Gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act of 1982: A public choice analysis of turnover in the U.S. House of Representatives

The present paper uses various data sets and statistical techniques to examine the outcome of gerrymandering under the Voting Rights Act of 1982 on turnover rates in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as the competitiveness in Party primaries for House seats. Evidence presented here suggests that political redistricting at the federal level (namely for U.S. House seats) has tended to favor incumbents in both the Party primaries and general elections. In fact, some results suggest that turnover rates (for 1988) are between 8.9 and 10.3 percentage points lower within states that engaged in such redistricting efforts. Our findings generally support the main tenets of the public choice view of legislator behavior.     

A multinominal logit analysis of the influence of policy variables and board experience on FOMC voting behavior

Previous studies have used probit or logit models to analyze two states of monetary policy (tighter or looser). In this paper we employ multinominal logit to permit Federal Reserve monetary policy to assume one of three alternative states (tighter, looser, or no change) as a function of three independent economic variables (unemployment, real growth, and inflation) and the amount of experience of the Board of Governors. The results indicate that the Federal Reserve reacted differently under Burns, Miller and Volcker and between Volcker's two operating procedures in the formulation of monetary policy.     

The politics of sustainable development: impediments to pollution prevention and policy integration in Canada

Abstract: Sustainable development has been widely hailed in Canadian environmental -policy circles, as has its related goals of promoting pollution prevention and integrating policy across sectoral, jurisdictional, and medium (e.g., air, water, land) boundaries. But such broad support has generally not served to translate sustainability into concrete policy initiatives at the federal or provincial levels. Indeed, most Canadian efforts to foster sustainability appear to be largely symbolic in nature, leaving the bulk of environmental regulatory functions highly fragmented by medium and oriented towards pollution control. In comparison with the United States, it remains much more difficult to discern prevention and integration principles being put into practice in Canada in many important areas of environmental policy. The decentralization of policy-making and the lack of policy entrepreneurship within environment ministries in Canada appear to contribute to this comparatively slower response to the challenge of sustainability. Sommaire: Dans les milieux qui formulent les politiques environnementales au Canada, on chante les louanges du développement durable; on vante aussi ses objectifs de promouvoir la prévention de la pollution et d'integrer les politiques au niveau des secteurs, des territoires administratifs et de I'ensemble des trois milieux: air, eau, terre. Cet appui généralisé n'a cependant pas permis, dans l'ensemble, de traduire la durabilité en initiatives concrètes aux niveaux fédéral et provincial. En fait, la plupart des efforts canadiens favorisant la durabilité semblent avoir un caractère largement symbolique, la plupart des fonctions de réglementation environnementale étant fortement fragmentées selon les milieux (air, eau, terre) et orientées vers le contrôle de la pollution. A l'encontre des États-Unis, on a du mal à voir pratiquer au Canada les principes de la prévention et de l'intégration dans de nombreux domaines de politique environnementale. La décentralisation de la formulation des politiques, ainsi que I'inactivité des ministères de l'environnement dans ce domaine, semble contribuer à cette plus grande lenteur face au défi de la durabilité.     

Left–right political scales

Nomination: 'Some expert judgments ' live on by Mogens N. Pedersen, p.147
Reflections: Revisiting expert judgements by Peter Mair & Francis G. Castles, p.150     

Social policy in rich and poor countries

Nomination: Does politics matter? A perennial question! by Hans Keman, p.159
Reflections: Politics does indeed matter! by Manfred G. Schmidt, p.164     

Left-right political scales

Abstract Although left-right scales are an inherent feature of much cross-national research, they have necessarily been created on a somewhat ad hoc basis, since the empirical foundation for valid cross-national scales rarely exists. This paper seeks to provide such a foundation by using judgements of party ideological position which are both explicit and non-idiosyncratic across a wide range of countries. These judgements derive from a so-called 'expert' survey of leading political scientists in Western Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. It is our hope that the scales which we derive in this way may prove useful in a wide variety of contexts of comparative research.     

Using Performance Measures for Federal Budgeting: Proposals and Prospects

The political system, the popular press, and the public have recently been concerned about measuring government performance. This concern for measuring performance should imply a concern for measuring it correctly. With this in mind, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently conducted an analysis of the use of performance measures in the budget process. The study attempts to review the issues raised by performance budgeting in the context of past and current efforts to link performance measures and budgeting. This article focuses on two portions of that study: The status of the current federal performance measurement efforts and specific observations designed to inject a note of caution into the current debate about performance measurement and budgeting.