12 research outputs found

    Critical Digital Infrastructure Protection: An Investigatoin Into The Intergovernmental Activities Of Information Technology Directors In Florida Counties

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    As cyber attacks become more sophisticated, the risk to all networked computer systems increases. Whether public or private, whether federal, state, or local, the threat is equally real. Consequently, local governments must respond accordingly to understand the threats, take measures to protect themselves, and determine how to respond in the event of a system breach. Additionally, since cyber criminals do not respect geographic or administrative boundaries, local leaders must be prepared to instantly interact with other governments, agencies, and departments to suppress an attack. Guided by the theory of intergovernmental management (IGM), this exploratory research investigated how Information Technology (IT) Directors in Florida county constitutional offices use intergovernmental relations and management activities as part of their information security efforts. Specifically, this research sought to determine: 1) which IGM activities do county IT Directors most often perform; 2) do county IT Directors make more use of vertical or horizontal IGM relationships; 3) is there a relationship between office/county demographics and the IGM activities its IT Directors most often perform? To answer these questions, an electronic survey was distributed to 209 directors, of which 125 responded. Overwhelmingly, the findings indicate that these Directors rarely engage in IGM activities regardless of the purpose or type of government/department contacted. However, when seeking intergovernmental assistance, it is most often horizontally with other Departments within their own government and least often vertically with Federal offices. The most frequently performed intergovernmental activity is seeking technical assistance, however seeking program/project information is also perform more frequently than the other activities explored in this research. The least frequently performed activities involved seeking to modify established IT partnerships. Further, there was evidence of relationships between certain office/county demographics and IGM activity. The discovery of these patterns and relationships can be used to aid policy and program development, as well as to stimulate deeper inquiry into the intergovernmental dimensions involved in protecting local elements of the U.S. Critical Digital Infrastructure

    THREE ESSAYS ON THE LINKS BETWEEN LOCAL GOVERNMENT STRUCTURAL CHANGES AND PUBLIC FINANCE

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    This dissertation, comprised of three essays, explains and evaluates local government structural changes from a public finance perspective. The first essay examines the determinants of the rapid growth of special districts, while the next two essays estimate the effects on property values of school district consolidation and village dissolution in New York State, respectively. Together, the three essays contribute to our understanding of the causes and consequences of local government structural changes in the United States. By bring together two central trends in state and local public finance, namely, the expansion of state-imposed tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) and the rapid growth of special districts, the first essay looks into the hypothesis that TELs are partly responsible for the increase of special districts over the last several decades. To eliminate the possible omitted variable bias, I employ a combination of fixed effects, regional time trends and approximate measures of fiscal conservativeness. Based on a national data set of counties over the period 1972-2007, I find TELs, on average, increase the use of special districts (circumvention effects), whereas TELs don’t force local governments to cut their intergovernmental fiscal transfer to special districts in the same county area (deterrent effects). The estimation results are robust to multiple tests of common trends assumptions, five alternative measures of TELs, alternative model specifications and different empirical strategies. This results confirm the theory that special districts have been extensively created by local general-purpose governments as an institutional strategy to circumvent the fiscal constraints imposed by TELs. The second essay explores the impacts of school district consolidation on property values in upstate New York from 2000 to 2012. This research, conducted in collaboration with Professors William Duncombe and John Yinger, adds a time dimension to research on the property-value impacts of consolidation. By combining propensity score matching and double-sales data to compare house value changes in consolidating and comparable school districts, we find that it takes time either for the advantages of consolidation to be apparent to homebuyers or for the people who prefer consolidated districts to move in. In addition, the long-run impacts of consolidation on house values are positive in low-income census tracts but negative in high-income census tracts. This result suggests that high-income households are particularly attached to the benefits, such as close contact with teachers, of small districts. Streams of institutional, economic and fiscal factors recently have been converging and substantially changing the landscape of local government in the United States. Dissolution, an old and new approach, has increasingly been used and therefore drawn much public attention nowadays. The third essay provides the first study investigating whether village dissolution, as a form of general-purpose government reorganization, affects the attractiveness of local communities. In New York, voters in several villages voted to dissolve the village and hence to shift all government services to the town government in which the village is located. I show that village dissolution does not alter the amount people are willing to pay inside the (eliminated) village boundaries, but that the price of housing declines in areas of the town outside the village (TOV). Presumably, residents in the TOV areas are upset with the negative externalities of village dissolution

    Brave New Wireless World: Mapping the Rise of Ubiquitous Connectivity from Myth to Market

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    This dissertation offers a critical and historical analysis of the myth of ubiquitous connectivity—a myth widely associated with the technological capabilities offered by “always on” Internet-enabled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. This myth proclaims that work and social life are optimized, made more flexible, manageable, and productive, through the use of these devices and their related services. The prevalence of this myth—whether articulated as commercial strategy, organizational goal, or mode of social mediation—offers repeated claims that the experience and organization of daily life has passed a technological threshold. Its proponents champion the virtues of the invisible “last mile” tethering individuals (through their devices) primarily to commercial networks. The purpose of this dissertation is to uncover the interaction between the proliferation of media artifacts and the political economic forces and relations occluded by this myth. To do this, herein the development of the BlackBerry, as a specific brand of devices and services, is shown to be intimately interrelated with the myth of ubiquitous connectivity. It demonstrates that the BlackBerry is a technical artifact whose history sheds light on key characteristics of our media environment and the political economic dynamics shaping the development of other technologies, workforce composition and management, and more general consumption proclivities. By pointing to the analytic significance of the BlackBerry, this work does not intend to simply praise its creators for their technical and commercial achievements. Instead, it aims to show how these achievements express a synthesis that represents the motivations of economic actors and prevailing modes of thought most particularly as they are drawn together in and through the myth of ubiquitous connectivity. The narrative arc of this dissertation is anchored by moments of harmonization among political economic interests as these shape (and are shaped by) prevailing modes of producing and relating through ubiquitous connectivity

    Domestic institutions and European monetary integration: The politics of monetary and fiscal convergence in Italy, 1992-1998.

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    This thesis analyses how Italy succeeded in fulfilling the macroeconomic convergence criteria agreed upon at the Maastricht conference in late 1991. It is argued that economic policy reform in Italy between 1992 and 1998 has to be understood primarily as the result of two sets of factors: international financial and political pressure; and domestic political and socio-economic institutions. The institutionally grounded concept of 'executive strength' is regarded as particularly important, as 'weak' Italian governments had been the main reason for unsustainable economic policies in the past. Methodologically, the study uses an historical-institutionalist approach to explain institutional and policy reform. From both an empirical and theoretical perspective, successful macroeconomic convergence during the 1992-98 period represents an anomaly. Hence the study of successful policy reform can be regarded as a 'deviant case study' which is implicitly comparative in nature. The thesis analyses in a historically-detailed manner institutional and policy reforms in the four most relevant policy areas, that is, budgetary policy, pension reform, private and public sector wage policies, and monetary and exchange rate policy. It is argued that policy reforms in these four areas made an important contribution to monetary and fiscal convergence. The study finds that the obstructive character of domestic institutions - and especially executive weakness - was overcome thanks to international pressure. Nonetheless, domestic institutions continued to affect policy outcomes. By comparing the French and Italian macroeconomic policy regimes, the concluding chapter provides a second-line defence in favour of the domestic-institutional and 'executive strength' accounts

    Globalization and Labour in the Twenty-First Century

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    Globalisation has adversely affected working-class organisation and mobilisation; but international labour movement demobilisation is not necessarily an irreversible trend. Globalisation has prompted workers and their organisations to find new ways to mobilise. This book examines international labour movement opposition to globalisation. It chronicles and critically scrutinizes the emergence of distinctively new forms of labour movement organisation and mobilisation that constitute creative initiatives on the part of labour, which present capitalism with fresh challenges. The author identifies eight characteristics of globalisation that have proven problematic to workers and their organisations and describes and analyses how they have responded to these challenges since 1990 and especially in the past decade. In particular, it focuses attention on new types of labour movement organisation and mobilisation that are not simply defensive reactions but are offensive and innovative responses that compel corporations to behave more responsively and responsibly towards employees and society at large. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of globalisation, political economy, labour politics, economics, Marxism and sociology of work

    State-firm bargaining at the subfederal level: The case of California's unitary tax.

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    This thesis models negotiations over U.S. subfederal economic policies that conflict with international norms. It analyses a recent case of a U.S. state government bargaining with foreign entities over a subfederal economic regulation which violated international norms: California's system of worldwide combined unitary taxation. The thesis applies Stopford and Strange's framework of state-firm bargaining to the subfederal level by: 1) determining which actors were involved in lobbying to change a U.S. state economic policy which violated international norms, California's unitary tax method; 2) determining the actors' policy agendas; 3) determining the different types of political and economic assets each actor possessed, and how effectively the actors used these assets to achieve their policy agendas; 4) determining how effectively the actors used various channels of negotiation to influence California's policy, and; 5) determining the most effective uses of assets and negotiating channels, key initiatives which influenced the outcome of the policy debate. What happens when U.S. state economic regulations conflict with international norms. What capabilities do states possess to defend their regulations when bargaining in the international arena. This thesis will argue that in the case of California's unitary tax, the following hypotheses are valid: 1) Powerful U.S. states such as California can maintain regulatory standards at odds with federal and international norms. Growing global economic interdepence is not eliminating California's regulatory options, since the U.S. federal government often refuses to effectively constrain powerful states which violate federal and international norms. 2) U.S. state governments can bargain directly with foreign governments and multinational enterprises as actors in the international arena. As the international arena increasingly intrudes on the affairs of subfederal governments, the U.S. federal government will not always be the preeminent negotiating channel for international actors seeking to influence U.S. economic policies

    Texas Law Review

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    Journal containing articles, notes, book reviews, and other analyses of law and legal cases
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