This article explores how the party-defined dimensionality of political competition relates to the number of parties competing in legislative elections. It demonstrates that a mathematical relationship between the number of electoral parties and the literature’s concept of dimensionality follows from the variables’ definitions; conversely, it argues that exploring the relationship between the n…
This article examines the extent to which measures to mitigate the current financial crisis and prevent future crises are permissible under a variety of bilateral, regional and multilateral trade and investment agreements. US trade and investment agreements, and, to a lesser extent, the World Trade Organization, leave little room to manoeuvre with capital controls, despite increasing evidence t…
This article discusses the confluence of international initiatives to counter money laundering and terrorist finance with migrant remittances and the growing use of mobile telephone technology for more than making a call. The experiences of Kenya and the Philippines with mobile telephone-based financial services are outlined as potential models consistent with the ‘risk-based’ approach now prom…
‘Improve the investment climate!’ is the dominant advice for governments wishing to achieve substantial increases in productive private investment. However, national-level investment-climate approaches have been criticised for not paying adequate attention to context and feasibility. This article experiments with a new approach which focuses on sectors and on relationships between policy-makers…
Aquaculture is equated with the reduction of poverty by intergovernmental agencies such as the FAO, which advocate the promotion of small-scale aquaculture through project-based interventions. There is a lack of convincing empirical evidence to support the efficacy of this type of intervention, however. Meanwhile, commercial cultured freshwater fish production has increased hugely throughout As…
This article reviews the changing perspectives for improving access to water in the slums of developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. While much of the literature continues to maintain an aversion to state-led urban development policies, there is now increasing emphasis on the importance of informal, small-scale providers and communitarian initiatives, following the many failures…
A nonrandomized experiment carried out in Jharkhand, India, shows how the effects of interventions designed to improve access to family-planning methods can be erroneously regarded as trivial when contraceptive use is utilized as dependent variable, ignoring women’s need for contraception. Significant effects of the intervention were observed on met need (i.e., contraceptive use by women who ne…
This study reports the results of the process evaluation component of the Process and Outcome Evaluation of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) program. The process evaluation consisted of multiple methods to assess program fidelity: (a) observations of G.R.E.A.T. Officer Trainings (G.O.T); (b) surveys and interviews of G.R.E.A.T.-trained officers and supervisors; (c) survey…
The use of web-based surveys to gather information from teachers has become increasingly common primarily based on the premise that they can reduce costs. Yet, relatively, little is known about the quality or cost effectiveness of web-based versus mail surveys for teachers. To study the efficacy of web-based teacher surveys, the author randomly assigned a nationally representative sample of 877…
Thus far researchers have focused on computing average differences in student achievement between smaller and larger classes. In this study, the author focus on the distribution of the small class effects at the school level and compute the inconsistency of the small class effects across schools. The author use data from Project STAR to estimate small class effects for each school on mathematic…
Incentives have shown a variable effect in improving survey response rates, but the effect of a pen from an organization to which the respondent has loyalty has not been studied. Recent college graduates were randomized to receive or not receive a college logo pen accompanying an initial survey mailing. Among 119 total respondents, there were no differences in response rate to the initial maili…
Evaluation designs for social programs are developed assuming minimal or no disruption from external shocks, such as natural disasters. This is because extremely rare shocks may not make it worthwhile to account for them in the design. Among extreme shocks is the 2010 Chile earthquake. Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), an ongoing early childhood program in Chile, was directly affected by the earthquake. …
Individuals in contact with the criminal justice system are a key population of concern to public health. Record linkage studies can be useful for studying health outcomes for this group, but the use of aliases complicates the process of linking records across databases. This study was undertaken to determine the impact of aliases on sensitivity and specificity of record linkage and how this af…
Free to Grow: Head Start Partnerships to Promote Substance-free Communities (FTG) was a national initiative in which local Head Start (HS) agencies, in partnership with other community organizations, implemented a mix of evidence-based family-strengthening and community-strengthening strategies. The evaluation of FTG used a quasi-experimental design to compare 14 communities that participated i…
In studying the characteristics that determine the public, nonprofit, and/or for-profit nature of organizations, public administration scholarship has elaborated upon the “dimensional” approach (e.g., Bozeman, Barry. 2007. Public values and public interest: Counterbalancing economic individualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univ. Press), to the point where it is now furnishing a rich body of th…
This article conceptualizes public service ethos as a multidimensional construct and develops a framework that explains first, why individuals are motivated by this ethos (Public Service Belief); second, how they deliver public services in accordance with this ethos (Public Service Practice); and third, what ends they perceive it to endorse (Public Interest). Despite considerable interest in pu…
Using data from the Federal Human Capital Survey, we demonstrate that the managerial traits of competence, integrity, and benevolence share an important common dimension that we identify as the trustworthiness of managerial leadership (TWML). Using recursive hierarchical linear models, we demonstrate that levels of TWML are strongly and positively associated with several measures of perceived o…
Previous evaluations of publicness have focused largely on organizations and organizational behavior. This analysis extends the applicability of publicness one step further, to consider the effect of the publicness of policy environments on resulting individual-level outcomes. Subprime or high-cost mortgage lending was an increasingly dominant strategy in the mid-2000s to deal with the uncertai…
Although ethics underlying public administration obviously changes over time, it remains largely unknown just how, when, or why this happens. This article presents a study on organizational reform in the system of taxation in Holland around 1748. Comparative use of Max Weber's characteristics of bureaucratization provides a historical perspective on the link between organizational reform and et…