Campaign finance reform legislation in the United States Congress: A critique

Legislation to reform campaign funding in the United States must produce a system which reduces the potential for corruption, real or perceived, and creates greater equality of fund raising opportunity between incumbents and challengers. Bills before the 104th Congress would require bureaucratic and arbitrary systems of regulation; they would not produce workable reform. Within the existing full disclosure system,two reforms would be most effective: setting maximum dollar amounts for “soft money” contributions; and limiting fund raising by lobbyists. An even more effective system would be to “blind” contributions made to the campaign committees of individual candidates. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Law and Firms' Access to Finance

This article examines how a country’s legal origin influencesthe operation of its financial system by using firm-level surveydata across a broad cross-section of countries on the obstaclesthat firms face in raising external finance. Using panel regressions,the article assesses two channels through which legal originmay influence the financial system. We find that the adaptabilityof a country’s legal system is more important for explainingthe obstacles that firms face in accessing external financethan the political independence of the judiciary.     

Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities

In what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed the ‘colonial imaginary’ issues of femininity, and who possessed it, were of prime importance. An orientalizing sociology sought to distinguish, and indeed to fix, differences between metropolitan and indigenous women as a rhetoric of hierarchy which secured proper and western femininity to white women. One critical route which colonial commentators and authorities took to produce that knowledge was to measure women's proximity to the practice of prostitution, a means which permitted discussion and judgement of racialized sexualities as well as of proper models of feminine behaviour. This article will explore the ways in which the new sociology of the Victorian period, wielded in a colonial context, served to separate women through race-based ideas of sexual behaviour and sexual order. It will deal with British India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

A benefit of one's own: older women's entitlement to Social Security retirement.

This article explores differences in Social Security eligibility and benefit levels for older men and women using survey data from the Health and Retirement Study combined with administrative records on actual work histories and Social Security rules. We are able to determine the fully insured status of those persons, how close they are to meeting eligibility criteria when they are not fully insured, and their prospects for benefits. Around three-quarters of older women nearing retirement today will be fully insured for Social Security old-age benefits on the basis of their own accounts, but the rest would need substantial extra employment to rise above the eligibility threshold. Further, two-thirds of older married women who are fully insured have sufficient lifetime earnings to translate into an age-65 primary insurance amount worth at least half their husband's, but the other one-third can expect no additional retirement benefit from contributing to Social Security late in life. Finally, most wives will not be able to improve their benefits by working more under current rules. These results have mixed implications regarding the potential impact of women's rising labor force attachment on eventual retirement benefits. Working more years could increase women's chances of becoming eligible for Social Security benefits, but that effect is likely to be small. Furthermore, even when women do become fully insured according to the rules, not many wives will receive a higher benefit at the margin. The reason is that married women still receive higher Social Security benefits as a spouse than they do on the basis of their own work record. In fact, the net benefit from Social Security due to additional work is negative once one takes into account the Social Security contributions the women paid while employed. Benefits paid to widows are even more likely to be based on the spouse's work history rather than on the woman's. Hence, the rising labor market attachment of women in the future may increase their eligibility for benefits but will produce only modest (and often negative) impacts on their old-age Social Security benefits under current rules.     

Public management: first approximations

Public Management as a synthesis of business management and public administration confronts some severe conceptual problems that are rooted in the dissimilarities between business and government. In the two books reviewed, the authors attempt to build concep- tual frameworks for studying public management which minimize the importance of many of these differences. As a result, both books come closer to meeting the expanding market for texts which present management tools and techniques than most of the other texts written in the past few years using a “Public A.dministration as Political Science” approach. Nevertheless, both books still fall considerably short of providing a coherent and comprehensive solution to the problem of defining the scope and substance of the field of Public Management. Therefore, Public Management, as presented in these books, remains largely a truncated field of study limited to issuestof internal management control and ,cost effectiveness. For the field to flourish, it must find a way to bridge and dissolve the dichotomies between politics and administration, policy and management, and political and technical rationality.