Modes of regulatory governance: A political economy perspective

This article introduces the special issue by presenting a framework for the study of regulatory politics using the analytical tools and approaches of comparative political economy. Having traced the evolution of studies on regulation, it argues that scholars should pay more attention to the systemic features affecting regulation and to the relationship between regulatory policies and their outcomes. The article presents the foundations of an analytical framework based on the “regulatory policy process,” a comprehensive approach that links inputs, outputs, and outcomes. The review of the contributions to this special issue shows that regulatory regimes can be better understood by placing them within the broader political economy of a state or region. A renewed focus on regulatory outcomes can help foresee what one should expect from the impact of a certain regulatory regime on a political‐economic system.     

Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: finding ‘facts’, telling ‘truth’

ABSTRACT

This article has a twofold aim. First, it discusses the contributions to the scholarly field of conflict knowledge and expertise in this special issue on Knowledge production in/about conflict and intervention: finding ‘facts’, telling ‘truth’. Second, it suggests an alternative reading of the issue’s contributions. Starting from the assumption that prevalent ways of knowing are always influenced by wider material and ideological structures at specific times, the article traces the influence of contemporary neoliberalism on general knowledge production structures in Western societies, and more specifically in Western academia, before re-reading the special issue’s contributions through this prism. The main argument is that neoliberalism leaves limited space for independent critical knowledge, thereby negatively affecting what can be known about conflict and intervention. The article concludes with some tasks for reflexive scholarship in neoliberal times.     

The New World of Crises and Crisis Management: Implications for Policymaking and Research

In recent years, we have witnessed a series of spectacular crises and disasters: 9/11, Madrid and London, the Asian tsunami, the Mumbai attacks, the implosion of the financial system—the world of crises and disasters seems to be changing. This special issue explores how these crises and disasters are changing and what governments can do to prepare. This opening article defines critical concepts, sketches a theoretical perspective, offers key research findings, and introduces the contributions to the special issue.     

Why social partnership matters: Irish policies for work – life balance

Since 1987 the Republic of Ireland has experimented with new forms of policy consultation and formulation that have been credited with turning the country into the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the 1990s. One of the most important of these new forms is a series of social partnership agreements that have become increasingly broad in scope over the past decade and a half. This article illustrates how the process of social partnership pact-making is able to assist in steering a new policy direction, and investigates what makes these social partnership agreements able to be reproduced over time, by focusing on the development of policies for reconciling family and working life in Ireland. This is an important and pressing issue for many post-industrial economies, and, without claiming too much for the partnership process since problems of reconciling family and working life are far from ‘solved’ in Ireland, social partnership has helped turn this from being a marginal to a key issue in Irish politics.     

Bricks in the wall: the politics of housing in Europe

Abstract

Housing has important economic, political, and social ramifications for Western Europe and beyond. Despite its importance in shaping economic and political outcomes, however, housing remains in the peripheral vision of major comparative political economy debates. This introduction to the special issue accomplishes four objectives. First it demonstrates how housing defies current political economy typologies by failing to conform to their theoretical and empirical predictions. Second it summarises the current state of housing research within political science, which still remains in its infancy. Third it highlights how the contributions in this special issue expand our understanding of how housing causes and is shaped by political and economic outcomes in Europe. Finally, this introduction concludes by outlining how the special issue contributions demonstrate housing’s importance for the welfare state, political preferences and electoral shifts, regulatory and redistributive policies, and financialisation and household indebtedness in Europe.     

Structure and Opportunity: Committee Jurisdiction and Issue Attention in Congress

This article explores how the congressional committee system shapes the dynamics of issue attention. Consisting of what is referred to as a congressional opportunity structure, it describes how committee jurisdictions provide an important institutional context for the attention paid to new issues in congressional hearings. This is illustrated through an examination of congressional attention to biotechnology over a 30-year period. This article finds that committees with broader jurisdictions were more active in biotechnology than committees with a narrow policy remit. However, these institutional effects varied widely, even within a single policy domain. This variation suggests that issue attention depends on the degree of fit between issue characteristics and the congressional opportunity structure. More broadly, the findings here illustrate the virtues of public policy research in studies of Congress.     

Assessing the Effects of Immigration and Diversity in Europe: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue on “Assessing the Effects of Immigration and Diversity in Europe” to the JEPOP readers. The article starts with a summary of the controversy generated by Putnam's 2007 article “E pluribus unum”. Next, it provides a brief account of the state of the art in the scholarship analysing the link between diversity, trust, social capital and social cohesion. The article continues with a discussion of a number of key problems that affect the existing scholarship, and highlights how the contributions to this special issue overcome some of these limitations. After this, the article considers the implications of this debate for the study of elections and public opinion. It concludes with a succinct overview of the contributions to the special issue and a discussion of how they help move forward the scholarship in this area.     

论民法典规范准用于行政协议

本文论述了民事规范准用于行政协议的问题。首先,要确定什么是行政协议,行政协议是设定、变更与废止行政权利义务的协议;其次,构成行政协议的情况下,考察是否存在特别规则,如果没有特别规则,而且确定存在法律漏洞的情况下,则可以准用民事规范。在准用民事规范时,要结合行政协议的特点,修正地进行适用。具体如在违法无效的情况下,必须是严重违反的情况下,才会导致行政协议的无效。在解除的情况下,要结合民法上继续性合同终止规则以及情势变更规则,进行法律适用。     

Introduction: The Transcripts of Peace: Public,Hidden or Non-obvious?

This piece introduces the special issue on everyday peace indicators. It considers the limitations of orthodox approaches to capturing and evaluating peace. Many of these approaches are top-down and reflect state-centric approaches. Alternatively they are focused on specific peacebuilding programmes and have little to say about the wider context in which peace is being built or obstructed. The lived-experience of conflict and war-to-peace transitions is often written out of accounts of peace and conflict. While recognizing that measuring peace is an inherently complex task, this introductory essay notes that there is little appetite among international organizations to reassess how they record and evaluate peace. In part, this is explained by the lucrative political economy of monitoring and evaluation. This special issue seeks to contribute to thinking about new agendas for evaluating peace.     

Spatialising New Constitutionalism: The Secwepemc People versus Sun Peaks Resort Corporation in British Columbia, Canada

This article focuses on the local governance process that occurred between the Secwepemc indigenous people and Sun Peaks Resort Corporation regarding the construction of a ski resort in the province of British Columbia in Canada. The article argues that this process was a localised manifestation of what Stephen Gill has labelled 'new constitutionalism' for it sought to contractualise the subsumption of a locality under the logics of capital accumulation in the world economy. The article uses this case study to endorse Gill's notion of new constitutionalism but seeks to emphasise the mechanisms of spatial scale transformation and regulation that occur through constitutionalised social relations in concrete, situated settings.     

Making sense of party strategy innovation: challenge to ideology and conflict-mobilisation as dimensions of party competition

Abstract

This article develops a pooled comparative analysis aimed at addressing two of the three overarching research questions of the special issue. It first discuss an ‘end of ideology’ research question: that is, whether party constituencies and party strategy show clear challenges to classic twentieth century ideological alignments. Second, it investigates the type of issue strategy that parties employ in this new ideological environment, expecting mainstream parties to stress a problem-solving approach, while challenger parties should favour a conflict-mobilisation strategy. Finally, the article combines these two fundamental dimensions (ideological consistency; reliance on problem-solving vs. conflict-mobilisation strategies) in order to identify party strategy innovations in current West European elections.     

Under Which Conditions Do Parties Attract Voters’ Reactions to Issues? Party-Varying Issue Voting in German Elections 1987–2009

Are voters’ choices influenced by parties’ position-taking and communication efforts on issues during a campaign? And if so, do voters’ reactions to issues differ across parties? This article outlines a research design for the statistical identification of party-varying issue reactions within the established paradigm of the Spatial Theory of Voting. Using a special feature of conditional logit and probit models – i.e. the estimation of alternative-specific coefficients instead of fixed ‘generic’ issue distance effects – it is possible to detect asymmetrically attached issue saliencies at the level of the voters, and hence at the demand-side of politics. This strategy opens a new way to systematically combine insights obtained by saliency approaches with the Spatial Theory of Voting. An application to the German parliamentary elections from 1987 to 2009 demonstrates that it is predominantly parties taking polar positions – and, more specifically, niche parties taking polar positions – that induce such asymmetric issue voting.     

Introduction: A post-Polanyian political economy for our times

Abstract

2014 is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation and the fiftieth anniversary of its author's passing. This special issue celebrates these markers by bringing together a collection of critical engagements with Polanyi's work which, whilst sympathetic to his intellectual aims, ward against any straightforward application to contemporary issues. In so doing, it suggests that part of the value of Polanyi's work lies not in its ability to be recited, repeated and re-applied in its original form, but rather in its openness and its susceptibility to alteration and transmutation. In this introductory article, I consider the return to intellectual ‘voices from the past’ in the post-2008 landscape. I suggest that the distinctiveness of Polanyi's voice comes from his attempt to problematize, challenge and re-imagine the very notion of ‘economy’ itself, a theme which underpins all of his most important ideas, and one which reverberates across contributions to this special issue. I suggest that, beyond his immediate critique of free-market ideas, the desire to de-centre the notion of an autonomous economic sphere – and to challenge abstract modes of thought that address such a notion, regardless of their political sensibilities – is his most valuable legacy, and one which might encourage us to seek out new innovations and engagements in future Polanyian scholarship.     

Legitimacy beyond the state: institutional purposes and contextual constraints

ABSTRACT

The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology further and show how the special issue’s individual contributions apply it to their cases. In the first section, we provide a sketch of our purpose-dependent theory of legitimacy beyond the state. We then highlight two features of the institutional context beyond the state that set it apart from the domestic case: problems of feasibility and the structure of international law.     

The political economy of regulatory change: The case of British merger control

This article aims to explain the broader evolution of British merger control. To this end it outlines a novel critical political economy perspective on regulation and regulatory change which differs from established political economy approaches, such as the regulatory capitalism/state perspectives, in three main ways: it places regulatory ideas at the heart of the analysis, it differentiates between different degrees of regulatory change, and it links regulatory change in delineated issue areas with changing power balances between fractions of capital and labor. The application of this perspective to the analysis of the evolution of British merger control provides some important new insights, most notably that the content, form, and scope of merger control in Britain have been deeply transformed in accordance with neoliberal ideas since the 1980s and that this process, which was part of a broader regulatory and ideational shift, was premised on the ascendancy of transnational capital.     

China's domestic strategic debate and confusion over the South China Sea issue

The article looks at China's strategic debate and confusion over the South China Sea (SCS) issue and explores why it has occurred. This article recognizes that China has not yet decided whether the SCS issue should be included among China's core national interests. Additionally, China has not quite figured out whether the priorities should be placed on the SCS claims or the Sino-US relationship. In addition, China has not worked out exactly what the Nine-Dash Line (NDL) means. It contends that identity is a key factor in informing a state's strategic concerns and policy objectives regarding the SCS. This article argues that China's dual identities force China to strike a middle ground, which causes domestic strategic debate and confusion. In the final analysis, this article tries to determine what salient implications a prevailing identity of China as a rising power would yield for its SCS policies.     

Issue Ownership of the Economy: Cross-Time Effects on Vote Choice

Issue ownership has become a useful concept for explaining party and voter behaviour in electoral democracies. This article argues that issue ownership can also provide us with a better understanding of the economic issue’s impact on the vote because perceptions of party competence at managing the economy can counterbalance the influence of retrospective economic evaluations, by encouraging voters to put economic performance (good or bad) into perspective. These general expectations are tested with the use of individual-level survey data from five Canadian Election Studies conducted between 1984 and 2011. That relatively long period of time allows estimation of the impact on incumbent vote choice of competence perceptions and economic assessments during both good and bad economic times. Consequently, the article shows that issue ownership of the economy matters to vote choice, that its influence has been consistent across elections, and that it outweighs the impact of retrospective economic judgements.     

Introduction: Issue Ownership

Although issue ownership theory – the idea that voters consider specific parties to be better able to deal with some issues – had already emerged in the 1980s, it is only in the past 10 years that the theory has gained prominence in the study of voter and party behaviour. Despite the steep increase in scholarly attention, there is still no consensus regarding the impact of issue ownership on parties and voters. This special issue makes two key contributions: firstly, it provides state of the art contemporary issue ownership research, by focusing on the historical roots as well on recent conceptual, theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Secondly, by focusing on new aspects and effects of issue ownership, the special issue offers a look forward and outlines a research agenda for future work on issue ownership.     

The Role of IPAA: Public Presentation — Key Issues in Governance

In the December 1997 issue of this journal our editors expressed concern about the decline in teaching of public administration. This does not reflect any decline in the overall level of involvement by government in the economy or society. Rather it seems to reflect changing perceptions of what is needed to succeed in public administration.
This in turn raises the very important issue of what we as a society expect from our future public administrators. While many management skills are common to both business and the public sector, public administration needs to extend beyond the limits of business management to comprehend issues such as accountability, probity and policy processes. Indeed it is increasingly being recognised that what is at stake is not just management per se, but rather the broader array of relationships involved in good governance.
The Institute of Public Administration Australia has over the years played an important role in bringing practitioners and teachers together to help foster a better appreciation of these issues. Now more than ever, when the public sector is experiencing considerable change, there needs to be a lively forum where these broader issues of public administration can be debated and new approaches can be tested.
The National Council of the Institute has accordingly been considering how the Institute might encourage a wider public appreciation of good governance. In order to assist in this process and to provide some guidance to spokepersons, the Council has agreed the following Statement. We hope that all members of the Institute will find this Statement helpful and will be encouraged to promote the ideals it seeks to uphold.     

The many faces of counterterrorism: an introduction

This article sets the stage for the special issue by describing the many faces of counterterrorism policy. The article highlights some key concepts??e.g., domestic and transnational terrorism, and alternative types of counterterrorism policies??that are applied throughout the special issue. The two data sets exploited in this issue??s empirical contributions are also described. Next, each of the 12 articles is introduced and briefly summarized. The main conclusions and insights of the articles are distilled and placed in perspective.