2 resultados para constitutional rights

em CaltechTHESIS


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Over the past decade, scholarly interest concerning the use of limitations to constrain government spending and taxing has noticeably increased. The call for constitutional restrictions can be credited, in part, to Washington's apparent inability to legislate any significant reductions in government expenditures or in the size of the national debt. At the present time, the federal government is far from instituting any constitutional limitations on spending or borrowing; however, the states have incorporated many controls on revenues and expenditures, the oldest being strictures on full faith and credit borrowing. This dissertations examines the efficacy of these restrictions on borrowing across the states (excluding Alaska) for the period dating from 1961 to 1990 and also studies the limitations on taxing and spending synonymous with the Tax Revolt.

We include socio-economic information in our calculations to control for factors other than the institutional variables that affect state borrowing levels. Our results show that certain constitutional restrictions (in particular, the referendum requirement and the dollar debt limit) are more effective than others. The apparent ineffectiveness of other limitations, such as the flexible debt limit, seem related to the bindingness of the limitations in at least half of the cases. Other variables, such as crime rates, number of schoolage children, and state personal income do affect the levels of full faith and credit debt, but not as strongly as the limitations. While some degree of circumvention can be detected (the amount of full faith and credit debt does inversely affect the levels of nonguaranteed debt), it is so small when compared to the effectiveness of the constitutional restrictions that it is almost negligible. The examination of the tax revolt era limitations yielded quite similar conclusions, with the additional fact that constitutional restrictions appear more binding than statutory ones. Our research demonstrates that constitutional limitations on borrowing can be applied effectively to constrain excessive borrowing, but caution must be used. The efficacy of these restrictions decrease dramatically as the number of loopholes increase.

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The Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County has severely limited the power of the Voting Rights Act. I argue that Congressional attempts to pass a new coverage formula are unlikely to gain the necessary Republican support. Instead, I propose a new strategy that takes a “carrot and stick” approach. As the stick, I suggest amending Section 3 to eliminate the need to prove that discrimination was intentional. For the carrot, I envision a competitive grant program similar to the highly successful Race to the Top education grants. I argue that this plan could pass the currently divided Congress.

Without Congressional action, Section 2 is more important than ever before. A successful Section 2 suit requires evidence that voting in the jurisdiction is racially polarized. Accurately and objectively assessing the level of polarization has been and continues to be a challenge for experts. Existing ecological inference methods require estimating polarization levels in individual elections. This is a problem because the Courts want to see a history of polarization across elections.

I propose a new 2-step method to estimate racially polarized voting in a multi-election context. The procedure builds upon the Rosen, Jiang, King, and Tanner (2001) multinomial-Dirichlet model. After obtaining election-specific estimates, I suggest regressing those results on election-specific variables, namely candidate quality, incumbency, and ethnicity of the minority candidate of choice. This allows researchers to estimate the baseline level of support for candidates of choice and test whether the ethnicity of the candidates affected how voters cast their ballots.