Tripartism and Its Aftermath

This chapter argues that the restoration of democracy in France started in earnest only with the election in October 1945 of a Constituent Assembly. When voters rejected the Constituent Assembly's draft constitution in the requisite referendum, another six months elapsed before a second Constituent Assembly reached sufficient compromises to produce a new draft, which won voter approval by a thin margin. During the long provisional interval, the CNR Common Program helped undergird Charles de Gaulle's unity government and subsequent tripartite coalitions after the general abruptly exited the scene. However, until the fall of 1947, when a great strike wave brought the experiment to an explosive end, tripartism remained the political framework for France's postwar moment. Successive governments addressed the intractable challenges of postwar recovery while they sought to implement the “peaceful revolution” imagined by CNR in such matters as economic controls, social security, housing, and educational opportunity.

You Want to Spend My Money How? Framing Effects on Tax Increases via Ballot Propositions

Recent scholarly work has discovered that modest changes in the framing of the titles and summaries of ballot measures can have dramatic effects on voter approval. This work expands upon these findings by exploring the effect of language specificity on support for ballot propositions that require the voter to pay for the measure with tax dollars. Although extensive research has explored ballot measure language complexity (e.g., position on the ballot, electoral effects, and prepossessed knowledge have all been shown to play a role in the outcome for propositions), left unanswered is the role of detailed language in altering support. Utilizing original experimental data, this work explores the framing effects of increasing specificity of proposed use of tax expenditures on support for ballot questions. Ultimately, this research finds that propositions providing more information to voters substantially increases the likelihood of support for those measures. Moreover, this increased specificity also bolsters certainty as to how the money will be spent, and intensifies how strongly voters feel about the issues being considered.

The Determinants of Ballot-box Budgeting in California

Although California often receives national attention for its budgeting at the ballot box, virtually all states engage in some level of it because bonds and constitutional amendments involving fiscal matters require voter approval. These decisions can constrain the discretion of policy makers, often making it harder to adopt annual budgets. Despite these consequences, little scholarly attention has been paid to this phenomenon. This article investigates the factors that lead to initiative use on budgetary matters. Specifically, data on California initiatives that earmark revenue or cut taxes from 1948 to 2004 are used to estimate count models. The results show that divided government and party polarization are central factors in determining the number of initiatives on the ballot, but they have divergent effects on earmarks and tax cuts. These factors increase initiative earmarks, while they reduce tax-cut initiatives. Budget conditions also play a significant role in the frequency of these measures.

MAKING PUNISHMENT PAY

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960–2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.

Assessing Transit Changes in Columbus, Ohio, and Sacramento, California

This paper compares the changes experienced by transit systems in two state capitals of similar size: Columbus, Ohio, and Sacramento, California. Over the past two decades, Sacramento added a light rail transit (LRT) starter line and experienced significant ridership growth on its multimodal rail and bus system, while Columbus remained all-bus and experienced a decline in patronage. Reasons underlying the divergent performances of these two systems are analyzed and discussed. It is concluded that, in Sacramento, willing political leadership took good advantage of a one-time opportunity for federal funding to build an LRT starter line; that adding LRT made transit more visible and effective and encouraged voter approval of additional local operating and capital funding; and that all of this resulted in a synergy that attracted more riders to the total LRT and bus transit system and led to extension of the rail system to a third corridor in 2003. Although planning for LRT was begun in Columbus during these same years, a serious interruption in the flow of local funds hampered transit development, required cuts in bus service, and prevented development of that region's planned LRT line. Columbus currently has an LRT project in preliminary engineering, and recent reports suggest a consensus to proceed may be emerging.