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Currently there are over 45 million Americans without health insurance. Recent growth in Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) enrollment of children has filled in the sizable gap created by decreased employer‐sponsored insurance since 2000. While the share of children who are uninsured actually decreased between 2000 and 2003, little progress was made in expanding public insurance to adults. As a result, advocates and policymakers at the federal and state level are searching for approaches to deal with the growing number of the uninsured. Conservatives advocate encouraging individuals to buy private insurance while liberals advocate the provision of health coverage through publicly financed health care. Using a 50‐state multilevel individual growth model, this study estimates the net effect of two state approaches in terms of reducing the uninsured: tax incentives (the conservative approach) and direct‐coverage programs (the liberal approach). The results suggest that these approaches have not achieved the results that many advocates had suggested. In the case of tax incentives, the results suggest that states with tax incentives experience increases in the rate of the uninsured. In the case of direct‐coverage programs, results suggest that states receive no relief in the number of uninsured individuals. Finally, the analysis suggests that the efforts originating at the federal level are most successful. These programs are a continuation of the incremental approach policymakers in America have taken to address the problem of the uninsured, rather than taking steps toward a truly comprehensive solution.

Community‐based efforts to address environmental problems occupy an increasingly large space on the environmental policy landscape. Advocates argue that local environmental institutions (LEIs) can deliver both procedural and environmental quality benefits. Yet, despite over a decade of expansive support, the performance of LEIs remains largely unknown, particularly with regard to environmental outcomes. In this article, we consider new environmental outcome data we compiled from local efforts to implement the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act. We find that stronger forms of LEIs generate both quantitatively and qualitatively better environmental outcomes, which suggests that LEIs may live up to their advocates' expectations.

Adam Smith is almost certainly history's most famous advocate of commercial society, but he frankly admits that the relentless pursuit of wealth is a major obstacle to tranquility and contentment and hence that, at first glance, the higher living standards that people "enjoy" in commercial society seem to come only at the cost of their happiness. I argue that the solution to this apparent paradox can be found in Smith's account of the positive political effects of commerce: dependence and insecurity are the chief obstacles to happiness and have been the hallmarks of most of human history, and so the alleviation of these ills in commercial society constitutes a great step forward. Money really cannot buy happiness, but the liberty and security that commercial societies tend to provide help to assuage the greatest sources of misery.

Some critics of John Stuart Mill understand him to advocate the forced assimilation of people he regards as uncivilized and to defend toleration and the principle of liberty only for civilized people of the West. Examination of Mill's social and political writings and practice while serving the British East India Company shows, instead, that Mill is a tolerant imperialist: Mill defends interference in India to promote the protection of legal rights, respect and toleration for conflicting viewpoints, and a commercial society that can cope with natural threats. He does not think the principle of liberty is waived for the uncivilized or that the West should forcibly reshape them in its own monistic image. Mill's tolerant imperialism reflects a tension between liberty and moral development that also surfaces when Mill thinks about the scope of government in civilized societies.

Quorums of participation or consent are contested components of direct-democratic institutions -- at least in Germany. It can be argued that a modified version of a quorum is desirable compared to a direct democracy without quorums, on the one hand, & to conventional ones, on the other hand. Using an anti-proportional quorum the extent of necessary participation would vary with the measure of consent. This proposed quorum could cope with all known problems addressed by advocates & critics of conventional quorums. It is particularly helpful in making political equality real in instruments of direct democracy. Tables, Figures. Adapted from the source document.