Shall Housekeeping Tasks Become a Duty for Husbands?

This popular newspaper headline has often be discussed in public. After all, statistics show, that men only spend 19 and a half hours per week to help with the cooking, washing, ironing etc., while the wife spends 35 hours for housekeeping.     

The Policymaking Role of State Supreme Courts in Education Policy

In this article, I examine the relationship between courts and legislatures from a comparative perspective. Specifically, I discuss how (1) the ideological composition of the bench, (2) the propensity of court involvement in a given policy area, and (3) the presence of an advisory opinion affect the number of bill introductions and policy enactments by state legislatures. Examination of education policy in the American states reveals that ideologically distant courts limit the number of bill introductions and bill enactments in state legislatures. Alternatively, the presence of an advisory opinion increases policy introduction and enactment in state legislatures. A fundamental implication of these findings is that courts exert the greatest impact on policy during the introduction stage of the legislative process. Previous studies have not examined the introduction stage and have therefore marginalized the real impact of court influence on policy.