Disaster Resiliency of U.S. Local Governments: Insights to Strengthen Local Response and Recovery from the COVID-19 Pandemic

This research presents implications of the global pandemic for local government resiliency in the United States. The authors explore insights from local government officials and managers on the front lines of response and recovery efforts to the biological natural disaster. Findings from the latest nationwide survey of U.S. local governments regarding their preparedness for weather-related natural disasters also inform responses to the current crisis. Results indicate that local governments are innovating and taking strategic actions to fight the virus, even as COVID-19 has exposed social inequities that are exacerbated as the virus spreads. Survey findings of disaster readiness of local governments to weather-related disasters shows that small, resource-poor governments will not be able to respond well and social inequities will grow. Policy strategies at all levels of government must recognize and account for these inequities as threat of this virus subsides, to support stronger, more effective readiness for the next biological catastrophe.     

Thick Red Tape and the Thin Blue Line: A Field Study on Reducing Administrative Burden in Police Recruitment

Police departments struggle to recruit officers, and voluntary drop-off of candidates exacerbates this challenge. Using four years of administrative data and a field experiment conducted in the Los Angeles Police Department, the authors analyze the impact of administrative burden on the likelihood that a candidate will remain in the recruitment process. Findings show that reducing friction costs to participation and simplifying processes improve compliance, as behavioral public administration would predict. Applicants who were offered simpler, standardized processes completed more tests and were more likely to be hired. Later reductions to perceived burden led to an 8 percent increase in compliance, with a 60 percent increase in compliance within two weeks. However, removing steps that would have allowed for better understanding of eligibility kept unqualified candidates in the process for longer, reducing organizational efficiency. These results extend the field's understanding of how administrative burden can impact the selection of talent into government.     

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding Ten Years on: Critical Reflections and Stimulating Ideas on an Evolving Scholarship

ABSTRACT

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISB's editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that time, what they would do differently (with hindsight), or how they see their articles contributing to current debates on intervention and statebuilding. We have selected one article per volume, and we have ordered the contribution starting from volume 1 (2007) to volume 9 (2015). The articles will be made open access for the year, and we highly recommend (re-)reading the original articles along with the comments from the authors.     

Affordability and mortgage design: Permanent buydowns and buyups

Abstract

A simulation model that mirrors the actual practices of lenders in setting qualification requirements for mortgage loans is used to assess the impact of permanent buydowns and buyups on the maximum sale price that buyers can afford. Buydowns are reductions in the coupon rate traded off against higher discount points; buyups are the reverse. Although buydowns have little effect on afford ability, buyups can have significant effects. Their potential is largely unrealized, however, because of the call risk to lenders of loans carrying premiums. The authors propose a “discount recovery” provision, which would be similar to a prepayment penalty except that the payment upon prepayment would be tied to the amount of the discount foregone by the lender. This would protect lenders against call risk, giving them every reason to offer buyups as a way of expanding demand.     

Performance and Management in the Public Sector: Testing a Model of Relative Risk Aversion

Research has demonstrated that management influences the performance of public organizations, but almost no research has explored how the success or failure of a public organization influences the decisions of those who manage it. Arguing that many decisions by public managers are analogous to risky choice, the authors use a well‐validated model of relative risk aversion to understand how such choices are influenced by managers’ perceptions of organizational performance. They theorize that managers will be less likely to encourage innovation or give discretion to employees when they are just reaching their goals relative to other performance conditions. Analyses of responses to the 2011 and 2013 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys provide considerable support for these assertions. The findings have significant implications for our understanding of the relationship between management and performance in public organizations.     

The citizen of empire

In this paper, the authors imagine a Citizen of Empire. This is a conceptualization of global citizenship as it might appear in Hardt and Negri's global social order of Empire. The article draws on Hardt and Negri's Empire as the model of global society to imagine what citizenship might look like on a global scale. Hardt and Negri's conceptualization of Empire offers a palette of new and emerging social relationships from which a vibrant conceptualization of citizen and citizenship can be imagined and new democratic politics practiced. First, the authors examine the concept of Empire to unearth foundational concepts upon which a notion of Citizen of Empire can be built. Second, the authors imagine a citizen who ‘calls Empire into being' rather than participating in the ready-made political, cultural, and economic institutions of the nation-state. Without institutional support, citizenship in Empire must be highly generative and creative, and it will operate on a virtual and poetic terrain by enacting mechanisms of deterritorialization, networking, and communication.     

Bridging the Public Service Motivation and Calling Literatures

Public administration research suggests there may be disparity in the extent to which public servants experience their work as a calling. The purpose of this article is to better illustrate and integrate calling research, which grows out of the positive organizational scholarship movement, into how we understand public service motives. The calling scholarship offers a productive way to view differences in public servants' orientations toward their work. Integrating calling into the public administration scholarship—particularly the public service motivation scholarship—provides insights to researchers and managers about how to help employees discover a deeper sense of meaningfulness in their work. In presenting the arguments and corresponding conceptual framework, the authors seek to supplement rather than replace the public service motivation construct. The authors articulate a research agenda that they believe will strengthen and enrich research on public servants' experience with their work.     

Taiwan and the geopolitics of late development

Abstract

Through a case study of Taiwan, this paper seeks to address recent debates surrounding the transformation of developmental states in East Asia. Whilst a number of authors have cited the Taiwanese state as being both cautious and resilient in the midst of global restructuring, this paper seeks to critically engage with such arguments by highlighting the dynamic and mutually constitutive relations between the forms of social relations that underpin late development and the wider geopolitical system in which such development occurs. Specifically, Taiwanese industrialisation can be viewed as an outcome of the US intervention in the Chinese civil war and subsequent exclusion of China from the regional political economy in the period between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The Kuomintang (KMT)'s retreat to Taiwan established the basis for the autonomous developmental state, and the US underpinned this state through military protection, aid and access to its own domestic market. However, the relative decline of US hegemony and the readmission of China into the international system have posed significant challenges to Taiwan's developmental state. The US sought to redress its trade imbalance with East Asia by placing pressure on Taiwan to liberalise its political economy. Furthermore, the very process of development itself served to undermine the autonomy of the state as it came under pressure from new social forces. Taiwan has more recently been faced with a dilemma of closer integration with the mainland or the maintenance of its de facto economic and political independence at the risk of becoming isolated from the global trading system.     

Proportional Representation,Majoritarian Legislatures,and Coalitional Voting

Voters in elections under plurality rule face relatively straightforward incentives. In proportional representation systems, voters face more complex incentives as electoral outcomes don’t translate as directly into policy outcomes as in plurality rule elections. A common approach is to assume electoral outcomes translate into policy as a vote‐weighted average of all party platforms. However, most of the world’s legislatures are majoritarian institutions, and elections in PR systems are generally followed by a process of coalition formation. Results obtained using this assumption are not robust to the introduction of even minimal forms of majoritarianism. Incentives to engage in strategic voting depend on considerations about the coalitions that may form after the election, and the voters’ equilibrium strategies are shaped by policy balancing and the postelectoral coalition bargaining situation, including considerations about who will be appointed the formateur.     

Equity in Federal Contracting: Examining the Link between Minority Representation and Federal Procurement Decisions

The federal government increasingly relies on nongovernmental organizations for procuring goods and services. This long‐term trend presents a significant challenge for administrators because it risks the egalitarian values of democracy by further distancing administrative action from direct, participative, democratic oversight. The authors put forward a theory of representative bureaucracy as a way to reconcile democracy with the reality of the contemporary policy process in which unelected officials are the principal decision makers. The theory is tested in the domain of federal procurement, specifically within the contract award decisions of 60 federal agencies over three years. The authors argue that increased minority representation in leadership positions results in an increased proportion of federal contracts awarded to small minority‐owned firms.     

Public–Private Partnerships and the Public Accountability Question

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are growing in popularity as a governing model for delivery of public goods and services. PPPs have existed since the Roman Empire, but their expansion into traditional public projects today raises serious questions about public accountability. This article examines public accountability and its application to government and private firms involved in PPPs. An analytical framework is proposed for assessing the extent to which PPPs provide (or will provide) goods and services consistent with public sector goals of effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. Six dimensions—risk, costs and benefits, political and social impacts, expertise, collaboration, and performance measurement—are incorporated into a model that assists public managers in improving partnerships’ public accountability.     

Leadership and the public sector: an internationally comparative benchmarking analysis

In this article the concept of leadership is explored. Particular attention is given to examining the dynamics of individual and team leadership, as it is postulated that the impact of top people and top teams is crucial to the running of today's organizations. The results of an extensive survey conducted across the departments of the Civil Service of a European country government will be presented. These results will be benchmarked against the results of a worldwide survey of business leaders, spanning 12 countries and the responses of top managers in National Health Service (HNS) Trusts, UK. Emphasis will be given to the necessity of conducting effective team leadership through high quality dialogue and through cabinet responsibility in order to successfully lead and maintain the organization on its agreed path. Finally, approaches to the development of leadership for those already in top positions and for those entering into such challenging positions, will be discussed.     

Road User Fees Instead of Fuel Taxes: The Quest for Political Acceptability

In light of recent regulatory changes in federal fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, the consensus forecast is that motor fuel taxes will not be an adequate source of dedicated funding for roadway maintenance and construction. This article accepts the notion that mileage fees are a promising replacement for the fuel tax and considers steps that might be taken to enhance the political acceptability of such a reform. The authors argue that simple, low‐tech ways of implementing mileage fees are possible in the near term and should be complemented by a well‐developed audit mechanism. Current trends in the automotive and auto insurance industries as well as social media are likely to reduce opposition to more technologically advanced mileage taxes in the long run.     

Different Processes,Different Outcomes? Assessing the Individual‐Level Impacts of Public Participation

This article empirically investigates the relative efficacy of different direct participation processes. Specifically, it compares the effects of three types of participatory processes (public meetings, focus groups, and citizen juries) on participants' issue awareness, competence, empowerment, and trust in service professionals. The authors hypothesize that all three participatory processes will positively affect these individual outcomes but that the magnitudes of effects will differ across the three processes. Using data from field experiments, the authors test and find general support for the hypotheses. This study contributes to understanding of public participation, particularly in terms of the relationship between participatory design and outcomes.     

Portraying the Nature of Corruption Using an Explorative Case Study Design

What is the nature of corruption in Western democracies? To answer this research question, the authors study 10 Dutch corruption cases in depth, looking at confidential criminal files. The cases allow them to sketch a general profile of a corruption case. The authors offer nine propositions to portray the nature of corruption. They conclude that corruption usually takes place within enduring relationships, that the process of becoming corrupt can be characterized as a slippery slope, and that important motives for corruption, aside from material gain, include friendship or love, status, and the desire to impress others. The explorative multiple case study methodology helps to expand our understanding of the way in which officials become corrupt.     

“Willing the Event”

Abstract

A major problem threatens Deleuze’s project in The Logic of Sense. He makes an ontological distinction between events and substances, but he then collapses a crucial distinction between two kinds of events, namely, actions and mere occurrences. Indeed, whereas actions are commonly differentiated from mere occurrences with reference to their causal dependence on the intentions of their agents, Deleuze asserts a strict ontological distinction between the realm of causes (including psychological causes) and the realm of events, and holds that events of all types are incorporeal happenings which are inseparable from expressed sense. For Deleuze, what counts as one’s action thus does not depend on one’s intention, but rather on a process of “making sense” of that action. Nevertheless, Deleuze continues to speak of the need to “will” the event. In order to resolve this apparent contradiction, I will read a conception of “expressive agency” into The Logic of Sense.     

Production,circulation and value

The Marxian transformation problem is usually thought of as bridging the transition from 'essence' (value) to 'phenomena' or surface (prices). This paper shows that such a conception is incorrect. The transformation is actually between two theoretical levels of the construction of the economic region of the capitalist mode of production. The first of these levels is production in itself (Capital,Volume I), while the second is the complex unity of production and circulation (Capital,Volume III). This theoretical construction is complicated for two reasons: (1) despite the fact that production is the dominant instance, the social relationships of commodity production appear only in circulation; (2) circulation categories appear implicitlyeven at the level of production in itself.

These considerations establish the transformation problem at the heart of a correct conception of the capitalist mode of production. Thus the sharpest distinctions between neo-Ricardianism, vulgar Marxism and Marxism can be drawn here. In particular, it is shown that a correct appreciation of the transformation problem proves the inadequacy of an instrumentalist conception of the state since, at least in this area, bourgeois class interest arises only at the level of class and is not the sum of individual interests (even over a subgroup of the class).

Finally, the transformation problem itself is reviewed in detail. Mathematical results are separated from the essentials of the problem which are shown to lie in the correct choice of normalization, a choice that insures the transformation will actually be from value to modified value and not from value to price.     

Environment-shaping: An Alternative Approach to Applying Foreign Development Assistance

Development assistance has a chequered past, in large part because planning for development assistance is historically such a fractured enterprise internally, and so disassociated from development assistance recipients’ assets and needs. The authors of environment-shaping offer an alternative development programme planning methodology that highlights above all else the ever-important relationship between development assistance and the environment into which it is offered. The authors employ an asset-based, rather than a traditional deficit-based, approach to assessing the environment for which development assistance will be formulated. The authors then highlight the power of perceptions in the creation of policy programming and in identifying and reinforcing opportunities for positive feedback loops within the recipient environment as critical to truly ‘sustainable’ development.     

Analytics and Beliefs: Competing Explanations for Defining Problems and Choosing Allies and Opponents in Collaborative Environmental Management

The rationale for collaborative environmental management often hinges on two factors: first, specialized training creates biased analytics that require multidisciplinary approaches to solve policy problems; second, normative beliefs among competing actors must be included in policy making to give the process legitimacy and to decide trans‐scientific problems. These two factors are tested as drivers of conflict in an analysis of 76 watershed partnerships. The authors find that analytical bias is a secondary factor to normative beliefs; that depicting the primary driver of conflict in collaborative environmental management as between experts and nonexperts is inaccurate; that compared to the “life” and “physical” sciences, the social sciences and liberal arts have a stronger impact on beliefs and choice of allies and opponents; and that multiple measures are needed to capture the effect of analytical biases. The essay offers lessons for public administrators and highlights the limitations and generalizations of other governing approaches.