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Partisan gerrymandering and the construction of American democracy
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ISBN: 9780472029525 0472029525 047211901X 1306081637 Year: 2013 Publisher: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press,

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"Erik J. Engstrom offers a historical perspective on the effects of gerrymandering on elections and party control of the U.S. national legislature. Aside from the requirements that districts be continuous and, after 1842, that each select only one representative, there were few restrictions on congressional districting. Unrestrained, state legislators drew and redrew districts to suit their own partisan agendas. With the rise of the "one-person, one-vote" doctrine and the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, redistricting became subject to court oversight. Engstrom evaluates the abundant cross-sectional and temporal variation in redistricting plans and their electoral results from all the states, from 1789 through the 1960s, to identify the causes and consequences of partisan redistricting. His analysis reveals that districting practices across states and over time systematically affected the competitiveness of congressional elections; shaped the partisan composition of congressional delegations; and, on occasion, determined party control of the House of Representatives"--


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Electing the senate : indirect democracy before the seventeenth amendment
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ISBN: 0691163170 1400852684 Year: 2015 Publisher: Princeton : Princeton University Press,

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"From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people--instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. Electing the Senate investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. Wendy Schiller and Charles Stewart find that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure. Electing the Senate uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship--played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners--that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. Electing the Senate raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government. "--


Book
The Evolution of a Nation : How Geography and Law Shaped the American States
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ISBN: 1283227487 9786613227485 1400840546 Year: 2011 Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press,

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Although political and legal institutions are essential to any nation's economic development, the forces that have shaped these institutions are poorly understood. Drawing on rich evidence about the development of the American states from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, this book documents the mechanisms through which geographical and historical conditions--such as climate, access to water transportation, and early legal systems--impacted political and judicial institutions and economic growth. The book shows how a state's geography and climate influenced whether elites based their wealth in agriculture or trade. States with more occupationally diverse elites in 1860 had greater levels of political competition in their legislature from 1866 to 2000. The book also examines the effects of early legal systems. Because of their colonial history, thirteen states had an operational civil-law legal system prior to statehood. All of these states except Louisiana would later adopt common law. By the late eighteenth century, the two legal systems differed in their balances of power. In civil-law systems, judiciaries were subordinate to legislatures, whereas in common-law systems, the two were more equal. Former civil-law states and common-law states exhibit persistent differences in the structure of their courts, the retention of judges, and judicial budgets. Moreover, changes in court structures, retention procedures, and budgets occur under very different conditions in civil-law and common-law states. The Evolution of a Nation illustrates how initial geographical and historical conditions can determine the evolution of political and legal institutions and long-run growth.


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What's the matter with Delaware? : how the first state has favored the rich, powerful, and criminal-and how it costs us all
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ISBN: 0691185778 Year: 2022 Publisher: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press,

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"How the "First State" has enabled international crime, sheltered tax dodgers, and diverted hard-earned dollars from the rest of usThe legal home to over a million companies, Delaware has more registered businesses than residents. Why do virtually all of the biggest corporations in the United States register there? Why do so many small companies choose to set up in Delaware rather than their home states? Why do wealthy individuals form multiple layers of private companies in the state? This book reveals how a systematic enterprise lies behind the business-friendly corporate veneer, one that has kept the state afloat financially by diverting public funds away from some of the poorest people in the United States and supporting dictators and criminals across the world. Hal Weitzman shows how the de facto capital of corporate America has provided safe haven to money launderers, kleptocratic foreign rulers, and human traffickers, and facilitated tax dodging and money laundering by multinational companies and international gangsters. Revenues from Delaware's business-formation industry, known as the Franchise, account for two-fifths of the state's budget and have helped to keep the tax burden on its residents among the lowest in the United States. Delaware derives enormous political clout from the Franchise, effectively writing the corporate code for the entire country-and because of its outsized influence on corporate America, the second smallest state in the United States also writes the rules for much of the world.What's the Matter with Delaware? shows how, in Joe Biden's home state, the corporate laws get written behind closed doors, enabling the rich and powerful to do business in the shadows"-- "Delaware is so boring that it's funny, as immortalized by one of the most memorable jokes in the movie Wayne's World. Indeed, Delaware is the de facto capital of corporate America, the embodiment of blandness. But what if behind this banality lay a systematic enterprise that blatantly diverted public funds away from the poorest people in America and supported the worst criminals and dictators in the world? Legal scholars, financial journalists, and elite businesspeople will all tell you that by now it's common knowledge that Delaware is not just business friendly-it is an obvious financial haven for terrorists, criminals, dictators, arms-dealers, money-launderers, and tax evaders. But no one has put all the pieces together and written a book about it. Accomplished investigative journalist Hal Weitzman does just that. This book explains in clear terms to the broadest possible audience how Delaware diverts money from the poorest states in the US through various means, most obviously the "Delaware loophole," which in effect enables huge businesses such as Home Depot and WalMart to avoid paying state taxes to the states in which they actually conduct business. In Shut Down Delaware, Weitzman will also show how Delaware is an integral part of an international system that fosters extraordinary tax evasion and money laundering, through its indefensible system of incorporation, which allows anyone to set up a business without specifying who owns the business. Over time what this has led to is that some of the biggest and most well-known businesses in the world sharing the same Delaware addresses as the world's most notorious arms dealers and dictators. Using public data, interviews, investigative journalism, and academic scholarship, Weitzman will be the first to put the story together in book form and call the industry out. For years, US lawmakers and law enforcement have been criticizing foreign tax havens such as Switzerland and Luxembourg for unjust practices, but when the trail inevitably leads back to Delaware, there is nothing more they can say or do. Shut Down Delaware will bring this glaring discrepancy to light, and the implications could be tremendous. First, there is no defense for Delaware allowing business incorporation without any identification. Second, many states have gotten wise and passed legislation preventing businesses from taking advantage of the "Delaware loophole" but most, including the nation's poorest states, have not. A high-profile book could be just what it takes raise public awareness on both fronts, and if these laws were changed, a huge amount of business would be affected. Shut Down Delaware has the potential to create an enormous shift in the way the world's largest companies and shadiest illegal entities do business in the United States"--

Keywords

Corporation law --- Tax havens --- Corporations --- Money laundering --- Taxation --- Delaware --- Economic policy. --- A Modest Proposal. --- American International Center. --- Americans. --- Andrew Fastow. --- Anonymity. --- Anti-competitive practices. --- Attempt. --- Backpage. --- Bank account. --- Bank fraud. --- Barry Pepper. --- Bureau of Corporations. --- Campaign finance. --- Candidate. --- Casino Jack. --- Chairman. --- Citizenship of the United States. --- Civil penalty. --- Corporation. --- Creditor. --- Crime. --- Currency transaction report. --- Customer. --- Delaware General Corporation Law. --- Enron. --- Facilitator. --- Federal government of the United States. --- Figure 1. --- Finance. --- Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. --- Financial crimes. --- Financial intelligence. --- Financial services. --- Foreign official. --- Fortune 500. --- Franchise tax. --- Fraud. --- Frederick Chiluba. --- Funding. --- George Washington. --- Gift card. --- Government agency. --- Government revenue. --- Governor of New Jersey. --- Hippie. --- Inauguration. --- Intellectual property. --- Internal affairs (law enforcement). --- International sanctions. --- Jack Abramoff. --- Jeffrey Skilling. --- Joe Biden. --- Jurisdiction. --- Kenneth Lay. --- Kleptocracy. --- Ku Klux Klan. --- Law enforcement. --- Lawsuit. --- Lawyer. --- Laxative. --- Legal fiction. --- Legislation. --- Lobbying. --- Lotion. --- Market capitalization. --- Mercenary. --- Mergers and acquisitions. --- Michael Scanlon. --- Misconduct. --- Money laundering. --- Op-ed. --- Operating agreement. --- Parent company. --- Paul Manafort. --- Perpetuity. --- Political scandal. --- Public finance. --- Regulation. --- Remittance. --- Resignation. --- Retirement. --- Revenue. --- Salary. --- Shell corporation. --- Slavery. --- Special agent. --- State law (United States). --- State legislature (United States). --- Statute. --- Subsidiary. --- Supply chain. --- Tax avoidance. --- Tax evasion. --- Tax. --- Terrorism financing. --- The New York Times. --- Trade union. --- Viktor Bout. --- Wide Variety. --- Zambia.

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