Local authority performance indicators: Dousing the fire of campaigning consumers?

Much criticism has been levelled at the reliability of the Audit Commission's measures of local authority performance, but less attention has been paid to the reality of their empowering effect on consumer groups. This article reports on the impact of the policy on one consumer group, ALL MOD CONS, a national charity which campaigns for more and better public toilets. It argues that, far from empowering the group, the annual publication of performance indicators has diverted its energies and resources into disseminating the Audit Commision's statistics to their members and drawing misleading conclusions from them which risk undermining the group's credibility. The case raises questions about the role of performance indicators in the democratic process.     

The New Research on Civil Wars: Does It Help Us Understand the Colombian Conflict?

The article synthesizes contributions from the recent comparative research on civil war and the case‐specific literature on Colombia to argue that too often, commentators on this conflict overlook some of its key dimensions. A comprehensive analysis shows that no fewer than six factors are fueling violent conflict in Colombia: economic forces, state weakness, landscape, U.S. policies, long‐duration and spin‐off violence, and malicious opportunism by non‐combatants. The first three are the ones that matter most. The case made here is that when analysts disregard the range and interrelat‐edness of the factors involved, the result is a distortion of reality and a tendency to support policies that will not enhance the prospects for peace.     

Mapping silent citizenship: how democratic theory hears citizens' silence and why it matters

Democratic theory hears silent citizenship as disengagement or disempowerment. Normatively, silent citizenship evokes the specter of civic passivity – of democratic citizens variably characterized by apathy, disaffection, selfishness, or a lack of political knowledge. Empirically, silent citizenship is linked to deficits of democracy – including voter turnout rates, the quality of political representation, and overall government responsiveness. One problem with these conclusions, however, is that we lack any systematic conceptualization of the range of different attitudes democratic citizens might hold in silence. This article seeks to fill in this conceptual gap by mapping the range of possible motivations for citizens to remain silent in developed liberal democratic systems. The key to doing so, I argue, is to distinguish between two measures of democratic citizenship: empowerment and communication. Separating these two measures reveals an entire spectrum of motivations for silence, which I organize into five distinct degrees of silent citizenship.     

A pluralistic perspective on the intractability of the International Joint Commission's Lake Ontario‐St. Lawrence River study

As environmental public participation has become increasingly mandated worldwide, its advantages and disadvantages have been widely documented. This article uses qualitative analysis of documentation and interviews with 40 participants in a US–Canadian International Joint Commission water management controversy. It demonstrates how ambiguity and diffuse power—that is, two characteristics of organizational pluralism—revealed in communication and governance contribute to the challenges of resolving the 13‐year controversy. The article adds to the literature that has largely focused on power disparities between governing or managing organizations and stakeholders and makes recommendations for addressing situations involving organizational and scientific ambiguity as well as relatively equal distribution of power. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unity of effort requires unity of object: why industry should not be involved in formulating public health policy

This paper provides a framework for examining the general issue of public health authorities' collaboration with industry. The framework distinguishes between industry involvement in the development of public health policy and the implementation of policy‐driven interventions. A distinction is also made between industries marketing products conducive to good health versus products that impact negatively on public health (e.g. alcohol and energy‐dense, nutrition‐poor food and beverage industries). Drawing on concepts with respect to the effectiveness of military coalitions, it is argued that a common goal (i.e. ‘unity of object’) is a prerequisite for optimal co‐operation (i.e. ‘unity of effort’) between collaborators in any sphere of activity. However, this vital precondition does not exist in the public health arena because the end goals of industry and those of public health are fundamentally different, if not opposed (i.e. profits to owners/shareholders versus the social good). It is argued that because of this fundamental disjunct between industry profit goals and the public good, unity of effort will always be compromised in any form of collaboration with industry, and particularly where public health policies and interventions are designed to negatively impact on product consumption. Hence, while industry can be asked to co‐operate in implementing public health policy initiatives, industry should never be involved in developing policy initiatives. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.