Vassilis K. Fouskas,Shampa Roy-Mukherjee,Qingan Huang and Ejike Udeogu,China & the USA: Globalisation and the Decline of America’s Supremacy

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Impact of “U.S. Veterans' Access,Choice and Accountability Act of 2014” on employee morale and work behavior: Does “creating an at‐will workplace” lead to better outcomes?

This study estimates the impact of job security rule changes on federal civilian employees' work attitudes and behavior (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intention) by looking at recent U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)'s Veterans' Access, Choice and Accountability Act (VACAA) of 2014. The data for the analysis are derived from the 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015 U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys. A difference‐in‐differences quasiexperimental methodology was used to examine the effect of a job security rule change on VA employee job satisfaction and turnover intention. This study's results indicate that the overall effect of the introduction of a new job security rule at VA is a decrease of approximately 7 percentage points in employee job satisfaction and 8 percentage points in employee turnover intention, which are a substantial effect. This study contributes to both the theoretical and the empirical understanding of at‐will employment systems and public employee work morale and attitudes.     

Incumbent positioning, ideological heterogeneity and?mobilization in U.S. House elections

This article examines whether the need to mobilize citizens pushes incumbents to the ideological extremes in U.S. House elections. We test whether incumbents are more ideologically extreme as the ideological heterogeneity of the district increases and if turnout increases as incumbents become more extreme. These tests combined with the observation that divergence decreases with competitiveness suggest that candidates balance the need to attract swing voters with the need to mobilize supporters. The results also suggest that the growth in elite polarization is linked to the growing ideological heterogeneity in the electorate.     

How Do Intrinsic Motivations,Work‐Related Opportunities,and Well‐Being Shape Bureaucratic Corruptibility?

A large body of research focuses on the institutional factors that shape country‐level corruption and the effectiveness of macro‐level anticorruption measures; however, corruption at the individual level remains understudied and thus poorly understood. This article examines the underlying causes of and mechanisms through which individual government bureaucrats engage in corruption. The researchers develop a framework that incorporates intrinsic motivations, work‐related opportunities, and work‐related well‐being to test the ways in which these micro‐level factors shape bureaucrats' propensity to engage in corrupt behaviors (or corruptibility). Using survey data from more than 1,300 Chinese public employees, the authors identify direct and indirect effects on corruptibility and discuss theoretical and practical implications.     

From Corporatism to Lobbyism? — Parliaments,Executives, and Organized Interests in Denmark and Norway

The integration of organized interests into the formation and implementation of public policies is a core institutional trait of the Scandinavian countries. However, significant changes have taken place in the relations between organized interests and public authorities in Denmark and Norway during the last two decades. The use of traditional corporatist structures of interest intermediation has been reduced in favor of a corresponding increase in lobbyism. At the same time a marked increase in the frequency and intensity of contacts between organized interests and parliamentary actors has taken place. The shift in focus mirrors the increasing role played by the two parliaments in public policy formation and a less positive assessment of the outcomes of strongly institutionalized corporatist policy making by administrative decision makers.     

Daniel R. Hammond,Politics and Policy in China’s Social Assistance Reform; Providing for the Poor?

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Who ‘marries’ whom? The influence of societal connectedness,economic and political homogeneity,and population size on jurisdictional consolidations

For decades, political scientists have been asking how political jurisdictions are formed and reshaped. Nevertheless, studies of local government jurisdictional formation are few and often plagued with endogeneity since the formation of jurisdictions cannot be separated from sorting effects. In this article, the unique case of the Danish structural reform is utilised to overcome endogeneity due to migration‐related sorting by studying patterns of municipal amalgamations. In the recent Danish reform, 239 of 271 municipal entities were forced to amalgamate simultaneously, while who actually amalgamated with whom was left entirely to negotiations between the respective municipalities. Applying logistical regression to a dataset where the unit of analysis is dyads of municipalities allows the construction of a relational model for estimating the effect of different political and societal variables on the likelihood of amalgamation. Societal connectedness, population size and geography are important predictors of amalgamation patterns, while political and economic homogeneity between municipalities does not appear to matter much.