of the state, and even the end of the nation-state. The central theme in these eulogies was that nation-states had lost control of their national economies, currencies, territorial boundaries, and even their cultures and languages and that macroscopic forms of power were shifting from the nation-state to the global market, transnational corporations, and globalized channels of communication. However, this article reexamines the relationship between globalization theory and state theory to argue that nation-states are the principal agents of globalization as well as the guarantors of the political and material conditions necessary for global capital accumulation. In contrast to those who see a nebulous logic of empire, a network state, or even a global state as the repositories of a new sovereignty, this paper suggests that globalization, in its current form, is actually a new form of American imperialism.     

Anti‐feminism in western Europe 1975–1987

This study traces the development of anti‐feminist attitude trends in Western Europe from 1975–1987. It focuses in particular on the sources of and changes in opposition to women's participation in politics by noting the percentages of Eurobarometer survey respondents who agreed in 1975, 1983, and 1987 that ‘politics should be left to men’.     

The Duel of Honor: Screening For Unobservable Social Capital

The duel of honor was a highly ritualized violent activity practiced(mostly) by aristocrats from about 1500 to 1900. The duel ofhonor was held in private, was attended by seconds and othermembers of society, was illegal, and often resulted from trivialincidents. Duels were fought according to strict codes, theirlethality fell over time, and certain members of society werenot allowed to duel. We argue dueling functioned as a screenfor unobservable investments in social capital. Social capitalwas used during this period to support political transactionsin an age when high civil service appointments were made throughpatronage. The screening hypothesis explains the puzzling featuresof the duel of honor, its rise and fall over time and locations,and the differences between European and American duels. In a state of highly polished society, an affront is held tobe a serious injury. It must, therefore, be resented, or rathera duel must be fought upon it; as men have agreed to banishfrom their society one who puts up with an affront without fightinga duel.

—Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell