THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY, DISCRIMINATION, AND ACADEMIC PERSONNEL POLICY

During the Seventies more than 133 civil rights decisions regarding academic personnel practices were issued by the federal judiciary. Various statutes were utilized to test the validity of personnel record confidentiality, academic credentials in job selection, pension plans and salary systems, and contract renewal, promotion and tenure decisions. Generally academic institutions lost when they challenged the jurisdictional and procedural authority of the government, but won a substantial majority of cases where individual faculty attacked a personnel decision. Overall the most significant trend was the growing willingness of federal courts to require that academic personnel policies conform to broad principles of civil rights law. In the Eighties these principles may substantially alter traditional personnel policies in higher education.     

THE NEED FOR PROGRAM AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT

This article makes the case for evaluation specific to local government. The article examines the impact of Proposition 13 in California with an eye toward the usefulness of program and performance evaluation. In an era of resource scarcity there is a need for enhanced performance. Performance evaluation is one way for local government administrators to enhance their programs and improve performance.     

TRENDS AND CYCLES IN THE COMPOSITION OF THE FEDERAL BUDGET, 1947–48

In this study, systematic movements in the composition of the Federal budget are studied, using a simple statistical structure which distinguishes trend, cyclical, and price-indexing phenomena. Using NIA data on budget expenditures and receipts, it is found that share movements on both sides of the budget are dominated by trends. Among expenditure categories, the shares of transfer programs show strong upward trends while the defense purchases share has beentrending strongly downward. On the revenue side, the shares represented by social insurance contributions and personal income taxes have been trending upward at the expense of corporateincome taxes and indirect taxes. Significant cyclical and price-indexing responsiveness is shown by several expenditure and revenue categories. A noteworthy finding is that the estimates show little evidence of structural change over 1947-1978, suggesting that the trend and otherforces found to be significant are not of recent origin but have been at work over the whole period.     

THE MEDIAN VOTER,VOTING, AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYMENT*

ABSTRACT This paper provides an explanation for the level of local government employment by developing a median voter model that allows for migration into and out of the city, a local government balanced-budget constraint, and voting behavior by public employees that reflects their role as both demanders and suppliers of local government goods. Unlike previous research, the model developed here explicitly considers voting (for the incumbent) probability density functions which furthermore need not be stationary. The main conclusions of the model are that, ceteris paribus, it is plausible that the level of local government employment varies inversely with the public employee wage demand and with the elasticity of the privately employed voting population with respect to the local tax rate but directly with the voter participation rate of public employees. Contrary to previous theoretical research, there is no determinate relationship between the level of local government employment and the voter participation rate of privately employed citizens. Inferences concerning the structure of local government are also discussed.     

FRESH COMMENTS ON NEGOTIATION BETWEEN THE 14TH DALAI LAMA AND THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Iwrote for China's Tibet of the topicbefore, and many of our readerswrote us explaining their under-standing for efforts made by theCentral Government in issues concerningnegotiation with the 14th Dalai Lama.However, the 14th Dalai astonishedthe world by lecturing on October 24,2001 in Strasbourg that he would work on"the Chinese leaders"for"a channel to beexploited,through negotiation with theChinese Government,for the settlementof problems that exist between China andTibet."