Examining the Logic Behind the Self‐Help,Self‐Taxing Movement: Business Improvement District Formation

An institution that has shown great promise in addressing the revitalization of declining central cities is Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). These private governments provide supplemental municipal services such as sanitation, security, and marketing to independent businesses in underserved commercial areas. By 1999, 44 U.S. states had legislation that enables and dictates the formation process and structure of BIDs. The surprising element of this legislation is the wide variation in approval needed to form a BID over a proposed geographical area. Some states require as little as 20 percent approval of proposed members and others as much as 75 percent approval to allow formation of a BID. This variation in state statutes likely influences the use of BIDs. Results highlight that relatively easier state enabled collective action positively impacts the creation of BIDs, the limited effects of tax expenditure limitations on the formation of BIDs and the positive impacts that new development has on the number of BIDs per state.     

Citizen co‐production of cyber security: Self‐help,vigilantes, and cybercrime

Given the limited resources and capabilities of states to maintain cyber security, a variety of co‐production efforts have been made by individuals or by collectives, of varying degrees of organization and coordination. This article identifies different forms of citizen co‐production of cyber security and notes the risk of unintended consequences. Safeguards and principles are proposed in order to facilitate constructive citizen/netizen co‐production of cyber security. Although co‐production of security can contribute to social control, only those activities within the bounds of the law should be encouraged. Activities of private citizens/netizens that test the limits of legality should be closely circumscribed.     

Reform of Press Self‐regulation

In July 2011 following the revelations about phone hacking, all three political party leaders called for radical reform of the current system of press self‐regulation. Those within the press itself, including the Daily Mail, also conceded that serious changes were necessary. At the same time both politicians and press stressed the importance of protecting the freedom of the press and preventing undue government interference. Starting with both these pre‐requisites in mind—the creation of a new independent system and the protection of press freedom—this essay suggests four possible models of reform. For each model the essay sketches the basic parameters of reform and then suggests three problems associated with each. It argues against those who claim that anything more than small changes to the status quo would be too costly, would threaten press freedom, or would be technologically impractical.     

Top‐Down Self‐Organization: State Logics,Substitutional Delegation,and Private Governance in Russia

This study investigates the counterintuitive emergence of self‐regulation in the Russian construction sector. Despite its proclivity for centralizing political authority, the government acted as the catalyst for the delegation of regulatory powers to private industry groups. The article argues that a factor little considered in extant literature—namely, a weak and corrupt bureaucracy—is key to explaining why the normally control‐oriented executive branch began to promote private governance despite industry's preference for continued state regulation. The article's signal contribution is to theoretically explain and empirically demonstrate how a government's prior inability to establish intrastate control over an ineffective and bribable public bureaucracy creates incentives for political authorities to search for alternative means for policy implementation outside of existing state agencies. These findings are important for understanding the impetus and logic behind particular regulatory shifts in countries where the state apparatus is both deficient and corrupt.     

Al Qaeda Versus Big Brother: Anxiety About Government Monitoring and Support for Domestic Counterterrorism Policies

Explanatory models of attitudes toward U.S. domestic counterterrorism policy routinely incorporate individual concern over terrorism, but uniformly disregard concern about the government??s use of domestic surveillance. Indeed, one of the most prominent works of this kind explicitly argues that ordinary Americans will not perceive that government monitoring targets people like themselves and thus domestic surveillance programs will not generate anxiety. We question this assumption on theoretical and historical grounds. Our research uses a unique probability sample survey to demonstrate that significant portions of ordinary Americans feel anxious about domestic government monitoring. Moreover, the results show that anxiety about government monitoring negatively relates to attitudes toward domestic counterterrorism policies. Although never included in previous models, and even plainly dismissed as irrelevant, felt anxiety about government monitoring importantly predicts attitudes about domestic counterterrorism policies.     

Truth Commissions and Procedural Fairness, Mark Freeman

In the last decade academic writing on transitional justicehas proliferated, but scholarly attempts to evaluate real worldresponses to dealing with the wrongs of the past and buildingpost-conflict societies are a more recent phenomenon. Of theworks that focus on experiences with truth commissions, MarkFreeman's book is perhaps the only sustained effort to examineself-consciously the question of the appropriate     

Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers

Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawing on recent advances in behavioral ethics, this article offers a new behavioral foundation for PCT's predictions by delineating the psychological processes that lead well‐intentioned people to violate moral and social norms. It reviews the relevant findings of behavioral ethics, analyzes their theoretical and policy implications for officials' decision making, and sets an agenda for future research.     

Self‐Organizing Policy Networks: Risk,Partner Selection,and Cooperation in Estuaries

Policy actors seek network contacts to improve individual payoffs in the institutional collective action dilemmas endemic to fragmented policy arenas. The risk hypothesis argues that actors seek bridging relationships (well‐connected, popular partners that maximize their access to information) when cooperation involves low risks, but seek bonding relationships (transitive, reciprocal relationships that maximize credibility) when risks of defection increase. We test this hypothesis in newly developing policy arenas expected to favor relationships that resolve low‐risk dilemmas. A stochastic actor‐based model for network evolution estimated with survey data from 1999 and 2001 in 10 U.S. estuaries finds that actors do tend to select popular actors as partners, which presumably creates a centralized bridging structure capable of efficient information transmission for coordinating policies even without any government mandate. Actors also seek reciprocal bonding relationships supportive of small joint projects and quickly learn whether or not to trust their partners.     

What Makes Popular Government Self‐reinforcing?

This article explores the ongoing debate on whether popular government is a continually improving or a continually deteriorating constitutional principle in Scandinavian politics. In particular, three recent articles that address this question are reviewed. One puts an almost entirely positive light on developments in Denmark. By contrast, the authors of the articles on Sweden and Norway are less inclined to see any parallel between economic growth, a sustainable welfare state and good public finances, on the one hand, and improved popular government, on the other. The aim here is to bring some clarity into this paradoxical picture by distinguishing between popular government as such and the prerequisites for popular government's long-term legitimacy. What makes popular government self-reinforcing, this article concludes, is the underlying, more fruitful question to pose. This query should be brought into the open and answered.     

Self‐Provision of Public Services: Its Evolution and Impact

This article establishes a framework for explaining the ways in which citizens, as clients of public services, attempt to deal with situations of combined market and government failures. Under certain conditions, citizens are driven to create self‐production mechanisms that often are extralegal or illegal. When faced with such social initiatives, politicians often support them, either passively or actively, by institutionalizing the new mechanisms. The article explains the evolution of the self‐provision model and its implications. The analysis includes a theoretical framework and a practical intervention scheme.