State of the Union Addresses and the President's Legislative Success

The State of the Union speech is generally considered a roadmap of the president's legislative program each year, yet little attention has been given to whether it functions as a determinant of the president's legislative success. The primary purpose of this article is to empirically examine the policy content of the message and the link to the president's policy success. In addition, I explore how this relationship is conditioned by the strength of the opposition party and the level of partisanship in Congress. Based on analysis of annual data from 1954–2000, the results indicate the speech has a positive and significant influence on the president's success in domestic policy. While this influence remains significant at low and average levels of partisanship and opposition party strength, it disappears when each factor is at high levels. I conclude with a discussion of how this study relates to previous research on the link between presidential speeches and legislative success.     

Cocaine and the British Empire: The Drug and the Diplomats at the Hague Opium Conference, 1911–12

This article will consider the reasons for the inclusion of cocaine in the Hague Opium Convention of 1912. This was the first time that the emerging international drugs regulatory system considered substances other than opiates and it was British delegates who took the initiative to include cocaine in discussions and in the final version of the agreement. Historians have tended to keep brief their accounts of this episode, seeing the British agenda on cocaine as driven primarily by their wider interests in opium, or alluding briefly to colonial anxieties about manufactured drugs. This article returns to the events of 1911–12 and argues that Britain's position on cocaine deserves greater attention. It shows that British administrations in Asia had tried to control a growing market there for the drug since the turn of the century, and that their efforts had failed. In exploring the history of these efforts, and their impacts in the early days of the international narcotics-control regime, the article suggests that imperial policies are more complex than many historians have previously acknowledged, and that it may be time for fresh thinking on the relationship between empires and drugs in modern Asia.     

Are Spells of Unemployment Longer in Nonmetropolitan Areas? Nonparametric and Semiparametric Evidence

I use nonparametric and semiparametric proportional hazard models to examine whether individuals resident in nonmetropolitan areas experience lower per period rates of exit from unemployment following job loss than metropolitan area residents. Results show that between 1989 and 1993 per period cumulative rates of exit from unemployment were slightly higher in nonmetropolitan areas, mainly due to nonmetropolitan–metropolitan differences in individual characteristics and local economic conditions. Employment density is found to have a positive association with rates of exit of unemployment in metropolitan areas but not in nonmetropolitan areas.     

Accumulations research: Problems and prospects for estimating site occupation span

Accumulations research examines the dynamic relationship among artifact discard, duration of occupation, and population size. The history of accumulations research is reviewed, emphasizing studies that use accumulation rates to measure site occupation span. Ethnoarchaeological and experimental research demonstrates that cooking pots are an ideal artifact type for accumulations research. Data from the Duckfoot site in southwestern Colorado are used to develop an annual accumulation rate of cooking pot sherds for households. This rate is used, along with population estimates and estimates of the total cooking pot sherd accumulation, to determine the occupation span of five sites located in the nearby Dolores River valley.     

Biodiversity Conservation: The Process of Economic Assessment and Establishment of a Protected Area in Vanuatu

This article describes the framework adopted for the socio-economic assessment of protected areas intended to safeguard biodiversity. This framework, which can be described as a three-tiered approach to conservation, is applied to the process of assessment and establishment of a protected area (PA) in Vanuatu. The potential benefits that the landowners of the PA could derive from logging activities, and the subsistence values derived from the PA are considered. It appears that if the PA was to be established without the payment of any compensation, the landowners would face substantial net costs. During the research process, it was suggested that the Government of Vanuatu could take up a lease on the land to compensate the landowners for the loss of potential logging royalties. When the benefits accruing to the landowners from a lease agreement are compared with the foregone logging royalties, it is found that the net present value of a seventy-five year lease agreement is approximately equivalent to the net present value of logging royalties.