This paper extends Stigler and Peltzman's approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature. The model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications. The paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior. The first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion; the second assumes that Congress controls agency decisions. The recent behavior of the Federal Trade Commission provides the empirical setting. Substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model, including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over FTC decisions.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1837369

Bureaucratic Discretion or Congressional Control? Regulatory Policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission

Ten of the 15 seats on the U.N. Security Council are held by rotating members serving two-year terms. We find that a country’s U.S. aid increases by 59 percent and its U.N. aid by 8 percent when it rotates onto the council. This effect increases during years in which key diplomatic events take place (when members’ votes should be especially valuable), and the timing of the effect closely tracks a country’s election to, and exit from, the council. Finally, the U.N. results appear to be driven by UNICEF, an organization over which the United States has historically exerted great control.

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How Much Is a Seat on the Security Council Worth? Foreign Aid and Bribery at the United Nations

Although observers of Brazilian politics commonly hold that voters reward incumbents for "bringing home the bacon," I provide reasons to question the direct link between pork and electoral success as well as statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of such a link. This generates a puzzle: if pork barreling is ineffective, why do Brazilian deputies spend so much time seeking pork? The answer is that deputies do not trade pork for votes, they trade pork for money: pork-barrel success helps incumbents raise funds from private sector interests that profit from government contracts. In turn, politicians' access to money, not pork, directly affects their electoral prospects. This article provides a new understanding of the electoral connection in Brazil by showing that existing analyses either have overestimated pork's impact or are underdetermined because they have not included measures of campaign finance. The findings should also encourage comparativists interested in pork-barrel politics, clientelism, th...

/pdf/pork-barreling-is-not-credit-claiming-or-advertising-3a53jpacoi.pdf

Pork Barreling Is Not Credit Claiming or Advertising: Campaign Finance and the Sources of the Personal Vote in Brazil

This study applies concepts derived from neo-institutionalism to coalition behavior in state supreme courts, using a pooled cross-sectional time series design. Neo-institutionalism embraces rational choice assumptions about human behavior, with particular attention to how institutional arrangements shape purposive behavior. From this perspective, dissent, or the tendency to form less than unanimous voting coalitions, is viewed not merely as the collective expression of individual attitudes or policy preferences or the result of structural characteristics of institutions but rather as a complex interaction of values and structures. A model incorporating variables derived from the neo-institutional perspective was estimated with GLS-ARMA and compared to an environmental model generated from past research. The amount of variation in dissent rates uniquely accounted for by the neo-institutional model is over six times that of the environmental model, while a composite model can explain more than one-third of the variation in state supreme court dissent rates for 1966, 1973, and 1981. More importantly, however, all the relationships posited by the neo-institutional approach are statistically significant and in the expected direction. An institutional approach guided by rational choice theory offers an important contribution toward developing a more refined understanding of judicial behavior. T he propensity for appellate court judges to dissent is of particular interest to scholars of judicial politics. Open expressions of disagreement among the members of a court offer researchers the opportunity to examine the political motivations underlying judges' voting. Patterns of conflict and consensus also provide the necessary foundations for developing theories of judicial behavior. An extensive body of literature has been generated on the subject of dissent. Utilizing an institutional approach, the research on state appellate institutions has identified the presence of an intermediate appellate court as a crucial determinant of dissent in state courts of last resort. Various environThis research was truly collaborative. The authors are listed in random order. Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at various conferences, and many helpful suggestions were offered. We wish to thank in particular John Gates, Gary King, Jeffrey Segal, and Dan Zimmer

Neo-Institutionalism and Dissent in State Supreme Courts

The Senate's equal representation of states shapes coalition building in distributive politics. The great variation in state population means that some states have far greater need for federal funds than others, but all senators have equal voting weight. As a result, even though all senators' votes are of equal value to the coalition builder, they are not of equal “price.” Coalition builders can include benefits for small states at considerably less expense to program budgets than comparable benefits for more populous states. Building on formal models of coalition building, two hypotheses are developed and tested. First, coalition builders will seek out less costly members to build supportive coalitions efficiently. Second, the final outcomes of distributive policy will more closely reflect the preferences of small-state senators than large-state senators. The hypotheses are tested by examining the 1991 and 1997–98 reauthorizations of federal surface transportation programs. The findings support both hypotheses.

Senate Representation and Coalition Building in Distributive Politics

The Kat River Settlement was established in the eastern Cape Colony in 1829 as a measure of frontier defence. In 1851 many of its coloured inhabitants rebelled against the colonial government. The rebels' motives were beyond the comprehension of contemporary officials, and no thorough investigation of them has since been made. All accounts agree that the Settlement initially thrived, despite the harmful effects of a frontier war in 1835. In later years, however, the government used the Settlement as a dumping ground for coloureds and tribesmen dispossessed elsewhere. The coloureds' system of economic clientship was simultaneously challenged by the extension of commercial farming techniques in the eastern Cape. Coloured people failed to obtain credit to enable them to adapt. Overcrowding and insecurity bred discontent, particularly among certain coloureds of Gonaqua (Khoi) origin, who remembered suffering earlier injustices at the hands of the whites. Unsympathetic colonial officials and the declining military importance of the Settlement compounded these basic grievances. In 1851, under cover of another frontier war, numbers of Settlement coloureds rebelled. The rebellion failed and the government appropriated the land belonging to the rebels, thus dispersing the last concentration of Gonaqua Khoi.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700012809

Progress and decline in the Kat river settlement, 1829–1854

Pork-Barrel Politics The Politics of Eastern Cape Separatism 1820–1854. By Basil A. le Cordeur. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1981. Pp. xiii + 314. £17.50.

Between 1800 and 1850 the Coloured people were a power in the eastern Cape Colony. During the 'Servants War' of 1799 they drove the encroaching Boers out of Uitenhage district. They then made terms with the white authorities, and Coloured levies fought for the Colony in the Xhosa Wars of 1819, 1835 and 1846. Each time they displayed outstanding qualities of loyalty and bravery. They also demanded equal treatment with white levies and generally showed great independence of spirit. This behaviour reflected their attitude in peacetime. Some, no doubt, submitted quietly to lives of servitude. But many tried to support themselves without wage labour and fiercely resisted attempts to force them into service. Coloured hostility—rather than its own sense of philanthropy—obliged the Government to abandon a 'vagrancy law' which the Cape Legislature put forward in 1834, 1847 ^ 8siThe wealthier colonists, who saw the legislation as a means of obtaining labourers, took a jaundiced view of Coloured independence. They berated the Coloureds as 'truculent', 'surly' and 'idle'. Nevertheless they had a healthy respect, born of experience, for the Coloureds' fighting abilities: as late as 1852 in the long-settled districts of the western Cape rumours of a Coloured uprising were enough to cause a panic among numbers of Boers and drive them into laager.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700014845

The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest Mission Stations and the Coloured Communities of the Eastern Cape 1800–1852 . By Jane Sales. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975. Pp. viii + 176. £7.50.

Tony Kirk

Papers

Progress and decline in the Kat river settlement, 1829–1854

Pork-Barrel Politics The Politics of Eastern Cape Separatism 1820–1854. By Basil A. le Cordeur. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1981. Pp. xiii + 314. £17.50.

The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest Mission Stations and the Coloured Communities of the Eastern Cape 1800–1852 . By Jane Sales. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975. Pp. viii + 176. £7.50.