The Development of the Urban Government System in Bangladesh: Does Coordination Exist?

This paper is intended to shed some light on the development of urban governance in Bangladesh by highlighting the issue of coordination. It addresses the question of whether there is any mechanism through which urban government bodies can ensure coordination on matters of dispute between different government organisations. The paper is based on a review of secondary literature as well as on primary data drawn from a case study on a city corporation. The available data substantiates the view that the process of urban service delivery in Bangladesh has lacked proper coordination mechanisms from its very inception. Successive governments since the independence of Bangladesh have experimented with the structural design of urban government bodies without considering the need for a proper mechanism to ensure sound coordination among actors involved in implementing the various policies of these bodies. Although an attempt was made by the then Awami League1 1 The Awami League is one of the two major political parties in Bangladesh. View all notes (1996–2001) government to establish a high-powered coordination committee under the chairmanship of the minister in charge of the Local Government, Rural Development and Cooperatives (LGRD&C) Ministry for each city corporation, in order to ensure better management of services and to settle disputes between various government agencies, the initiative was perverted upon the change of state power in 2001. As a result, these bodies continue to suffer from problems of coordination.     

Do Citizens Trust the Civil Service Differently? Comparing the Determinants of Confidence in Political-Administrative Institutions

This paper asks whether citizens judge public administration to be trustworthy using different criteria from other political institutions. Using survey data, we estimate ordered logistic and multivariate regressions to compare the determinants of trust in six different political-administrative institutions. Findings show that social trust, political interest, as well as other individual characteristics, have very similar effects on trust regardless of the institution. The evidence shows that people who are older and more educated, interested in politics, and employed in the public sector, are only slightly more likely to make some sort of distinction. Implications for non-discriminant judgement mechanisms are discussed.     

Does Drug Trafficking Impact Terrorism? Afghan Opioids and Terrorist Violence in Central Asia

ABSTRACT

The relationship between drug trafficking and terrorism remains a contentious issue. While some assert that drug trafficking is a strong predictor of terrorism, others contest this observation. This study focuses on the impact of the Afghan opioid trade on terrorist violence in Central Asia, a region of drug transit states. We employ Geographic Information Systems–enabled visualizations of the drug trade and terrorism as well as statistical tests to study the drug–terror relationship at the subnational level. Our findings lend support to the argument that the drug trade facilitates terrorism, but we also find that the drug–terror relationship is multifaceted, complex, and intimately linked to the state.     

Post-NPM Reforms or Administrative Hybridization in the French Health Care System?

New public management (NPM) provides an opportunity to analyze a reform trajectory that is influenced by country-specific institutional and social traditions. France adopted its own version of NPM, embracing some of its “traditional” elements such as quasi-markets and performance evaluation and rejecting others. NPM reforms in France pursued a re-centralization agenda rather than a disaggregation of public agencies. Outcomes were below expectations in core areas such as citizen participation and physician professional satisfaction. Subsequent health reforms indicate convergence toward a hybrid system rather than toward a post-NPM paradigm.     

Local Party System Nationalisation: Does Municipal Size Matter?

Local party systems are not necessarily copies of their country's national party system. Some national parties do not field candidates in all municipalities, while in other municipalities there are non-partisan lists/local parties. In this article it is hypothesised that the larger the municipality (in number of inhabitants), the more the local party system will resemble the national party system (and vice versa). The hypothesis is tested using data from the 2001 local elections in Denmark. For this purpose, an index of local party system nationalisation is developed. The index is formulated in general terms so as to make it applicable in other settings and in comparisons between countries and over time.     

Does the Increase in Competition between Schools Improve the Quality of the Service? The Role of Educational Reform in Chile

We analyse the effect of geographic competition between schools on academic performance in Chile. The analysis controls for prior pupil performance, and a range of school and municipality characteristics. We allow for the endogeneity of voucher school location, using the number of local Catholic churches as an instrument. We find that a larger number of public schools positively affects the quality of education of other schools located in the same area, particularly amongst middle-class families and in middle-ranking schools. However, the number of voucher schools is associated with lower performance in neighbouring schools, which we attribute to pupil sorting.     

Does Market Access Mitigate the Impact of Seasonality on Child Growth? Panel Data Evidence from Northern Ethiopia

Seasonality in agricultural production continues to shape intra-annual food availability in low-income countries. Using high-frequency panel data from northern Ethiopia, this study attempts to quantify seasonal fluctuations in children’s weights. Consistent with earlier studies, we document considerable seasonality in children’s age and height adjusted weights. While children located closer to local food markets are better nourished compared to their counterparts residing farther away, their weights are also subject to considerable seasonality. Further analysis shows that children located closer to food markets consume more diverse diets than those located farther away but the content of the diet varies across seasons. This leads us to conclude that households located near these food markets are not able to insulate their children from seasonal weight fluctuations. We discuss some policy options with potential to address this threat to child wellbeing.     

Does Ideology Matter? Incentive,Efficiency and Management in the Public Sector

Contracting out has become increasingly popular as a strategy for public sector management for reducing costs, alleviating the burden on government agencies providing services, as well as taking advantage of the practices that have succeeded in the private sector. Generally, the system of management in capitalist liberal democratic systems of government that emphasize rule of law, transparency, performance measurement, and accountability are expected to be more efficient, while socialist regimes are considered to be inefficient due to the lack of these features. This article compares two dissimilar cases of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Shenzhen Special Economic Zone of China. An examination of the management of contract in the area of public housing in these cities reveal that the socialist city of Shenzhen has achieved a higher level of efficiency, while capitalist Hong Kong lags behind in establishing an effective system of management of contracts in the public sector. The finding challenges the traditional assumptions related to efficiency under different ideological regimes.     

Analysing the Impact of Price Shocks in Rural Economies: Do Household Responses Matter?

We analyse the impact of higher food prices on rural households in Tanzania focusing on the often neglected role of households’ behavioural responses. We introduce a new framework which considers the production response jointly with substitution effects in consumption and takes into account households’ market participation choices. Taking into account behavioural responses on consumption and production can significantly alter the sign and magnitude of the welfare impact in the long run.     

Does Size Matter? Reassessing the Relationship between Aquaculture and Poverty in Bangladesh

Aquaculture has long been promoted by development institutions in Bangladesh on the understanding that it can alleviate poverty. Most of this attention has focused on forms of the activity commonly referred to as ‘small-scale’. This article draws on concepts from the literature on agricultural growth and elaborates a typology of aquaculture based on relations of production which suggests that, in Bangladesh, quasi-capitalist forms of aquaculture may possess greater potential to reduce poverty and enhance food security than the quasi-peasant modes of production generally assumed to do so. The implications of this conclusion are explored.     

Going online. Does ICT enabled-participation engage the young in local governance?

Local governments increasingly use online strategies to strengthen political participation of citizens in policy and politics. Young people, however, are generally under-represented. This article studies age patterns of participation across offline and online forms of action to test whether online initiatives are able to overcome this age bias. We first report a case study of online and offline problem reporting to local authorities. We find that simply going from offline to online participation reinforces rather than mitigates age bias. We then report a case study of message posting on an online political forum. In this case, age bias disappears. In contrast to the traditional instrumental modes, a forum is an expressive form of online participation. The young seem to value the act of participating over the outcomes of participation. For practice, these findings suggest a need for participation policies that speak to these expressive needs of young. In recent years, social media have reinforced the potential for expressive participation.     

Welfare Dynamics in Pakistan and Ethiopia – Does the Estimation Method Matter?

Identifying household-level welfare dynamics and associated dynamic poverty trap thresholds can have important implications for the targeting of poverty reduction policies. The small existing empirical microeconomic literature has found evidence both for and against poverty traps. Using household panel data from rural Pakistan and Ethiopia, this article examines whether these different results are likely driven by differences in estimation methods or whether they reflect actual differences across settings. It applies the estimation methods from the existing literature to the same two datasets and also proposes a novel semiparametric panel data estimator that combines the advantages of the previous fully parametric and nonparametric approaches. The results suggest that absent any dynamic poverty trap thresholds the effect of using different estimation methods is secondary, having a small influence on the estimated long-term level of household well-being but not the identification of multiple dynamic welfare equilibria and associated dynamic poverty thresholds. Households in rural Pakistan and Ethiopia seem to be stuck in a static, structural-type poverty trap facing an expected level of long-term well-being that places them squarely in poverty.     

Assessing the Terrorist Threat: Impact of the Group's Organizational Design?

Each terrorist organization faces a critical tradeoff between effectively managing the organization's violent behavior while remaining secure from counterterrorism efforts. Drawing on organization theory and terrorism literature, this article develops theoretical linkages between the organizational design of a terrorist group and this critical tradeoff. It considers the impact of four key design parameters: membership, operational space and time, formalization, and centralization. The first two structural parameters construct the physical anatomy of a terrorist organization. The latter two structuring parameters prescribe or restrict the behavior within this organizational context. Net advantages by means of rising structural design parameter values are increasingly offset by the organizational strength and security vulnerabilities that inherently follow from the rising structuring parameters.     

The New Panopticon? Examining the Effect of Home Confinement on Criminal Recidivism

Due to its versatility within the criminal justice system, home confinement has broad appeal as a sentencing option. This meta-analysis examines the effectiveness of house arrest and electronic monitoring on the recidivism of adult offenders. Fourteen effect sizes (from 11 studies) that present recidivistic outcomes were quantitatively pooled, and separate meta-analyses were conducted on varying categories of recidivism severity to assess the differing impact of home confinement. The findings suggest that home confinement helps adult offenders successfully reintegrate into the community upon release from closed custody and deters future offending. Implications for correctional policies and practices toward home confinement as a community-based prevention strategy to supervise offenders are discussed.     

What Accounts for Party System Stability? Comparing the Dimensions of Party Competition in Postcommunist Europe

Why do party systems stabilise quickly in some new democracies while others remain in extended flux? As a core variable of comparative politics, party system stability has led scholars to generate various theoretical explanations, but consensus is still lacking. Given its widely divergent party systems, postcommunist Europe presents an important opportunity to revisit stability's determinants. Applying hypotheses derived from theories about competition in multidimensional policy spaces, I find that they better explain variation in a 14-case sample than contending hypotheses about the electoral system, economic performance, constitutional design, political culture, or previous democratic experience.