INFORMATIZATION AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A POLITICAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

In recent years, both academic and policy making circles in the UK have shown a growing interest in the potential uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the delivery of government services. Much of the academic literature has been centred around the concept of 'informatization', and it has been suggested that the new technologies are transforming public services. Key theorists in the field of Public Administration have argued that informatization is one of a number of major trends likely to shape public services in the twenty-first century. However, the dominant theoretical approaches within public administration- those rooted in political sciencesuggest that inertia and stability are the norm in the public sector; clearly there is something of a contradiction between these two broad approaches. This paper outlines three political science perspectives that might be used in analysing informatization: the policy networks approach, rational choice and the new institutionalism. Evidence is then drawn from the social security, health care and social care sectors of the British public sector and related to the political science frameworks in order to examine their utility. Not only do these frameworks rightly highlight the incremental nature of change, but they also help to explain important variations in ICT use across the three policy sectors. It is concluded that combining the study of informatization and political science offers a fruitful avenue for future research.     

State-authorizing citizenship: the narrow field of civic engagement in the liberal age

Liberal citizens are held ethically accountable not only for their own acts and behaviors, but also those of their state. Reciprocally, a proper liberal subject is one that metonymizes with the state, merging their fates and moral worth, and taking personal responsibility for the state’s actions. I claim that as a result, the liberal subject is not only self-authorizing according to liberal theories of moral autonomy, but also state-authorizing. I demonstrate the above claims through a consideration of changing activist practices among the Israeli political left. I show that the hegemonic model of civic engagement is oriented towards the state and state policy as the privileged and naturalized site of ethical intervention. I then describe the ways this model hampers political endeavors by restricting the sites of intervention as well as structural access to political participation. I also consider contemporary efforts at political engagement that bypass the state.     

HIGH-TECH DEVELOPMENT POLITICS:

This article examines the current nature of dependency in the context of global restructuring, where technological change in computers and telecommunications has made those sectors central for global economic competition. The Brazilian policy to promote computer manufacturing and software development, or informatics, is an example of a strategy to transform dependency in this context. This article examines the political and economic conditions that affected implementation of the Brazilian informatics policy after it became the object of a U.S. trade investigation in 1985. It identifies three sets of structural constraints on policy choices and outcomes: trade conflicts with the U.S. government, rapidly changing international product markets, and trade dependence. These constraints were found to persist, despite proficient and flexible political efforts to adapt to changing market conditions and manage ties with foreign capital.     

Different Eastern European Countries at Different Crossroads

This paper takes an initial step toward a better understanding of the complex set of pressing problems that need to be addressed by the Eastern European nonprofit sectors and their supporters in the near future. It gives an overview of the main challenges and claims that different nonprofit sectors of the region are at different crossroads. It identifies a general policy crisis that is fueled by the lack of a comprehensive knowledge of the sector and clear political intentions of cooperating with it. In addition, the dependence on foreign funding may result in a sustainability crisis in several Eastern European countries. In the most developed part of the region, the main elements of the present crisis are the fiscal, economic, effectiveness, identity, and legitimacy problems, which have something in common with the challenges facing the much more mature nonprofit sectors of the developed world.     

Integrated physical and mental health care at a nurse-managed clinic: report from the trenches

The Health and Wellness Center (HWC), located in Joliet, Illinois, is a nurse-managed universally accessible primary health care center funded by a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration. The goals of the HWC are to improve access to quality primary health care services for all patients, including those who are uninsured and underserved, and to develop and implement a model of nurse-managed primary health care that integrates both physical and mental health assessment and treatment. After 5 years of developing and using this model, it is clear that integration requires strategic supports from the financial, political, and professional sectors to be considered a cost-effective model of health care delivery. Recommendations for policy and practice change are offered based on the author's experiences of providing integrated health care at the HWC and the health care industry's responses to uninsured or underinsured patients' needs.     

Ideas in action: the politics of Prussian child labor reform, 1817–1839

This article explains the political origins of an 1839 law regulating the factory employment of children in Prussia. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to explain why Prussia adopted the particular law that it did. Existing historical explanations of this particular policy change are not correct, largely because they fail to take into account the actual motivations and intentions of key reformers. Second, the article contributes to theories of the role of ideas in public policymaking. Ideas interact with institutional and political factors to serve as motivators and as resources for policy change. As motivators, they drive political action and shape the content of policy programs; as resources, they enable political actors to recruit supporters and forge alliances. I offer a theory of the relationship between ideas, motivation, and political action, and I develop a methodological framework for assessing the reliability of political actors’ expressed motivations. Further, I explain how political actors use ideas as resources by deploying three specific ideational strategies: framing, borrowing, and citing. By tracing how different understandings of the child labor problem motivated and were embodied in two competing child labor policy proposals, I show how the ideas underlying reform had significant consequences for policy outcomes.     

The political economy of financial inclusion: tailoring donor policy to fit

Financial inclusion has recently become a globally acclaimed policy objective. This provokes the need to review policy in this sector, particularly in light of the tensions that arise between donor approaches founded on market modernism and governments with more activist leanings. This is done here in the context of efforts to move donor development policy beyond ‘best practice’ institutional blue‐prints to those which are ‘good enough’, which seek to understand underlying political economy dynamics in order to find space to engage with governments. In doing so, it is argued that there is scope for ‘working with the grain’ and harnessing the political economy of government policy in order to produce financial inclusion outcomes.     

Caspian Oil in a Global Context

This paper provides a brief overview of the political economy of Caspian oil. It begins by situating the Caspian region's oil sectors in the larger global market, before proceeding to examine the ways in which the Azerbaijani, Turkmen, and Kazakh oil sectors have been organised and governed since 1991. The paper then considers the likely consequences of recent policy shifts in Kazakhstan, the region's most important oil producer. A further section considers the questions of transport infrastructure and export routes, which remain particularly complex problems for Central Asia's landlocked producers. This is followed by a brief conclusion. The paper's central argument is that it is by no means certain that the Caspian region's hydrocarbon potential will be developed in a timely, economically efficient way. While the impact of geology, geography, and international price movements can hardly be ignored, policy-makers can do much to raise or lower the long-term elasticity of the supply by the Commonwealth of Independent States. Unfortunately, policy in the region seems, on present trends, likely to lower it.     

Anti‐American Resistance in Latin America: An Issue of Sovereignty,Militarization, and Neoliberalism

In recent years, Latin America has experienced a shift toward the left, bringing attention to the significance of US‐Latin America relations and the history of resistance that these dynamics have engendered. While the voices and faces of these resistance movements may be perceived as new, their roots date back to the turn of the 20th century. The emergence of an anti‐American narrative from diverse sectors in Latin America as part of a response to US policies – political, military, and economic – provides an opportunity for reflection on this history. By examining US policy towards Latin America, and the emerging forms of resistance from local sectors in response to policies on sovereignty, militarism, and neoliberalism, we can better situate the ‘anti‐American’ resistance movements of today.     

Stories About Child Sexual Abuse: Textual Analysis of Instruction Manuals in Israel

This paper overviews the socio-historical background underlying the construction of child abuse as a public issue in Israel, and analyzes one cultural product of this process—textbooks and manuals on child sexual abuse prevention. Analysis of the Israeli narratives reveals that they mimic American counterparts and address an ideal Jewish middle-class, ignoring other societal sectors. The narratives individualize and medicalize both victim and abuser. Focusing on stereotyped techniques for the individual’s survival and recovery, they avoid discussion of broader social and political power relations.     

Application of theory-based evaluation for the critical analysis of national biofuel policy: A case study in Malaysia

Theory-based evaluation (TBE) is an effectiveness assessment technique that critically analyses the theory underlying an intervention. Whilst its use has been widely reported in the area of social programmes, it is less applied in the field of energy and climate change policy evaluations. This paper reports a recent study that has evaluated the effectiveness of the national biofuel policy (NBP) for the transport sector in Malaysia by adapting a TBE approach. Three evaluation criteria were derived from the official goals of the NBP, those are (i) improve sustainability and environmental friendliness, (ii) reduce fossil fuel dependency, and (iii) enhance stakeholders’ welfare. The policy theory underlying the NBP has been reconstructed through critical examination of the policy and regulatory documents followed by a rigorous appraisal of the causal link within the policy theory through the application of scientific knowledge. This study has identified several weaknesses in the policy framework that may engender the policy to be ineffective. Experiences with the use of a TBE approach for policy evaluations are also shared in this report.     

Migration Policy and Industrial Structure: The Case of Switzerland

Structural change in OECD countries, emphasizing knowledge‐based sectors, has led to an increasing demand for highly skilled labour. One means of meeting this demand has been to implement a selective immigration policy. Such policies, however, have been criticized for channelling labour into low‐producing sectors and occupations, hampering structural change. Proponents of such criticism point to Switzerland's former policy of channelling immigrants into so‐called seasonal sectors, a practice abandoned in the early 1990s, as having contributed to Switzerland's low growth rates. To assess this, we here analyse the amended migration policy's effects on skill structure and sectoral distribution of immigration flows using data from the Swiss Census of 1990 and 2000 to determine whether the new policy has led to an immigrant inflow more adapted to the processes of structural change. We find that the share of highly skilled immigrants has increased notably under the new migration policy. Our analysis also shows an important change in the sectoral focus of the new arrival inflow. Not only have fewer immigrants been entering declining sectors, but the majority of migrants arriving under the new policy regime have been absorbed into growing and knowledge‐based sectors, meaning they are employed primarily in service and knowledge‐intensive sectors. Overall, the analysis provides ample evidence that the current admission policy as ositively contributed to tructural change in Switzerland.     

Are Conventional Farmers Conventional? Analysis of the Environmental Orientations of Conventional New Zealand Farmers*

Abstract Within the political economy of agriculture and agrofood literatures there are examples of approaches that reject simple dichotomies between alternatives and the mainstream. In line with such approaches, we challenge the assumption that alternative agriculture, and its attendant improved environmental practices, alternative management styles, less intensive approaches, and better approaches to animal and ecosystem welfare, is the only source of agricultural sustainability. This article uses national farm‐survey results for New Zealand's sheep and beef, dairy, and horticulture sectors to examine conventional farmers, measure their assessments of farming practices, and assess their environmental orientation. Analysis identifies a proenvironmental cluster of farmers in each sector characterized by a higher environmental‐orientation score and distinct ratings of other farm practices queried in the survey. We interpret the results in terms of the exposure of different agricultural sectors to the effects of market‐based, audited, best‐practice schemes. The presence of shades of “greenness” among conventional farmers has important implications for environmental management and for our understanding of the various and complex pathways toward the greening of agrofood systems.     

Corporate-governmental networks in the Netherlands

Corporate networks studies have been restricted mainly to the private or business sectors. Network analyses involving both corporations and state or government agencies have been extremely rare. In this paper, the intercorporate network of interlocking directorates in the Netherlands, based on 86 large corporations and financial institutions, is studied in terms of a bipartite corporate—governmental network which arises from the interlocking memberships linking these corporations with major committees, agencies and similar centers of decision in the public sector or central state mechanisms in the Netherlands. The corporations, representing 27 industrial sectors, have been related to government and state agencies in 28 policy sectors. In this exploratory analysis the two heavy industries, metal/shipbuilding and chemicals/oil stand out clearly. With respect to the 17 central firms the results demonstrate consistent correspondence between their central position in the Dutch corporate network and the degree of their interlocks with policy sectors in the state. The results also show that the interlocks are overwhelmingly linked with the two policy sectors “economic affairs” and “education and sciences”. Hence a more detailed analysis of the interlocks with these two policy sectors is reported.     

CHALLENGES TO EU POLITICAL INTEGRATION AND THE ROLE OF DEMOCRATIZATION1

The European Union project of political integration faces three main challenges. The first concerns the constitutional make-up of the European Union as a political system. Key here is the role of subsidiarity and the question of statehood. The second challenge has to do with the opportunity structures for participation in a multilevel and supra-national context of governance. The third challenge is that of political identity. In the contemporary political debate, the first of the above challenges is discussed almost exclusively in terms of institutional mechanisms, the third in terms of symbolic identification based on culture and language. Opportunity structures for participation are thought to matter as a means of legitimacy or, alternatively, in terms of political acceptability. The underlying assumption is that policy is mainly a matter of technocratic management and politics a question of identity. This is the key problem of the contemporary discourse regarding European integration and the EU democratic deficit.     

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE POLITICAL PROCESS: Movements, Corporations, and the State

I explore two questions in this article: (1) How has the role of the U.S. state in the political process changed vis‐à‐vis corporations? (2) What tactical repertoires have movements devised to confront this changing political process? Through the lens of the U.S. environmental movement, I find that (1) the state's policy‐making authority has weakened as corporations have become both policy makers and the new targets of challengers, (2) the environmental movement has devised organizing strategies–such as corporate‐community compacts or good neighbor agreements–to respond to and influence this new political process, and (3) those segments of the movement that ignore the political economic process are likely to meet with failure. These changes in the political economy constitute a challenge for the political process model. I therefore propose a “political economic process’ perspective to extend the political process model and more accurately capture these dynamics. The political economic process perspective evaluates four state‐centric assumptions of the political process model (the state as the primary movement target or vehicle of reform, the state policy‐making monopoly, capital as just another interest group, and the primacy of the nation‐state level of analysis) and demonstrates that the political economic process has changed in dramatic ways.     

Bandwagon, underdog, and political competition: the uni-dimensional case

This article studies the effects of bandwagon and underdog on the political equilibrium of two-party competition models. We adapt for voter conformism the generalized Wittman?CRoemer model of political competition, which views political competition as the one between parties with factions of the opportunists and the militants that Nash-bargain one another, and consider three special cases of the general model: the Hotelling?CDowns model, the classical Wittman?CRoemer model, and what we call the ideological-party model. We find that the presence of voter conformism significantly affects the nature of political competition, and its effect on political equilibrium is quite different depending on the model one uses. In the Hotelling?CDowns model, political parties put forth an identical policy at the equilibrium, regardless of the type of voter conformism, and this is the only equilibrium. In both the ideological-party and classical Wittman?CRoemer models, parties propose differentiated policies at the equilibrium, and the extent of policy differentiation depends on the degree of voter conformism.     

SUSTAINABILITY OF THE FRIEDMAN RULE IN AN INTERNATIONAL MONETARY POLICY GAME

This article develops a two-country monetary economy model in order to analyze the international monetary policy game between governments and the domestic monetary policy game between each government and its private sector. We prove that if governments can commit to their own private sectors, the cooperative equilibrium of the game between governments is for them to follow the Friedman rule. When governments lack such ability to commit, we find that the Friedman rule is more likely to be sustained in our open-economy model than in the closed-economy model of Ireland. ( JEL E31, E52, E61)     

Social Position and Commitment to Core Values:

The present analysis addresses whether gender influences support for the core values of individualism, self-reliance and equal opportunity. Both a capitalist economic system and democratic political system emphasize the value of the individual, self-reliance and equal opportunity. It is argued that socialization within these systems promotes individualistic beliefs even among those who are discriminated against. The impact of gender on commitment to core values and the influence of these values among women and men on support for government helping women is explored. The results suggest that men and women equally support individualistic values and that these values are similarly influential on questions of government intervention on women's behalf. Exceptions are found among younger men, who more likely support intervention than older men, and that among women, positive regard for women achieves a significant impact on policy support whereas the same does not hold true among men. It is argued that individualistic commitments among women and men provide the impetus to evaluate policy decisions in terms of the nature of government intervention even though women comprise the targeted beneficiaries of these policies.     

SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISIS IN A MONETARY UNION: ACCOUNTING FOR EXCESSIVE DEBT,HOUSING BUBBLES,AND THE TRANSMISSION OF CRISES

Despite vast empirical documentation of the recent sovereign debt crisis in southern Europe, there is little research accounting for the following stylized facts in a single coherent framework: continuous borrowing, high growth, housing bubbles, and current account deficits since the beginning of the European Monetary Union ending with a sudden crisis and subsequent contagion of crisis. We fill this gap by proposing a model and fitting it to the data. Using a growth model with collateral constraints of small peripheral economies in the institution of a monetary union, we analyze the multilayer moral hazards underlying excessive borrowing. Since housing bubbles can support a constant loan‐to‐value (LTV) ratio lower than LTV limits, peripheral economies can lock into a steady‐state Ponzi growth equilibrium with high growth and current account deficits, but these economies become vulnerable to crises. We identify the “self‐fulfilling crisis region” (SFCR), in which the economy grows fast with a seemingly safe LTV ratio, but with a vulnerability to crises. Moreover, a crisis in one sector propagates to other sectors by endogenously expanding their SFCRs. We derive some policy implications on LTV regulations and market psychology. Finally, our calibration exercise presents how bubbles develop and burst along with contagion across sectors, accounting for the data. (JEL E44, F34, O16)