Does the Restrictiveness of State Tax and Expenditure Limitations Affect State Revenues and Expenditures?

This paper examines the impact of tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) on state governments. We examine how TELs are represented in empirical modeling. We compare and contrast an index of state-level TEL restrictiveness to a simple dummy variable approach. We use a panel of data for the 50 U.S. states to capture changes in state TELs and a generalized method of moments (GMM) dynamic panel estimator. We find that results vary across the two methods of capturing the presence of TELs, suggesting that simple dummy variables are not sufficient to capture the heterogeneity of TELs across states and over time.     

THE PROGENITORS OF TERRORISM:RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES OR EXTREME IRISH REPUBLICANS?

The literature on the origins of modern terrorism generally acknowledges that terrorism as a recognisable phenomenon had its roots during the latter decades of the nineteenth century and that the first exponents to embrace violence in a systematic way as a strategy to achieve their political ends were the extremist groups of the social revolutionary movement in Russia, particularly Narodnya Volya. Their campaign of terrorist attacks culminated in March 1881 with the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second and thus both the conceptual and methodological seeds had been sown that led in the following century to the political violence in the characteristic form that we now refer to as terrorism. It is argued here that this unilinear model is flawed as it ignores the seminal contribution to the development of terrorism in the twentieth century made by the extreme Irish nationalist movement. During the years from January 1881 to January 1885 they mounted a series of bomb attacks in cities on the British mainland with the objective of forcing the government to relinquish its rule of the island of Ireland. Their strategy, operational methodology, tactics and targeting were innovative in both concept and execution and in turn they provided a blueprint for the conduct of terrorism that has not changed fundamentally for well over a hundred years. Terrorism, as it manifested itself in the 20th century, owes at least as much to the strategy, tactics and techniques developed and applied in the 19th century by the “physical force” proponents of the Irish republican movement as it does to the more readily acknowledged activities of the Russian revolutionaries.