Collective capabilities, culture, and Amartya Sen’sDevelopment as Freedom

Conclusion Sen showed his usual wisdom and astute judgement in keeping his argument carefully focused and, therefore, elegant and compelling. Nonetheless, the understanding and pursuit of “development as freedom” must go beyond the arguments he lays out. As the global political economy moves with ever greater determination toward the implantation of more thoroughly marketized economic relations, analysts must correspondingly focus more closely on how to prevent market-based power inequalities from undermining “development as freedom.” Centralization of power over the cultural flows that shape preferences is a more subtle form of “unfreedom” than those which Sen highlights, but no less powerful for being subtle. Institutional strategies for facilitating collective capabilities are as important to the expansion of freedom as sustaining formal electoral institutions. Indeed, without possibilities for collective mobilization formal elections too easily become a hollow farce. Sen’s capability approach provides an invaluable analytical and philosophical foundation for those interested in pursuing development as freedom, but it is a foundation that must be built on, not just admired. Peter Evans is professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research interests focus on globalization and global governance institutions, and their effects on ordinary citizens. He has written numerous articles and books on subjects ranging from globalization, the role of the state in industrial development, and urban environmental issues. A current project supported by the Russell Sage Foundation examines possibilities for constructing North-South links between labor movements as a strategy for increasing the bargaining power of labor movements in the global South.     

Parties, rules and government legislative control in Central Europe: The case of Poland

A distinguishing feature of Central European polities is a strong policy-shaping role of parliaments. This article demonstrates how party political and procedural factors set the scene for the executive's loss of legislative control in Poland. Parties undermine the governmental grip because of their limited internal cohesion and competitive coalitional strategies. Parliamentary rules reinforce such party effects. The executive can shield its bills from amendments by relying mainly on partisan controls, not formal privileges. But, as an analysis of over 300 bills shows, when party discipline and coalition cooperation are in short supply, partisan controls are ineffective as instruments of legislative control.     

The uses of models in legislative planning

Previous research on United States public employee strikes has considered the occurrence and breadth of strikes, but seldom duration, as dimensions of the strike which merit examination. This study considers a much neglected dimension of strikes, duration, which is particularly important to public administrators and unions who become actively involved with resolving such disputes. Factors which theoretically were expected to be associated with the duration of public employee strikes--the economic expectations of the striking workers, various characteristics of the bargaining environment, and the fiscal condition of the jurisdiction taking the strike-—were identified and considered. Results indicated that one factor in particular, the fiscal constraints of the jurisdiction taking the strike, was significantly associated with longer strikes, indicating that public employee unions may not necessarily be deterred from engaging in protracted strikes because of a precarious fiscal climate.     

information technology and the political world: the impacts of it on capabilities,interactions, orientations and values

A framework is developed for analyzing the impacts of information technology on politics and the public sector. By analyzing the findings in all relevant empirical research studies published in 16 scholarly journals during a six-year period, the incidence and direction of key impacts of IT are specified. In general, there is a limited number of empirical studies, with more case studies than studies based on survey-research, more analyses of U.S. politics and government than ones on other advanced democracies, and more focus on the local level than the national level. Overall, the research concludes that the impacts of information technology are generally positive, especially regarding the enhancement of capabilities, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and information quality. Impacts are more mixed on patterns of individual and group interactions and on orientations toward decision and action. The area in which the research identifies the most negative effects is the impacts on values, such as privacy, legal security and job enhancement.     

Planning,Budgeting, and Health Care Performance in Ukraine

Abstract

The Government of Ukraine has not pursued health care reforms now commonplace in the rest of Europe and Central/Eastern Europe that rely less upon centralized, state delivery of services and more on decentralized operational responsibilities and competition for services that increase patient choice. The Ukrainian health sector suffers from personnel overspecialization and facility overcapacity, resulting in high-cost, low productivity services. Budget funds are unavailable for operations and maintenance resulting in poor quality services. The state provides health care as a constitutionally-protected monopoly, relying on the traditional command and control model which ignores cost/quality competition options and responsibilities to patients. Overall, the system which produces these results is over-centralized, requiring achievement of physical service norms without providing sufficient funds. The centralized system does not monitor or evaluate services beyond narrow financial accountability and control requirements. The health care system is paradoxically over-centralized but unable to regulate or control local health care official decisions to ensure compliance with national standards. Needed are reforms in the health care policy and operational areas to produce the supply of services needed for national economic recovery. In the short-term, the budgetary framework can be improved as an operational/management guide through development of comparative information on results. Most of this information can be based on the economic classification consistent with the chart of accounts. Funding stability can be increased to improve expenditure control by implementing a new fiscal transfer formula that provides discretion (i.e., block grants) and performance criteria (i.e., outcome measures). In the medium-term, building on the technical foundation of physical norms and statistical reporting, the health care budgeting and financial management system should shift emphasis to: program planning, policy and management analysis, and public communications. The results of these reforms should lead to decentralized health care operations, service analysis, and delivery responsibilities. At the same time, the reforms should lead to proper centralization of responsibilities for strategic policy decisions, safety regulation, national standards, and program evaluation.     

Institutional design and legislative conflict: The Russian Supreme Soviet-a well-oiled machine, out of control

This article develops a comparative institutional framework for evaluating the new legislatures of the former Soviet Union, and demonstrates that the conventional wisdom about the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet is wrong. It was not a totalitarian, Soviet institution whose omnipotent and malevolent Chair singlehandedly dominated policy outputs and controlled the membership. Rather, the Supreme Soviet's non-partisan, committee-centered design enabled the committees to dominate the legislative process and to virtually exclude conflict, even on such objectively contentious legislative issues as the annual budget. However, the non-partisan design denied the legislature the mechanisms for controlling the Chair on non-legislative, political issues, particularly in relations with the executive branch. On legislative issues, the Supreme Soviet was a well-oiled machine, but on political issues it was out of control, thus leading to the legislature's demise. This article demonstrates the utility of an institutional framework for comparing post-communist legislatures, and the necessity of disaggregating legislative and political issues when evaluating legislative performance.     

Planning, Performance And Public Services

The policies of the Labour government in the UK place renewed emphasis on rational planning in the public sector. The government’s assumption is that this approach to decision making will lead to improvements in performance. Although the theoretical costs and benefits of rational planning have been widely debated in the public administration literature, no systematic empirical research on the impact of planning on the performance of public organizations has been conducted. By contrast, the relationship between rational planning and the success of private firms has been investigated extensively. A meta‐analysis and critical review of this evidence suggests that planning is generally associated with superior performance. However, important questions remain unresolved. For example, under what circumstances does planning work best, and which elements of planning are most important? Therefore, although it may be appropriate to encourage public agencies to consider carefully the potential benefits of planning, rational processes should not be imposed upon them.     

Recession, Climate Change and the Return of Planning

As the global financial crisis emanating from the United States shuts down world markets, can globalization survive? Will the resurgent intrusion of the state—and thus politics—into the market lead to protectionism and collapse, as was the case in the early 20th century? Or will the new interconnectivity of climate change and mutual economic dependence—especially between China and the US—deepen global links? The former mayor of Shanghai, legendary Nobel economist Paul Samuelson and Third Way guru Anthony Giddens ponder those questions in this section.     

Regionalism and the nationalization of the legislative vote in post-communist Russian politics

This study examines the extent to which the nationalization of the vote has occurred in Russia since 1993. To what extent is the Russian party vote “nationalized”, or in other words, to what extent are there differences between the national party vote and the party vote in the various regions of the country? What explains why such variations exist? To answer these questions, I examine a number of factors (the strength of the local executive, the degree to which local parties are entrenched, etc.) that explain why party politics in certain regions in Russia are characterized by a more “nationalized” vote than others.     

Two-dimensional legislative conflict: unique implications for the effectiveness of local councils

ABSTRACT

Organisational scholars argue there are two distinct types of conflict found in the private-sector workplace. One is referred to as task conflict and the other relational conflict. We use their insights to devise our own measures of conflict on local elected councils. As opposed to ‘task conflict’ we use the term ‘policy conflict’ and keep the same nomenclature ‘relational conflict.’ We will contend it is important to not conflate the two. In this work, we test our unique operationalisations of conflict on an established measure of Governing Board Effectiveness. Because of concerns over using the same survey instrument to measure both explanatory variables and the dependent variable we also test our thesis regarding two-dimensional legislative conflict on entirely exogenous measures of ‘healthy cities.’ We find that higher levels of policy conflict comport with good governance outcomes, while relational conflict provides no measurable benefit.     

Foreign direct investment and technology capabilities in the developing countries: a review

Economically developing countries are facing the very difficult problems of mastering the skills involved in newly emerging science-intensive industries. To improve technological capabilities, they must expend resources to establish themselves in industries that are technologically mature. Transfer of knowledge is the crux of the direct investment, so in this context transfer of technology (ToT) plays a vital role in the economic and technological development. So, the wide spread discussion of “economic globalization” has involved an important debate on the role of technology in “economic globalization” and economic growth. Much of that debates has concentrated of corporate behaviour within the developed countries but transfer of technology (ToT) combines the development of indiginous technological capabilities also. At the same time, organizational skills, procedure, and assumptions within the globalization of technology need to be adapted to fit the new technology in the developing countries. Thus this paper try to explain the story of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the economic growth and development of technology through technological capabilities that provides for an increasingly intense end of domestic competition. The paper also analysis and review the effect of access to technology and level of competition, on the level of technological capabilities by inference a strategy for the success acquisition of technology in developing countries.     

Crisis management of social structures: Planning,propaganda and societal morale

A paper originally delivered in 1955 to American Air Force Officers at the Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.A. Air Base. Prepared for publication under the editorial supervision of Nobuko Gerth and Michael Hughey.