Legislative Calendars and Workload Management in Texas
There is a well-developed normative model of how state legislatures ought to use calendars to make the management of their workloads more efficient. State legislatures that follow the normative model identify more and less important bills. Presumably, major and minor bills are treated differently--but are they? This study desegregates the agenda of the Texas Legislature into unimportant, less important, and more important bills as defined by bill placement on calendars. There are systematic differences in the way bills of varying importance are treated. Moreover, the differences are consistent with the contention that calendars can facilitate the more efficient management of legislative workloads.
Paths, Events and Strategic Choices: The Evolution of American State Legislatures
American state legislatures have evolved dramatically throughout their history (Squire and Hamm 2005). In particular, the structures, rules and procedures governing the operations legislatures have changed significantly over the course of the 20th and 21st Centuries (Hamm, Hedlund and Martorano 2001, 2006; Martorano 2006). The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework for studying the development and evolution of American state legislatures.
State and local politics
The stories of the former comfort women have galvanized both Asian and non-Asian intellectuals working in a variety of fields. Scholars of Asian history and politics, feminists, human rights activists, documentary filmmakers, visual artists, and novelists have begun to address the subject of the comfort system to take up the cause of the surviving comfort women's sturggles to call attention to sexual violence against women, especially during wartime to consider the links among militarism, racism, imperialism, and sexism and to include this history into 20th-century political history. This volume contains a cross-section of responses to the issues raised by the former comfort women and their new visibility on the international stage. Its focus is on how theorists, historians, researchers, activists, and artists have been preserving, interpreting, and disseminating the legacies of the comfort women and also drawing lessons from these. The essays consider the impact and influence of the comfort women's stories on a wide variety of fields and describe how those stories are now being heard or read and used in Asian and in the West.