British Questions: A Non-Instrumentalist Answer

It is the argument of this article that interpreting the UK in instrumental terms, while highlighting important issues of policy and institutional coordination, is inadequate for a full understanding of the British question. Tracing the instrumentalist thesis in historical, constitutional and political argument, the article points out the limits of this style of thinking and suggests that there…

The Quiet Man of British Politics: the Rise, Fall and Significance of Iain Du…

This article offers a reappraisal of the performance of Iain Duncan Smith as Conservative Party leader between 2001 and 2003. The rationale for the paper stems from the relative neglect of his leadership by political scientists. The paper argues that to disregard his party leadership tenure is to fail to understand the evolution of Conservative Party politics in the era of New Labour hegemony. …

Chronicles of a Death Foretold: the Winter of Discontent and Construction of …

Thirty years on, and in the context of a new crisis, it is time to return to the Winter of Discontent and to the mythology that it has generated. In this paper, I show that the Winter of Discontent was in many respects a manufactured crisis—lived, experienced and responded to through a very particular construction of the events. And I show that such a construction of events is difficult to reco…

Legislators' Blogs in Taiwan

Elected representatives in numerous democracies have adopted blogging as an additional mode of communication with their constituents. In the UK and other advanced democracies, this development has stimulated scholarly optimism as a potential remedy to the estrangement that citizens feel between themselves and their representatives. This article looks at the blogging practices of legislators in …

Evaluating the Success and Contribution of a Minor Party: the Case of the Aus…

This article evaluates the success of the Australian Democrats, a minor party that gained parliamentary representation in federal politics from 1977 until 2008. The party's contribution to Australian democracy is analysed in three areas: electoral, organisational and parliamentary, according to a broader notion of success that incorporates a party's longer term impact on the processes and cultu…

Political Disaffection: What We Can Learn from Asking the People

This interpretive study of the meaning of politics for Dutch citizens offers a distinct contribution to the debate about political disaffection. Politically disaffected citizens interviewed understand politics in terms of a lifeworld-politics clash, and they espouse a policy-oriented ideal of politics that puts their lifeworld at the centre. Although their approach suggests that they turn away …

Women Candidates and Party Practice in the UK: Evidence from the 2009 Europea…

Existing comparative research suggests that women candidates have better opportunities for electoral success when standing in (i) second-order elections and (ii) proportional representation elections—the 2009 European Elections provide an example of both criteria. This paper examines the 2009 results to build upon earlier work on the 1999 and 2004 elections by considering (i) regional patterns …

Public Bill Committees: An Assessment Scrutiny Sought; Scrutiny Gained

Courtesy of a little-noticed reform in the autumn of 2006, Westminster's legislative process has been revitalised. Changes to the House of Commons committee stage of the consideration of bills, have made legislative scrutiny more effective. The reform also has the potential to contribute to a cultural shift in the attitude of all Members of Parliament to accepting the importance of holding the …

Reform of the Wash-up: Managing the Legislative Tidal Wave at the End of a Pa…

In the few days between the calling of a general election and the dissolution of the Westminster Parliament, outstanding legislation is expedited through the Commons and Lords on the basis of deals made privately between the government and main opposition party. This process, known as the wash-up, has been criticised for restricting parliamentary scrutiny and marginalising backbenchers, crossbe…

India: Governance and Growth in State Capacity

Edition

Volume 23, Issue 3, July 2010. pages 381–384

ISBN/ISSN

14680491

Collation

-

Series Title

Governance

Call Number

-

The Life and Death of Public Organizations: A Question of Institutional Design?

Why do some public organizations grow old and others die young? Since Herbert Kaufman first posed this question, considerable research has been devoted to answering it. The findings of that research suggest that the design of new public organizations affects, to a significant degree, their survival chances. In this article, we test whether and how “design factors” affected the durability of the…

The Dynamics of Top-Down Organizational Change: Donald Rumsfeld's Campaign to…

Drawing upon interviews with 69 defense policymakers and close observers, this article develops an extrapolation-oriented case study of Donald Rumsfeld's campaign to transform the development of the U.S. Defense Department's future capabilities. This reform effort, launched by President George W. Bush during his first presidential campaign, encountered difficulties in developing and promoting t…

Improving Russian Justice with Foreign Assistance: Model Courts and the Tacti…

This article argues that as an interactive, tactical approach to sharing good practices, model courts represent an especially fruitful vehicle for accomplishing judicial reform. This contention is illustrated with an assessment of Canadian and American judicial reform projects in Russia in creating model district courts and diffusing their experience to other courts throughout the country. Mech…

The Evolution of Budgetary Institutions in Estonia: A Path Full of Puzzles?

This article examines the evolution of budgetary institutions in Estonia between 1993 and 2008, with a main focus on rules governing the preparation, adoption, and implementation of the state budget. It discusses the initial choice of budgetary institutions in 1993 and subsequent developments in the light of theoretical propositions put forth by the fiscal governance literature. The case of Est…

Local Governance Arrangements and Democratic Outcomes (with Some Evidence fro…

This article carries a broad definition of public–private concertation as a flexible form of governance that is able to overcome the distinction between network governance and participatory governance. It creates a unified framework relying on a process-related democratic approach in order to properly assess these practices in their democratic outcomes. This allows the article to fully depict h…

Renewal of Public Policy via Instrumental Innovation: Implementing Automated …

This article examines the renewal of public policy via instrumental innovation since the adoption in France of an automated sequence of detection and sanctioning of speed limit violations. Involved here is an instrument of public policy that points up the changes that have taken place in recent years in respect of road safety policy and provides a clearer view of some aspects of ongoing state r…

Emotional Beliefs

A belief in alien abduction is an emotional belief, but so is a belief that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, that one's country is good, that a sales tax is unjust, or that French decision makers are irresolute. Revolutionary research in the brain sciences has overturned conventional views of the relationship between emotion, rationality, and beliefs. Because rationality depends on emotio…

Nonstate Actors and the Diffusion of Innovations: The Case of Suicide Terrorism

Studies of terrorism in general and suicide terrorism in particular tend to view terrorist groups independently. However, what if the propensity for a terrorist group to adopt suicide tactics depends in part on its external linkages and the relationship between the organizational capabilities required to adopt the innovation and the organizational capabilities of the group? This article shows t…

Constraining Coercion? Legitimacy and Its Role in U.S. Trade Policy, 1975–2000

The role of legitimacy in international relations is a topic of much debate, yet there is little understanding of the mechanism behind it. Here I address this discrepancy by asking: are state threats perceived as (il)legitimate more or less likely to be successful? By operationalizing illegitimacy as unilateral action in the presence of a multilateral option, I consider the variation in the suc…

Toward Internationally Regulated Goods: Controlling the Trade in Small Arms a…

Contrary to the general trend of trade liberalization, specific goods—such as small arms, drugs, and antiquities—have come under increasing international control in recent decades through a set of international regulatory agreements. This article offers a theoretical framework of government preferences on the international regulation of these goods. Departing from conventional models of trade p…