1,721,020 research outputs found
U.S. Presidential Vetoes, 1st Congress -100th Congress
No full textKiewiet, D. Roderick, and Mathew D. McCubbins. The Logic Of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Spring 1991
Tim Groseclose, Cheating: an insider’s report on the use of race in admissions at UCLA [Book Review]
No full textCheating:an insider’s report on the use of race in admissions at UCLA, is Tim Groseclose’s provocative narrative of how affirmative action policies have played out at a major public university. Groseclose chronicles the efforts of UCLA admissions officers to satisfy two contradictory demands. The first was to produce a student body with a significantly larger number of African-Americans. In May 2006, demonstrators had gathered outside Chancellor Carnesale’s office to express concern over the declining number of African-American students at UCLA. A few months later Acting Chancellor Norm Abrams addressed the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools (CUARS), of which Groseclose was a member. Abrams asked the committee to change its procedures in order to increase the admissions rate for underrepresented minority students. Specifically, he indicated that they should adopt the “holistic” process that Berkeley was using, and that they should do so quickly
The Demise of California's Public Schools Reconsidered
Full text linkEverybody knows that the taxpayer revolt embodied in Proposition 13 killed California's public-school system, once the nation's best. Or did it
Accounting for the Electoral Effects of Short Term Economic Fluctuations: The Role of Incumbency-Oriented and Policy-Oriented Voting
Full text linkSeveral previous studies have found considerable evidence of incumbency-oriented voting, i.e. voting for or against the incumbent president and candidates of his party on the basis of fluctuations in economic conditions. This study explores the hypothesis that voting in response to economic conditions is often policy
The Day After Tomorrow: Managing the Retrenchment of Public Employee Retirement Systems
Full text linkThe Pew Center estimates that as of July 2008, state and local governments in the United States had promised current and future retirees 2.35 trillion of projected assets to pay for them. The investment losses that public employee pension funds experienced during the market downturn of 2008-09 made the trillion dollar gap much larger. In this paper I discuss how the pension funding gap has developed, compare the situation in California with that of other states, and discuss the ways in which the state government and local governments in California are responding to the increasing strains pension obligations place on their finances. I recommend that the constitution of California be amended to forbid the state and all local governments from ever again issuing pension obligation bonds, and to forbid the state of California, as well as all local governments within the state, from ever again offering their employees defined benefit pension plans
Approval Voting: the Case of the 1968 Election
Full text linkFor most of this nation's history, electoral democracy has consisted mainly of competition between the candidates of two major national parties. Thus in most elections for national office the present method of categorical voting, that is, voters vote for one candidate only, has served adequately. Except for the electoral college, this method satisfies a simple democratic criterion - the winner is prefferes to the loser by a simple majority of the voters
Vote Trading in the First Federal Congress? James Madison and the Compromise of 1790
No full textIntroduction. It is fitting that the men who designed the Constitution of the United States in 1787 are known as "the Framers," for that document is skeletal indeed. This is not to say that these individuals chose to engage in an abstract exercise in implementation theory. Advocates of particular policies, eager to have their preferences graven into constitutional bedrock, compelled delegates to the Constitutional Convention to consider all the major issues of the day. With a few exceptions, however, specific policies were not embedded into the Constitution, as doing so would have precluded adoption or stymied ratification. It was thus left to the First Federal Congress, elected in the first federal election of 1788, to address the many thorny questions that the Convention had left unresolved
Bureaucrats and Budgetary Outcomes: Quantitative Analyses
No full textThe expansion of the public sector in advanced industrial democracies is one of the most important political developments of the last hundred years. Government bureaus throughout the world now provide trillions of dollars annually in services that were previously supplied either privately or not at all -- from parking ramps to pollution control, health care to housing, and rockets to rock concerts. At the beginning of this long period of growth in the public sector, many observers welcomed it as the happy consequence of increasing affluence and the desire for social progress (Wagner 1958). It appeared to them that government, in response to popular demand, was simply shouldering its responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry from cradle to grave. By the 1970s, however, the public sector in many Western democracies accounted for over half of the GNP. By this time, the growth of government had provoked a great deal of alarm -- especially among public choice theorists (Buchanan 1977). After regressing government growth rates on a battery of income, wealth, and population variables, Borcherding (1977) concludes that only about half of the growth in the public sector can be accounted for by increases in public demand
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