Critical epistemology for Analysis of Competing Hypotheses

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) promises a relatively objective and tractable methodology for ranking the plausibility of competing hypotheses. Unlike Bayesianism, it is computationally modest. Unlike explanationism, it appeals to minimally subjective judgments about relations between hypotheses and evidence. Yet the canonical procedures for ACH allow a certain kind of instability in applications of the methodology, by virtue of supporting competing rankings despite common evidential bases and diagnosticity assessments. This instability should motivate advocates of ACH to focus their efforts toward creating structured methods for individuating items of evidence.     

Competing Ontologies: A Primer for Public Administration

A growing number of public administration theorists are taking up the question of ontology—the nature of existence. This primer on the topic provides a basic explanation of ontology, describes the fundamental debates in the competing ontologies of Western philosophy, and discusses why ontology is important to social and political theory, as well as to public administration theory and practice. Using an ideal‐type approach, the author analyzes how different ontologies imply particular political forms that undergird public administration theories and practices. This ideal‐type model can be used to identify the ontological assumptions in these theories and practices. The article concludes with an invitation for personal reflection on the part of scholars and practitioners in regard to which ontology best fits their experience and beliefs and the alternatives that we might pursue for a better future.     

A Statistical Method for Empirical Testing of Competing Theories

Empirical testing of competing theories lies at the heart of social science research. We demonstrate that a well‐known class of statistical models, called finite mixture models, provides an effective way of rival theory testing. In the proposed framework, each observation is assumed to be generated either from a statistical model implied by one of the competing theories or more generally from a weighted combination of multiple statistical models under consideration. Researchers can then estimate the probability that a specific observation is consistent with each rival theory. By modeling this probability with covariates, one can also explore the conditions under which a particular theory applies.We discuss a principled way to identify a list of observations that are statistically significantly consistent with each theory and propose measures of the overall performance of each competing theory. We illustrate the relative advantages of our method over existing methods through empirical and simulation studies.     

Quebec Confronts Canada: Two Competing Societal Projects Searching for Legitimacy

Forced centralist policies, made possible by the utilizationof Ottawa's spending, taxation powers, and frequent oppositionto Québec's policy preferences led a large number ofQuébecers to favor greater sovereignty. The federal government'sattempts to reduce provinces tojunior governments in the federationhave backfired in Québec's case, and led to the constructionof a modern, liberal, pluralistic, and territorial nationalistproject. Meanwhile, Québecers continue to shape a visionof themselves lhal is marked by sharp differences with the Canadianpolitical project of undifferentiated citizens and that erectsinstead a communitarian model inspired by social democraticvalues.     

On the Competing Definitions of Recession

The long-standing recession definition employed by the National Bureau of Economic Research in its dating of the business cycle is reviewed and challenged. An argument is made in favor of the practical superiority of the common-use alternative of two consecutive down quarters of aggregate output.     

Efficiency in Politics: Competing Economic Approaches

The article reviews four recent economic books on efficiency in democracy. Special emphasis is given to two ambitious competing approaches: Mancur Olson's theory of encompassing interests and Donald Wittman's Myth of Democratic Failure . It is argued that the thesis that democracy should generally be presumed to be efficient is problematic in several respects. Sweeping conclusions are reached by virtue of a superficial application of economic analogies, which abstracts away many crucial characteristics of democratic politics, such as information imperfections, weak incentive structures, and collective action failures. The basic explanation for efficient outcomes may have more to do with the size of rulers' stakes in the economy than with voluntary Coasean bargaining.     

Systematically Dependent Competing Risks and Strategic Retirement

In many applications of survival analysis, the risk of an event occurring for one reason is dependent on the risk of the same event occurring for another reason. For example, when politicians suspect they might lose an election, they may strategically choose to retire. In such situations, the often-used multinomial logit model suffers from bias and underestimates the degree of strategic retirement, for example, to what extent poor prior electoral performance diminishes electoral prospects. To address this problem, the present article proposes a systematically dependent competing-risks (SDCR) model of survival analysis. Unlike the frailty model, the SDCR model can also deal with more than two risks. Monte Carlo simulation demonstrates how much the SDCR model reduces bias. Reanalysis of data on U.S. congressional careers ( Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004 ) documents the strategic retirement of representatives, indicating that electoral pressure is more effective at turning out incumbents than previously recognized.     

Public Management Reform: Competing Drivers of Change

Public management reforms often are portrayed as part of a global wave of change, and all organizational change is interpreted within a single reform paradigm that is rooted in economics and market–based principles. Reforms outside this paradigm go unnoticed. This article examines the assertion that different drivers of change competing with the dominant focus of management discourse remain present and influence the direction of reform. It presents three alternative drivers of change rooted in normative values and provides evidence of their relevance from three national cases. Normative influences are reflected in a stream of activities occurring within the same time period in different civil service systems. The direction of public management practice cannot be seen as fully determined by any one approach to government reform or as traveling in only one direction. Understanding the balance among competing drivers of change is a key to interpreting both contemporary and future administrative reform.     

Federalism and Competing Values In The Reagan Administration

Ronald Reagan has made revitalizing federalism a central componentof his domestic agenda. Although this goal has sometimes complementedhis other policy aims, this article focuses on cases where conflictshave arisen between the president's devolutionary goals andother primary objectives of his administration, such as deregulatingthe private sector and reducing domestic expenditures. Judgedfrom this perspective, policies supportive of federalism, asdefined by the president, have fared less well in his administration.After a series of brief case studies analyzing such policy decisions,the implications for the future of federalism are discussed.     

关于铁路基层公安机关千展创先争优活动的思考

基层是创先争优活动的核心,是公安工作战斗力的基础,也是形象展示的重要平台和窗口。针对当前铁路基层公安机关创先争优活动存在的主要问题,应秉持创新理念,延伸争创内涵,大胆探索,小心论证,从绩效引导、实战激励、特色凸显、习惯养成入手,把行业公安创先争优活动不断引向深入。     

Designing state aid formulas

This paper designs a new equalization‐aid formula based on fiscal gaps of local communities. When states are in transition to a new local aid formula, the issue of whether and how to hold existing aid harmless poses a challenge. The authors show that some previous studies and the formulas derived from them give differential weights to existing and new aid in filling the gap and hence effectively treat communities receiving greater amounts of existing aid more favorably than communities receiving less or no existing aid. As a fairer alternative, the authors propose a new approach that considers existing and new aid as completely equivalent in filling the gap by focusing on the equalizing impact of combined (new and existing) aid. In addition, unlike most previous research that focuses only on a single year's new aid distribution, the authors simulate the dynamics of aid distributions over multiple years using Massachusetts data. They further provide and compare several possible methods by which state policymakers could direct extra aid dollars to communities with larger unfilled gaps in dollar terms. Although the proposed aid formula is designed for municipal aid and tailored to Massachusetts, the authors note that foundation aid formulas for education implicitly treat existing aid in the same way and suggest that the framework, principles, and policy recommendations might also be applicable to other states. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

国际竞争力理论及其发展

针对国际竞争力理论研究发展,一方面分析了国际竞争力是由企业竞争力、产业竞争力和国家竞争力等构成的,另一方面分别分析其构成理论时联系我国竞争力问题明确提出,迎接WTO挑战的重要问题之一是要提升我国的国际竞争力,即提升企业竞争力、产业竞争力和国家竞争力。而对此首要的是加快市场化改革进程,进一步进行体制创新,尤其是全方位的制度创新,这既包括经济体制也包括政治体制。     

Unpacking the Effects of Competing Mandates on Agency Performance

Public administration scholars and practitioners uniformly agree that saddling agencies with multiple mandates breeds dysfunction and impedes performance. However, less is known about the mechanisms by which combining purposes has these effects. This study of a broad set of U.S. federal agencies finds support for the conventional wisdom by showing that agencies balancing greater numbers of programs perform worse. The analysis further suggests that such organizations struggle largely because they are more likely to be forced to simultaneously adopt conflicting stances toward program targets. Moreover, when programs force agencies into conflicts in which they are asked to both support and restrain the same target, the resulting uncertainty among personnel regarding agency priorities helps explain why operations are negatively impacted. Thus, it is not simply that accumulating missions impedes agency performance but rather how those competing mandates interact that can define whether an agency will struggle to achieve its objectives.     

Comparing Competing Theories on the Causes of Mandate Perceptions

The discussion of presidential mandates is as certain as a presidential election itself. Journalists inevitably discuss whether the president-elect has a popular mandate. Because they see elections as too complex to allow the public to send a unitary signal, political scientists are more skeptical of mandates. Mandates, however, have received new attention by scholars asking whether perceptions of mandate arise and lead representatives to act as if voters sent a policy directive. Two explanations have emerged to account for why elected officials might react to such perceptions. One focuses on the president's strategic decision to declare a mandate, the second on how members of Congress read signals of changing preferences in the electorate from their own election results. We test these competing views to see which more accurately explains how members of Congress act in support of a perceived mandate. The results indicate that members respond more to messages about changing preferences than to the president's mandate declaration .     

Testing Federal Student-Aid Fungibility in Two Competing Versions of Federalism

This study employs twenty-three years of federal, state, andinstitutional student-aid data to investigate the effects offederal grants to students on the behavior of higher educationinstitutions. Unlike previous studies, this research differentiatesbetween federal-aid programs according to whether a federalprogram follows "redivision federalism" or "cooperative federalism"concepts. Pell grants, exemplifying the former, appear highlyfungible and inversely related to institutional grants to students,while campus-based federal programs, exemplifying "cooperativefederalism, " appear less fungible and positively associatedwith institutional grants. The results also suggest that grantsto students are more important to higher education opportunitythan indicated by some previous research.