The Never-Boring Balkans: The Elections of 2016

A quarter-century since the troubled democratic transitions of the former Yugoslav republics, elections in the region are competitive and few would expect that losers would dare to reject voters’ verdict. Europe’s proximity and the institutions of Euro-Atlantic integration have greatly aided the region’s transformation. Yet this tale of a region eager to integrate with the West is not the whole…

Tunisia’s Islamists and the Turkish Model

Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have historically excluded Islamist parties from the political process, making it difficult to assess assumptions about how they would behave in power, let alone about their potential to stimulate and steward a democratic transition. Until Tunisia’s Ennahda party won elections in 2011, no Islamist party in (or beyond) the M…

The Three Regions of the Old Soviet Bloc

The 21 former Soviet-bloc countries fall into three classes of political systems representing a good equilibrium, a bad equilibrium, and a final group that teeters between the two. The nine Central and East European countries that have become EU members represent a good equilibrium: they retain democratic political systems and have corruption under reasonable control. Seven post-Soviet countrie…

Violence Against Women in Politics

Reports of physical attacks, intimidation, and harassment aimed at female politicians, activists, and voters have grown as women have become more politically engaged around the world. Often dismissed as the “cost of doing politics,” such acts pose a serious threat to democracy and raise questions about the progress that has been made globally toward incorporating women as full political actors.…

Turkey: How the Coup Failed

On 15 July 2016, Turkey was shaken by an attempted coup. For the first time in modern Turkish history—a history littered with attempted coups—the elected government thwarted the putsch. We suggest that the success of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in defeating the coup attempt is part and parcel of its competitive authoritarian regime. On the one hand, AKP’s extensive access to …

A Transformed Political Landscape

The 23 June 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership exposed deep fractures within the British party system. Products of global political, cultural, and financial trends, these fractures have diminished the power of the U.K. government and of other Western democracies alike. Though the EU’s role in these changes was ambiguous, it became a scapegoat for them, and on the initiative of Conservat…

The Risk to Northern Ireland

The United Kingdom’s 23 June 2016 vote to leave the European Union represents an immense challenge for the Irish peace process. The implicit assumption of continuing British and Irish participation in Europe was woven into the terms of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, which brought an end to three decades of intercommunal violence known as the Troubles. This assumption underpinned guarantees to c…

Resistance from Scotland

Since the 23 June 2016 EU referendum, in which 62 percent of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the EU, the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) has made it a priority to carve out a prominent role for Scotland in the U.K.’s negotiations to withdraw from the EU. Led by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP aims to either derail Brexit’s course or otherwise guarantee Scotland’s members…

A Nation Divided

On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted by a 52 to 48 margin to leave the European Union. The result of the EU referendum was the latest and most dramatic expression of long-term social changes that have been silently reshaping public opinion, political behavior, and party competition in Britain and Western democracies. In this essay, we consider the underlying social and attitudinal shifts t…

The Signs of Deconsolidation

In recent years, parties and candidates challenging key democratic norms have won unprecedented popular support in liberal democracies across the globe. Drawing on public opinion data from the World Values Survey and various national polls, we show that the success of anti-establishment parties and candidates is not a temporal or geographic aberration, but rather a reflection of growing popular…

Journal of Democracy, Volume 28, Number 1, January 2017

Edition

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ISBN/ISSN

10455736

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Does Civil Service Reform Affect Behavior? Linking Alternative Personnel Syst…

Current literature on civil service reform lacks any studies that examine how these reforms impact employee behavior. The research presented here links the presence of alternative personnel systems and perceptions of procedural justice in 2005 to the rates at which complaints were filed in 2006 in the federal government, after controlling for the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Amo…

Autonomous Agencies and Perceptions of Stakeholder Influence in Parliamentary…

This article examines the following question: How do independent agencies within parliamentary democracies perceive the influence of various political principals and societal stakeholders in their environment on their strategic and policy decisions? This question is examined through an extension of the theory and methodology of Waterman, Rouse, and Wright for 213 Dutch agencies. We find that ag…

Competing Explanations for Minority Enrollments in Higher Education

Abstract Although diversity has been considered a vital component in higher education over the past several decades, little research—theoretical or empirical—has rigorously examined the determinants of minority enrollments in higher education. By drawing on literature across several fields, this article helps close this gap by testing competing theoretical explanations for minority enrollmen…

Scientific Expertise and the Balance of Political Interests: MEDCAC and Medic…

Edition

Volume 22, Number 1, January 2012 p. 55-82

ISBN/ISSN

10531858

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Series Title

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

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An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance

Collaborative governance draws from diverse realms of practice and research in public administration. This article synthesizes and extends a suite of conceptual frameworks, research findings, and practice-based knowledge into an integrative framework for collaborative governance. The framework specifies a set of nested dimensions that encompass a larger system context, a collaborative governanc…

Agency Performance and Executive Pay in Government: An Empirical Test

Public management reform has drawn inspiration from principal agent theory and private management, and a favored reform strategy has been civil service reform that strongly recommends pay-for-performance. The hypothesis tested in this paper is that the incentive effect will improve public sector management. The basis is the performance management system introduced in Danish central government w…

Benchmarking and Interorganizational Learning in Local Government

Scholars have questioned the value of benchmarking as a means of advancing public sector performance and innovation, pointing instead to evidence of isomorphism among benchmarking organizations. The authors of this article assert that different types of benchmarking should be distinguished from one another in such assessments and suggest that the verdict for best practice benchmarking will diff…

How (Not) to Solve the Problem: An Evaluation of Scholarly Responses to Commo…

Public administration scholars are beginning to pay more attention to the problem of common source bias, but little is known about the approaches that applied researchers are adopting as they attempt to confront the issue in their own research. In this essay, we consider the various responses taken by the authors of six articles in this journal. We draw attention to important nuances of the com…

Public Management, Context, and Performance: In Quest of a More General Theory

Recent years have seen a substantial growth in the large-N quantitative study of public management and performance. Much of the progress can be attributed to a small number of data sets on local governments in a few countries. The range of data sets suggests the validity of the overall hypothesis of management affecting performance, but the precise findings also vary across these and other cont…