David Mayhew’s Divided We Govern significantly challenged the conventional wisdom of the adversarial effect of divided government on government effectiveness in the United States. While the post-Mayhewian literature has been centred on legislative productivity as a measure of gridlock, gridlock is here defined as an ‘inability to change policy’. In this study, the preferences of the legislators, such as the filibuster, override and House median veto players are plotted in Euclidean space. The analysis focuses on the influence of the area of the winset, which is an intersection overlapped by the veto players’ indifference curves. There is a substantial impact of the area of the winset on the change in policy output point, which is measured by the ADA scores and by Poole’s Mean Winning Coordinate. Yet divided government has marginal or no effect on policy swing. The conclusion is that the preferences of veto players, but not party control of the government, have a substantial impact on gridlock in the United States.

For decades, scholars have debated the relative explanatory power of economic and political factors in determining policy outputs. In addition, I introduce a new concept, "systematic determinants," which includes incrementalism and proportionalism. Policy spending is likely to change only marginally, or incrementally, from previous spending levels. Also, the relative sizes of policy programs in a government are likely to remain similar, or proportional.In my study of the elementary and secondary educational spending by the state governments of the United States in 2000, I found that the systematic determinants, such as incrementalism and proportionalism, have a greater influence on the educational spending. Also, my finding shows that Democratic-majority legislative chambers are likely to increase educational spending.

This paper examines political influences over U.S monetary policy, analysed quarterly from 1953 to 2000. We use indicators of presidential and congressional ideology as predictors of actor preferences and as representative of overhead democracy. We also include several economic variables predicting percent change in the federal funds rate. While not surprised to find that economic conditions are important in explaining Fed decisionmaking, we also find that the theory of overhead democracy also contributes to the explanation. Initially, both presidential and congressional ideology are important but in a combined model, presidential variables wash out influence of congressional variables. Thus, we conclude that overhead democracy must be included in models predicting Fed decisionmaking.

Metazosulfuron is a novel sulfonylurea herbicide discovered and developed by Nissan Chemical Industries, Ltd., which exhibits excellent herbicidal activity against Echinochloa spp., annual and perennial weeds including sulfonylurea resistant biotypes in paddy fields at 60-120 g a.i./ha with good crop safety to rice. In addition, it has favorable toxicological, ecotoxicological and environmental profile. Metazosulfuron (trade name; Altair ® ) was registered and launched in Japan in 2013, and has been also introduced in Korea and China as of 2016. This paper describes a history of discovery, syntheses, herbicidal characteristics and crop safety of metazosulfuron.

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