Legislation

About: Legislation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 62664 publications have been published within this topic receiving 585188 citations. The topic is also known as: law & act.

Organized Interests and the Decision of Whom to Lobby in Congress

Abstract: In a departure from previous research, we focus on the dyadic relationship between lobbyists and committee members in the House of Representatives in order to test hypotheses about what factors shape the decisions of individual groups to lobby individual committee members. Our primary assumption is that organized interests seek to expand their supportive coalitions and affect the content and fate of bills referred to committees. In order to accomplish these goals, they give highest priority to lobbying their legislative allies in committee; allies may lobby other members of Congress on a group's behalf and shape legislation to conform with a group's preferences. But organizations with access to a strong resource base can move beyond their allies and work directly to expand support among undecided committee members and legislative opponents. Our empirical analysis provides evidence to support our expectations.

Structuring politics: The rules of the game: The logic of health policy-making in France, Switzerland, and Sweden

Abstract: Explaining change is a central problem for institutional analysis. If institutions are purported to have a kind of staying power, then how can the same institutions explain both stability and change? If institutions limit the scope of action that appears possible to different actors, why can they sometimes escape these constraints? This essay uses the case of national health insurance politics to show how institutions can explain both policy stability and policy change. The key to the analysis is a break with "correlational" thinking. Rather than analyzing policy-making in terms of correlations between policy inputs (such as demands from various social groups or past policy legacies) and policy outputs (such as specific pieces of legislation) the strength of institutional analysis is to show why policy inputs and policy outputs may be linked together in different ways in different political systems.

The Mythologies of Faculty Productivity: Implications for Institutional Policy and Decision Making

Abstract: Research accomplishment, the most "cosmopolitan" academic function, has social and economic value. Research visibility certainly enhances institutional stature among peers (Alpert, 1985). Political and public support for academic institutions, however, rests on the perceived institutional commitment to "local functions," especially teaching and learning (Ewell, 1994; Hearn, 1992). Legislative calls for accountability and effectiveness, and public concern about increasing costs and the potential adverse consequences for access clearly focus on the teaching mission. Many state legislatures have focused on faculty commitment to teaching often in terms of instructional productivity. Efforts to eliminate tenure by the governing boards in Arizona and Florida, legislation in Ohio to mandate an increase in the time faculty spend on teaching, and growing legislative interest in post-tenure review are specific expressions of this concern. The focus of this reform movement is not limited to public institutions. The Nati onal Science Foundation, which supports and influences both public and private institutions, recently required grant applicants to state how their research work will affect their teaching effort. Much of the policy debate about the nature of faculty work is shrouded in myth, opinion, and conjecture. Critics of the perceived lack of emphasis on teaching in research universities may assume that this criticism applies equally well to teaching-oriented colleges, a questionable assumption at best. Parents, potential students, and even state legislators often overestimate the actual cost of attending college (National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education, 1998). Yet the perceived inattention to teaching and learning, particularly at the undergraduate level, is not off base (B ok, 1992; Fairweather, 1996). Boyer (1990) acknowledged the legitimacy of this claim when he attempted to encourage institutional responsiveness to public concerns about teaching and learning. He advocated considering teaching as a form of scholarship to increase its status on college campuses. The American Association of Higher Education Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards took Boyer's concepts a step further, encouraging institutional teams to foster changes in local faculty rewards. The willingness and ability of academic institutions to respond effectively to these challenges is influenced by what Clark (1972) calls institutional sagas. These sagas contain a variety of beliefs or myths that help perpetuate organizational culture by socializing new participants (students, administrators, and especially the faculty) by establishing norms for their behavior. Among the set of beliefs held by many academic administrators and faculty members about the nature of faculty work and productivity are that (a) teaching, research, and service are activities imbedded in some form within each faculty member's work effort, (b) teaching and research are mutually reinforcing, and as a consequence (c) faculty can simultaneously be productive in teaching and research. Other than hiring new faculty members, the principal expression of academic values about faculty work lies in the promotion and tenure decision. It is here rather than in institutional rhetoric that the faculty seek clues about the value of different aspects of their work. It is here that productivity is most meaningfully defined and evaluated. Yet promotion and tenure decisions are both individual and private in nature. These characteristics make it difficult to identify the cumulative effects of individual decisions within an institution, much less identify patterns across types of institutions and disciplines. The purpose of this article is to identify these larger patterns by examining national data that represent criteria often used in local promotion and tenure decisions or in annual faculty reviews. I am particularly interested in the belief that all aspects of faculty work--particularly teaching and research--can be equally (or somewhat equally) addressed by the work of each faculty member. …

No Child Left Behind?: The Politics and Practice of School Accountability

Abstract: The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act is the most important legislation in American education since the 1960s The law requires states to put into place a set of standards together with a comprehensive testing plan designed to ensure these standards are met Students at schools that fail to meet those standards may leave for other schools, and schools not progressing adequately become subject to reorganization The significance of the law lies less with federal dollar contributions than with the direction it gives to federal, state, and local school spending It helps codify the movement toward common standards and school accountability Yet NCLB will not transform American schools overnight The first scholarly assessment of the new legislation, No Child Left Behind? breaks new ground in the ongoing debate over accountability Contributors examine the law's origins, the political and social forces that gave it shape, the potential issues that will surface with its implementation, and finally, the law's likely consequences for American education

Social licence and environmental protection: why businesses go beyond compliance

Abstract: Traditionally, corporations which complied with the dictates of applicable legislation would have regarded not just their legal, but also their social obligations, as ending at that point. Socio-legal research suggests that corporations complied with law only for instrumental reasons (to avoid legal penalties) or, because "regulations are taken to be a measure of societal expectations, and [are] thus interpreted as a guide to an organisation's moral and social duties," (Wright, 1998: 14). From this traditional point of view, corporations could be expected to take actions which went 'beyond compliance' only where they saw some self-interest in doing so, such as increasing profit, usually over the short-term (Porter and Van der Linde, 1995)