Post-crisis learning in public agencies: what do we learn from both actors and institutions?

Post-crisis learning is a challenge for public organizations, and especially for agencies which handle health and environmental risks. This article investigates how the Belgian Food Safety Agency settles mechanisms for drawing lessons from crises while ensuring day-to-day routine. The framework by Crozier and Friedberg is used as a guideline to consider both the actors and the system, both strategic games and institutional constraints. The article helps in understanding the institutional logics underpinning how the public organizations learn from societal risk and crisis. Centralization and openness appear to be guiding principles, resulting from the learning games. They also generate tensions that the actors’ games manage by defining new rules for cooperation. Both the practice (through our case study) and the theory (combining actors and institutions) broaden the lens of policy analysis for what policy-making at organizational level concerns.     

Sharp Threshold Detection Based on Sup-Norm Error Rates in High-Dimensional Models

We propose a new estimator, the thresholded scaled Lasso, in high-dimensional threshold regressions. First, we establish an upper bound on the ?_∞ estimation error of the scaled Lasso estimator of Lee, Seo, and Shin. This is a nontrivial task as the literature on high-dimensional models has focused almost exclusively on ?₁ and ?₂ estimation errors. We show that this sup-norm bound can be used to distinguish between zero and nonzero coefficients at a much finer scale than would have been possible using classical oracle inequalities. Thus, our sup-norm bound is tailored to consistent variable selection via thresholding. Our simulations show that thresholding the scaled Lasso yields substantial improvements in terms of variable selection. Finally, we use our estimator to shed further empirical light on the long-running debate on the relationship between the level of debt (public and private) and GDP growth. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Projections internationales ou détours vers le local? Les diplomaties identitaires des sikhs (Inde) et des Mohajirs (Pakistan)

Ethnic diplomacy can be characterised as a ‘popular mode of diplomatic action’. As such, it is an illustration of the privatisation of diplomacy, which may involve private actions sponsored by state actors or, on the contrary, private actions with a public outcome in the realm of foreign policy. By attempting to reach out to state actors, international organisations and global NGOs, ethnic diplomats articulate a cultural mode of transnational mobilisation. But these two dimensions of ethnic diplomacy, its ‘culturality’ and its ‘transnationality’, cannot be taken for granted and should be questioned thoroughly. Through this analysis, it appears that long-distance nationalists do not always succeed in transnationalising their activities and that they often end up re-locating themselves in exile. And more than ethnicity or cultural repertoires, it is the political culture of ethnodiplomatic organisations and their relations with the diasporic environments in which they evolve which helps to explain the outcome of these popular modes of diplomatic action.     

Advanced Placement Statistics: Expanding the Scope of Statistics Education

A list of consequential developments in the field of statistics for the past quarter-century must include the creation and implementation of the Advanced Placement (AP) program in Statistics. This program has introduced millions of high school students to our discipline over the past 18 years, contributing to the large increase in the number of undergraduate students pursuing statistics as their major in college. ASA members and leaders have played a substantial role in shaping this program and furthering its success.     

Work Related and ``Private' Social Interactions at Work

Fifty-four young professionals in their first job after apprenticeship described their task-related and private interactions at work during five days, using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Records self-observation method (Reis and Wheeler, 1991). Results showed that more task-related interactions were reported than private interactions at work. The latter are described as more personally meaningful and more often initiated by the person or mutually initiated than task-related interactions. The number and duration of task-related interactions depended on the profession and the working conditions. The individual's own activity level during task-related interactions was predicted by social skills, measured 6 months before the diary study. Frequency of private interactions at work depended on familiarity level with colleagues. After controlling for role ambiguity and social stressors, more interactions and higher satisfaction with interactions at work predicted affective commitment, and more interactions at work also predicted job satisfaction. The study highlights the importance of conducting micro-analyses of social interactions at work.     

Cross-Regional Divorce Risks in Belgium: Culture or Legislative System?

Cross-national research is by definition carried out between different countries. Looking at country differences often results in common and diverse sets of divorce risks. This article uses a cross-national research perspective on divorce risks within a single country. Belgium is a special case in this respect. The division of the country in two regions with a different language and a quite different historical background often frightens researchers to include the country in large-scale international comparisons. We argue that Belgium is an interesting test case in international perspective since it combines—in a quasi-experimental setting—two important explanatory conditions for divorce risks on the macro level. First, Belgium is a unitary country with a single social security system, similar labor market characteristics, and a single family policy. Second, whereas the institutions between the northern and the southern part are similar, Belgium is culturally divided in a rather Catholic northern part (Flanders) and a secular southern part (Wallonia). This division is often referred to as a northern (Scandinavian) and a southern (Spain, Italy) cultural pattern. This means that when studying divorce patterns, we have the opportunity to examine the net effect of cultural determinants because of the similar feature of the institutional setting of both the Walloon and the Flemish part of the country.     

Estimation of extreme quantiles from heavy and light tailed distributions

In Gardes et al. (2011), a new family of distributions is introduced, depending on two parameters τ$\tau$ and θ$\theta$, which encompasses Pareto-type distributions as well as Weibull tail-distributions. Estimators for θ$\theta$ and extreme quantiles are also proposed, but they both depend on the unknown parameter τ$\tau$, making them useless in practical situations. In this paper, we propose an estimator of τ$\tau$ which is independent of θ$\theta$. Plugging our estimator of τ$\tau$ in the two previous ones allows us to estimate extreme quantiles from Pareto-type and Weibull tail-distributions in an unified way. The asymptotic distributions of our three new estimators are established and their efficiency is illustrated on a small simulation study and on a real data set.     

The Short French Internet Addiction Test Adapted to Online Sexual Activities: Validation and Links With Online Sexual Preferences and Addiction Symptoms

The goal of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of a French version of the short Internet Addiction Test adapted to online sexual activities (s-IAT-sex). The French version of the s-IAT-sex was administered to a sample of 401 men. The participants also completed a questionnaire that screened for sexual addiction (PATHOS). The relationships of s-IAT-sex scores with time spent online for online sexual activities (OSAs) and the types of OSAs favored were also considered. Confirmatory analyses supported a two-factor model of s-IAT-sex, corresponding to the factorial structure found in earlier studies that used the short IAT. The first factor regroups loss of control and time management, whereas the second factor regroups craving and social problems. Internal consistency for each factor was evaluated with Cronbach's α coefficient, resulting in .87 for Factor 1, .76 for Factor 2, and .88 for the global scale. Concurrent validity was supported by relationships with symptoms of sexual addiction, types of OSAs practiced, and time spent online for OSAs. The prevalence of sexual addiction (measured by PATHOS) was 28.1% in the current sample of self-selected male OSA users. The French version of the s-IAT-sex presents good psychometric properties and constitutes a useful tool for researchers and practitioners.     

Mixture models in measurement error problems, with reference to epidemiological studies

Summary. The paper focuses on a Bayesian treatment of measurement error problems and on the question of the specification of the prior distribution of the unknown covariates. It presents a flexible semiparametric model for this distribution based on a mixture of normal distributions with an unknown number of components. Implementation of this prior model as part of a full Bayesian analysis of measurement error problems is described in classical set-ups that are encountered in epidemiological studies: logistic regression between unknown covariates and outcome, with a normal or log-normal error model and a validation group. The feasibility of this combined model is tested and its performance is demonstrated in a simulation study that includes an assessment of the influence of misspecification of the prior distribution of the unknown covariates and a comparison with the semiparametric maximum likelihood method of Roeder, Carroll and Lindsay. Finally, the methodology is illustrated on a data set on coronary heart disease and cholesterol levels in blood.     

Management Control in Local Public Administrations in France - Typological Construction and Organizational Determinants - the Case of Large Intermunicipalities

Public Organization Review - This article is part of the fields of public management and management control. Its objective is to shed light on the management control function in local public...