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One dilemma facing new or newly independent states, such as those of the former Soviet Union, is how to design effective legislatures when political parties are weak and fragmented or even nonexistent. In this book, Joel M. Ostrow develops a comparative institutional framework to explain marked differences in behavior across three post-Soviet legislatures: the Russian Supreme Soviet, the Russian State Duma, and the Estonian legislature. He argues that these differences in ability to manage political conflict can be explained in large measure by the design of the legislatures. Most significant is the choice of whether and how to include parties or partisan factors. Legislatures are an omnipre...
More than fifty years have passed since the American Political Science Association published "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," a controversial report that addressed the lack of national cohesion within the major parties. Although parties have changed a great deal since then, they remain a critical component of American democracy. While the possibilities and limits of responsible party government have been central topics in the literature since 1950, this book is the first to reassess all aspects of the APSA report. Here a distinguished group of scholars—among them Charles O. Jones, Barbara Sinclair, Frank J. Sorauf, John Bibby, and Gerald Pomper—examine the effectiveness, acc...
Macroeconomic policy is one of the most important policy domains, and the tools of macroeconomics are among the most valuable for policy makers. Yet there has been, up to now, a wide gulf between the level at which macroeconomics is taught at the undergraduate level and the level at which it is practiced. At the same time, doctoral-level textbooks are usually not targeted at a policy audience, making advanced macroeconomics less accessible to current and aspiring practitioners. This book, born out of the Masters course the authors taught for many years at the Harvard Kennedy School, fills this gap. It introduces the tools of dynamic optimization in the context of economic growth, and then ap...
Seeks to explain the causes of ambiguously worded state legislation. The level of detail in a given law can have dramatic consequences for how that law is interpreted and applied. In The Devil Is in the Details, Rachel VanSickle-Ward focuses on the dynamics of social policy construction in the United States in order to better understand why the wording of legislation can range from the specific to the ambiguous. When policies are high salience, the fissures produced by partisan discord, interest group diversity, and pluralistic executive branches promote ambiguous policy. When policies are lower profile, this relationship is more tenuous and, at times, inverted, with contention producing mor...
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Outside the United States, forced municipal mergers were a popular policy in many European countries and Canadian provinces during the 1960s and 1970s. The city of Laval, just north of Montreal, and the "unicity" of Winnipeg owe their origins to this period - both amalgamations failed to meet their original objectives. Despite the emergence of "public choice" theory - which justifies municipal fragmentation on market principles - some politicians and public servants in the 1990s have continued to advocate municipal amalgamations as a means of reducing public expenditure, particularly in Ontario. In Merger Mania Andrew Sancton demonstrates that this approach has generally not saved money. He ...