Assessing the public's understanding of constitutional reform: Evidence from Argentina

Constitutional and institutional reform is occurring at an impressive rate throughout the world. To explain the dynamics of reform the scholarly literature has focused almost exclusively on political elites. Analyses of the role played by public opinion in the constitutional reform process have been largely missing. This study takes an initial first step toward understanding the role played by public opinion through an analysis of public understanding of selected constitutional reform issues in Argentina. The evidence indicates that the Argentine public has a fairly sophisticated understanding of the issues involved in constitutional reform. This finding suggests that current elite-based explanations of constitutional and institutional reforms are incomplete. The article also provides a point of departure for future studies of the complex elite-mass interaction that occurs during reform.     

Why teens do not benefit from work experience programs: Evidence from brother comparisons

Social scientists' research on the consequences of teenage employment suggests that government programs providing teenagers with work experience should have worked better than they have. One explanation is that the government failed to deliver an otherwise effective treatment. This article considers three alternative explanations. The first is that the apparent benefits of working during the teenage years are illusory, reflecting only unmeasured differences between teens who do and do not work. A second explanation is that the groups targeted by government programs, the disadvantaged, benefit less from working as teenagers. A third explanation asserts that program participants and working teens experience different benefits because they have different employment experiences. Using information on brother pairs, this article examines these issues. It determines that conventional analyses of the returns to teenage employment greatly overstate the benefits poor minority teenagers receive from working. Our results suggest that the mixed success of previous programs is not primarily due to poor implementation or government involvement per se. Rather, these programs have had limited success because, for those teenagers targeted, work experience during the teenage years does not raise future earnings.     

Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina

Scholars disagree about the nature of party attachments, viewing partisanship as either a social identity or a rational maximization of expected utility. Empirically, much of this debate centers on the degree of partisan stability: findings of partisan fluctuations are taken as evidence against the social‐identity perspective. But drawing such conclusions assumes that the objects of identity—parties—are fixed. If we instead allow party brands to change over time, then partisan instability is consistent with a social‐identity conception of partisanship. To demonstrate this, I develop a branding model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands. The model suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments. I test this implication using a survey experiment in Argentina and find evidence consistent with the model.     

Intensifying Social Exchange Relationships in Public Organizations: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

In accordance with social exchange theory, prominent streams of management research emphasize the importance of reciprocal exchange relationships between organizations and their employees. When employees perceive themselves as supported by the organization, they reciprocate with increased work motivation. However, we do not know how this knowledge can be developed into management initiatives that increase public employees’ perceived support, because severe endogeneity problems make it difficult to estimate the effect of organizational support on employee commitment outside the laboratory. We use a randomized field experiment involving more than 800 public employees to estimate the effect. We find no average effect of the organizational support treatment on the employees’ perceived organizational support. Yet, a subgroup analysis shows a positive treatment effect when the employees’ local front‐line managers felt less supported prior to the intervention. We discuss the implications for theory and management practice. ©2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Representation and Inclusion in Public Organizations: Evidence from the U.K. Civil Service

Theories of workforce diversity in the public sector assume that organizations that are more representative of the population they serve are more likely to foster an inclusive work climate in which individuals from different sections of society can thrive. The authors examine this assumption by studying whether gender and minority ethnic representativeness are related to perceptions of inclusiveness and the experience of discrimination and bullying within U.K. civil service organizations. Findings suggest that gender representativeness and minority ethnic representativeness are both associated with an inclusive work climate, with each aspect of representativeness positively related to higher perceptions of inclusion and lower levels of discrimination and bullying. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Leadership Experiences Within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections: Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.     

Taking a Closer Look at the Empowerment‐Performance Relationship: Evidence from Law Enforcement Organizations

This article examines the influence of empowering leadership practices on police officers' job performance, perceptions of managerial effectiveness, and unit performance. These relationships are examined using multisource survey data collected from 100 law enforcement managers, 446 of their subordinates, and 98 of their direct supervisors. The analysis shows that empowering leadership contributes positively to subordinate officers' job performance and unit effectiveness. Empowering leadership is also positively associated with subordinate but not with supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Task‐oriented leadership, however, is positively associated with both subordinate and supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Implications of these results for managerial leadership in law enforcement organizations are discussed.     

Opening late-industrializing economies: lessons from Argentina and Australia

Economic liberalization has met substantial resistance in polities as different as Argentina and Australia. For these late industrializing nations the verb protect came to mean much more than just granting favors to industrialists. It also involved reducing the risks previously taken by societies engaged in economic modernization. After histories of vulnerability to external forces, they deliberately fostered collusion between the public and private sectors in an attempt to achieve benefits at the lowest cost for participants from all social classes. Consequently, economic liberalization now demands more than revisions in economic logic and the attitudes of industrialists, as recent attempts to reform economic strategy in both nations indicate. For three generations who were nurtured on these rent seeking notions of political economy, it requires a fundamental transformation of popular attitudes about the creation and distribution of private and public goods.This article is a substantially revised version of a paper I presented at the 46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 4–8, 1988. I am especially grateful to Carlos Waisman who invited me to write the paper, to an anonymous reader for this journal who suggested many useful revisions, and to the journal's editor, William Ascher, for his leadership.     

On the Dynamics of Reform Resistance: Why and How Bureaucratic Organizations Resist Shared Service Center Reforms

Across the globe, governments are engaging in Shared Service Center (SSC) models to rationalize their internal overhead processes. Scholarship is increasingly recognizing the challenges that governments face when embarking on an SSC reform. This study examines one of the most prevalent, yet undertheorized, risks: the role of resisting organizations that are pressured to engage in an SSC model. A context-sensitive and narrative approach is used to describe and explain the origins, nature, and consequences of organizational resistance against SSC reform proposals. Our findings demonstrate the interplay between organizational resistance, institutional features and contextual opportunities and constraints for resistance, the interaction of which produced a dynamic that dramatically affected the process and content of the reform under study.     

Political institutions and sovereign borrowing: evidence from nineteenth-century Argentina

I study the relationship between political institutions and sovereign borrowing when constitutional constraints are systematically chosen to obtain better credit conditions. I argue that the impact of institutional constraints on country risk premia depends on the government’s concern with the country’s creditworthiness and its “willingness to repay”; two variables that are hardly observable. To properly evaluate the relationship between political institutions and sovereign borrowing, I focus on the link between institutional constraints and the risk premia of Argentine bonds between 1822 and 1913. Specifically, I analyze whether a “structural break” in the government’s cost of borrowing time-series exists. I use the Perron-Volesang test for structural change with unknown break dates. The statistical analysis indicates that the adoption of institutional constraints led to significant improvements in borrowing terms: the series has a single structural change; and the distinctive break point is associated with the country’s adoption of constitutional checks and balances. Time-series regressions and instrumental variables (IV) estimation reinforce these findings.     

Looking in the Wrong Place: Why Chile Provides No Evidence for Social Security Privatization

The performance of Chile's system of state-sponsored private pensions has been a major theme for advocates of privatizing U.S. Social Security. Chile's experience also has been criticized by defenders of the current U.S. system. This article explains why, though the critics deserve the upper hand, the whole discussion is misguided. The most basic issue in the policy debate is how adequately pensions could be financed through regulated individual investment in financial markets. Chilean experience offers little evidence on this question because, for the first fifteen years of the system, pensions and accumulations in the Chilean funds had little to do with the kinds of market forces that would be relevant to predicting experience anywhere.     

The Flypaper Effect: Evidence from India

The flypaper effect refers to the phenomenon whereby expenditure stimulus from unconditional grants exceeds that from an equivalent increase in income. The flypaper effect has been described as "money sticks where it hits." The present study empirically tests the flypaper effect for the Indian economy. The study also tests the asymmetry hypothesis that looks at the impact of retrenchment in grants. Results obtained in the present study show the flypaper effect to be vindicated. We find that both capital and revenue expenditures receive a greater stimulus from grants than would an increase in income. Results show that in the prereform period both revenue and capital expenditures are maintained during periods of grant cuts. However, in the postreform period it is only expenditures on revenue accounts that are maintained in periods of grant reduction. We also find that during periods of grant reduction, state governments maintain their expenditure programs by raising their own tax revenue. This suggests that grants from the center have had a disincentive effect and could be a reason that state governments have not exploited their tax potential to the fullest. By bringing to the fore the disincentive effect of grants we wish to emphasize the urgency of taking a closer look at restructuring and redesigning our system of intergovernmental transfers.     

Strategic coalition voting: Evidence from Austria

Strategic coalition voting assumes that voters cast their vote in a way that maximizes the probability that a preferred coalition will be formed after the election. We identify three decision contexts that provide incentives for strategic coalition voting: (1) a rental vote of a major party supporter in favor of a preferred junior coalition partner perceived as uncertain to pass a minimum vote threshold, (2) avoiding a wasted vote for the preferred small party that is not expected to pass the minimum vote threshold, and (3) explicit strategic coalition voting to influence the composition and/or portfolio of the next coalition government. The results based on a nationally representative survey conducted before the 2006 Austrian general election generally support these hypotheses.     

Building Network Implementation Capacity: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Network research increasingly draws attention to capacity affecting outcomes. This study examines network implementation capacity and develops a framework that focuses on three dimensions: financial, managerial, and technical capacity. It also contributes by focusing on the Network Administrator Organization (NAO)-type network. Based on a case study of two large eco-financing networks in China, this study finds positive impacts of network implementation capacity on policy outcomes. It also draws attention to network strategies and their impact on capacity. It identifies the positive effect of efforts to maintain network stability as well as negotiation and participation strategies on network implementation capacity. This study draws attention to implementation capacity as a determinant of network outcomes and suggests that studies in public administration give greater attention to NAO-type networks.     

Strategic coalition voting: Evidence from New Zealand

Whereas the classic literature on strategic voting has focused on the dilemma faced by voters who prefer a candidate for whom they expect has little chance of winning a seat, we consider the dilemma faced by voters in PR systems who do not expect their preferred party to be in government. We develop hypotheses relating to strategic voting over multi-party governments that we test using the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) campaign study of 2002. We find evidence that expectations play a role in structuring vote choice. While there is clear evidence of wishful thinking there is also evidence that voters respond to expectations about government formation. These expectations may mobilize voters and lead them to defect from their first preference.     

Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia

Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win votes and popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties' popular support. We argue that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and only confer a political advantage when voters are uncertain about parties' economic policies. Using a series of experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non‐Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non‐Islamic parties. Our findings demonstrate that Islam's political advantage is real, but critically circumscribed by parties' economic platforms and voters' knowledge of them.     

Why Immigrants Stay in Fashion: Insights from New York's Garment Industry

For many observers the influx of immigrants into New York's garment industry seemed to exemplify the deleterious impact of undocumented immigration: native displacement and a simultaneous deterioration of wages and working conditions. This article argues that this conventional view is incorrect. There is little evidence linking immigrant presence to the availability of undocumented workers. Rather, the immigrant presence is the consequence of the industry's basic labor strategy; immigrants have moved into garments as an older labor force deriving from earlier waves of migration has cyckd out.     

Seizing the Day: Why Britain Will Benefit from Holocaust Memorial Day

In his rejoinder to Dan Stone, Cesarani attempts to answer the objections raised by the latter against the establishment of a Holocaust memorial day in Britain. Using the public response (so far) to the recent opening of the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust exhibition as a test case, he argues that, contrary to Stone's worry that no one would register the existence of a memorial day, the British public shows every sign of being far from indifferent to the events being 'commemorated'. Cesarani characterizes Stone's other concerns as a counsel of despair. It is up to those who dissent from a safely distanced, homogenized or reductive view of the Jewish tragedy-or from a view of the British government as being anything but blameless in the commission of international human rights abuses and genocides, both historical and contemporary-to make sure that the 'plurality of memory' that Stone advocates is not traduced by the events of the day.