Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.

     

Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda: Popular Challenges to the Official Discourse of Post-Genocide National Unity

Reconciliation is among the most contested terms in current peacebuilding and transitional justice debates. Critics often view reconciliation as romantic—expecting immediate harmony after enormous harm—or imposed on victims by religious groups or governments that prefer the language of ‘moving on’ to addressing systemic causes of conflict. This essay reconsiders the concept of ‘reconciliation’ by drawing on community-level experiences in post-genocide Rwanda. This context highlights nuanced interpretations of reconciliation that, in key respects, respond to critics' concerns and call for reappraisal of reconciliation as a central objective after mass violence. In particular, many Rwandans' participation in the gacaca community courts—which, between 2002 and 2012, prosecuted 400,000 genocide suspects in around 1 million cases in 11,000 jurisdictions overseen by locally elected lay judges—represents a form of negotiated reconciliation. This version emphasizes long-term formal and informal negotiations between antagonistic parties during gacaca hearings but crucially long after trials have ended. In contrast, the transactional reconciliation advocated by the Rwandan government through its discourse of ‘national unity’ views reconciliation as immediate and elite-imposed—a perspective that rightly raises the ire of critics but to which negotiated reconciliation offers an important riposte. This essay is based on more than 650 interviews between 2003 and 2014 with Rwandan genocide suspects, convicted perpetrators, survivors, gacaca judges and policymakers as well as observations of 105 gacaca hearings in 13 communities across Rwanda.     

Contemporary Challenges in Local Government: Evolving Roles and Responsibilities,Structures, and Processes

Editor's Note: The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2014. This article is the first of several that will appear during the next year about the council‐manager plan to commemorate ICMA's 100th anniversary. Three contemporary leadership challenges face local governments today. The first encourages department heads to more actively work the intersection between political and administrative arenas. The second promotes collaborative work, synchronizing city and county boundaries with problems that have no jurisdictional homes. The third argues that citizen engagement is no longer optional—it is imperative—and that connecting engagement initiatives to traditional political values and governing processes is an important mark of successful community building. These three leadership challenges stem from a widening gap between the arenas of politics and administration—that is, between what is politically acceptable in public policy making and what is administratively sustainable. The gap is fueled by conflicting trends experienced locally and common internationally. Failure to bridge this gap between political acceptability and administrative sustainability results in decreasing legitimacy for governing institutions and increasing challenges.     

Leadership and Organizational Culture: Sustaining Dialogue between Practitioners and Scholars

Few topics in the study of contemporary public organizations better illustrate the burdens—and potential benefits—of sustaining dialogue between practitioners and scholars than the interplay between leadership, organizational culture, and public sector performance. Following two decades of intensive research and advocacy, the last 10 years have seen diminished scholarly attention to this subject, while efforts to shape culture remain central to the leadership of public organizations. This essay reflects on the 8 Cs of organizational culture: complicated, control, competence, commitments, credibility, conflict, context, and change.     

Organizational Influences,Public Service Motivation and Work Outcomes: An Australian Study

ABSTRACT

This research examines the influence of organizational factors—intrinsic rewards, extrinsic rewards, work relations with management, and work relations with co-workers—on the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) and two work outcomes: job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using data from the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes of over 2,200 employees in the Australian public and private sectors, this study found a direct and significant association between the two work outcomes and PSM (and the PSM-fit variable). Despite their significant and direct effects on the work outcomes, the organizational factors did not show any significant moderating effects on the relationships between PSM-fit and the two work outcomes.     

Learning from the States? Federalism and National Health Policy

In its 1993 report, the Winter Commission gave direction to the federal government in the area of health policy and Medicaid: lead, follow, or get out of the way. This article examines how the federal government responded to that advice, specifically asking what has happened in the allocation of responsibility in health policies between 1993 and 2006. In short, unlike the suggestion that there be a better‐defined direction in federal–state policy assignments in health, the ensuing years have resulted in more of the same. The authors examine what has happened, particularly focusing on vertical diffusion—where the states have acted first—and on the role of policy learning in federal decision making. They find little recognition of policy learning in recent federal health laws—even in areas in which state experience was extensive. The federal government is leading in some health policies—but it is leading without learning.     

ABA ratings: what do they really measure?

Several recent spatial modeling studies incorporate valence issues—e.g., voters’ evaluations of the candidates’ competence, integrity, and charisma—that may give one of the candidates an electoral advantage that is independent of his policy positions. However to date all such models assume that while voters value positive valence characteristics, the candidates themselves do not. We develop a spatial model where the candidates are valence-seeking, i.e.—like the voters—the candidates prefer that the winning candidate possess qualities, such as integrity, diligence, and competence, that will enhance his job performance. We analyze a spatial model where the candidates value both the valence qualities and the policies of the winning candidate, and we show that the candidates’ optimal policy choices typically diverge as the valence differential between them increases, and in particular that the valence-disadvantaged candidate normally has incentives to become more extreme as the valence advantage of her opponent increases.     

Ethnocentrism as a Short‐Term Force in the 2008 American Presidential Election

Faced with a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama, voters in 2008 were swayed by the familiar play of factors—party identification, policy preferences, and economic conditions—but also, we find, by ethnocentrism, a deep‐seated psychological predisposition that partitions the world into ingroups and outgroups—into “us” and “them.” The effect of ethnocentrism was significant and substantial, and it appeared over and above the effects due to partisanship, economic conditions, policy stances, political engagement, and several varieties of conservatism. Two features of Obama were primarily responsible for triggering ethnocentrism in 2008: his race and his imagined Muslim faith. As such, we demonstrate that ethnocentrism was much more important in 2008 than in the four presidential elections immediately preceding 2008, and we show that it was much more important in the actual contest between Senator McCain and Senator Obama than in a hypothetical contest between Senator McCain and Senator Clinton.     

Unionization and Work Attitudes: How Union Commitment Influences Public Sector Job Satisfaction

This article explores whether union commitment dampens public sector job satisfaction. By examining the connection between union commitment and two workplace attributes that are presumed to be more prevalent in public sector workplaces—perceptions of higher red tape and greater public service motivation—this article develops three hypotheses exploring the direct and indirect relationships between union commitment and public sector job satisfaction. The findings from a series of structural equation models indicate that union commitment directly increases members’ job satisfaction, but it more prominently increases members’ job satisfaction indirectly by reducing perceived red tape and enhancing public service motivation.     

Inertia and Neighboring Effects in Local Tax Policy: Illinois' Experience with a Local Option Tax on Telecommunications

Illinois reconfigured the legal basis and constraints for municipal telecommunications taxes in 2003. We use data on municipalities' initial (assigned) tax rate, fiscal condition, population, changes in tax rates of neighboring municipalities and neighbors' initial (assigned) tax rates to explain changes in telecommunications tax rates between 2003 and 2008. We find clear evidence of an important and statistically significant inertia effect—municipalities initially assigned a zero tax rate continued to stay tax free—and important and statistically significant neighboring effects—municipalities whose neighbors changed tax rates did the same, and municipalities whose neighbors were assigned relatively high initial rates increased their own rates faster.     

When does the multiple principals hypothesis hold? The politics of U.S. agency policymaking autonomy

When the bureaucracy's political principals hold different preferences for policy, does this increase the bureaucracy's policymaking autonomy? Existing theory strongly suggests “yes.” We, however, argue that this pattern will materialize only when the bureaucracy's principals are all on the same side of the political divide. (i.e., unified government). Using data gathered from the American states at two time points, we capture preference divergence by measuring the ideological distance between the bureaucracy's key political principals—legislators, governors, and courts—on the common left–right dimension. We measure policymaking autonomy through multi-faceted surveys of state agency leaders. In keeping with our argument, we demonstrate that greater preference divergence across the bureaucracy's principals is associated with increased agency policymaking autonomy under unified—but not under divided—government. The results shed new light on when, and why, the bureaucracy's political principals may provide an oversight check on the policymaking power of the modern administrative state.     

The war on solicitation and intersectional subjection: quality-of-life policing as a tool to control transgender populations

Abstract

The selective enforcement of solicitation laws on transgender individuals—often referred to as “walking while trans”—has an especially pernicious effect on transgender people of color, immigrants, and the poor. Intersectional subjection—the interaction between multiple categories of identity and diffuse power and sources of authority within contemporary American society—facilitates processes of governmentality and makes some transgender individuals more vulnerable to forms of social control such as trans-profiling. Using intersectional subjection to analyze the selective enforcement of solicitation laws exposes how trans-profiling (1) works to marginalize and remove transgender people of color and transgender immigrants from public spaces; and (2) enforces raced and classed gender norms and reifies white cis-heteronormative privilege. The concepts of intersectionality, subjection, and governmentality elucidate the mutually constitutive relationships among informal and formal actors and institutions in sanctioning the profiling of individuals for “walking while trans” as a tool for mitigating the threat transgender people of color and trans-immigrants pose to dominant power structures and narratives.     

Does the Love of Money Moderate the Relationship between Public Service Motivation and Job Satisfaction? The Case of Chinese Professionals in the Public Sector

To what extent do attitudes toward money—specifically, the love of money—moderate the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction among public sector professionals in China? The authors collected data from full‐time public sector professionals who also were part‐time students in a master of public administration program in eastern China. After confirmatory factor analyses, the regression results show that a public servant’s love of money moderates the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction—that is, individuals with a strong love of money have a significantly stronger relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction than those without, a finding that supports the “crowding‐in effect.” Alternatively, for high love‐of‐money civil servants with a “steel rice bowl” mentality, high job satisfaction is explained by the best offer (output) for the minimum amount of effort (input), at least within Chinese culture. Such findings are counterintuitive in light of Chinese personal values, equity theory, public servants’ institutional background, ethical organizational culture, and corruption.     

Change, Continuity, and the Evolution of the Law

Congress regularly passes significant laws. Some of these laws continue in their initial form, with the original bargain struck by the enacting coalition untouched by any future laws; others are changed—strengthened or weakened—soon after passage. What accounts for this variation in the stability of laws, in the longevity of the original legislative agreement? We contend that political conditions at the time of enactment—in particular, the existence of divided government and the level of ideological disagreement between the House and Senate—influence the likelihood that a law will be amended. We demonstrate that laws originally crafted by diverse political coalitions are less durable than those crafted by strong, unified coalitions, which are in a position to entrench their preferred policies and protect them from future change. Furthermore, we show that the probability of a law being amended is affected by future political conditions, the actions of the judiciary, and factors specific to the law.     

The roots of the Lega Nord’s populist regionalism

ABSTRACT

Newth’s paper contributes to a greater understanding of the connection between regionalism and radical-right ideology by examining the roots of the Italian Lega Nord’s regionalist, populist and nativist discourse with a new framework of populist regionalism. By analysing the discourse of two waves of regionalist activism in Lombardy and Piedmont, represented respectively by movements for regional autonomy (MRAs) and the Lega Nord (Northern League), Newth underlines a significant connection between populist regionalism and the radical right, represented by the process of Othering directed against both internal and external migrants. At the same time, examination of narratives used during these two waves of activism reveals differences—at times nuanced, at times more explicit—between their respective populist and nativist identities.     

Politics and enlightenment: Kant and Derrida on cosmopolitan responsibility

Walter Benjamin once remarked of the enterprise of translation ‘that it is nowhere’: that the labour of transcribing the sense, inflection and difference of any particular language and text must always situate the translator in a space which is neither ‘of the original, nor ‘of the language into which it is to be transcribed. This ‘non‐position’ of the translator—between the original and its analogue, between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, the difference and the acceptability of the text—marks the labour of translation as an ethical responsibility: that of communicating the significance of something—a gesture, a story, a custom, a tradition—which has appeared to this/our socio‐linguistic culture as strange and unfathomably alien; and to achieve this communication without annulling its strangeness, its alterity. The purpose of my comparison of Kant and Derrida's remarks on cosmopolitical responsibility therefore, is fourfold. First, I want to suggest that it is this ‘stricture’ of translation—this difficult responsibility of both judging and respecting the difference of foreign’ cultures—which marks the (non‐Kantian, non‐situated) ‘territory’ of cosmopolitical responsibility. Second, by using Kant's remarks on the relationship between the political evolution of European Enlightenment culture and a possible world confederation of sovereign states, I want to point up the hierarchies and secondarizations involved in the determination of universal standards of moral, ethical and political conduct (even if these standards are originally prosecuted as the legislative conditions of a ‘radical democracy'). Third, I want to look at the ways in which the stricture of translation has been articulated as a theory of ‘global’ responsibility—particularly in the divergent ethical and political approaches of Jurgen Habermas and Jean‐Francois Lyotard. Fourth, I want to suggest that it is Derrida's idea of a ‘dual responsibility’ of critical thought to the political and philosophical resources of European Enlightenment and to the difference of non‐European nations and cultures, that marks the difficulty (the stricture) of acting responsibly within the global economics of power, identity and legislation. I want, in other words, to show that the ‘nowhere’ of Benjamin's translator, is a ‘place’ whose possibility demands a certain ‘Kantian’ right of reflection; that is, the right to pursue the ‘transcendent’ principle of respect for the other.     

Risk Attitudes and Political Participation

This article contributes to existing explanations of political participation by proposing that citizens’ attitudes towards risk predict participation. I argue that people who are risk accepting participate in political life because politics offers novelty and excitement. Analyses of two independent Internet surveys establish a positive, significant relationship between risk attitudes and general political participation. The analyses also suggest that the relationship between risk attitudes and action varies with the political act: people who are more risk accepting are more likely to participate in general political acts, but they are no more or less likely to turn out in elections. Further analyses suggest that two key mechanisms—novelty seeking and excitement seeking—underlie the relationship between risk attitudes and political participation.     

Marx,Engels, and Ecology*

The following is a brief survey of Marx and Engels’ views on ecology, from the viewpoint of their relevance for 21th-century ecosocialism. While there are some serious limitations in the way both consider the “development of productive forces,” there are powerful insights in their discussion of the destructive consequences of capitalist expansion for the environment—an expansion that generates a disastrous metabolic rift in the exchanges between human societies and nature. Some ecological Marxists distinguish between “first stage ecosocialists”—who believe that Marx analyses on ecological issues are too incomplete and dated to be of real relevance today—and “second stage ecosocialists,” who emphasize the contemporary methodological significance of Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism. This paper tries to argue for a third position (which probably could be accepted by several people of the two groups above): Marx and Engels’ discussion on ecological issues is incomplete and dated but despite these shortcomings it does have real relevance and methodological significance today.     

Appropriators not Position Takers: The Distorting Effects of Electoral Incentives on Congressional Representation

Congressional districts create two levels of representation. Studies of representation focus on a disaggregated level: the electoral connection between representatives and constituents. But there is a collective level of representation—the result of aggregating across representatives. This article uses new measures of home styles to demonstrate that responsiveness to constituents can have negative consequences for collective representation. The electoral connection causes marginal representatives—legislators with districts composed of the other party's partisans—to emphasize appropriations in their home styles. But it causes aligned representatives—those with districts filled with copartisans—to build their home styles around position taking. Aggregated across representatives, this results in an artificial polarization in stated party positions: aligned representatives, who tend to be ideologically extreme, dominate policy debates. The logic and evidence in this article provide an explanation for the apparent rise in vitriolic debate, and the new measures facilitate a literature on home styles.     

The transformed identity of a banking corporation's employees, 1960s–1980s

The current paper discusses one aspect of corporate social responsibility—employee community volunteering—as implemented at an Israeli banking corporation. The literature on corporate social responsibility as a feature of global capitalism has largely ignored the history of corporate philanthropy and its relation to the current model of social responsibility. Moreover, to date, no studies have addressed the relationship between models of corporate social responsibility, on the one hand, and management approaches, on the other. In this historical–ethnographic study, we examine a case in which, we argue, normative management models and advanced marketing approaches combined to shape new conceptions and practices of employee volunteering. We examine how the process evolved over the course of three marketing campaigns initiated by the bank's management between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. In the early 1960s, the models in question helped refashion the employees' identity as service providers ‘empathic’ toward clients. By the late 1970s, their identity was transformed once again, this time to incorporate a ‘humane’ orientation toward the ‘community’. In the process—the results of which are still felt today—the employees became the carriers and disseminators of an organizational culture that emphasized values of philanthropy and social commitment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.