The Contemporary Relationship of ‘New Left’ and ‘New Right’ Parties with Interest Groups: Exceptional or Mainstream? The Case of Norway's Socialist Left and Progress Party

Allegedly, the new green and left parties that were established in Western Europe during or after the 1960s tend to be characterized by informal but significant links with social movement organizations. In contrast, weak links or virtual lack of such connections is often seen as one of the enduring characteristics of the new populist (radical) right parties. However, there are both empirical and theoretical reasons for examining these conventional wisdom(s) more closely. To date, only limited evidence is available on this aspect of new European parties in general. Examining Norway's successful new left and populist right party, and based on rich original data, this case study adds to our knowledge in several ways. The analysis reveals that the socialist left has even closer and more wide‐ranging relationships with interest groups than traditionally suggested and that the Progress Party enjoys organized contact with various interest groups. Since these parties are only two, and not necessarily quintessential examples of the party families in question, the results cannot overturn the conventional wisdom, but they nonetheless question and supplement it by throwing light on the conditions favouring the development of stronger, and more varied, links to interest groups. Together with other presumably ‘atypical’ party examples mentioned in scholarly literature, the case of Norway calls for further empirical investigation. Finally, with an eye to future comparative research, the possible explanations for these findings are briefly discussed.     

The electoral effectiveness of constituency campaigning in the 2010 British general election: The ‘triumph’ of Labour?

This article establishes a model of likely campaign effectiveness, before examining the intensity of constituency campaigning at the 2010 general election in Britain and its subsequent impact on electoral outcomes, using both aggregate and individual level data. It shows that constituency campaigning yielded benefits in varying degrees for all three main parties and that Labour’s constituency campaign efforts were effective despite the electoral context, and ultimately affected the overall outcome of the election. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of the circumstances under which campaigns are likely to be more or less effective, and provide further evidence that a carefully managed campaign stands the most chance of delivering tangible electoral payoffs.     

The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract

Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.     

The Rise of Citizen Groups? The Mobilization and Representation of Danish Interest Groups, 1975–2010

Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increasing citizen mobilization from other countries is expected, it is argued here that the development of groups’ political representation as a consequence of this mobilization depends on the dynamics of resource exchange in different political arenas. This argument is tested on a unique dataset of Danish interest groups in 1975 and 2010 which includes data on group populations and group access to the administration and the media. The analysis demonstrates that citizen groups must overcome not only the challenge of organizing, but also persistent logics guiding the inclusion of, interest groups in different political arenas. Citizen groups have been more successful in increasing their representation in the media than in the administrative arena.     

The Obama Administration and PBB: Building on the Legacy of Federal Performance‐Informed Budgeting?

The administration of President Barack Obama, like those of his immediate predecessors, is focused on trying to improve the quality of, and use of, performance data. The federal government has been pursuing performance‐informed budget reforms for more than 50 years. Most recently, the Bush administration reforms included the President’s Management Agenda and the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). The Obama administration reforms include: measuring the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; reducing or eliminating poorly‐performing programs; setting a limited number of short‐term, high‐priority performance goals; and funding detailed program evaluations. The administration is taking a more agency‐driven approach than the Bush administration, but continues to find it challenging to move beyond production of performance data to its use. There should be opportunities to show how performance information can be used for decision making, given the change in the political climate and the needs to reduce spending and the deficit. Historically, there has been little appetite in the Congress for evidence‐based decision making. The administration, however, can continue to demonstrate how federal agencies can use performance information to more effectively manage programs.     

The Life and Death of Public Organizations: A Question of Institutional Design?

Why do some public organizations grow old and others die young? Since Herbert Kaufman first posed this question, considerable research has been devoted to answering it. The findings of that research suggest that the design of new public organizations affects, to a significant degree, their survival chances. In this article, we test whether and how “design factors” affected the durability of the so‐called New Deal organizations initiated under FDR's first term. Our findings confirm that design factors do matter, but their effects change over time. We draw out some potential implications for institutional design and sketch a renewed research agenda to determine why some public organizations survive environmental pressure whereas others succumb to it.     

The economic effects of constitutions: replicating—and extending—Persson and Tabellini

Persson and Tabellini (The Economic Effects of Constitutions, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003) show that presidential regimes and majoritarian election systems have important economic effects. Here, the number of countries is expanded and more recent data is used. In replicating and extending their analyses, we find that the effect of presidential regimes vanishes almost entirely. With regard to electoral systems, the original results are largely confirmed: majoritarian (as opposed to proportional) electoral systems lead to lower government expenditure, lower levels of rent seeking but also lower output per worker. The institutional details, such as the proportion of candidates that are not elected on party lists and district size, are particularly important.     

(The) Erasure – Mass Human Rights Violation and Denial of Responsibility: The Case of Independent Slovenia

The case of the erased residents of Slovenia – when approximately 18,000 people who were mostly of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ethnicity, were erased from the permanent residence registry of the Republic of Slovenia – represents one of the most severe cases of administrative ethnic/racial discrimination and human rights violations in the post-communist East and Central Europe outside the conflict area. The erasure caused “civil death” of the people who were affected by the measure, depriving them of civil, political, social, and economic rights. In 2007, 4 years after the 2003 Constitutional Court decision, declaring the 1992 erasure an unconstitutional act of the state and requiring the legislator to adopt measures to reinstate the statuses of the erased people, the problem remains unsolved and unaddressed both systemically and individually, and the situation of erasure persists. This article presents the case and analyses of the framework that made the erasure possible in terms of the preparation of the majority of Slovenes to accept and even support the violations and politicians to renounce their political responsibility to those who have lost the right to have rights. This article is based on the insights of the research project Contemporary Citizenship: Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion (2000–2003) led by Vlasta Jalušič. The analysis of the case of erased was published in Jasminka Dedić, Vlasta Jalušič, and Jelka Zorn (eds.), The Erased: Organized Innocence and the Politics of Exclusion, translated from Slovenian by Olga Vuković and Marjana Karer (Ljubljana: Peace Institute, 2003), at . The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for the extensive and most helpful comments.

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The governance of the European patent system: effective and legitimate?

Abstract

This article argues that effectiveness and legitimacy are two inseparable issues for the success of economic governance systems. Moving beyond the conventional market failure and state failure approaches, the article develops the notion of network governance success, a notion that looks at the formal and informal dimensions of interactions in economic systems. This is further developed into an analytical framework which is then used in the assessment of the structural features of the current European patent system, one of the most advanced, complex, and contested economic systems in Europe. The conclusions elaborate on the normative implications regarding the current weaknesses of the European patent system, and examine the general theoretical implications of the findings, particularly looking at the effectiveness and legitimacy of technically complex governance systems.     

The Cohesion and Teaching of English Writing

This paper introduces the purpose of our English teaching briefly and a few points for attention in the standards of English writing evaluation. On the basis of this, it discusses the relationship between English writing and cohesion in order to try to find an appropriate method for our English writing.     

The partisan heuristic and the voters’ knowledge: The essential role of the information environment

The low-information rationality theory expects voters with low political knowledge to make more use of the partisan heuristic than those with high knowledge. However, empirical studies on decision making in direct democracy observe a positive correlation between political knowledge and the use of party cues. We resolve this tension between theory and empirical evidence by demonstrating that the relationship between political knowledge and the use of party cues is conditional on the information environment. We provide evidence for this hypothesis by exploiting a natural experiment in Switzerland and analyze a large variety of direct democratic votes. The results show that voters with lower levels of political knowledge tend to align less with their preferred party because they often have a wrong perception of their preferred party’s vote recommendation. However, if information on parties’ position is easily available, their vote choice is at least as much in line with their preferred party as among those with high knowledge. This suggests that in such an information environment voters with low political knowledge strongly rely on the partisan heuristic. Our research note supports the low-information rationality theory and this way contributes to the literature on the quality of political opinion formation and the political psychology of reasoning and decision making.     

China and the world: The challenge of ‘opening up’

Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800s to the 1980s, by Jack Gray. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto, 1990. Ixix + 456 pp. £35.00 hardback, £11.95 paperback. ISBN0–19–913076–0 and 0–19–821576–2.

The Pride that was China, by Michael Loewe. Sidgwick & Jackson, London; St. Martin's Press, New York, 1990. xxiii + 312 pp., illus., maps. £20.00. ISBN 0–283–99648‐X.

Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution, by Helen F. Siu. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1989. £30.00; $45.00. xxvi+378 pp. ISBN0–300–04465–8.

Asian Frontier Nationalism: Owen Lattimore and the American Policy Debate, by James Cotton. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989. vi+181 pp. £35.00. ISBN0–7190–2585–0.

China's Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy, by Andrew J. Nathan. Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. xi+242 pp. ISBN 0–231–07284–8.

The Spirit of Chinese Foreign Policy: A Psychocultural View, by Chih‐yu Shih. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, 1990. xi+231 pp. £40.00. ISBN 0–333–51155–7.

Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences, edited by Howard Goldblatt. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, and London, 1990. x+253 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0–87332–502–8.

Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II, edited by Jennifer Cushman and Wang Gungwu. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 1988. xi+344pp. ISBN 962–209–207–1.

Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid‐Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1989. xvii+309 pp., illus. $25.00. ISBN 0–520–06256–6.     

“The Mother of Reason and Revelation”: Benjamin on the Metaphysics of Language

This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as impenetrable or mystical, they are relevant to and, in part, motivated by concerns of more mainstream twentieth century philosophy of language, in particular Russell's paradox. His “metaphysics of language” understands reference or designation, central to analytic theories of meaning, as derived from a more fundamental, aesthetic meaning.     

The Westminster Model and the “Indivisibility of the Political and Administrative Elite”: A Convenient Myth Whose Time Is Up?

This article argues that the principle of indivisibility in the relationship between political and administrative elites acted as a central convention of the Westminster system for much of the twentieth century. It explores how in more recent decades this principle has been challenged by the shift to a principal–agent approach. It considers the extent to which this shift diminishes the traditional Westminster model's understanding of the minister–civil servant relationship as one based on a symbiotic interdependent partnership. In its place has emerged a more universal command and control relationship that is seen as necessary to meet the demands of modern accountability and transparency. Such a change has fundamentally altered a long‐established power‐bargain between ministers and civil servants and undermined a core tenet of the Westminster model.     

New politics and party systems: The emergence of a new type of party?

Building upon theories of new politics, this article suggests an ideal‐typical model of New Politics parties that integrates all important aspects of a political party: organisation, ideology, membership and electorate. It is then demonstrated that for Germany, Sweden, and Austria such a model is necessary in order to distinguish between conservative or centrist ‘Green’ formations and parties that are genuine products of the ‘new politics’.     

‘The importance of being honest’: Switzerland,neutrality and the problems of intelligence collection and liaison

This paper seeks to contribute to a number of debates that have attracted scholarly attention over the last few years. Firstly, by examining the experiences of the Swiss foreign intelligence service, the paper takes issue with what one scholar has dubbed ‘intelligence history snobbery’; a process that has privileged the study of the major powers and overlooked the contribution made to the secret world by the intelligence agencies of small states. Secondly, the paper explores the extent to which a state's engagement in the secret world is affected by its preconceived ideas over its place and standing in the international community. It asks whether the behaviour of a neutral foreign intelligence service is likely to differ from that of any other ‘small’ state, and whether neutrals can be both honest brokers in international affairs, and earnest players in the field of secret intelligence. The final section of the paper looks at the impact of the end of the Cold War and the emerging ‘global war on terror’ on the shape of the Swiss intelligence community.     

The Promises and Pitfalls of Prime Provider Models in Service Delivery: The Next Phase of Reform in Australia?

At a time of fiscal restraint and reductions in the size of the public sector, governments in Australia are exploring new approaches to delivering public services. One model receiving attention is the prime provider approach. This is an approach where government contracts a lead or prime provider who in turn organizes and manages a group of sub‐contractors. In prime provider approaches, non‐government organizations take on a quasi‐government role and this brings a new complexity into the relationships between the various actors involved in developing and delivering public services. This article provides an overview of prime provider approaches and, drawing on the limited research to date, poses questions that we view as being critical to the current debate. The aim is to provoke further discussion on the potential impact of prime provider approaches.