Search

A conference paper related to the proportion of women in courts of the general jurisdiction and intermediate and the highest appellate courts in the U.S. to be presented at the Southern Political Science Association conference is presented. It discusses about the increase in number of female chief justice in the U.S. Supreme Courts. Information about methods of selection of judges in the U.S. states is also presented.

The paper presents the results of a study involving the teaching of writing in an undergraduate public administration class. The course involved collaboration between an instructional librarian and a political science faculty member to develop a course that would incorporate the Association of College and Research Libraries' Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education into the teaching methods utilized. To meet its goal of ensuring that graduates of the University have effective research and written communication skills, the University has a writing requirement that all undergraduate students take two freshman composition courses and an additional two designated writing intensive courses, at least one of which must be from the student's major or minor field. The public administration class that was the subject of the study is designated as a writing intensive class and it is the only undergraduate political science course offered that focuses on the subfield of public administration. Thus, a major goal of the collaboration was to incorporate writing and research instruction into the course without detracting from the typical introductory coverage of public administration material.The study used pre- and post-testing to measure the effect of the course on the students' levels of information literacy, and a standardized writing rubric to measure the quality of the students' writing abilities throughout the progression of the course. The paper lays out the design of the course and reports the results of the study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers in the area of municipal finance have traditionally classified cities for comparison purposes based on the form of government (mayor versus manager) or metropolitan status (central versus suburb) of the city. However, with changes in the governing structure and general nature of cities, the continued validity of such classification methods has been called into question. The National League of Cities (NLC) recently developed a new typology that consists of six categories of cities: Spread cities; Gold coast cities; Metro centers; Meltingpot cities; Boomtowns; and Centervilles.This paper explores the NLC typology in terms of the financial behavior of the cities within each category and examines differences among the categories through analysis of variance and t-test methods. The study tests six hypotheses predicting statistically significant differences between city types within the NLC typology in terms of expenditure, revenue, and debt practices. The analysis uses institutional, demographic, and financial data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the International City/County Management Association. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers in the area of municipal finance have traditionally classified cities for comparison purposes based on the form of government (mayor versus manager) or metropolitan status (central versus suburb) of the city. However, with changes in the governing structure and general nature of cities, the continued validity of such classification methods has been called into question. The National League of Cities (NLC) has developed a typology that consists of six categories of cities: Spread cities; Gold coast cities; Metro centers; Meltingpot cities; Boomtowns; and Centervilles.This paper compares the NLC typology to the more traditional means of classification in terms of the financial behavior of U.S. cities. The analysis uses institutional, demographic, and financial data for 936 cities obtained from the U.S. Bureau of the Census and the International City/County Management Association. Several regression models are used to measure the utility of each classification scheme to predict fiscal outputs of the cities and to compare their usefulness. Results show that the regression model utilizing the NLC typology classifications is the most predictive for spending on common functions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]