Shane Martin  Richard Whitaker 《West European politics》2013,36(7):1464-1486

Abstract

A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system. For example, powerful parliamentary committees are considered a necessary condition for the legislature to help police policy compromises between parties in multiparty government. But can other parliamentary instruments perform this role? This article suggests parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. In order to test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010?2015 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions as the divisiveness of a policy area increases. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important oversight role through other parliamentary devices, including helping to police the implementation of coalition agreements.  相似文献   

    

Richard Ericson  Dean Barry  Aaron Doyle 《Economy and Society》2013,42(4):532-558

The key tenets of neo-liberalism regarding risk, governance, and responsibility are critically evaluated through an empirical study of the private insurance industry. Recent tendencies in this industry towards increasing segmentation of consumers regarding risk, and towards an expansion of private policing of insurance fraud, are analysed. The definition of moral hazard is broadened to include all parties in the insurance relationship, not just the insured. Moral hazards embedded in the social organization of private insurance lead to various kinds of immoral risky behaviour by insureds, insurance companies, and their employees, and to intensified efforts to regulate this behaviour. The analysis concludes with some critical observations about the neo-liberal emphasis on minimal state, market fundamentalism, risk-taking, individual responsibility, and acceptance of inequality.  相似文献   

Not All Actors Are the Same: Some Comments in Response to Gideon Aran and Ron E. Hassner's “Religious Violence in Judaism: Past and Present”     

Richard D. Hecht 《Terrorism and Political Violence》2013,25(3):409-412

  相似文献   

    

Richard Ericson & Myles Leslie 《Economy and Society》2013,42(4):613-624

Abstract

Power's book examines how organizations are designed through risk-based science, law and managerial techniques. As organizations have come to think of, reform and govern themselves through the vague but powerful notion of risk, both the fortunes of the managers who conceive of these designs and the behaviour of the organizations themselves have been affected. Power develops four themes as he analyses the consequences of these moves towards risk management as governance. First, he notes the tensions that have emerged as risk management systems take in information about uncertainty in the operational environment and process it into risk, while simultaneously producing yet more uncertainty. Second, he offers an account of developments in the system of professions as the abstractions of mathematical risk analysts have lost ground to managerial approaches to the processing and uses of risk. Third, he applies neo-liberal notions of the individual to organizational behaviour in an analysis of the conflict between risk-embracing profit motives and risk-averse precautionary instincts. Fourth, he argues that the uptake of risk management techniques and discourses in organizations has fundamentally changed the way they view themselves and operate in the world. As better risk management through internal self-control has become the obvious solution to every problem, enterprise values and trust have imploded. We close our review with a critique of this implosion thesis, suggesting directions for future research for socio-legal, governance and organizational behaviour scholars.  相似文献   

    

Richard A. Jones 《Socialism and Democracy》2013,27(2):30-32

  相似文献   

    

Richard Allan 《Terrorism and Political Violence》2013,25(1):62-74

Scholars have traditionally argued that Islamist terrorist groups tend to commit higher casualty attacks. Noting that casualty rates of attacks vary widely across Islamist terrorist groups, this study advances an alternative hypothesis that group organizational features and goal structures better explain differing casualty rates than does the overarching ideological type. Using both cross-national analysis and a case study of post-invasion Iraq, I demonstrate that there are two basic types of Islamist terrorist groups whose organizational and goal-structure features explain divergent casualty rates: “strategic groups” that function similarly to secular national-liberation and regime-change movements and “abstract/universal groups” that are affiliated with the global al-Qaeda network.  相似文献   

    

Andrew T. Green  Richard D. Kohl 《Democratization》2013,20(1):151-165

A large number of multilateral and bilateral donors have become engaged in the area of democracy and governance (DG) assistance over the last 15 years, stimulated by a series of trends and events. Despite the maturation of DG assistance as an important development area and the high profile of democracy promotion as a key foreign policy goal, research on the impact of this assistance and the effectiveness of different types of programming has been limited. Donors are constantly in need of feedback on the effectiveness and impact of their programming in order to revise programme designs, re-strategize aid portfolios, or address new DG issues. Moreover, legislatures increasingly require government aid agencies to be able to measure the results of their programmes, thereby demonstrating a ‘return on investment’ that would guide future assistance. Quality research is hampered by a daunting political, logistical, and methodological context, however. In 2005 a donor-sponsored workshop was organized to discuss challenges facing the evaluation and assessment of DG programming and assistance. The purpose of this article is to share insights from the workshop with a wider audience of scholars, practitioners and other policy-makers in the hope that this will stimulate additional research and thinking in this area.  相似文献   

    

Richard Rose 《Democratization》2013,20(2):251-271

To be admitted to the European Union (EU), an applicant country is expected to meet five conditions for democratic governance set out in the EU's Copenhagen criteria. The first section compares the EU's criteria with alternative criteria of democracy and of governance. Secondly, the article uses New Europe Barometer sample surveys to demonstrate how the bottom-up evaluation of governance by a country's citizens can complement top-down evaluations by external institutions. Evaluations by citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Ukraine are compared with those of citizens in eight post-communist countries admitted to the EU in 2004. Factor analysis demonstrates that, unlike democracy indexes, democratic governance is a multi-dimensional concept. Citizens characterize their system of democratic governance as acceptable on some criteria but not on others. Taken singly, each Copenhagen criterion can be a tool for diagnosing an area of weakness in democratic governance. However, political pressures lead policymakers to lower demands for improving governance as a deadline approach for deciding whether or not to admit an applicant country to the European Union.  相似文献   

    

Richard Milgrom 《Capitalism Nature Socialism》2013,24(2):75-95

  相似文献   

    

Richard Levins 《Capitalism Nature Socialism》2013,24(2):31-33

  相似文献