Blogs

"Access and Lobbying: Looking Beyond the Corruption Paradigm," by Dorie Apollonio, Bruce E. Cain, and Lee Drutman, Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 36:1 (2008) (attached; see below), has some very valuable things to say about local government lobbying, even though it focuses on federal government lobbying.

The authors note that, despite the greater focus of academics and good government groups on campaign finance regulation, more money is spent by companies on lobbying...

One Indian tribe wants to build a casino, another tribe already has one in the area and doesn't want competition. You're a council member in the city that can effectively block the casino from being built. Both tribes want your support, and are willing to back up that support with campaign contributions. What do you do?

According to an article in yesterday's ...

I just received an e-mail announcing a search for a new editor of the journal Public Integrity, the only academic journal in the field in which I work. Here is the description of the journal by its publisher on the journal's webpage:

What should an ethics program do when an agency or department takes ethics advice and enforcement into its own hands? This issue has arisen in Hawaii County, according to two articles in West Hawaii Today, one from two years ago, the other from last week.
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Although citizen participation is not part of government ethics, it's important to keep reminding ourselves that it is central to government ethics, because it is a principal goal of government ethics programs.

Officials' ethical misconduct undermines citizen trust and participation, but there are also other obstacles that get in the way. One of these is the lack of opportunity to express opinions in public forums at a time when input can make a difference. This post will look at...

In a recent blog post, the background issue was the effect of independent spending on a local public campaign financing program in Santa Fe.

Especially in the shadow of recent Supreme Court decisions, this is currently a serious problem for many local public campaign financing programs, and is a potential problem for all of them. In public testimony to the New York...