Economic Linkage and Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik: The Case of the Warsaw Treaty

This article focuses on German–Polish relations at the time of the 1970 Warsaw Treaty, a pivotal moment in German diplomatic history. However, the study's relevance goes beyond this case. It illustrates an important source of the Federal Republic's international influence, past and present: its ability to use economic strength for political purposes. As this case shows, Germany has been particularly successful in using economic incentives (positive linkage) to improve ties with its neighbours. This article illustrates the important role of positive linkage both in German Ostpolitik and in international relations in general.     

Efficient local charity with self-selection

How is charitable giving within a city influenced by the prospect of donor and recipient migration? The theoretical literature on charitable contributions in a closed economy has mainly argued that the market level of private giving will tend to be lower than optimal, wherever there exists a local fiscal externality between donors and recipients. Interjurisdictional models of voluntary redistribution, on the other hand, abstract from altruism to explore the interjurisdictional fiscal externality resulting from the failure of one community to account for the migration impacts of its actions on other communities. This paper integrates and extends both literatures by allowing for local altruism among the mobile residents of a system of local economies. Within a single community, mobility thus introduces adverse selection considerations for each donor via the migration of both recipients and other donors. Moreover, any change in the local transfer level influences both equilibrium wages and donor behavior system-wide. The analysis demonstrates that the market level of local charitable giving will be lower than is either ‘locally’ or ‘globally’ optimal in some cases and plausibly higher than optimal in others, depending on the effect of migration and expectations on wages. The self-selection nature of donor decision making does eliminate the usual interjurisdictional fiscal externality, though it leaves a role for government intervention via subsidies to altruistic behavior.     

Feminism and Political Analysis

Though not a united body of thought, feminism insists on the importance of women and the need to combat their oppression. This agenda has underlain feminists'attempts to identify an appropriate research method and their criticisms of traditional social science methodology. In some cases it has led to the repudiation of'male'science and epistemology altogether. Feminist political scientists to date have shown less interest in methodological issues. Instead they have concentrated on questioning their discipline's understanding of the nature, behavioural forms and location of politics. While not amounting to a'revolution', taken together these feminist criticisms do expose both the frequent scientistic pretensions and the conceptual narrowness of traditional political science.     

On the political economy of state highway expenditures: Some evidence of the relative performance of alternative public choice models

This paper explores the extent to which the public demand for roads and/or power of special interest groups determines road expenditures at the state level using an extension of the methodology developed in Congleton and Shughart (1990). Reduced form models of median voter demand, special interest group equilibria, and a combined model are estimated using cross-sectional state data from the United States. We generally find support for the hypothesis that voting matters. The pure median voter models have a better fit than the pure special interest group models. Moreover, in our combined model, we find that variables from the median-voter model can not be dropped without significantly reducing the combined model's fit.     

Foreign assistance and development in a small-island economy: The case of Fiji

In many works on comparative public administration and development management the arguments put forward are often presented within the framework of comparing developed and less-developed countries. However, within the latter category there are fairly substantial differences, usually categorized within the context of system of government, or degrees of per capita income. Rarely is the question of scale addressed head on. One dimension of this, for instance, is the nature and operation of public administration where the proliferation of traditional ministries, and the impartiality of the administration, become very problematic in terms of the extremely limited resources and the very personal nature of public life— especially in the microstates. In this paper the question of scale is addressed in the context of the relationship between one island state, Fiji, and its bilateral and multilateral partners. This is considered not just in terms of aid and loans, but in terms of such issues as the ‘critical mass’ of skilled professional people, and the problems of functioning in a system where the rules for such things as overheads seem to have been evolved in the context of the Third-World giants. It is shown that the scale variable is a very powerful one in both the effectiveness and efficiency of governments working in tandem with major external sources of capital assistance.     

Institutional innovation,development and environmental management: An ‘administrative trap’ revisited. Part I

In the first section of this two-part study the author considers the relationship between administrative structure and the persistence of broad ecological problems. This is set in the context of the issues leading to, and identified at, the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972. It is evident that, despite all the interest and effort, the main parameters of environmental well-being show that the situation remains at least as bad. The case is made that there is a considerable dysfunction between the nature of ecological problems and the ‘problem-solving’ structures within the public arena. This dysfunction is here termed the ‘administrative trap’. This section concludes by reviewing three areas in which administrative innovation resulted very largely from the Stockholm initiative: Global Conferences and their attendant Global Institutions; Ministries of the Environment; and ‘reforms’ in the legislative apparatus.