Reinventing Government: The Case of National Service

When Bill Clinton embraced national service as one of his administration's priorities, he took a step forward on two of his key initiatives. Not only was national service a new initiative in its own right, but Clinton also held it up as a model of his efforts to reinvent government. It would be an exemplar of government that is catalytic, competitive, decentralized, and results oriented. This case study examines the theory and reality of reinvention. The Corporation for National Service and its programs have come under fire for being more political than catalytic, being simultaneously too centralized and too decentralized, and pursuing too many unclear goals. This article seeks to identify discontinuities between the rhetoric and the reality of reinvention in this instance and draw lessons for public-sector reform.     

Party politics and the survival of central bank governors

Legally independent central banks leave elected politicians with little direct control over monetary policy. The most important indirect channel of influence for governments thus consists in appointing ‘responsive’ central bank officials and removing ‘hostile’ ones. This premise is tested by examining the effect of partisan ties between central bank governors and governments or presidents in 30 European democracies between 1945 and 2012. Drawing on an original dataset containing information on the party affiliations of 195 governors, event history models are employed to show that affiliation with a party represented in the executive (the government or the presidency) has a large and significant positive effect on governor survival. However, affiliation with an opposition party only increases governors' hazards during the first four years of their term, suggesting that the impact of the party label may be overridden as more reliable information about a governor becomes available.     

The politics of neighbourhood institutions: The Italian case

This account is part of a larger research effort which is aimed at evaluating the significance for Italian society of the introduction of new government institutions at the neighbourhood level and of identifying the circumstances under which they are likely to be promoted and to succeed. The article looks at which types of neighbourhood government have been instituted and which cities in Italy have taken advantage of the provisions following the national legislation on neighbourhoods passed in 1976. An examination of conceptual models of neighbourhood government, secondary and interview data relating to the debate on the law, and neighbourhood electoral data are brought to bear on the two questions.     

The politics of flatland

A version of the median-voter theorem holds for two-dimensional spatial models in which voters regard the two dimensions as economic goods or goodlike activities and in which the set of feasible outcomes is constrained by budget or technology. Although mathematically trivial, this fact has widespread analytical uses. After arguing that our two-dimensional model, with its stability property, fits a number of important and general policy areas, we use our analysis to address some prominent theoretical issues.     

Pathological politics: The anatomy of government failure

This essay is a slightly altered version of chapter 4 in Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy.(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission from The Independent Institute.     

The politics of kinship

Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim explores our most intimate ties to others – the ties of kinship. Antigone’s Claim explores the politics of kinship through a reading of the figure of Antigone. For Butler, Antigone represents a crisis of the Oedipal order of kinship, revealing the possibility of new forms of kinship itself. Butler presents a persuasive and moving argument for the necessity of changes in our conception and practice of kinship. However, her account of new kinship forms is less persuasive, failing to engage adequately with the sociality of kinship or to provide a radical model of its new forms. Butler argues that Antigone does not represent a feminist politics. However, Antigone’s Claim suggests that, if we are to re-conceive the politics of kinship, then it is necessary to reread Antigone as a political figure.