Is the state social or the computer inhuman? Claims for state support and citizenship in post-socialist Georgia

In the discussions of citizenship in post-socialist Georgia, the topic of social entitlements predominates. Soviet social citizenship, which granted the full range of social rights, significantly shaped the people's current expectations of social rights in Georgia. In order to address the external and internal pressure for poverty alleviation, the Georgian government started reforming the social support system of the country. The cornerstone of Georgia's current social policy is a new social assistance programme, the main principle of which is to provide social benefits to the poorest families as identified by an evaluation system. This paper explores the enactment of the ‘targeted social assistance’ (TSA) programme in a village in north-western Georgia. By participating in the TSA programme, Georgian citizens exercise social citizenship as a practice of bargaining for universal social rights that at present are not achievable for all as the state provides social security only to extremely needy families. The category of social citizenship described by T.H. Marshall helps us to understand the claims of Georgian citizens for state support. The discrepancy between social security and social citizenship causes people to misunderstand the goals of the TSA programme and this ultimately leads to dissatisfaction among Georgia's citizenry.     

Democracy and Security in the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood? Assessing the ENP in Georgia,Moldova, and Ukraine

This article explores the European Union’s (EU) democratic and security objectives in the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) toward three post-Soviet states: Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. By discussing the ENP’s objectives, this study concludes the following: first, despite long-term ENP democracy promotion, there have been very limited democratic developments in the partner states between 2005 and 2014; second, security challenges remain in partner states in the breakaway regions in Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk in Ukraine. Therefore, EU’s Kantian view of security through democracy has failed, and its ambition to create a ring of Eastern friends has not led to improved relations in the Eastern neighborhood. On the contrary, the EU’s push eastward has instead intensified insecurity in its partner states due to limited democratization.     

Homelessness Interventions in Georgia: Rapid Re-Housing,Transitional Housing,and the Likelihood of Returning to Shelter

Since 1987, billions of dollars in homeless assistance have been allocated annually by the U.S. federal government. Yet few evaluations of homelessness interventions exist. This study analyzes the likelihood that households in Georgia returned to shelter within two years of leaving one of three interventions: rapid re-housing (RRH), transitional housing (TH), and emergency shelter (ES), with the latter serving as a reference. Using propensity scores, RRH households were matched to comparable TH and ES households. Generalized linear mixed modeling then controlled for household characteristics as well as variation between intervention implementations. We find that the likelihood of returning to shelter did not seem to be affected by whether study households were gradually transitioned or rapidly placed into housing. Additionally, the effect of TH for households without children seems highly dependent on the intervention’s implementation, which deserves further study. Our findings are generalizable to a small, better resourced segment of the general homeless population.     

State‐Building and the European Union's Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus: Why Legitimacy Matters

This article asks under which conditions the state‐building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites “from below.”     

Patriotism, pigskins, and politics: an empirical examination of expressive behavior and voting

In this paper we use data collected from nearly 4,000 single-family residences in Auburn, Alabama to investigate empirically whether specific political expressiveness (displaying a candidate’s election sign in one’s yard), general socio-political expressiveness (flying an American flag on either Memorial Day or Independence Day), or non-political expressiveness (displaying support for Auburn University’s football team outside one’s home) is related to the likelihood that at least one resident voted in the national/state/local elections held November 7, 2006. Controlling for the assessed value of the property and length of residential ownership, we find strong evidence that all three measures of expressive behavior are statistically significant predictors of a greater likelihood of voting than occurred at residences showing no evidence of these expressive behaviors. These findings suggest that voting may be more completely understood not as politically-expressive behavior but, rather, as a generally expressive tendency that happens on occasion to be manifested in a political context. That is, an understanding of why some people vote and others do not may require an understanding of why some individuals are more expressive (generally speaking) than others.     

Personnel Reform in the States: A Look at Progress Fifteen Years after the Winter Commission

Trends in states’ civil service reforms since the Winter Commission’s report was published in 1993 are described and evaluated in the context of its recommendations. The authors argue that the commission’s reform agenda relies on a public service bargain that requires public employees, elected officials, and other stakeholders to respect, trust, and support each other’s efforts to serve the public interest. Its recommendations for modernizing state and local personnel systems are discussed and related to the “reinvention” and New Public Management initiatives of the past 20 years. Many of these ideas have been adopted by state governments, but there is no single reform model that has been followed across the states. Some states, such as Georgia and Florida, have engaged in radical reforms that include replacing traditional merit systems with at‐will employment models. The general pattern involves decentralization, deregulation, and limitation of employee protections. While many of the management‐oriented changes advocated by the Winter Commission are staples of states’ civil service reforms, its emphasis on a “trust and lead” strategy based on public service values, partnership, and leadership in the public interest has not received much attention. In general, objective evaluations of states’ reforms are needed to determine whether their purposes are being achieved.     

37 years with Keith T. Poole

This piece contains slightly revised remarks made at the conference honoring Keith T. Poole held at the University of Georgia in May, 2017. Poole’s major contributions are summarized.     

The Georgia Lottery: Assessing Its Administrative, Economic, and Political Effects

This article examines the Georgia lottery as a “policy laboratory” and its potential effect on state‐level policy diffusion. The authors summarize an extensive research project they directed that included a survey of every state that offers a lottery, a general population survey of Georgia citizen attitudes toward the lottery, and results from an economic model summarizing the economic effects of the lottery. The analysis reveals that the Georgia lottery has been a significant source of revenue for the state's budget and operates in an administratively cost‐effective manner. The analysis also confirms the conventional wisdom that lower‐income households spend a greater proportionate share of their income on the lottery and that African Americans are more frequent players than whites. Furthermore, the Georgia lottery enjoys broad public support, the key to which appears to be the earmarking of lottery funds to specific, new, popular education programs. However, the data reveal that those educational programs promulgated by the Georgia lottery benefit citizens from both high and low socioeconomic status. Finally, the article suggests that lottery‐generated funds may reach a plateau or peak during the first decade of implementation and that state policymakers should design lottery‐funded programs accordingly.     

The Politics of Civil Service and Administrative Reforms in Development—Explaining Within‐Country Variation of Reform Outcomes in Georgia after the Rose Revolution

This article examines the role of politics as a determinant of civil service and administrative (CSA) reform outcomes in Georgia. The majority of existing studies on CSA reforms face several methodological challenges, which make it difficult to understand the influence of politics in more detail. Based on literature review findings, the article proposes a model for within‐country comparisons that allows one to control for a number of variables such as context and policy design. Comparing CSA reform outcomes in the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs in Georgia after the 2003 Rose Revolution through a matched case study, the article shows that certain countrywide legal adjustments, anti‐corruption measures and context variables are necessary but insufficient conditions for successful reform. While in general Georgia has achieved considerable success in its CSA reform efforts, the President's leverage over reform implementation, leadership at the ministry level and the politics of foreign aid have led to significant variation in reform outcomes across the analysed institutions. In addition to this, institutional constraints reflecting inherent differences between policy sectors explain another part of the variation in outcomes in Georgia. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Democracy or Good Governance? Globalization,Transnational Capital,and Georgia's Neo-liberal Revolution

Western aid donors merge democracy and good governance in theory and practice. Yet, since the 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia's governance indicators have soared while its democracy scores have plummeted. The good governance–democracy merger constitutes an attempt by the transnational capitalist class to cultivate consent for its hegemonic project of neo-liberal globalization. This article highlights the personal and institutional networks connecting Georgian elites with the organizations involved in globalizing governance and democracy. It shows how these organizations are dominated by the representatives of transnational capital. Finally, it shows that Georgia, as an undemocratic but effective ‘governance state’, is not an exception.     

Does Earmarked Revenue Provide Property Tax Relief? Long‐Term Budgetary Effects of Georgia's Local Option Sales Tax*

This study examines the long‐term effects of the 1% General‐purpose Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) on the level of property tax in Georgia counties with a pooled interrupted time‐series analysis. The LOST has been earmarked for property tax relief in Georgia counties since 1976, but debates remain on whether the proceeds have been used as additional revenues. We find that the adoption of LOST brought short‐term property tax relief but not long‐term property tax reduction. The result suggests that long‐term property tax relief would not be realized by earmarked revenue without careful policy design to safeguard fungibility.     

Ethnicity,decentralisation and the fissile state in Georgia

This article addresses the problems entailed in decentralising a successor state of the former Soviet Union. On many different scales, Georgia should be a wealthy country. The population is well educated, there is rich agricultural land, a thriving wine industry, several mineral extraction industries and access to oil. The central argument of this article is that it is governance, or rather the failure of governance that is at the heart of many of Georgia's problems—in particular, a failure over a number of years to find a balance between the considerable ethnic diversity of the country and their aspirations regarding self‐government, and the need for the assertion of central power from Tblisi in occupying the power vacuum left by the demise of the Soviet Union. The structure of the article moves through an analysis of the context of decentralisation, into a brief survey of the major ethnic groups and the nature of the local government system, paying particular attention to the attempts by Tblisi to provide a coherent glue for a state that is liable to break apart. The concept of the ‘fissile state’ is used to convey this brittle context within which institutional reform needs to take place given the pressures from below and the pressures exerted by external actors as Georgia seeks to move closer to the European polity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Under Two Flags: Symbolic Voting in the State of Mississippi

Participants in a specialelection held in the State of Mississippion April 17, 2001, voted overwhelminglyagainst changing the design of the state'sflag, which incorporates a symbol of theConfederacy. The determinants of voting onthe flag are analyzed and turnout rates inApril 2001 are compared with those forrecent gubernatorial and presidentialelections. We find that the flag votedivided Mississippians sharply along linesof race, class and political ideology. Akey empirical implication is that voterpositions in issue space tend to be morepolarized when political choices haveexpressive as opposed to instrumentalconsequences.     

Citizenship gone wrong

This paper examines how and why a deliberate enactment of the state got out of control. It does so by outlining three phases of border management in Tusheti, a highland province of post-Soviet Georgia. In the first phase, control was directly exercised by the local population. At the same time, border transgression for economic and political purposes was encouraged. A second phase of border management was triggered by the Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In order to discredit claims that Chechen ‘terrorists’ were hiding in Georgian territory, the Georgian government, monitored by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, effectively brought border transgression to a standstill. Finally, a third phase was initiated by a mission of the Georgian Orthodox Church sent to Tusheti with the aim of ‘spiritual fortification’. In the end, despite their courageous civic engagement, the locals had fewer entitlements than before. In order to explain what went wrong, I reflect on the downside of performing and incorporating the state and elaborate three different models of citizenship enacted by the key players in each distinct period. Finally, I argue for a temporalisation and hence deconstruction of the notion of ‘post-socialism’.     

Nationally poor,locally rich: Income and local context in the 2016 presidential election

When social scientists examine relationships between income and voting decisions, their measures implicitly compare people to others in the national economic distribution. Yet an absolute income level (e.g., $57,617 per year, the 2016 national median) does not have the same meaning in Clay County, Georgia, where the 2016 median income was $22,100, as it does in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where the median income was $224,000. We address this limitation by incorporating a measure of one's place in her ZIP code's income distribution. We apply this approach to the question of the relationship between income and whites' voting decisions in the 2016 presidential election, and test for generalizability in elections since 2000. The results show that Trump's support was concentrated among nationally poor whites but also among locally affluent whites, complicating claims about the role of income in that election. This pattern suggests that social scientists would do well to conceive of income in relative terms: relative to one's neighbors.     

In Capable Hands: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Competence and Consistency on Leadership Approval

Current research demonstrates that instances where leaders’ promises and actions are inconsistent leads to lower public approval and support. While there are exceptions to this trend there is no cohesive framework to address this issue. We introduce a conceptualization where public reactions to a leader’s inconsistency is placed in a broader context of public perception of the leader’s overall competency. We claim the public evaluation of the leader is dependent on her competency. And while inconsistency of a particular act can negatively affect public evaluations of the leader, the extent of that effect is conditioned by leaders’ competency. To test this perspective we experimentally manipulate both the competency of the leader as well as her consistency in following up on her promises. Furthermore, we expand the context of inconsistency to include both international and domestic domains. We find both leaders’ competency and inconsistency matter in public approval. Our findings hold across policy domains and levels of issue salience.     

The Effect of Voting Technology on Voter Turnout: Do Computers Scare the Elderly?

In the aftermath of the Florida debacle in the 2000 Presidential election, there has been an emphasis on replacing voting equipment perceived as inferior (e.g., punch card ballots) with more technologically advanced voting methods. It is possible, however, that not all voters will be comfortable with high-tech voting devices. Elderly voters, for example, might be familiar with the old voting machines but apprehensive about computerized voting. If this is the case, the fear of new voting technology might cause the turnout of elderly voters to decrease. We test for this effect by analyzing the change in voter turnout across Georgia counties in the two most recent gubernatorial elections, as it relates to the share of the counties’ populations that is over the age of 65 years. Consistent with the hypothesis that computers scare the elderly, we find a significantly negative relationship between the change in voter turnout and the elderly share of the population. An additional 1% of the population that is elderly is associated with a 0.3–0.4% decrease in turnout. The hypothesis that elderly voters were apprehensive about the change in voting technology is also supported by the increase in absentee balloting.     

Volunteer Involvement in Local Government after September 11: The Continuing Question of Capacity

The 1990s witnessed extensive promotion of volunteerism and the creation of a federal and state infrastructure to support government voluntary activities. What has been the impact on local governments? This article reports on a 2003 survey of volunteer involvement in Georgia local government, which followed a similar 1990 study and provides a rare opportunity to examine long‐term trends in public volunteerism. Volunteerism in Georgia cities and counties has increased during the past decade, with 81 percent of all jurisdictions now reporting some volunteer engagement. The events of September 11, 2001, have had a small but generally positive effect on volunteer utilization. However, political and labor resistance to government volunteers has not been resolved. And the increase in public managers' concerns that they lack the funding or staff to utilize volunteers suggests that governmental capacity remains the principal obstacle to greater volunteer involvement in local governments.     

Barriers for Crowd’s Impact in Crowdsourced Policymaking: Civic Data Overload and Filter Hierarchy

While crowdsourcing is an increasingly common method of open-government practices to strengthen participatory democracy, its impact on governance is unclear. Using data from a crowdsourced city-plan update by the City of Palo Alto, California, this article examines the impact of a crowd’s input on policy changes. We used an enacted policy change to quantify government’s response to crowd suggestions, whether crowd suggestions are adopted in the policy changes or not. While the city responded to less than half of the crowd’s suggestions, the likelihood of its doing so increased by 51.42 percentage points when the crowd’s ideas were amplified by a citizen advisory committee (CAC), a panel of residents working with the city in the policy update. We also found that the government is more likely to respond to crowd suggestions that are perceived as actionable. These two factors—CAC and the perceived data quality—constitute a filter which the crowd’s suggestions have to pass to make into the policy. This filter created a hierarchy in the participatory practice. Although crowdsourcing intends to create equality and inclusiveness in policymaking, our findings reveal that the civic data overload and the filter hierarchy complicate the adoption of crowdsourcing as a democratic innovation in governance.     

Die proportionale Ministerienaufteilung in deutschen Koalitionsregierungen: Akzeptierte Norm oder das Ausnutzen strategischer Vorteile?

In this paper, we corroborate Gamson’s Law for a data set including German coalition governments on the federal and Länder level. We further tackle the question of how to explain this regularity. Here, we conclude that it is not the bargaining power of parties resulting from seat distribution that could be able to explain Gamson’s Law. In fact, we identify Gamson’s Law as a behavioural norm which evolved over time in Germany. We finally confirm the conjecture that on average smaller parties profit and larger parties suffer from deviations from Gamson’s Law. However, there is also a strong party bias which is able to invert this effect for single parties as e. g. the Greens or the Party of Democratic Socialism. Further variables such as the size of the party system or the number of parties which form a coalition government can also explain some deviations from the Gamson’s Law.