Balanced Norms Research Articles

The Partisan Foundations of Balanced Budget Politics

The historical image of the Republican Party as a party strongly supporting the balanced budget norm has come under increasing scrutiny as many prominent Republicans, including President George W. Bush, have overtly argued that tax cuts should be a higher priority than deficit reduction. Have the Democrats truly surpassed the Republicans as being better advocates for deficit reduction, however? To determine partisan support for balancing the budget, I analyze balanced budget amendment votes in Congress since 1982, the “Fiscal Responsibility” vote scores given to members of Congress by the Concord Coalition, and the relationship between party control of the White House and the size of the deficit. Findings suggest mixed evidence to support both Democratic and Republican claims to be the party most likely to back deficit reduction. While evidence from the legislative branch implies that Republicans are competitive with the Democrats in regards to deficit reduction, the story from the executive branch suggests that Democrats have done a much better job of reigning in budget deficits. As a result, the leadership of the White House in regards to balancing the budget appears to be more important than ever.

Inconsistency in the Law: In Search of a Balanced Norm

The law is not a bunch of scattered rules, it is a body. This simple statement suffices to demonstrate that consistency is crucial for the law. Esteemed philosophers radicalise the statement: If it stops being consistent, to them the law is no longer the law. Consequently, consistency must be an absolute value, not to be traded against whatever competing normative concern. This paper adopts the opposite, consequentialist position. It takes consistency as a value, but one that bears balancing according to the principle of proportionality. In order to rationalise this balancing exercise, the paper does two things. It offers a taxonomy of consistency objects, and of ensuing definitions of consistency. Rules, authoritative statements of fact, output and outcome are taken up in turn. Definitions rely on mathematical set theory, and on basic concepts from statistics, like variance and skewedness. Secondly, the paper opposes the normative values in favour of legal consistency, and the concerns that might justify occasional deviations from this normative goal. It sketches the complementary implications of design for consistency and design for (some) inconsistency.

Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization for Model Reduction

In this paper a global stochastic optimization algorithm, which is almost surely (a.s.) convergent, is applied to the model reduction problem. The proposed method is compared with the balanced truncation and Hankel norm approximation methods by examples in step responses and in approximation errors as well. Simulation shows that the proposed algorithm provides better results.

The Heavenly Chorus: Interest Group Voices on TV News

The work of E. E. Schattschneider (1960) and others suggests that there may be systematic biases or unrepresentativeness in the voices that interest groups contribute to public deliberation about policy. Evidence from hundreds of TV news stories concerning 80 diverse policy issues from the 1969-82 period indicates that corporations and business groups predominated (especially on economic issues), with 36.5% of all interest group mentions, contrasted with only 13.2% for labor. Professional and agricultural interests were rarely heard from. Citizen action groups had 32% of all interest group stories, but these often concerned unpopular protest activity. Such imbalances, apparently resulting from differential command of money and other resources, seem to violate norms of equal access, representativeness, balance, and diversity in the marketplace of ideas.

Constitutional Limitations on State Tax Exportation

The notion that there are constitutional limitations on the power of the states to export their tax burdens to residents of other states has been the predicate of recent court challenges to state taxing schemes. The concept of state tax exportation and its implications for constitutional analysis have not, however, been systematically explored by the courts. The economics of state tax exportation suggest that a judicial inquiry into the extent of state tax exportation would be a formidable if not an insuperable task. And the Supreme Court, when recently confronted with an opportunity to constitutionalize a principle of excessive state tax exportation, flatly declined to do so. It is nevertheless possible that the concept of state tax exportation may have a role to play in constitutional analysis as a vague admonition to the states not to transgress some yet to be defined norms of fiscal balance in our federal system.

Constitutional Limitations on State Tax Exportation

The notion that there are constitutional limitations on the power of the states to export their tax burdens to residents of other states has been the predicate of recent court challenges to state taxing schemes. The concept of state tax exportation and its implications for constitutional analysis have not, however, been systematically explored by the courts. The economics of state tax exportation suggest that a judicial inquiry into the extent of state tax exportation would be a formidable if not an insuperable task. And the Supreme Court, when recently confronted with an opportunity to constitutionalize a principle of excessive state tax exportation, flatly declined to do so. It is nevertheless possible that the concept of state tax exportation may have a role to play in constitutional analysis as a vague admonition to the states not to transgress some yet to be defined norms of fiscal balance in our federal system.