Civil Service Reforms in Italy : The Importance of External Endorsement and A…

The traditional portrait of civil servants in Italy, as well as in most other countries, has always been one of not particularly efficient employees yet have the benefit of a secure job and can look forward to a comfortable retirement package. In order to change this image, public management reforms have largely focused on civil servants since the 1990s. However, many academics and practitioner…

The Internationalization of Early Childhood Education and Care Issues : Frami…

Edition

Volume 24, Issue 2, April 2011, pages 285–309

ISBN/ISSN

09521895

Collation

-

Series Title

Governance

Call Number

-

The Power of the Purse : Supranational Entrepreneurship, Financial Incentives…

This article shows how the European Commission cultivates policy shifts toward a particular idea of a common European Higher Education Area by using its considerable financial leverage. By making European Union (EU) funding dependent on grant recipients meeting certain strategically selected conditions, the Commission creates new incentive structures for domestic actors, in this case higher edu…

Dimensions of Family Policy and Female Labor Market Participation : Analyzing…

This article investigates whether and how family policy influences the probability and intensity of mothers' labor market participation. Unlike previous studies, this contribution focuses on group-specific policy effects, thereby accounting for the fact that, theoretically, women with different resources and preferences should respond differently to given policy measures. The analyses show that…

Why Do Private Governance Organizations Not Converge? A Political–Instituti…

Voluntary governance arrangements focusing on responsible business behavior have proliferated over the past decades, and in many sectors of industry, different governance organizations now compete for business participation. This private governance competition has negative consequences for the effective functioning of these arrangements. In the literature up until now, optimism prevails on how …

Kerala's Ombudsman : A Mismatch of Mission and Capabilities

India, like many developing nations, has adopted many accountability institutions. One of these is the ombudsman. Originally a Swedish invention, ombudsman's offices were adopted by many countries over the last 50 years. Recently, the South Indian state of Kerala has instituted an ombudsman's office. While it has had notable successes in resolving minor cases related to local government institu…

A model of non-informational preference change

According to standard rational choice theory, as commonly used in political science and economics, an agent’s fundamental preferences are exogenously fixed, and any preference change over decision options is due to Bayesian information learning. Although elegant and parsimonious, such a model fails to account for preference change driven by experiences or psychological changes distinct from inf…

Paradox lost : Explaining and modeling seemingly random individual behavior i…

Despite a large body of experimental data demonstrating consistent group outcomes in social dilemmas, a close look at individual behavior at the micro level reveals a more complicated story. From round to round, individual behavior appears to be almost random. Using a combination of formal deduction and agent-based simulations, we argue that any theory of individual choice that accounts for the…

Coordination dilemmas and the valuation of women in the U.S. Senate : Reconsi…

We offer a model of colleague valuation to illuminate the coordination challenges women legislators face. Our model predicts that women members’ strategies depend upon whether they value women colleagues as much as men do, or instead value fellow women colleagues more highly. We test these predictions by analyzing leadership PAC campaign contributions U.S. Senators made to incumbent and challen…

The origins of social institutions

How do individual agents enact the institutions that govern collective behavior in a social situation? How do individuals come to share self-enforcing expectations about collective behavior, so that societal rules and constraints have an effect on individual choice? Conventional accounts, such as contract and evolutionary theories or the analysis of conventions and social conflict, cannot expla…

Majorities with a quorum

Based on a general model of the ‘quaternary’ voting rule, sensitive to voters’ choices between four different options (abstaining, voting ‘yes’, voting ‘no’ and staying at home), we systematically study different types of majority and quorum. The model allows for a precise formulation of majority rules and quorum constraints. For such rules four types of majority can be defined. We also conside…

On the buyability of voting bodies

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest groups compete. In contrast, imposing the secret ballot is an effective way to fight vote buying in the…

Cross-Cutting Issues and Party Strategy in the European Union

Has European integration affected national electoral politics beyond the margins? Experts describe its main impact as empowerment of radical voices. Mainstream parties avoid European Union (EU) issues that divide their left-or right-based organizations; extreme parties attack the EU and the center’s silence. But EU issues also generate important dynamics inside mainstream parties. The authors t…

Capitalist Systems, Deindustrialization, and the Politics of Public Education

Recent years have seen a number of studies on the determinants of educational spending. Almost all of the existing work emphasizes the importance of left-wing governments as a motor of expansion because such expansion allegedly ensures both redistribution and the facilitation of a supply-side economy. The existing literature thereby corroborates the power resource theory. Against this common wi…

Remote Control : How the Media Sustain Authoritarian Rule in China

This study examines the role of the media in sustaining regime stability in an authoritarian context. The article engages the recent work on authoritarian resilience in comparative politics but goes beyond the standard focus on elections to other important institutions, such as the media and courts, that are used by authoritarian leaders to bolster legitimacy. The authors find that the Chinese …

To Call or Not to Call? Political Parties and Referendums on the EU’s Const…

Why did some political parties in the EU member states support and others oppose a facultative referendum on the Constitutional Treaty? The authors argue that electoral competition played a major role in determining how parties positioned themselves with respect to the desirability of a referendum. Parties that expected electoral gains supported and those that expected electoral losses opposed …

Homing in on excellence : Dimensions of appraisal in Center of Excellence pro…

Excellence has become a watchword for goal setting and assessment in science and technology policy. While the concept has been around for many years in its commonsense meaning, it is now explicitly used for science governance; however, so far little work has been done to detail, operationalize and systematize the dimensions of value present in academic evaluators’ use of the concept. This artic…

Synthesis in policy impact assessment

Impact evaluators of large-scale and multi-domain policy proposals have had difficulties in aggregating detailed assessment results into summative evaluative conclusions. Assumptions about how to aggregate impacts from micro to macro level across multiple evaluation domains (economic, social, natural environment) differ and different approaches produce different end results. An aggregation prob…

The limited scope of policy appraisal in the context of referendum democracy …

The article investigates how the specific political system context shapes the effectiveness of policy appraisals. Based on a single case study on Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) in Switzerland, we argue that the meager impact and success of the RIA is due to its institutional context, namely Swiss semi-direct referendum democracy. Direct democratic involvement and the division of power in th…

The logic of evaluation professionalism

This article draws on the sociological literature to (i) explore the intersection between evaluation and professionalism; (ii) identify the extent to which evaluation fulfills the main attributes of professionalism; (iii) apply logical models of professionalism to the practice of independent and self-evaluation; and (iv) speculate about the future of the discipline. It rests the case for evalua…