Suchergebnisse

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In its 2001 performance and accountability report on the Department of Justice, GAO identified five major management challenges. Justice has since made progress on (1) developing measurable performance targets in reducing illegal drugs and (2) improving management of its asset forfeiture program. However, three challenges remain and a fourth managing the FBI's transformation was added. GAO prepared this report to bring these major challenges to the attention of the Congress and Justice. This is part of a special series of reports on governmentwide and agency-specific issues."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Social Security covers about 96 percent of all US workers; the vast majority of the rest are state, local, and federal government employees. While these noncovered workers do not pay Social Security taxes on their government earnings, they may still be eligible for Social Security benefits. This poses difficult issues of fairness, and Social Security has provisions that attempt to address those issues, but critics contend these provisions are themselves often unfair. Congress asked GAO to discuss these provisions as well as the implications of mandatory coverage for public employees."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the results of our review and assessment of bankruptcy court-weighted case filings, the workload measure the Judicial Conference first considers in assessing the need for additional bankruptcy judgeships. Weighted filings are a statistical measure of the estimated judge time that specific types of bankruptcy cases are expected to take. Congress asked us to assess whether weighted case filings are a reasonable means of measuring bankruptcy judges' case-related workload and to assess the methodology of any proposal to update the current case weights."

We report the results of an experiment involving 820 randomly sampled adults. Half heard about a female Republican candidate for Congress. The other half learned of an otherwise identical male candidate. Democrat and Independent voters were more likely to trust, think qualified, view as a leader, and vote for the female Republican (contrasted with the male Republican). On the other hand, being female led to associations that hurt Republican women within their own party. We augment our experimental results by providing evidence that Republican women have done significantly worse than Democratic women in winning nominations in open-seat congressional districts.

Im Rahmen des ersten "World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies" (WOCMES) fand im September 2002 in Mainz ein Symposium zu den Perspektiven der Euro-Mediterranen Partnerschaft statt (auch Barcelona-Prozess genannt). In den drei Panels wurde zu folgenden Themenschwerpunkten gearbeitet: Region Building in the Mediterranean, Rethinking Cooperation, Redefining Security sowie Democracy and Human Rights: Values, Norms and Interests. Der vorliegende Beitrag resümiert die Beiträge und Diskussionen. Hervorgehoben werden kann, dass seit dem 11. September eine verstärkte Tendenz besteht, die Mittelmeerpolitik unter dem Primat der Sicherheitspolitik wahrzunehmen. Der Kampf gegenden internationalen Terrorismus, so wie er in den autoritären Partnerländern geführt und von der Europäischen Union geduldet wird, entzieht vor allem der europäischen Demokratisierungs- und Menschenrechtspolitik zunehmend den Boden. Die Förderung von Demokratie und Menschenrechten, so das einhellige Plädoyer aller anwesenden Wissenschaftlerinnen, müsse jedoch gerade angesichts neuer Sicherheitsrisiken weiterhin im Zentrum der Euro-Mediterranen Partnerschaft stehen, da Sicherheit und Demokratisierung zwei Seiten derselben Medaille sind. (ICA2)

AbstractPolitical analysts are variously divided over the prospects for South Africa's democracy. This article both explores and explains their great diversity of opinion. It investigates the implications, both positive and negative, of African National Congress one-party electoral dominance. The paper goes on to assess the reliability of the mechanisms through which an electorally dominant government can be rendered politically accountable. It then explores the implications of political challenges — concerning capital and skills flight, HIV/AIDS, and corruption — that have licensed further speculation about South Africa's future, and concludes that a cohesive ruling alliance offers the best hope of entrenching the country's imperfect democracy.

The National Growth and Poverty Eradication Strategy (NGPES) is the strategic framework under which all of the Government's future growth and poverty eradication programs will be developed and implemented. The NGPES is the result of a process that started in 1996 when the 6th Party Congress defined the long-term development objective as freeing the country from the status of least-developed country (LDC) by 2020. The NGPES is a comprehensive framework for growth and development, and has a particular focus on the improvement of the poverty situation in the poorest districts. It has thus a dual objective: enhancing growth and development, and reducing poverty.

In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act that ended the entitlement of poor families to government assistance. The debate leading up to that transformation in welfare policy occurred in the shadow of Speenhamland—an episode in English Poor Law history. This article revisits the Speenhamland episode to unravel its tangled history. Drawing on four decades of recent scholarship, the authors show that Speenhamland policies could not have had the consequences that have been attributed to them. The article ends with an alternative narrative that seeks to explain how the Speenhamland story became so deeply entrenched.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Under the Transportation Equity Act for the 21 st Century (TEA-21), Congress authorized federal funding for New Starts fixed guideway transit projects--including rail and bus rapid transit projects that met certain criteria. In response to an annual mandate under TEA-21, GAO assessed the New Starts evaluation and ratings process for the fiscal year 2004 cycle, including (1) changes to the process and any related issues and (2) any challenges related to New Starts initiatives contained in the administration's fiscal year 2004 budget proposal."

This report examines various issues pertaining to foreign students in the United States. Since the Immigration Act of 1924, the United States has expressly permitted foreign students to study in U.S. institutions. Most foreign students are at least 18 years old and are enrolled in higher education programs. Foreign students are generally considered to enrich cultural diversity of the educational experience for U.S. residents as well as enhance the reputation of U.S. universities as world-class institutions. Concerns have arisen in recent years that have caused Congress to take a new look at the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provisions that govern their admission.

Abstract US foreign economic policy in the field of agricultural products is the end-result of two conflicting strategies. On the one hand, agricultural prices are guaranteed on the domestic market in order to provide farmers with decent earnings. On the other hand, high tariff s protect American agriculture from low-cost imports. This policy is based on compromises between diverging and unequal interests such as the Executive, Congress, and farmers. It has been able, in the long term, to exempt agriculture from the usual liberalisation of trade. This "agricultural fortress" is a model which the European Community tried to reproduce in favour of its own farmers.

Abstract: The literature analyzing the effects of job satisfaction on congressional retirement has been inconclusive. The problem with this literature is its reliance on indirect measures of job satisfaction. We use a direct measure of job satisfaction to demonstrate that job satisfaction does have a significant independent effect on congressional retirement. The findings imply that the indirect measures of job satisfaction measure frustration as opposed to job dissatisfaction, a conceptually different variable. The fact that members' job satisfaction affects their career length suggests that a Congress that keeps its members happy will have greater retention and will, presumably, keep its best members.

This is a fascinating book essential for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China–India relations. It presents in considerable detail and from a number of different perspectives the strategic vision of a coalition of China and India struggling in common to create a new world economic–political order in greater comport with the interests and values of the peoples of the non-Western world. This vision of Sino-Indian co-operation in building a new world order was posited as the desirable end-goal of the process of Sino-Indian rapprochement presided over by Indian Congress Party and Chinese leaders beginning in 1988.

To what extent do national forest policy decisions reflect a balance between the interests of environmentalists and the timber industries? National forest policy making from 1960 through 1995 was analyzed using the advocacy coalition framework developed by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith. The authors found that forest policy shifted in a more ecologically sensitive direction beginning in the late 1980s. Changes were largely attributable to the ability of the environmental coalition to manipulate new information to influence key decision makers within Congress and to take advantage of more favorable decisional venues to overcome structural biases built into existing forest policy-making arrangements.