The Budget Enforcement Act in 1991: Isometric Budgeting

The immediate effect of the Budget Enforcement Act (BEA) of 1990 was to cancel a pending $110 billion sequester and to change the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit targets. These and other changes allowed Congress and the administration to escape responsibility for increases in the deficit if discretionary spending was kept within the caps and no new entitlement programs or revenue enhancements were added. This assumption and others relating to the empowerment of the Appropriations Committees and the new authority of the OMB are explored in this article.     

Credit enhancement of municipal debt

Abstract: The municipal bond bank (mbb) innovation began in Canada in 1956 and in the United States in 1970. This paper concentrates on why mbbs exist, their characteristics, where they work best, and how they compare with other municipal debt credit enhancement techniques. It concludes with a discussion of the future role these organizations will have in providing long-term capital funding to municipalities in Canada and the United States. Sommaire: Le principe de la Banque d'obligations municipales (BOM) fut introduit en 1956, au Canada et, en 1970, aux États-Unis. Cet article explore la raison d'être des BOMS, leurs caractéristiques, leurs conditions de succés maximum et les compare à d'autres techniques pour rehausser le crédit de la dette municipale. L'article se termine par une discussion sur le rôle que ces organisations auront à l'avenir dam le financement capital à long terme des municipalités au Canada et aux États-Unis.     

Power,throne, and rank

Richard Hoggart has spent all his working life teaching English literature and involved in different ways with cultural studies. He is the author of the seminal book The Uses of Literacyand most recently of Townscape with Figures: Farnham—reviewed in this issue of SOCIETY.     

The measurability of budget related rent-seeking

It has been suggested that the extent of rent-seeking expenditures arising from attempts to influence budget allocations should be estimated by the absolute magnitude of the observed changes in allocation. Instead, we argue that it is the extent of theex ante prospective changes that determine the level of rent-seeking, and that in the presence of countervailing activity these may be quite unrelated to the ex post observed values. We further argue that the traditional rent-seeking model of competition for a pre-specified rent is inappropriate in this context.     

Construct accessibility and electoral choice

Chronic accessibility refers to a long-term bias to notice, process, and have available for recall certain types of information across a variety of different stimulus objects in a variety of different situations. This paper illustrates the usefulness of studying the chronic accessibility of political constructs in the field of political behavior. The chronic accessibility of four generic political constructs are operationalized: candidates, issues, groups, and parties. The accessibility of these four political constructs is shown to be relatively stable over time and to guide the processing of information about a wide variety of political objects. Next, a voting model is tested that identifieswhich voters will rely chiefly on issue orientations, group orientations, candidate orientations, and/or party orientations in making their vote decision. The voting model is validated across two distinct ways of operationalizing the political chronicities and three different election studies spanning a 28-year period. Finally, although this paper has focused onindividual political behavior, several ways that an information processing approach could shed light on macrolevel political questions are discussed.     

Democratic decentralization or political consolidation: The case of local government reform in Karnataka

In 1987 the Indian State of Karnataka implemented panchayat reform legislation. The ideological orientation of the Janata Government's reforms is considered, together with the question of whether stronger local government in India increases the state's autonomy within the federation. The Karnataka reforms are expected to be significantly different from the reforms enacted in other states. Participation by marginalized groups may assist the Janata party in incorporating them into its network of patronage. Local level planning has been made more effective. The legislation gives the zilla parishad control over the line departments of the State Government. Administrative power is likely to experience increased local political direction. However the financial independence of the zilla parishad is by no means assured. The final outcome will also depend upon the attitude towards the reform of the Congress Party, anxious about its power base in the Karnataka countryside.