AID'S CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY: CURRENT PROPOSALS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

Aid to Africa is less threatened by the current foreign policyand fiscal pressures than by a complex crisis of legitimacyregarding the enterprise. Despite official rhetoric to the contrary,most aid insiders are disappointed by the current achievementsof aid. The current malaise has resulted in a considerable fermentof thinking about how to make aid more effective. This articledescribes four sets of proposals that have been advanced. Theseinclude proposals to make aid more selective, as well as toadopt a more need-based approach, which includes proposals topromote government ownership, and to focus aid on non-governmentalactors in the private and voluntary sectors. It is argued thateach of these proposals is desirable, but that together theyare probably incompatible, certainly difficult for the donorsto implement and unlikely to address the real problems thathave plagued aid and African development these last thirty-fiveyears. The real challenge, not addressed by most current reformproposals, is to change how donors and recipients manage aid,so that it contributes to a sound development strategy. Thearticle concludes that the main impulse for reform must comefrom African countries themselves, rather than from the donorcountries.     

CHANGING NATIONAL RULES: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS (1960–2004)

This paper will empirically analyse the evolution of national rule changes for the domain of post‐war Dutch higher education. We focus on rule changes because in the life cycle of rules – births, changes and repeals – change is the most common event. Our theoretical framework is mainly based on the organizational ecology and top management demography literatures. We will be integrating these perspectives, adapting them to our research context. In so doing, we focus on rule density, a minister’s demographic characteristics (such as age and tenure) and cabinet features (for example, power and turnover) as deteminants of rule changes. The empirical results provide significant support for the majority of our theoretical predictions. Overall, the results suggest that the ecological processes are the most robust, followed by the characteristics of ministers and the features of cabinets.     

The micro–macro interactive approach to political trust: Quality of representation and substantive representation across Europe

The relevance of the macro-context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more-educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro–macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual-level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro-level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual-level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro-context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country-year combinations), enriched with country-level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi-level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro–macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more-educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.     

A CASE OF PARTIAL CONVERGENCE: THE EUROPEANIZATION OF CENTRAL GOVERNMENT IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

This article compares the Europeanization of central government in four Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs): Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia. Using a large N survey of ministerial civil servants, it finds that the Europeanization of central government is characterized by partial convergence. The scope of Europeanization is large and similar among CEECs, reaching widely and deeply into government ministries. Moreover, patterns of Europeanization are similar among CEECs: the same ministries form the ‘inner core’ and ‘outer circle’ of Europeanized ministries; only a small proportion of civil servants work full‐time on EU issues and routinely engage in activities that ‘project’ national policies at EU level. Compared to old member states, patterns of Europeanization show signs of convergence, while the scope of Europeanization is larger in CEECs.     

FROM RED TAPE TO WHICH PERFORMANCE RESULTS? EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RED TAPE AND VARIOUS DIMENSIONS OF PERFORMANCE IN HEALTHCARE WORK UNITS

Decades of research on red tape have still to provide final answers as to whether red tape reduces performance. This may be due to not distinguishing the different dimensions that public service performance consists of. Shifting the focus to rules and their characteristics, this study analyses how the degree of compliance burden and lack of functionality of rules relates to overall and dimensional public performance. Building upon the argument that red tape reduces resources and motivation and by doing so influences performance, hypotheses are put forward regarding the relationship to performance. Using red tape reports from employees in 49 work units and performance rated by the supervisor, this study shows that performance is at its lowest when the rules have a high compliance burden and lack functionality. Moreover, the dimensional analyses show that compliance burden may be most detrimental for output, whereas lack of functionality reduces responsiveness and democratic outcomes.     

THE STATE AND THE THREAT OF CASCADING FAILURE ACROSS CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES: THE IMPLICATIONS OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM MEDIA INCIDENT REPORTS

The threat of cascading failures across critical infrastructures has been identified as a key challenge for governments. Cascading failure is seen as potentially catastrophic, extremely difficult to predict and increasingly likely to happen. Infrastructures are largely privately operated and private actors are thought to under‐invest in mitigating this threat. Consequently, experts have demanded a more dominant role for government, including the use of regulation. Empirical evidence on cascading failure is, however, extremely scarce. This paper analyses new data drawn from news reports on incidents. We find that, contrary to current thinking, cascades are not rare. Neither do they indicate a wide array of unknown dependencies across infrastructures. Rather, we find a small number of focused, unidirectional pathways around two infrastructures: energy and telecommunications. We also found that most cascades were stopped quickly, in contrast to the oft‐cited ‘domino effect'. These findings undermine the case for more intrusive public oversight of critical infrastructures.     

WORK,INCOME SUPPORT,AND CRIME IN THE DUTCH WELFARE STATE: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY FOLLOWING VULNERABLE YOUTH INTO ADULTHOOD

Life‐course criminological research has consistently suggested that employment can reduce criminal behavior. However, it is unclear whether the financial aspects of employment or the social control that inheres in employment best explains the relationship between employment and reduced offending. By using longitudinal information on a sample of men and women (N = 540) who were institutionalized in a Dutch juvenile justice institution in the 1990s, this study examines the effects of employment as well as the different types of income support on crime. Random‐ and fixed‐effects models show that for men, both work and income support are associated with a reduction in the rate of offending. For women, however, although employment is correlated with a lower offending rate, receiving income support, and in particular disability benefits, is correlated with a higher offending rate. The findings support both theories that stress the financial motivation for crime as well as theories that emphasize the importance of informal social control for reducing offending.     

Value orientation, left-right placement and voting

Abstract. In this article we try to disentangle the constraints between traditional lines of political polarization (left-right placement) and newer distinctions (materialist/postmaterialist values) among mass publics. It is shown that voting or party preference is most clearly related to the left-right placement of the respondents. However, this placement is directly and strongly dependent on the materialist/postmaterialist orientation, while background variables like education, income and age are linked to voting via this value orientation. The materialist/postmaterialist orientation appears to be the present-day interpretation of the dominant political conflict in advanced industrial society. Although alignments and orientations count for a substantive part of the variance in voting, the power of these models to predict the actual vote of people turns out to be rather poor.