Toward Participatory and Transparent Governance: Report on the Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government:

The Global Forum on Reinventing Government has made government reform and new forms of comparative public administration and politics global issues. Since the forum was initiated in the United States in 1999, it has been held in locations around the world with broad representation. Yet the proceedings of these forums have not been fully reported to the international public administration community. This paper reports on the ideas on reinventing governance that emerged from the Sixth Global Forum. Many of the participants in the forum came from developing countries, so the paper also provides ideas and points of view on governance that are beyond the mainstream literature in this area.     

Electoral institutions, partisan status, and political support in Lesotho

Does the introduction of proportionality in electoral systems help to boost popular evaluations of democracy? This article takes advantage of an electoral reform in Lesotho to conduct a natural experiment. We trace shifts over time in popular political support, using Afrobarometer data collected before and after reform to measure mass satisfaction with democracy and public trust in political institutions. We find both direct and indirect effects. In the aggregate, Lesotho's transition from a majoritarian to a mixed electoral system is directly associated with increased levels of citizen support for the country's state and regime. Importantly, however, formal institutions have only indirect effects at the individual level, where a person's informal partisan status – as a member of a winning majority or losing minority – mediates the impacts of institutional change.     

Credibility,preferences, and bilateral investment treaties

When is a commitment mechanism employed as a solution to a time-inconsistency problem? This article provides a nuanced answer to this question by studying bilateral investment treaties (BITs). We develop a game theoretic model of BIT signing in which the government of a capital-importing country and an investor from a capital-exporting country strategically interact. The model predicts that, on the one hand, when host states highly value foreign direct investment (FDI), the likelihood of BITs increases as their judicial institutions lack credibility. On the other hand, when their preferences for FDI are only modest, the likelihood of BITs increases as their judicial institutions become more credible. We employ Cox proportional hazard models to test our hypotheses, and the results largely support our theory. Our findings have broad implications for the large literature on credible commitment, which has paid insufficient attention to the interplay between preferences and credibility.     

Liberal coercion? Prostitution,human trafficking and policy

Liberal prostitution policy aims at improving labor conditions for prostitutes and protecting victims of forced prostitution. Given its policy mandates, legalized prostitution should be linked to better protection policies for trafficking victims and stronger anti-trafficking measures. In this paper, I investigate empirically whether or not legalized prostitution improves protection policies for victims, as it is presumed. The results of my analysis—using data from 149 countries for the period of 2001–2011—suggest that a liberal prostitution policy does not lead to better protection and, in some cases, legalized prostitution can be detrimental to protecting victims of human trafficking.     

Does the longer tenure of local government heads affect the performance of local governments? The Korean case

The relationship between the length of tenure of elected heads of local governments (HOLG) and performance of local governments remains ambiguous, with few empirical studies on it. Korea presents a compelling case in that it has limited HOLG to serve only three consecutive terms based on the untested belief that longer tenures have a negative effect on local governments. To address these gaps, this study applies the fixed effect panel model, using the Korean government data from 2008 to 2014. Our findings reveal a negative relationship between tenure length and efficiency, particularly among local governments demonstrating a low level of efficiency. The relationship between the length of tenure and integrity is also negative, especially among local governments with low levels of integrity. However, given that these relationships disappear when factors specific to local governments are controlled, our findings should be interpreted cautiously.     

Measurement and analysis of diastereomer ratios for forensic characterization of brodifacoum

The highly toxic anticoagulant rodenticide brodifacoum is an organic compound that has two diastereomeric forms. In this paper, we consider the hypothesis that the relative population of the diastereomers is a characteristic of forensic value for the association or source attribution of specimens of brodifacoum. In general, the stereoisomer distribution in an organic compound depends on the reagents, conditions, and methods used for synthesis and purification, and may vary over time due to differential stabilities of the stereoisomers. The stereoisomer distribution may thus serve as an identifier of the production methods and history of samples and provide a basis for comparing recovered specimens. We refer to this novel approach for signature detection as stereoisomer distribution analysis or SDA. If the stereoisomers are diastereomers, quantitative determination of the diastereomer ratio in a specimen can be performed by a number of techniques, notably gas or liquid chromatography or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. This paper describes an NMR spectroscopic analysis of ten commercial technical grade brodifacoum samples from distinct batches originating from three different sources. The results reveal detectable source-to-source and batch-to-batch variations in diastereomer ratios.     

Intimate Partner Violence among Asian Americans: Risk Factor Differences across Ethnic Subgroups

A limited number of studies have been conducted on intimate partner violence (IPV) among Asian Americans. This study aims to fill this gap by examining risk factors for IPV and ethnic differences within Asian American subgroups. Logistic regression analyses were conducted, using data from the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS). This study found that while prevalence rates of IPV varied across ethnic groups, the differences disappeared when controlling for demographic, interpersonal, and sociocultural variables. The study findings also showed that risk for IPV was higher for US-born Asian Americans, and that perceived discrimination increased the risk.     

Evaluation of the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987: Impact and Challenges for Preserving Underwater Cultural Heritage

In the demand of regulatory policy to control salvage of shipwrecks and protect the nation's underwater cultural heritage, the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987 allowed the exception of the admiralty law to give states authority and management of abandoned shipwrecks for the purposes of preservation and recreation. Due to the lack of its regulatory power and vague standards, the Act has been harshly criticized for being ineffectual in resolving conflicts between commercial salvors, and states or protecting illicit salvage. This research will examine the purpose and impact of the policy under the framework of the National Historic Preservation Act, which restrained options in the policymaking. While acknowledging its limitations, this research finds that the Act enabled the inclusion of historic shipwrecks in the nation's preservation system, allowed funding, and promoted its use for public benefits. Studying the Act in the policy context of the U.S. historic preservation can promote the rightful understanding of its policy limitations as well as impact, and support feasible policy improvement.