Law Enforcement Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina

Major disasters represent infrequent events that often require response organizations to vicariously learn from the experiences of others in order to improve their operations. A primary mechanism for such knowledge diffusion is the different practitioner and empirical journals for the organizational fields that comprise disaster response. A review of the literature for the law enforcement field, however, reveals that little attention is given to how these organizations manage actual disasters. In particular, the presentation of organizational experiences, whether through case studies or other methodologies, is very limited in the practitioner and empirical literature of this field. This represents a considerable problem for improvements of disaster response operations given that law enforcement agencies represent a key component in such efforts. The research presented in this article is an effort to fill this knowledge gap and thereby facilitate organizational learning to improve future law enforcement disaster response activities. The authors traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina to examine the response efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to the storm. The findings from this research are reported here in a lessons‐learned format to inform law enforcement disaster response policy.     

Crowdsourcing Government: Lessons from Multiple Disciplines

Crowdsourcing has proliferated across disciplines and professional fields. Implementers in the public sector face practical challenges, however, in the execution of crowdsourcing. This review synthesizes prior crowdsourcing research and practices from a variety of disciplines and focuses to identify lessons for meeting the practical challenges of crowdsourcing in the public sector. It identifies three distinct categories of crowdsourcing: organizations, products and services, and holistic systems. Lessons about the fundamental logic of process design—alignment, motivation, and evaluation—identified across the three categories are discussed. Conclusions drawn from past studies and the resulting evidence can help public managers better design and implement crowdsourcing in the public sector.     

Overcoming ethnic inequalities: Lessons from Malaysia

Beginning in 1971, Malaysia took unprecedented steps to improve the welfare of ethnic Malays vis-à-vis the country's large Chinese minority. The programs included quotas in education, employment, and ownership, as well as a variety of subsidies, credit schemes, and political measures. The circumstances were favorable: The disadvantaged ethnic group was a majority and held the political reins, and soaring export prices generated much new growth to redistribute. But enormous efforts at “affirmative action” led to only marginal changes in the interethnic distribution of income. Malaysia's new policies reduced racial inequalities less than one might have hoped, but they also had fewer bad effects on economic efficiency and political stability than one might have feared.     

Gentrification in tourist cities: Evidence from New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Tourism‐led redevelopment often provides city residents with increased opportunities for employment, leisure, and cultural enrichment, but it can also have dramatic and unpredictable effects on their lives. One of these effects involves the repercussions of redevelopment that transforms working‐class neighborhoods into middle‐ or upper‐class areas catering to tourists. We use the city of New Orleans as a case study to explore the connections between tourism and gentrification.

We first discuss the growth of tourism in New Orleans, paying particular attention to its geographic scope. We then consider the ways in which gentrification and tourism are connected in New Orleans and what their relationship adds to theories of tourism development and urban revitalization. The analysis concludes with an in‐depth look at one of the nation's oldest black neighborhoods, Tremé, where both tourism and the nonblack population have been increasing in recent years.     

Intelligence Learning and Adaptation: Lessons from Counterinsurgency Wars

Critics of US intelligence focus extensively on the alleged inability and unwillingness of intelligence agencies to learn and adapt. Analysis of eight counterinsurgency wars suggests instead that external factors largely influence the intelligence-related performance of whole governments, including organizational structures, unity of effort and command, adequacy of resources, and leadership quality. Assessment of the performance of US intelligence since 9/11 indicates that the same variables influence the performance of US intelligence, suggesting that the US intelligence reform debate focuses too narrowly and on the wrong factors.     

Vote Compass in British Columbia: insights from and about published polls

ABSTRACT

Published polls in the 2013 British Columbia provincial election conspicuously failed. This paper uses the Vote Compass Voter Advice Applications to shed light on the prediction failure. At the same time, it considers whether the dynamics of expressed vote intention in the Compass can be deployed as a rolling cross-section – in particular, whether the dynamics of participant self-selection are driven by temporally differentiated bias. Analysis will include selection effects within the Compass, as participants choose whether or not to proceed beyond the “voter advice” component to the political perception and intention batteries.     

Democratising the military: Lessons from Mediterranean Europe

This article analyses the factors and processes involved in democratizing the armed forces of Spain, Greece and Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s. After a brief comparative review of the history of civil‐military relations in the three countries, the article examines the role of societal, institutional (military professional) and international factors in the democratisation process. The article concludes that military professionalism can be a stimulant to intervention and de‐intervention, depending on societal considerations and the perceptions of the military at a given time. Explanations accounting for military democratisation can be found at the level of value‐congruency between society (including the international arena) and the armed forces.     

Externalised Justice and Democratisation: Lessons from the Pinochet Case

The attempt to try Pinochet in Spain exemplified and publicised a trend to use 'externalised justice' to tackle impunity for human rights crimes. It also demonstrated the possibilities and limitations of externalised justice initiatives, in terms of securing democracy at the national level, and of advancing accountability for serious crimes under international law. In Chile, Argentina and Spain the Pinochet affair served to restart stalled impulses towards accountability, accelerate democratic reform and challenge the legitimacy of compromises conceded during earlier democratic transitions. With regard to the wider role of international law in limiting impunity, expectations for rapid or consistent replication of 'the Pinochet precedent' have not been met. Despite some notable achievements, the exercise of universal jurisdiction by national courts remains inconsistent and controversial. The International Criminal Court (ICC) provides a new mechanism for external justice. An aggressive US campaign to undermine it, and to reverse progress in international law, is a serious obstacle to fulfilment of the ICC's enforcement role. However, at the domestic level the ICC may have similar indirect effects to the Pinochet litigation, boosting domestic enforcement prospects and strengthening democratic commitment. In both cases the key role for externalised justice is as stimulus or back-up. This suggests that progress in tackling impunity depends on incremental and dynamic interaction between domestic and international law, and between national and transnational actors.     

Bureaucratic Structure and Administrative Behaviour: Lessons from International Bureaucracies

This article contributes to a growing literature on international bureaucracy by exploring the relationship between bureaucratic structure and administrative behaviour. The ambition of this study is twofold: first, it explores the extent to which international bureaucracies combine two inherent behavioural logics: a logic of hierarchy and a logic of portfolio. Second, two key empirical lessons are used to modify four conventional claims in existing research. Drawing on a rich body of data from three international bureaucracies (the European Commission, the OECD Secretariat, and the WTO Secretariat), this study suggests that administrative behaviour among international civil servants is profoundly shaped by the bureaucratic structures of international bureaucracies. Variation in the abovementioned behavioural logics is conditioned by two aspects of bureaucratic structure: First, the accumulation of relevant organisational capacities at the executive centre of international bureaucracies, and second, the vertical and horizontal specialisation of international bureaucracies.     

政治人:多维视阈下的研究命题

政治人问题的研究是中国民主政治研究和思想政治教育研究的重要逻辑前提和逻辑起点.当前学术界对政治人的研究并不是很多,急切需要"发展"与"补充",因而时于当前政治人研究的若干意义的分析显得尤为重要.为此,本文从人性的无限丰富性与政治人属性、人的政治属性解读与政治人界定、人的思想品德结构与政治人素质、思想政治教育创新与政治人塑造、中国政治发展与政治人命题等多维视阈和角度对政治人这一研究命题进行了思考和分析,进而力图推进对政治人命题的进一步研究和探索.