Funding,capabilities and the use of child soldiers

Recent years have seen increased scholarly attention given to the issue of child soldiering. Primarily dedicated to the decision-making calculus of rebel groups, this body of work has generally emphasised supply-side versus demand-side arguments. We contribute to this growing literature by explicitly investigating a previously untested aspect of the latter. Prior scholarship has made vague references to a potential association between economic endowments and child soldiering, including natural resource wealth, but scant empirical attention has been given. We argue that the specific type of endowment has important consequences for the decision to utilise child soldiers. We argue access to and exploitation of lootable natural resources (e.g. gemstones) to be especially likely to promote the use of child soldiers due to their ease of access, the low skills required to harness them and the heightened likelihood that groups will become more profit-oriented. A systematic cross-national investigation of rebel groups provides robust evidence that lootable resources such as diamonds and gemstones are strongly associated with the use of children, while non-lootable resources such as oil are not.     

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.     

Child marriage,human rights and international norms: the case of legislative reform in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force in 1990. It condemns child marriage, violence and discrimination against children and enjoins tutelage for their education and health. Implementing such principles in national legislation sometimes conflicts with local norms relating to respect for cultural and religious traditions. This was the case of Trinidad and Tobago, a multicultural and multi-religious society that legally sanctioned child marriage until 2017. The paper makes two unique contributions to the literature. First, using the literature on child marriage and the obligations under international conventions, the paper creates a child marriage conceptual framework with the main normative positions on child marriage. Second, using the framework, it explores the normative motivations underlying the domestic legal reform debates held in parliament between 2015–2017. The paper uses the conceptual framework to explain the transformations in the traditional positions of local religious and ethnic groups, provides evidence of norm penetration from the international to a local multicultural setting and furthers the literature on international human rights norm penetration and contestation.     

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.     

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.     

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.