Two models of the urban crisis: An analytical essay on banfield and forrester

This essay examines the arguments and evidence used in two recent models of the urban crisis—Edward C. Banfield'sThe Unheavenly City and Jay W. Forrester'sUrban Dynamics. Although Banfield's model is sociological and Forrester's is economic and physical, both imply that not much can be done to alleviate urban problems and that positive programs may make them worse. The authors of this critique contend that the articulation of argument and evidence is inadequate to support the implication. They advocate that promising current programs be refined on the basis of evidence and experience and that policymakers continue to search for efficient new programs through social experiments.     

Governing Globalization? The State,Law, and Structural Change in Corporate Governance

Current analysis of the 'globalization' of the activity of capitalist corporations tends to argue that the legal institutional frameworks of the nation state are of little importance in determining the governance of those corporations, and that the regulation of those corporations therefore is impossible. This view simply ignores the role that those frameworks do in fact play. In this paper, various styles of corporate governance are analysed in terms of the influence of the company law, financial market regulation, and employment law promulgated by nations or nation state groupings. Rather than the globalization of corporate governance reflecting the unimportance of the nation state, it reflects a change in the style of regulation.     

Opening the Mexican political system: Public opinion and the elections of 1994 and 1997

Over the past decade, the proliferation of election surveys has worked to undergird the electoral system in Mexico and to make electoral fraud more difficult. In the presidential elections of 1994, significant controversies arose as to survey methodologies, but by the congressional elections of 1997 the fierce debates over methodologies had subsided. Substantively, the surveys confirm the accuracy of the vote count in 1998, allow profiles of voters to be constructed for the three most important parties and mark declines in the support of the once dominant Partido Revolucionario Institucional.