<p>California's Constitutional Revision Commission assembled the state's leading scholars to investigate how the structure of the constitution affects state and local government. Their proposals for far-reaching and innovative reform incorporate ideas from across the political spectrum and form a benchmark for future debate about California governance.</p>

Constitutional Reform in California: Making State Government More Effective and Responsive

History

Bruce E. Cain

Roger G. Noll

Americas

Institute of Governmental Studies Press

<p>California often leads the nation forward. From the tax revolts of the 1970s to the digital revolution of the 1990s, America's largest state has become the proving ground of the national future. Today, California is again showing the way, this time toward a rich diversity that is already spreading to the rest of the nation. By 2000, California had become the first large state to have a majority of nonwhite residents. Texas has since followed, and today a variety of states across the nation are approaching that benchmark: Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, New York. How does California's extraordinary diversity affect its politics? The essays collected in this volume examine many of the crucial issues that spring from California's changing demographics. What are the fundamental trends underlying the changes? How is a changing population affecting political behavior and participation? What is the interplay between increasing minority communities and California's cherished initiative process? What about the impact on organized labor? These questions and others are examined by many of the state's leading scholars in Racial and Ethnic Politics in California: Continuity and Change. The lessons learned are important not only in the Golden State. Almost one in every eight Americans now lives in California; such sheer demographic bulk ensures that the state cannot be ignored. As editors Bruce Cain and Sandra Bass note in their introduction, The demographic die has been cast. Extraordinary diversity is the coming reality. This important book helps us to understand the political impacts and realities of that change, both in the laboratory of tomorrow California and across the United States.</p>

Racial and Ethnic Politics in California: Continuity and Change, vol. 3

Politics & Social Sciences

Sandra Bass

Politics & Government

Term limits have changed Sacramento, but exactly how have they affected the Legislature, and what can the institution do to respond? In Adapting to Term Limits: Recent Experiences and New Directions, Bruce E. Cain and Thad Kousser measure the effects of term limits and identify ways to adapt to them. Guided by the testimony of informed observers, their report offers quantitative analyses using bill contents and histories, voting behavior, budget figures, and other archival records to explore the effects of term limits. Concluding that term limits have eroded legislative capacities in unhelpful ways, they offer recommendations for restoring some of those capacities while maintaining the legislative turnover mandated by Proposition 140.

Adapting to Term Limits: Recent Experiences and New Directions

Thad Kousser

Public Policy Institute of California

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Books by Bruce E. Cain