Measuring Progress: Community Indicators and the Quality of Life

Abstract

As communities and local governments increasingly have become concerned about quality‐of‐life issues, community indicators have become a widely used tool to measure the status of the quality of life and progress being made toward improving it. Indicators provide a vehicle for understanding and addressing community issues from a holistic and outcomes‐oriented perspective. They are useful, within the context of an overall community‐improvement process, both as a planning tool, based on a community's vision, and as an evaluation tool to measure progress on steps taken toward improvement. Their usefulness is maximized when they are both directly tied to public‐policy and budget decision making and when the community feels a sense of ownership of the indicators through direct citizen involvement with them. This article briefly describes four major approaches to community‐indicators work, and then in more detail, illustrates one of the approaches called “quality of life.” This approach is illustrated with experiences of the Jacksonville (Florida) Community Council Inc. (JCCI), a pioneer and leader in the community‐indicators movement.     

IMPLEMENTING WELFARE REFORM IN MICHIGAN: THE ROLE OF STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRATS[1]

ABSTRACT

This study examines the implementation of welfare reform policies enacted by the state of Michigan. In particular, it focuses on how welfare policy is altered as it devolves from state policy makers to street-level bureaucrats in three local welfare agencies in Michigan. The analysis reveals that street-level bureaucrats in local welfare offices are in a position to interpret broadly stated goals handed down from officials, and, in some cases, to manage and greatly influence the delivery of services when messages are mixed. The study also suggests that the actual policies or services delivered by front-line workers in welfare offices do not completely correspond with the policy directives issued by state officials.     

NGOs as Incubator of Participative Democracy in South Korea: Political,Voluntary, and Policy Participation

Abstract

This article is designed to examine the roles of Non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Korea as an incubator of participative democracy and to review the evolution of their relationship with governments. The study is comprised of four parts. First, related literature on NGOs will be examined from three different perspectives: state‐civil society perspective, voluntary social service perspective, and policy perspective. Second, this essay will survey emerging roles of NGOs in promoting organized citizen participation in the three areas: political participation, voluntary social service participation, and policy participation. Third, recent governments' institutional efforts to support NGOs will be reviewed briefly. Finally, this paper will conclude with the implications for the future of government‐NGOs relationship in policy‐making processes.     

Regularization of Irregular Migrants and Social Policies: Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines the social policy implications of the regularization of irregular immigrants. As an act of legal integration regularization arguably is about irregular migrants’ inclusion into mainstream social and legal structures and, as a corollary, has important implications for migrants’ access to social rights. Based on a recent comparative study of regularizations and their impact in seven EU Member-States, the study finds that access to social rights associated with regularizations indeed are reported as the most important impacts of regularization by regularized migrants themselves, next to access to work and related welfare entitlements.     

Political violence in pre‐coup Turkey

Abstract

The long‐standing and pervasive patterns of political violence in Turkey, which were only abated by the military coup of September 1980, are examined in terms of their historical and sociopolitical antecedents. The paper concludes that political violence in Turkey is the result on the one hand of the specific forms of Kemalist modernization to which the country was subjected from 1920 to 1945. Kemalism led to modern political and legal institutions, but left much of Turkey's cultural and economic life subject to traditional values. In addition, Kemalism bequeathed a legacy of political parties that saw the national good identified solely with each political organization's success, which in turn subjectively legitimized violence against political opponents as acceptable in the struggle for the national welfare. After 1945 the legacy of Kemalism was joined by severe developmental problems in the area of economics and social welfare, a resurgence of hyper‐nationalism over the Cyprus issue, and an anti‐modernist backlash through a revival of Islamic traditions. The results were conflicts in a society already strained by the symptoms of second stage modernization that could not be compromised within the parameters of the Turkish political system.     

The success of a policy model: Irrigation management transfer in Mexico

Abstract

The Mexican policy of Irrigation Management Transfer has been widely propagated as a success and has become a model for other countries seeking to improve the performance of their irrigation systems while also cutting public expenditures. This article analyses the process of policy-making that has generated the policy model and follows the practices, means, and events through which it has achieved increasing transnational circulation, popularity, and support. The main argument of this article is that the success of a policy model is only a success within the cultural and ideological understandings of a policy network and given the means, practices, and events that generate and disseminate it. This particular case further suggests that success in policy-making, rather than being based on straightforward evidence of improved management performance, is often part of a cultural performance.     

Governance Strategies and Welfare Effects: Vertical Integration and Contracts in the Catfish Sector in Vietnam

Abstract

Using an original dataset from the Vietnamese catfish sector, we study the impact of vertical coordination options on household welfare and the implications of different stages of vertical coordination for the success of the whole sector. The welfare gain from contract farming and employment on processor-owned estate farms is estimated using a maximum simulated likelihood estimator. Our results show positive welfare effects from participating in contract farming, but not from employment on processor-owned estate farms. The results imply that contract farming presents opportunities for economic growth, but additional effort is required to make the contracts more accessible to smallholders.     

THE WELFARE STATE: A REGULATORY PERSPECTIVE

The role of regulation and the regulatory state in social policy, redistribution, and the reforms of the welfare state are increasingly important but often underestimated and misunderstood. These problems are evident in Majone's highly influential work where the regulatory state and the ‘positive’ state stand as two alternative monomorphic forms of state. This article offers a polymorphic alternative where the regulatory state may come to the rescue of the welfare state, allowing independent extension, retrenchment, and stagnation of welfare via social regulation. The article extends a regulatory governance perspective into the core of the welfare state, clarifies the relations between fiscal and regulatory instruments, and demonstrates that the boundaries of the regulatory state are wider than are usually understood. It turns our understanding of the welfare state on its head, highlighting first the less visible regulatory layer, and then the more visible layer of fiscal transfers.     

Is the Chinese ‘entrepreneurial welfare state’ an industrial policy in disguise?

Abstract

What has driven China, a developing country that has only recently saved itself from nationwide poverty, to increase its investment in social welfare so rapidly and extensively in the past decade? Drawing on extensive field research in a prefecture-level district in southwest China between 2014 and 2017, the authors argue in this article that local governments in China provide welfare housing programmes as a veil for developmentalist industrial policies aimed at industrial upgrading and the improvement of dynamic efficiency. The article demonstrates the unique incentive structure behind the local Chinese governments’ role as the front-line investor in social welfare benefits, and how the local state has cunningly used the façade of welfare provision to (1) divert the earmarked budget to implement development-oriented industrial policy; and (2) fake a discursive congruence between the heavily interventionist local practice and the overall neoliberal central-level policy discourse that features deregulation, small government and a laissez-faire developmental pathway. Exploring this set of strategic dynamics underlining the manoeuvres of the Chinese welfare operation helps us understand the variability of welfare state forms and trajectories of developmental strategy in the Global South.     

TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR ESTABLISHING POLICY SUCCESS

Claims that a particular policy has been a ‘success’ are commonplace in political life. However, a few of these claims are justified in any systematic way. This article seeks to remedy this omission by offering a heuristic which practitioners and academics can utilize to approach the question of whether a policy is, or was, successful. It builds initially on two sets of literature: Boyne's work on public sector improvement; and the work of Bovens et al. on success, failure and policy evaluation. We discuss the epistemological issues involved in whether it is possible to produce an objective measure of ‘success’. Subsequently, we present a framework for assessing success, focusing on three dimensions: process success; programmatic success; and political success. We then move on to raise a series of what we term complexity issues in relation to success for whom; variations across time, space and culture; and methodological issues.     

Deserving Shelter: Conditional Access to Accommodation for Rejected Asylum Seekers in Austria,the Netherlands,and Sweden

Abstract

Limitations in access to welfare services for noncitizens of a host country are structured through conditional entitlements, which require benefit claimants to meet certain conditions to access welfare services. This article explores the conditions and regulations determining access to state-organized accommodation facilities for non-removed rejected asylum seekers in Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden and the way in which these conditions are implemented. Based on qualitative interviews with stakeholders and analysis of policy documents, I argue that qualities of deservingness, such as vulnerability and performance, determine noncitizens’ access to state-provided accommodation, which strengthens the logic of migration control.     

Safe Haven Questioned: Proof of Identity Over Persecution of SOGIE Asylum Seekers and Refugee Claimants in Canada

Abstract

Canada, being a country that recognizes sexual orientation and gender identity/expression (SOGIE) as grounds for asylum or refugee status, can appear initially to be a safe haven for those persecuted based on such characteristics. Yet, claimants are required to prove the SOGIE upon which the persecution of the person is reported to have been based. Given that essentialist and binary notions of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression are the criteria utilized, such policy imposes traditional Westernized notions of identity with homonational and recolonizing effects on individuals who are attempting to resettle in Canada.     

Ethno‐political activity and the psychology of terrorism

Abstract

Studies of terrorist psychology have typically focused either on single individuals or group dynamics within the organizations that these individuals have joined. Less attention has been paid to the background conditions which give rise to these individuals and organizations, even for environments in which generalization appears to be feasible. This paper focuses on one such environment. Its principal goal is to highlight the theoretical connections between a society's ethnic cleavages; the development of ethno‐political activity, especially organized violence and terrorism; and the implications of this activity for the functioning of institutions in “democratic” and “non‐democratic” societies. A related objective is the identification of policy responses to latent or manifest ethno‐political activity and an assessment of their potential efficacy. These points are illustrated by examining a small ethnic group, the South Moluccans in Holland, which would appear to have had little motivation to engage in violence or terrorism, but some of whose members nevertheless did.     

Implementing Electronic Notification in Los Angeles: Citizen Participation Politics by Other Means

Abstract

This paper considers whether new information and communication technologies have significant effects on citizen participation by evaluating the development of a major innovation in electronic governance. We analyze the creation of an electronic system in Los Angeles to provide stakeholders a warning of upcoming political decisions and an opportunity to furnish feedback. We evaluate this innovation not only as a technological innovation that affects citizens’ capacity and motivation for participation but also as an alternative institutional means for involving citizens in policy making and public administration. To place this experiment within this larger institutional perspective, we draw upon the lessons of historical reforms aimed to expand citizen participation. We find that although technology does positively affect individuals’ capacity and motivations, technology, by itself, does not overcome the political, institutional, and behavioral impediments that have limited previous participatory reforms.     

Assessing China's Public Price Hearings: Symbolic Aspects

Abstract

The effectiveness of the public hearing as a participatory instrument has been debated. This paper argues that evaluation of the public hearing could be improved by an interpretive and institutional analysis. Introducing four major recent public hearings, this comparative study assesses the development and use of public hearing in China's governmental price making. It concludes that the public hearing should be viewed as a type of participatory institution. Its effectiveness relies on other institutional factors and on whether it can evoke values of citizenship, due process and deliberation. Constrained by China's political and social institutions, current Chinese price hearings are framed on the basis of consumer rights rather than citizen rights. The public hearing is perhaps the oldest and most widely used technique for citizens to participate in governmental decision making in western countries (Checkoway, B. The politics of public hearing. J. Appl. Behav. Sci. 1981, 17(4), 566–583), but it is not a popular topic theme at present. While the public hearing originally emerged for the purpose of due process in trial‐type or quasi‐judicial rule making, it has become an important citizen participation instrument since the 1960s and 1970s (Ibid. and Cole, R.L.; Caputo, D.A. The public hearing as an effective citizen participation mechanism: a case study of the general revenue sharing program. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 1984, 78(2), 404–416), especially to make public policy responsive to those disadvantaged. In contrast, the public hearing was not in place until the late 1990s in China, but it has become a top issue theme since 2000. This paper aims to assess the development and use of public hearings in China from a comparative perspective: is it effective for citizens to participate? If not, will it work in the future? How does the institutional context affect the operation, effectiveness and symbolism of public hearings in China? The paper also sheds lights on how to use interpretive and institutional analysis for the evaluation of public hearings in general.     

Why does terrorism terrorize?

Abstract

Attempting to lay bare the psychological roots of terrorism, the author alludes to the views of such rebels against the status quo as Marx, Engels, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and examines in greater detail the myths and beliefs current in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and even in the modern period that were instrumental in instilling fear and terror into the minds of men. It is held, for instance, that such countercultures and aberrations as the drug culture, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, and the Symbionese Liberation Army seem to be clear manifestations of the excitement and fear that assault individuals in the name of political ideals. The author offers a “model of terroristic resonance,” based on the public perception of a terrorist as being uncaring, vengeance‐oriented, and single‐minded in his aggressivity; also perceived in terrorists is a sense of randomness and unpredictability, infusing in their victims an extreme anxiety and an awesome sense of the uncanny, the effect of which may be likened to an irresistible impulse from the id assaulting the personification of the social representative of the superego. Modern‐day terrorists, it is claimed, carry on an ancient messianic and prophetic tradition of horror that is being visited upon man because of his violation of absolutist values.     

Not unlearning to care – positive moral development as a cornerstone of nonkilling

ABSTRACT

In this theoretical paper, selected areas of moral development as well as some of the respective theories and models are used to characterise positive, healthy moral development. Such moral development is seen as one prerequisite of nonkilling. From a lifespan perspective, core concepts such as moral motivation and moral agency are combined into an understanding of moral development, as based on the making meaning of experience in the context of social interaction and co-construction. The aim of (socio)moral development is seen in moral maturity, that is, the genuine understanding of the way our own actions or nonactions affect the welfare of others, including the motivation, the sense of personal responsibility, and the will to act in such ways as not to harm or to protect or re-establish others’ welfare. Reaching this aim can be seen as the outcome of healthy moral development.     

Rewarding Fire with Fire: Effects of Retaliation on Terrorist Group Dynamics

Abstract

Comparative studies of the psychology of terrorism indicate that there is no one terrorist mindset, A theme in common among the disparate groups is the strong need of marginal alienated individuals to join a group of like‐minded individuals with a similar world view that “it's us against them, and they are the cause of our problems.” This strong need to belong gives particular force to the power of group dynamics. While the ideology is the glue that holds the group together and serves as the rationale for its actions, terrorists do not commit acts of terrorism for ideological reasons. The amelioration of the societal injustice which they indicate incites and justifies their terrorism does not reduce the lure of terrorism, because of the powerful hold of the group on its members.

Paradoxically, a policy of reactive retaliation with the goal of deterring terrorist acts may have the opposite effect and reinforce the mind set of the terrorist. For the group under threat, the external danger has the consequence of reducing external divisiveness and uniting the group against the outside enemy. The survival of the group is paramount because of the sense of group identity it provides.

Identifying the locus of control is of crucial significance in estimating the effects of counter‐terrorist policies upon a terrorist group. For the autonomous terrorist cell, active retaliation may reinforce the cohesion of the group; for the corporate terrorist organization, issues of organizational survival may become paramount. Neither the terrorist group nor the terrorist organization can be forced to give up terrorism, for to do so would be to lose their reason for being. For state‐supported and directed terrorist groups on the other hand, the terrorist group in effect serves as a paramilitary group under central government control. In this situation, group and organizational considerations are less relevant, for the object of the counter‐terrorist policy is the government of the sponsoring state. Since the survival of the state and national interests are the primary values, retaliatiatory policies, can, in the short run, have a deterring effect. In the long run, the most effective anti‐terrorist policy is one which renders the terrorist career less attractive to potential members, facilitates terrorists leaving the group, and reduces external support.     

Lone parent families within New Labour welfare reform

The reform of the British system of welfare undertaken by the Labour government places a great emphasis on paid work, which is seen as the main route to escape poverty and the natural way to fulfil citizen obligations. Lone parents are a target group for welfare to work policies and, if they are on benefits, they are strongly encouraged to get a job. This article explores the main policies designed to promote employment among them—the New Deal for Lone Parents being the most significant—and the issues they raise. It is argued that the success of the welfare to work strategy for lone parents could be severely compromised without the consideration of at least two sensitive issues: the potential dangers of a compulsory scheme and the recognition of the relevance of caring activities and their integration into a more comprehensive concept of citizenship.     

Indigenous food sovereignty in a captured state: the Garifuna in Honduras

Abstract

This study explores the emergence of the Afro-Indigenous food sovereignty movement in the context of a captured Honduran state and unequal political economy. In contrast with national-level research that has advocated a policy of food security in the context of non-indigenous campesino movements, this work explains how food sovereignty is more appropriate regarding Garifuna Hondurans. In a political economy that has precluded other options, and given the deep cultural relation that Garifuna activists have to land and autonomy, food sovereignty provides a possibility around which Indigenous development can be animated. It encapsulates a local ‘fight’ response to repression as an alternative to northern ‘flight’, often via migrant caravans, that many Garifuna have undertaken. This study shows how food sovereignty, more than being a technical policy set, is a discursive and material node through which dispossessed and especially indigenous populations can enhance decolonial power in the contestation of entrenched hegemonic and institutionalised power in a corrupt, unequal and colonised political economy.