Posts Tagged Government
Terrorism, interest-group politics, and public policy: curtailing criminal modes of political speech.
Terrorist incidents have occurred in the United States and around the world for centuries. Tax revolters, anarchists, war protesters, and other critics of government policy have often used violence to send messages to the policymakers controlling the issues of interest. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, have been widely interpreted as a comment on U.S. policy toward the Islamic world, especially U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, terrorist attacks might be defined as violence for the purpose of sending a political message with the aim of influencing policy or at least of voicing disapproval. In this sense, terrorism is one possible method of “political dialogue.”
Even when political analysts do not share the goals of terrorist groups, they may defend the use of violence as a method of sending messages because of the political nature of the message sent. After all, political messages and popular protests receive special protection in all liberal democracies, and civil disobedience has often generated improvements in government policies. The conjunction of the “political message” explanation of terrorist actions and a “free speech” justification of those actions clearly resonates with some proponents of popular resistance, but it is nonetheless a bit puzzling for most proponents of free speech. Those who advocate the former explanation might argue that the United States brought the recent attacks on itself by various foreign-policy mistakes made over the years. Most proponents of free speech will reject this conclusion as a justification for terrorism, but they have not yet found a clear line of argument with which to respond to it.
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Can Internet Users Alter Public Policy on Climate Change?
There are an estimated 295 million English speaking internet users and somewhere around 1,000 million users worldwide. Within the internet there are thousands of groups, chats and forums. What would happen if internet users joined into one overwhelming group to lobby for action to reduce global warming? What would happen if millions of emails were sent, on a given day, to the world’s policy makers? What would happen if the U.S. Congress, the White House, members of Parliaments, Prime Ministers and other world leaders received hundreds of millions of emails, in a single day, demanding that action be taken now to end the pollution of or planet?
This year, Earth Day is April 22nd.
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The Uneasy Public Policy Triangle in Higher Education: Quality, Diversity, and Budgetary Efficiency
This publication takes up the challenge of describing and analyzing the internal and external dynamics of United States higher education policy with regard to three global and often conflicting goals of higher education policy: quality, diversity, and efficiency. The issue of diversity, on the one hand, which covers many others, such as access, participation, equity and opportunity, is indeed the oldest among these goals and was a predominant objective of public policy over the long period of expansion of higher education in the United States after the Second World War. The themes of quality and budgetary efficiency, on the other, have both more recently moved up on the political agenda within a context of increasing globalization of markets and international competition, tightness of public budgets, and changes in the political, social, and economic climates. The book aims at pointing out critical issues in the tensions that exist among these basic policy options and tries to give some direction and recommendations for future priority setting in higher education.
The publication is in fact a collection of discussion papers presented in October 1988 at the College of William and Mary on the interaction of public policy and higher education. Fourteen papers have been grouped together in five sections of which the first one sets the historical scene of higher education policy making in the United States. Changes in the interaction of federal and state involvement in higher education policy are discussed. From a rather limited and haphazard involvement of government in higher education policy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the federal government has become massively involved in need-based student aid and research subsidization from the seventies onwards without being able, however, to embrace institutional financing. The states on the contrary, traditionally in charge of institutional support, have started to supplement federal student aid over the seventies.
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