The Western secret services,the East German Ministry of State Security and the building of the Berlin Wall

The main reason for the closure of the East–West sectoral border in Berlin on 13 August 1961, and the ensuing construction of the Berlin Wall, was to prevent refugees from fleeing the German Democratic Republic and so keep the Communist state in being. However, new evidence shows that the border was also closed for security reasons, as the Communists claimed – they called it ‘the securing of the state border’ (‘die Sicherung der Staatsgrenze’). The open border with the West in Berlin was the main cause of the GDR's intense security crisis in the 1950s and its closure gave the state greater stability. The security advantages to the Communists of closing the border were so obvious that the Western secret services had long feared that they would do precisely this. In particular, the West's spy chiefs saw that Khrushchev's ultimatum of November 1958 over Berlin was in part designed to put an end to their operations. Although they did not see precisely what action would be taken, they expected some measure or other to deprive them of their base in West Berlin; they saw also that the closure of the sectoral border was a distinct possibility. Far from being unanticipated, the security measure taken by the Communists in August 1961 was one of the most long-expected and carefully-prepared-for events of the twentieth century.     

Discounting the benefits and costs of environmental regulations

This paper develops a two-stage procedure for discounting the benefits and costs of environmental regulations that is a variant of the shadow price of capital approach. Under this approach, the capital costs imposed by a regulation are annualized using the marginal rate of return on capital and then both benefits and costs are discounted using the social rate of time preference. This approach yields results that differ significantly from those of conventional discounting when benefits occur with a substantial lag or when benefits are long term.     

Writing the regulations for health

The development of regulations in health is much more than a purely technical procedure. Rather, it involves decisionmaking and bargaining processes that engage a wide range of individuals and organizations with diverse interests and varied resources. Attempts at statutory precision and goal clarification may improve, but will not fundamentally alter the regulation writing experience. The dynamics of regulations development are revealed in three cases. The primary case, The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, suggests that despite the efforts of the regulations writers themselves, there are limits to the extent to which basic interest conflicts and questions of health policy can be resolved in the process. Other cases examined are the Professional Standards Review Organization Act of 1972 and the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act of 1974.     

中美政府规制改革动因之比较

规制改革是20世纪70年代以来全球性的政府改革运动,但是各国政府规制改革的动因却不尽一致。美国政府规制改革的动因主要在于过度规制本身的弊端、公共舆论对过度规制的怀疑引发的政府信任危机、信息技术革命的推动和解决被规制企业内部低效率问题的要求;而中国政府规制改革的动因主要在于建立社会主义市场经济体制的客观要求、加入WTO的压力、国有企业发展的困境和民主政治建设发展的需要,二者存在市场经济的发展程度不同、政府介入企业的深度不同、改革的技术基础不同和制度文化环境不同等差别,因此中国在借鉴美国规制改革的经验时必须谨慎地批判吸收。     

Politics and the State

Political theorists disagree about whether 'politics' and 'the political' should bedefined narrowly or broadly. Defenders of broad conceptions argue that narrow definitions exclude phenomena that ought to be included and lead us to misunderstand the relationship between different forces in society. Defenders of narrow conceptions argue that broad definitions collapse the distinction between the social and the political, and deprive politics of any distinctive identity. I shall argue that neither of these arguments is successful and that disputes over whether we should adopt a narrow or a broad view of politics are, for the most part, merely verbal.     

Do child care regulations affect the child care and labor markets?

The effect of child care regulations on outcomes in the child care market and the labor market for mothers of young children is examined. The analysis uses a time series of cross sections and examines the robustness of previous cross‐section findings to controls for state‐level heterogeneity. Child care regulations as a group have statistically significant effects on most outcomes, with or without state fixed effects. However, regulations do not vary enough within state over time to allow precise identification of most individual regulation effects. The great majority of estimated regulation effects in all specifications are small and insignificantly different from 0. Some of the estimated effects seem reasonable in sign and magnitude, but others are clearly implausible. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Even though the unequal reach of the state has become an important concern in the literature on developing democracies in Latin America, empirical measures of intracountry variation in state capacity are scarce. So far, attempts to develop valid measures of the reach of the state have often been hampered by inadequate data. Leveraging insights from national‐level scholarship, this article proposes a tax‐based measure to capture such intracountry variation. Drawing on a comprehensive data set of municipal finance and estimates of economic activity derived from nighttime lights, it maps state capacity in Ecuador. The article validates the measure on the basis of survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project. A multilevel analysis demonstrates that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the services provided by the state in municipalities with higher state capacity, which strengthens confidence that the measure picks up relevant differences.     

The State of the State: Comparing Governance in China and the United States

How do two world powers with starkly different governing systems share common accountability problems, and why? Does the cycle of administrative reform produce additional need for reforms that come full circle, eventually exacerbating problems without solution? Yongfei Zhao and B. Guy Peters of the University of Pittsburgh examine governance in the United States and China and point out that conflicts in government functions unique to each country result in strikingly similar accountability issues.     

Decommodification and the Workfare State

Two related concepts have been used to understand the welfare state –'decommodification' and the 'workfare' or the 'competition' state, as it relates to processes of 'recommodification'. I show how these related literatures may be integrated in order to enhance our understanding of current labour market policies. Applying these concepts to an analysis of the ideas and policies of New Labour leads to the conclusion that state welfare services are being reconfigured to serve more effectively the needs of the market, through a process of 'administrative recommodification'.     

Transforming the Administrative State: Reform in Hong Kong and the Future of the Developmental State

Hong Kong has been depicted as an administrative state where the civil service is insulated from political and societal forces and enjoys a stable pattern of growth in rewards and status. In these respects, it is similar to other Asian developmental states. In Asia, as in the West, traditions underlying the administrative state are being challenged. The Hong Kong civil service has recently come under serious criticism as a result of a major fiscal crisis and a series of administrative failures, while the unelected status of the chief executive is a focus of growing protest. What is the reform capacity of the Hong Kong bureaucracy in these circumstances? What is the likely trajectory of administrative reform, and can we expect Western models of the neo‐administrative state to be relevant and appropriate to Hong Kong and, by extension, to the rest of Asia?     

State of the Field

Although scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the ‘bait‐and‐switch’ imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive ‘reactive sequences’ when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.     

State Capacity,Bureaucratic Politicization,and Corruption in the Brazilian State

Responding to recent articles in Governance highlighting the need for improved measurement of bureaucratic characteristics, this article describes efforts to map Brazil's federal agencies on three dimensions—capacity, autonomy, and partisan dominance—derived from data on more than 326,000 civil servants. The article provides a “proof of concept” about the utility of agency‐level measures of these variables, demonstrating how they relate to an output common to all agencies: corruption. The article provides a first step in the direction of building a comparative research program that offers objective evaluation of bureaucracies within nation‐states, with the intent of better disentangling their impact on governance outcomes.     

The consequences of midnight regulations and other surges in regulatory activity

Is the midnight regulations phenomenon real and what are its consequences? This paper finds that when an administration??s time is almost up, submissions of economically significant regulations nearly double. Such surges in regulatory activity decrease the duration of regulatory review at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), likely because of political pressure to quickly approve new rules. Specifically, one additional economically significant regulation submitted to OIRA decreases the mean review time for all regulations by about two thirds of a day. If OIRA review improves regulation quality, then regulatory surges that decrease review time could hinder such improvement.     

The Return of the State: Globalization,State Theory,and the New Imperialism *

The interest in state theory that swept academic circles following the Miliband–Poulantzas debate waned considerably in the late 1980s and 1990s so that much of the last decade was notable for the impoverishment of state theory. Indeed, during this time, there was a never ending litany of books and articles on the crisis of the nation-state, the eclipse of the state, the retreat of the state, and even the end of the nation-state. The central theme in these eulogies was that nation-states had lost control of their national economies, currencies, territorial boundaries, and even their cultures and languages and that macroscopic forms of power were shifting from the nation-state to the global market, transnational corporations, and globalized channels of communication. However, this article reexamines the relationship between globalization theory and state theory to argue that nation-states are the principal agents of globalization as well as the guarantors of the political and material conditions necessary for global capital accumulation. In contrast to those who see a nebulous logic of empire, a network state, or even a global state as the repositories of a new sovereignty, this paper suggests that globalization, in its current form, is actually a new form of American imperialism.