Steven M. Maser

Demographic factors affecting constitutional decisions: the case of municipal charters

13. ConclusionsAfter decades of studying municipal charters largely by looking for patterns in the data, we have a good basis for proceeding more formally with testable theories. The political significance of demographic change becomes apparent by looking at its impact on political conflict in combination with the biases in social-choice rules. The theory of civil rights provides a framework for doing this. It suggests identifying (1) the distribution of civil rights conveyed to citizens by alternative charters and (2) the bases for political conflict, such as different demands for services and the unequal command of economic resources to satisfy them. Charters, then, become political tools. Simple statistical tests fail to refute this.The methodology employed in these tests follows logically from the theory. However, untangling region from the state laws is easier than untangling ethnicity or even race from income as explanatory variables. Understanding cultural differences that may well create value conflicts independent of financial ones will be still more difficult. Furthermore, some population changes should be considered endogenous to a theory of charter reform. Better estimates will require multiple-equation formulations that can handle simultaneity. In sum, more thought, better data, and more refined tests are necessary.How deterministic can we be in making predictions? Some ambiguity may be inherent in studying institutions such as city charters. The significance of a particular provision is not always the same because of its complex interactions with other provisions. The context in which citizens enact a provision is, of course, all important. The more subtle the impact of the provision, the more subtle the contextual factors that induced its enactment. That may justify close historical analysis informed by a theory of constitutional contracts, but it inhibits prediction. Still, predicting the direction and rate of change in municipal charters should be within the realm of possibilities.

The Contractual Architecture of Public Policy: A Critical Reconstruction of Lowi's Typology

We outline a theory of public policy using our transaction space model of contractual analysis. This approach is based on transaction cost economics, game theory, and the contractual paradigm. It treats government activities, including statutes and the organizations that administer them, as long-term contracts negotiated to economize on the costs of decision making. We return to Theodore Lowis typology of public policies--although our construction departs from its underlying assumptions in numerous ways--to answer two questions. First, how does government come to be involved in some coercive activities and not others? Second, why does Lowis typology appear to fit some policies so well and to be inadequate for others? According to our theory, demand for government intervention arises when people cannot resolve private problems of coordination, division, and defection, each a distinct dimension of transaction space. Lowis typology fits unidimensional problems best. Multidimensional problems are more complex but consistent with the model.

State Export Promotion for Economic Development

As part of their economic development programs, state governments have begun a variety of activities to promote exporting by their local firms. To describe which promotional methods are being used and why, this article summarizes the results of a survey of state officials, incorporating information from other recent studies. Perhaps the least costly method is governments supplying information to businesses as a way of reducing the extraordinary uncertainties associated with exporting; almost all states do that. State laws or regulations may impede exporting; few states recognize that and few have done anything about it. Programs such as subsidized loans or intergovernmental cooperation are used in varying degrees. The efficiency and efficacy of any program turns in part on conditions peculiar to each state.

Rational Rhetoric in Politics: The Debate Over Ratifying the U.S. Constitution

During the debate over ratifying the U.S. Constitution, both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists offered inconsistent arguments. They violated principles of transitivity (e.g., statements such as “A furthers B” and “B furthers C” coexist with the statement “A hinders C”). Using cognitive mapping to extract the network of causal assertions offered during the debate, and transaction resource theory to identify game-theoretic structures in these maps, including coordination, bargaining, and social dilemma games, we find that violations of transitivity have only two sources. They arise in bargaining games, where concessions not only entail costs but also reduce the prospect for a costly conflict, and social dilemmas, where cooperation not only entails individual costs but also increases the amount of public good produced. Thus conflicting valuations of concessions and cooperation generate an ambivalence that is reflected in transitivity violations. Hence these violations serve as markers within the maps that indicate the presence of either bargaining games or social dilemmas. These games also reflect situations in which debaters have incentives to engage in strategic manipulation of information.

The impact of asset specificity on single-period contracting

Abstract Asset specificity plays an important role in contracting independently of bounded rationality and opportunism. A model of risk-averse rational maximizers, acting within a state preference framework in which Nature is the only source of risk, predicts that (1) asset specificity reduces the contractual incentives and the scale of commitment by parties to a contract when incentive remains; (2) risk aversion augments the importance of asset specificity; and (3) asset specificity tends to necessitate default premia and lead to larger premia where these are needed to create mutual incentives. Two classes of contractual arrangements are illustrative: those in the construction industry and those associated with debt financing.

How Bid-Protest Mechanisms Mitigate Opportunism in Government Contracting

ABSTRACT This article proposes that government contracting, especially the source-selection process, gives rise to a particularly intractable set of transactional hazards: governmental opportunism and third-party opportunism. It shows how the first of these hazards can be addressed by third-party intervention and how third-party intervention leads to third-party opportunism. It argues that existing arrangements governing the source-selection process, primarily the GAOs bid-protest mechanism, mitigate the consequences of governmental opportunism and the direct harm resulting from third-party opportunism. More formally put, it concludes that the bid-protest mechanism works to minimize the maximum losses resulting from opportunistic behavior in the source-selection process. Therefore, existing governance arrangements are reasonably effective solutions to the idiosyncratic transactional hazards associated with source selection in government contracting.

The Fox and the Henhouse: On the Wisdom of GAO Audits of the Federal Reserve

Is assigning the GAO to protect against political favoritism by the Fed like asking the fox to guard the henhouse? According to Steve Maser and Fred Thompsons work it is: they find that Congressional pressure has a large impact on GAO decision making.

Helping Legislators Legislate: An Executive Education Program for State Senators

Abstract This paper reports on lessons learned from designing and delivering a two-day executive education program to help state senators be better senators. We provide 10 lessons on the process of creating and delivering the program and five lessons about its content. We base these lessons on observations we made during the program and evaluations submitted by the participants. We frame the lessons in ways that apply to a range of legislative institutions.