Central bank independence and inflation: Corporatism,partisanship, and alternative indices of central bank independence

A well-developed theoretical literature suggests that central bank independence causes low inflation. Empirical work supporting this hypothesis is unsatisfactory, however, for two reasons: statistical analysis has only recently begun to include control variables, and important political variables that are related to inflation have not yet been included; analysis has not yet undertaken a systematic comparison of alternative indices of central bank independence. This paper addresses both weaknesses by testing the explanatory power of eight indices of central bank independence in a political-economic model of inflation. The results suggest that while support for the central bank independence hypothesis survives a relatively inclusive set of control variables, support for the hypothesis is not independent of the particular index upon which analysis relies.     

Inflation,unemployment and government popularity—Dynamic models for the United States,Britain and West Germany

There has been numerous attempts to model the relationship between unemployment, inflation, other economic variables and government popularity in a variety of industrial countries. However, there is conflicting evidence about the magnitude and significance of effects both between different countries, and within the same country at different points of time. The purpose of this article is to examine the existing literature, to provide a critique of the theoretical and statistical validity of many existing studies, and to specify and estimate a dynamic model of the relationship between inflation, unemployment and government popularity in three countries over the post-war period. This model is a multivariate transfer function with an autoregressive-moving average error structure which has been developed in its general form by Box and Jenkins. The results demonstrate significant relationships between inflation, unemployment and government popularity, but relationships which are relatively weak and unstable over time.     

The Cartography of Opportunity: Spatial Data Science for Equitable Urban Policy

As evidence of the contextual effects of place upon individual outcomes has become increasingly solid over time, so too have urban policies and programs designed to connect underserved people with access to spatial opportunity. To this end, many attempts have been made to quantify the geography of opportunity and quite literally plot it on a map by combining evidence from studies on neighborhood effects with spatial data resources and geographic information systems (GIS) technology. Recently, these opportunity maps have not only become increasingly common but their preparation has been encouraged and facilitated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A closer look at the foundations and methods that underlie these exercises offers important lessons I examine the practice of opportunity mapping from both theoretical and methodological perspectives, highlighting several weaknesses of the common methods. Following this, I outline a theoretical framework based on Galster’s categorization of the mechanisms of neighborhood effects. Using data from the Baltimore metropolitan region, I use confirmatory factor analysis to specify a measurement model that verifies the validity of the proposed theoretical framework. The model provides estimates of four latent variables conceived as the essential dimensions of spatial opportunity: social-interactive, environmental, geographic, and institutional. Finally, I develop a neighborhood typology using unsupervised machine learning applied to the four dimensions of opportunity. Results suggest that opportunity mapping can be improved substantially through a better connection to the empirical literature on neighborhood effects, a multivariate statistical framework, and more direct relevance to public policy interventions.     

Contracting Public Sector Services: A Meta-Analytic Perspective of the International Evidence

The performance framework adopted for this review includes five dimensions — economic, social, democratic, legal and political issues. This article presents summary findings from a statistical (meta-analytic) review of the performance measurements found in the available international literature on privatisation and contracting-out government services… This enables an assessment to be made of the extent to which reform objectives appear to have been achieved in practice. The article discusses the gains which result from contracting reforms, and the extent to which these gains accrue to various stakeholders — whether community, customers, the organisation or government.     

A retrospective on retrospective voting

This paper critically reviews the extensive literature on retrospective voting in response to economic conditions. Each of the major types of analyses which have been performed — time-series analyses of national vote totals, presidential popularity, and cross-sectional analyses of individual survey responses — has raised several interesting and important questions. The answers that have been obtained, however, are only partial and limited, as each of these approaches entails serious problems of estimation and interpretation. Further progress in this area, we argue, requires explicit treatment of conceptual and statistical issues that have hindered previous research: the dynamic formulation of expectations and preferences, the incidence of policy (and nonpolicy) effects across the population, and notions of incumbency and political responsibility.     

Political stability and the science of comparative politics

Abstract. The utility of comparative politics has been questioned from time to time in two ways. Doubts have been cast upon its ability to offer genuine and useful generalisations, and these doubts have been reinforced by the appearance of studies which, while statistically adventurous, are not grounded upon a sufficiently sound theoretical base. In this paper we consider Alasdair MacIntyre's objections to the idea of a science of comparative politics, and discuss the nature of law-like generalisations. We explore the extent to which MacIntyre's objections may be overcome, and indicate the form that generalisations about political stability could take. We also argue that studies of stability need a clear explanatory linkage between the empirical data they utilise and the hypotheses of a theory about political stability. This is often lacking in such studies, which seem to substitute a sophisticated statistical technique for genuine political theory.     

New politics: Just post‐materialist? The case of the Austrian and Swiss Greens

While Inglehart's post‐material model figures very prominently in the literature on new politics, the limits of its relevance have seldom been critically assessed. This article uses various inconsistencies between his model and the socio‐economic features of the Austrian and Swiss Greens to point to some of its theoretical shortcomings. Because of its psychological assumptions, the model neglects various cultural and historical structures which are essential for any full and consistent explanation of new politics in Austria and Switzerland.     

The Capital Budget: History and Future Directions

While there is a substantial body of literature concerning capital programming and budgeting in the private sector, there is only a modest literature on this subject in the public sector. Government researchers and public administration scholars have, for about seventy-five years, recognized the value of budgeting for operating expenses and have tried to develop theoretical frameworks for the public budgeting process. However, very little of this attention has been devoted to capital budgeting. As Alan Steiss has stated," The theory of capital budgeting has not been set forth; rather the emphasis... has been on devising and improving the techniques of capital budgeting." Michael White has called capital budgeting an "elusive subject" that "lacks clear definitions, organized traditions of inquiry, conceptual boundaries, standard questions, and reliable data sets."     

Measuring and explaining disparities in felony sentences: Courtroom work group factors and race,sex, and socioeconomic influences on sentence severity

The author develops a scaling technique for felony sentence severity that includes probation and estimates of expected actual incarceration time in a single metric scale. The author uses the severity measure and nonreactive case data in a set of statistical analyses with which he attempts to test recent theoretical developments in the trial court literature that posit individual actor effects related to extralegal variables in sentencing decisions and the importance of interaction among work group members in those decisions. The findings indicate that differential effects exist across judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys in a court and offer support for the influence of the courtroom work group.     

Public administration,context and innovation: A framework of analysis

Innovation in public administration (PA) has played a pivotal role in building good governance and has attracted significant attention in the academia. The literature on PA innovation is burgeoning; however, this article argues that there is ‘a missing link’ in the extant literature in that the impacts of variation in context on PA innovation have not been sufficiently investigated. This article elaborates the analytical perspectives on the influences of various contexts over PA innovation and the mechanisms through which impacts may take place. Both theoretical and methodological complexities and challenges are apparent in disentangling contextual influences from other factors. The article proposes a research agenda for a context‐orientated comparative analysis of PA innovation and offers a brief illustration regarding contextual differences between China and the European Union in existing studies. The article calls for further studies in this direction.     

Politics Lost, Politics Transformed, Politics Colonised? Theories of the Impact of Mass Media

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the literature on the relationship between politics and mass media, mainly in discrete topic areas such as the impact of mass media on electoral behaviour, the emergence of new forms of political communication, or media political economy. At the same time, this diverse literature has often focused on a single general issue, typically characterised in terms of the 'transformation' of politics. Despite this common theme, there has been relatively little attempt to connect and compare the different approaches. Looking at the theoretical differences in the new literature on politics and mass media reveals three perspectives – pluralist, constructivist, and structuralist. These approaches have too often tacitly co-existed, instead of more competitively striving to advance knowledge in the three main topic areas above.     

Keynes,Friedman, or Monnet? Explaining parliamentary voting behaviour on fiscal aid for euro area member states

This article investigates the determinants of parliamentary support for international fiscal aid. Departing from the literature on presidential systems, it analyses an exemplary case of a parliamentary system, Germany. Two theoretical accounts are distinguished. The first perceives MPs as policy-seekers and focuses on the positioning of government and opposition parties and individual MPs on an economic left?right and a pro- versus anti-EU dimension. The second regards MPs as vote-seekers and presumes an electoral district connection. The statistical analysis of a new data-set containing information on 17 Bundestag roll-call votes from 2009 to 2015 finds support for the first account: voting in favour of fiscal aid measures is mainly driven by government membership and EU support. By contrast, neither economic ideologies, nor district or mandate characteristics influence support for fiscal aid. The article contributes to a growing literature on the domestic politics of international political economy.     

Disputes, Democracies, and Dependencies: A Reexamination of the Kantian Peace

Militarized interstate disputes are widely thought to be less likely among democratic countries that have high levels of trade and extensive participation in international organizations. We reexamine this broad finding of the Kantian peace literature in the context of a model that incorporates the high degree of dependency among countries. Based on in-sample statistical tests, as well as out-of-sample, predictive cross-validation, we find that results frequently cited in the literature are plagued by overfitting and cannot be characterized as identifying the underlying structure through which international conflict is influenced by democracy, trade, and international governmental organizations. We conclude that much of the statistical association typically reported in this literature apparently stems from three components: (1) geographical proximity, (2) dependence among militarized interstate disputes with the same initiator or target, and (3) the higher-order dependencies in these dyadic data. Once these are incorporated, covariates associated with the Kantian peace tripod lose most of their statistical power. We do find that higher levels of joint democracy are associated with lower probabilities of militarized interstate dispute involvement. We find that despite high statistical significance and putative substantive importance, none of the variables representing the Kantian tripod is associated with any substantial degree of predictive power.     

What drives the adoption of climate change mitigation policy? A dynamic network approach to policy diffusion

The requirement of bottom-up action from all the countries to deal with climate change makes it necessary to analyze the factors influencing policy adoption. This article contributes to the policy literature by shedding light on the conditions, which incentivize countries to adopt more climate mitigation policies. The theoretical argument builds on the integrated approaches to study policy diffusion, which include both internal and external determinants as explanations for the adoption of policies. While previous applications typically operationalize the latter by regional proximity, this study highlights the added value of network dependencies capturing political and cooperative interactions across countries. The article finds that the adoption of climate policies is a matter of social influence. Countries are more likely to adopt policies if they cooperate with countries that have adopted more climate policies and are in a similar structural position to countries that are active in climate protection. This article not only is an important theoretical contribution to the policy literature but also enriches our methodological and empirical understanding of climate policy diffusion.     

Three Traditions of Network Research: What the Public Management Research Agenda Can Learn from Other Research Communities

This article identifies and describes the development of three parallel streams of literature about network theory and research: social network analysis, policy change and political science networks, and public management networks. Noting that these traditions have sometimes been inattentive to each other's work, the authors illustrate the similarities and differences in the underlying theoretical assumptions, types of research questions addressed, and research methods typically employed by the three traditions. The authors draw especially on the social network analysis (sociological) tradition to provide theoretical and research insights for those who focus primarily on public management networks. The article concludes with recommendations for advancing current scholarship on public management networks.     

Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses

Despite the vast coalition literature, pre-electoral coalitions have never been at the center of any systematic, cross-national research. Given their prevalence and potential impact on government composition and policies, this represents a serious omission in our knowledge of coalitions. I begin to remedy this situation by testing two hypotheses found in the literature on party coalitions. The first is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form in disproportional systems if there are a sufficiently large number of parties. The second is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form if voters face high uncertainty about the identity of future governments. These hypotheses are tested using a new dataset comprising legislative elections in 22 advanced industrialized countries between 1946 and 1998. The results of the statistical analysis support the first hypothesis, but not the second.     

中国地方政府绩效评估的可持续性问题研究——基于“甘肃模式”的理论反思

政府绩效评估作为一种创新性的政府管理工具,其科学性与可持续性成为推动政府绩效管理和政府能力建设的关键。然而由于多种因素的影响,我国地方政府绩效评估的持续性开展面临着一系列的障碍。为了深入解析这些障碍并提出解决方法,文章运用文献研究法及模型分析法等,试图从既往文献的梳理入手,结合中国地方政府绩效评估的典型模式之一的"甘肃模式",对该模式中出现的问题和面临的困境进行系统的理论分析,在此基础上分析总结出我国地方政府绩效评估可持续开展的重要影响因素:法律保障、政治支持、社会参与以及评估体系设计。在以往政府绩效评估理论研究的基础上,作者构建出一个新的理论分析模型,并据此模型对"甘肃模式"进行分析,提出促进地方政府绩效评估可持续性发展的若干建议。目前国内学者对于绩效评估可持续性问题的研究相对较少,因而本文中的相关结论与建议对于推动我国地方政府绩效评估的可持续性具有一定的理论指导意义与实践参考价值。     

Communitarianism

This article presents 'Communitarianism' in political theory as a 'Blind Alley'. This is on the grounds that it is difficult to find a political theorist who is willing to be called a communitarian, because the literature lacks any well delineated concept of community, and because a number of awkward theoretical questions, notably about power, arise which are not clearly addressed within the literature. Furthermore, communitarianism has been a blind alley for feminists. Although feminism and so-called communitarianism share an opposition to some other varieties of social and political theory, the apparent affinities between feminism and communitarianism mask significant differences.     

Avoiding Theoretical Stagnation: A Systematic Review and Framework for Measuring Public Value

Public value theory has become a hot topic in public administration research, but its proponents have long recognised difficulties in empirically testing the theory's central propositions. There has been a lack of clarity about how to measure the extent to which organisations are generating public value, which has rendered researchers unable to quantitatively study the causes, consequences and correlates of public value. The current study systematically reviews the growing literature on public value measurement to identify, evaluate, and synthesise available measures. Through a qualitative synthesis of the themes present in published measures, we identify four key components for measuring public value that appear to be important across a range of policy and national contexts. Our review identifies a promising framework that could be used to structure a comprehensive measure of public value and, in doing so, provides a means to progress theoretical development and testing of the public value approach.     

Political Power, Fiscal Crises, and Decentralization in Latin America: Federal Countries in Comparative Perspective (and some Contrasts with Unitary Cases)

What factors shape decentralization processes in Latin Americanfederations? This work reviews and statistically analyzes currentapproaches on the topic, questions some claims of generalityin their theoretical frameworks, and presents an argument toexplain variation in decentralization processes across thesefederations. The main hypothesis is that the degree of decentralization(in fiscal and administrative terms) in Latin American federationshas been shaped by the political power of the national executiveand sub-national actors and the fiscal context in which theyinteract. The article presents statistical evidence (for federaland unitary countries between 1979 and 1998) to sustain someof the expectations in the argument and discusses some of itslimitations.