Suchergebnisse

THE TENDENCY TOWARD CENTRALIZATION IN SCHOOL FINANCES IN RECEN YEARS HAS MOSTLY WORKED TO INCREASE THE INFLUENCE OF THE STATE GOVERNMENTS. SINCE 1970 ATTENTION HAS BEEN DIRECTED TO THE NEED FOR MORE EQUITABLE FUNDING SCHEMES, BUT ATTEMPTS TO INCREASE FEDERAL AID TO SCHOOLS HAVE LARGELY FAILED. ABOUT IS STATES HAVE ADOPTED NEW FORMULAS AIMED AT EQUALIZING SCHOOL DISTRICT BUDGETS.

Crisis and Consensus in British Politics focuses on the collapse of the post-war consensus in the mid 1970s crisis and the emergence of a new consensus in the 1990s. It follows this process through six key policy areas including civil service reform, privatisation, macro-economic management and relations with Europe. It is designed for students following courses in modern history, politics and public policy as well as general readers with an interest in current affairs.

What are the consequences of including adjectives in legislation? Presenting a difference-in-differences analysis of a natural experiment, this paper demonstrates that the word 'vulnerable' had a strong and statistically significant effect on homelessness provision in England after 2002. When compared to Wales as a control group, comparator English local authorities identified using propensity score matching saw an average 81% drop in applying their duties to house. Using new panel data covering 728 local authority-years and testing four hypotheses under eight model specifications it will be shown that mixing legislative and natural languages significantly affects policy provision, even when controlling for political, financial and socioeconomic variables.

Using unfamiliar research methods requires confidence and open-mindedness. I am not a confident mathematician, and could previously have been called numerophobic. But a research question as to why the British Government was losing more immigration appeal cases in court forced me to engage with quantitative methods. I sought to explain the fact that 25 of 78 immigration appeal cases were lost by the crown from 1970 to 1994, but 90 of 174 cases were lost in just 17 succeeding years. I suspected the explanation lay in the increased indeterminacy of parliamentary legislation. My question, and theory, demanded I use computer-assisted natural language processing of legal documents, and that I then analyse the results with multivariate logit regression analyses, including models for random effects. These methods would, in the past, have left me bewildered. But my journey of methodological discovery was, in the end, rewarding and demonstrated the centrality of confidence to teaching and learning.

Why does the British government increasingly lose immigration cases in court? More broadly, what can explain the changing behaviour of appeal court judges? It is because government powers to manage immigration, delegated by Parliament, are increasingly couched in indeterminate language. Indeterminacy in legislation not only allows for executive discretion but also encourages litigation. Parliament has therefore provided the cause of action, and judges are not being 'activist'. This argument revitalises, with nuance, the legal model of judicial behaviour. New evidence supports the claim, with discourse analysis of all 1233 sections of immigration legislation enacted from 1905 to 2016 showing an increase in indeterminacy. Logit regression modelling of 252 immigration appeal cases between 1970 and 2012 shows that changes to language and the administration of the law can explain the outcome in 73% of cases.

Development projects like schools and latrines are popular with politi- cians and voters alike, yet many developing countries are littered with half-finished projects that were abandoned mid-construction. Using an original database of over 14,000 small development projects in Ghana, I estimate that one-third of projects that start are never completed, con- suming nearly one-fifth of all local government investment. I develop a theory of project non-completion as the outcome of a dynamically incon- sistent collective choice process among political actors facing commitment problems in contexts of limited resources. I find evidence consistent with key predictions of this theory, but inconsistent with alternative explana- tions based on corruption or clientelism. I show that fiscal institutions can increase completion rates by mitigating the operational consequences of these collective choice failures. These findings have theoretical and methodological implications for distributive politics, the design of inter- governmental transfers and aid, and the development of state capacity.

Legislative language is a crucial, yet somewhat overlooked element of British politics. So how has the language of British legislation changed over the past century? All 191,080 pages of legislation enacted between 1900 and 2015 were assessed for changes in the quantity of legislation. And, 5,878 sections of legislation from 1920 to 2015 were analysed for changes to the quality of language. Parts of speech that affect the subject, object and verb of sentences were recorded, giving a novel long-term study of indeterminacy in legislative language. Findings show that interpreting legislation became increasingly dependent on circumstance and discretion after the war. Change further accelerated after 1975. This reflected a widening gap between public demands placed on government power, and the difficulties faced in accommodating these demands.

Competition policy and law, appropriately implemented and enforced, are essential to the optimal functioning of a market-orientated economy. International organizations, including the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and regional groupings such as the European Union (EU), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), all emphasize, to a greater or lesser extent, the need for a pro-competition policy to be adopted, to promote industrial efficiency and economic growth. The unspoken, but implicit, precondition for an effective competition policy is that the national government is ideologically committed to markets as the primary economic regulator, rather than to state-centred planning, or excessive public sector intervention to promote 'national champions'. For markets to function, there must be competition. The intriguing question is whether the Chinese authorities now accept this ideological position, and the need for a competition law to enhance domestic competition, after almost 30 years of economic reform. This brief will go on to explore the validity of the assertion that the adoption of a Chinese competition law, in present conditions, may be inappropriate, and might, in fact, impede the creation of a more economically efficient market.