Transnational public goods provision: the increasing role of rising powers and the case of South Africa

The paper delineates three debates, which will be conflated. One line of discussion relates to public goods at a transnational level. Here, the referencing of debates regarding the characteristics of ‘a common good’ will be of significance. A second strand addresses the group of countries known as the ‘rising powers’ and the role these countries could play towards a globalised common good. A third discussion thread analyses South Africa as a case study for the main rising power on the African continent. By creating connections between the lines of discussion, this paper drives forward the debates on how the role of rising powers can be conceptually repositioned in the light of a changing global context, and explores how these countries can respond to global challenges.     

Administrative Styles in the OECD: Bureaucratic Policy-Making beyond Formal Rules

As we know from comparative public policy, bureaucracies contribute to a considerable degree to the contents and the ways of policy-making. One important driver of administrative policy-making are their specific “styles” or “cultures”. “Administrative styles” are understood here as the standard operating procedures and routines that characterize the behavior and activities of administrative bodies in initiating, drafting and implementing policy. In this article, we convey the concept of Administrative Styles to the level of International Organizations (IOs) and apply it to the Organization for Economic Development and Co-Operation (OECD). The article proceeds in three steps: First, the concept of administrative styles is introduced and refined. Drawing on expert interviews with OECD staff, we secondly show that consideration of OECD administrative styles significantly advances the literature’s understanding of the organization. Finally, we give an outlook on new research avenues and the relevance of our findings for the study of International Public Administrations (IPAs) more generally.     

Conflicts of customary land tenure in rural Africa: is large-scale land acquisition a driver of ‘institutional innovation’?

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.     

Behavioral Public Administration: Combining Insights from Public Administration and Psychology

Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro‐level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, add nuance to, or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two‐way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political‐administrative setting. Finally, four principles are proposed to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.     

A comment on Meillassoux and some notions about an agricultural state

Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911 by Wang Yeh‐chien. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. Pp. xiii + 172, 36 tables, 7 figures.

An Estimate of the Land‐Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908 by Wang Yeh‐chien. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973. Pp. xi + 57, 27 tables.

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson. New Left Books, 1974; pp. 304, £5.00 and pp. 573, £8.50.

Contrasting Communities: English Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Margaret Spufford. Cambridge University Press, 1974. Pp. xxiii + 374, maps, tables, graphs; £7.70.     

PREDICTING STATE ABORTION LEGISLATION FROM U.S. SENATE VOTES: THE EFFECTS OF APPARENT IDEOLOGICAL SHIRKING

The recent Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services giving more discretion to states to regulate abortion has led to speculation concerning which states might move to limit abortions. Medoff (1989) attempts to predict how state legislatures might vote on state-level abortion legislation by examining the 1983 Senate vote on the Hatch/Eagleton Amendment. We expand upon Medoff's analysis by incor- porating recent developments in agency theory as it applies to the political agents (i.e., Senators) in the empirical model. The results demonstrate that accounting for Senatorial "shirking" and state ideology substantially im- proves the predictive ability of the model for the Senate abortion vote. The predicted votes of the state's Senators, after eliminating the effects of apparent Senatorial shirking, are used to infer the likelihood of state-level legislation substantially restricting abortion. We compare these results to a base model that ignores the issue of shirking and find increased predict- ability and several differing results.