Gasoline Tax Increases in the American States: A Case for Responsive Taxation

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Ellen C. Seljan ◽  
Allison K. Schneider ◽  
Dalles Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Predictive Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Traffic Fatalities ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Gasoline Tax ◽  
Gas Tax ◽  
American States ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Gasoline Taxes

This paper analyzes the determinants of legislation to increase state gasoline taxes from 1985 to 2013. It closely considers the motives of the political actors considering adoption, comparing the predictive power responsive government and excessive government theories. It finds strong evidence for responsive governments: traffic fatalities per-capita and the proportion of bridges deemed structurally deficient are among the strongest predictors of state gas tax increases. The conclusion of this paper is that gasoline tax increases in the American states represents a case of responsive taxation.

Measuring the Influence of Political Actors on the Federal Budget

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (2) ◽  
pp. 603-608
Author(s):  
BEN HAMMOND ◽  
LEAH ROSENSTIEL
Keyword(s):  
Measurement Error ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Original Data ◽  
The Political ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Determinants ◽  
Null Result ◽  
Research Questions

When estimating the political determinants of the federal budget, scholars face a choice between using measures of funding and measures of spending as their outcome of interest. We examine the consequences of this choice. In particular, we argue that spending outcomes may serve as a poor test of the research questions scholars seek to answer, since spending data conflate competing budgetary influences, are downstream measures of the appropriations that originated them, and induce measurement error. To test our claim, we compare the spending data used in a recent study (Berry and Fowler 2016: American Journal of Political Science 60 (3): 692–708) with an original data set of military construction appropriations. While an analysis of the spending data produces a null result, the same analysis using the appropriations data provides strong evidence that legislators use their committee positions to distribute pork. Our findings have broad implications for studies that use measures of spending in the congressional and presidency literatures.

Equal Votes, Equal Money: Court-Ordered Redistricting and Public Expenditures in the American States

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 767-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Ansolabehere ◽  
Alan Gerber ◽  
Jim Snyder
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Public Expenditures ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
American Experience ◽  
American States ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Sectional Analysis ◽  
Legislative Districts ◽  
State Legislative

Court-ordered redistricting in the mid-1960s eradicated severe disparities in the populations of U.S. state legislative districts. We examine the geographic distribution of money by states to counties. Cross-sectional analysis shows that counties with relatively more legislativeseats per person prior to redistricting received relatively more transfers from the state per person. Over time, counties that lost legislative seats subsequently received a smaller share of state funds per capita. We calculate that population equalization significantly altered the flow of state transfers to counties, diverting approximately $7 billion annually from formerly overrepresented to formerly underrepresented counties, an effect missed by past studies. For those concerned with the design of democratic institutions around the world today, the American experience provides clear evidence of the political consequences of unequal representation.

Information Component of Disintegration Processes in Spain and Great Britain: the Comparative Aspects

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-154
Author(s):  
Vasyl Karpo ◽  
Nataliia Nechaieva-Yuriichuk
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Practical Interest ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Times

From ancient times till nowadays information plays a key role in the political processes. The beginning of XXI century demonstrated the transformation of global security from military to information, social etc. aspects. The widening of pandemic demonstrated the weaknesses of contemporary authoritarian states and the power of human-oriented states. During the World War I the theoretical and practical interest toward political manipulation and political propaganda grew definitely. After 1918 the situation developed very fast and political propaganda became the part of political influence. XX century entered into the political history as the millennium of propaganda. The collapse of the USSR and socialist system brought power to new political actors. The global architecture of the world has changed. Former Soviet republic got independence and tried to separate from Russia. And Ukraine was between them. The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine was the start point for a number of processes in world politics. But the most important was the fact that the role and the place of information as the challenge to world security was reevaluated. The further annexation of Crimea, the attempt to legitimize it by the comparing with the referendums in Scotland and Catalonia demonstrated the willingness of Russian Federation to keep its domination in the world. The main difference between the referendums in Scotland and in Catalonia was the way of Russian interference. In 2014 (Scotland) tried to delegitimised the results of Scottish referendum because they were unacceptable for it. But in 2017 we witness the huge interference of Russian powers in Spain internal affairs, first of all in spreading the independence moods in Catalonia. The main conclusion is that the world has to learn some lessons from Scottish and Catalonia cases and to be ready to new challenges in world politics in a format of information threats.

Winning the Argument and Moving the Fight: The Legacy of a Grassroots Humanitarian

Public Voices ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Mary Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Winning Strategy ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Trade Offs

The author of this article argues that the two-decades-long litigation struggle was necessary to push the political actors in Mississippi into a more virtuous than vicious legal/political negotiation. The second and related argument, however, is that neither the 1992 United States Supreme Court decision in Fordice nor the negotiation provided an adequate riposte to plaintiffs’ claims. The author shows that their chief counsel for the first phase of the litigation wanted equality of opportunity for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), as did the plaintiffs. In the course of explicating the role of a legal grass-roots humanitarian, Coleman suggests lessons learned and trade-offs from that case/negotiation, describing the tradeoffs as part of the political vestiges of legal racism in black public higher education and the need to move HBCUs to a higher level of opportunity at a critical juncture in the life of tuition-dependent colleges and universities in the United States. Throughout the essay the following questions pose themselves: In thinking about the Road to Fordice and to political settlement, would the Justice Department lawyers and the plaintiffs’ lawyers connect at the point of their shared strength? Would the timing of the settlement benefit the plaintiffs and/or the State? Could plaintiffs’ lawyers hold together for the length of the case and move each piece of the case forward in a winning strategy? Who were plaintiffs’ opponents and what was their strategy? With these questions in mind, the author offers an analysis of how the campaign— political/legal arguments and political/legal remedies to remove the vestiges of de jure segregation in higher education—unfolded in Mississippi, with special emphasis on the initiating lawyer in Ayers v. Waller and Fordice, Isaiah Madison

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
Quality Health Care ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Quality Health ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
High Standards

Why do some societies achieve high standards of living, relatively broad access to education and quality health care, serviceable infrastructure, predictable and largely impersonal legal procedures, and relatively accessible avenues to peaceful political expression, while others stagnate with guarded islands of extravagant wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty, corrupt autocratic systems, and simmering conflicts—or even full-blown civil wars? Why, did South Korea, a dictatorship that faced devastating war from 1950-1954, and whose 1960 GDP per capita was half that of Mexico and twice that of India, have, by 2015, a per capita GDP that exceeded Mexico’s by a factor of three and India’s by a factor of 17—in addition to a largely peaceful transition to democracy? How might a society, trapped in stagnation, corruption, and repression, initiate and sustain processes of economic and political development?

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Ethical Disposition

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

Corruption and Political Order

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Gray
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Capital Flight ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Political Settlement ◽  
The Way

This chapter contrasts the way that the political settlement in both countries shaped the pattern of redistribution, reform, and corruption within public finance and the implications that this had for economic transformation. Differences in the impact of corruption on economic transformation can be explained by the way that their political settlements generated distinct patterns of competition and collaboration between economic and political actors. In Vietnam corrupt activities led to investments that were frequently not productive; however, the greater financial discipline imposed by lower-level organizations led to a higher degree of investment overall in Vietnam that supported a more rapid economic transformation under liberalization than in Tanzania. Individuals or small factional networks within the VCP at the local level were, therefore, probably less able to engage in forms of corruption that simply led to capital flight as happened in Tanzania, where local level organizations were significantly weaker.

scholarly journals Globalization and educational inequality during the 18th to 20th centuries: Latin America in global comparison

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Baten ◽  
Christina Mumme
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Gdp Per Capita ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Global Comparison ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Rich

AbstractThis paper explores the inequality of numeracy and education by studying school years and numeracy of the rich and poor, as well as of tall and short individuals. To estimate numeracy, the age-heaping method is used for the 18th to early 20th centuries. Testing the hypothesis that globalization might have increased the inequality of education, we find evidence that 19th century globalization actually increased inequality in Latin America, but 20th century globalization had positive effects by reducing educational inequality in a broader sample of developing countries. Moreover, we find strong evidence for Kuznets’s inverted U hypothesis, that is, rising educational inequality with GDP per capita in the period until 1913 and the opposite after 1945.

OMNES QVI SVNT EIVS ORDINIS A POMPEIO EVOCANTVR: THE PROCONSUL POMPEIUS’ SENATORIAL MEETING IN 49 b.c.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Roman M. Frolov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Republican Rome ◽  
The Future ◽  
Scholarly Attention

In his Bellum Ciuile, Caesar reports the events of 1 January 49 with these words (1.3.1): misso ad uesperum senatu omnes qui sunt eius ordinis a Pompeio euocantur. laudat <promptos> Pompeius atque in posterum confirmat, segniores castigat atque incitat. When the Senate had been dismissed towards dusk, all who belonged to that order were summoned by Pompeius. He praised the determined and encouraged them for the future while criticizing and stirring up those who were less eager to act. This meeting has not attracted much scholarly attention and admittedly for a good reason: other circumstances of the outbreak of the Civil War are, perhaps, more significant for understanding the events as well as the intentions and decisions of the political actors. The importance of this gathering lies, however, not so much in what its role might have been in the developments of the year 49 but rather in the context of the phenomenon of the promagistrates’ interference in the domestic politics of Late Republican Rome.

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