Urban Governance And Policy Networks: On The Urban Political Boundedness of Policy Networks. A French Case Study

The paper analyses the changes within two policy domains in one French city. The aim is not so much to demonstrate the role of policy networks but to stress the importance of their articulation within a given political space. The paper does not conclude on the emergence of a new type of network governance but rather shows how urban political élites have deliberately encouraged the formation of policy net-works in Rennes. That strategy makes sense in their attempt to strengthen an urban collective actor. Policy networks therefore should not be analysed autonomously as their impact is largely shaped by the interest and collective goals of the existing regime of governance in Rennes.     

Curbing Corruption in Public Administration: A Case Study from Italy

The aim of this article is to verify whether the historic sentence, no. 500/1999 of the Italian Legitimacy Court (Corte di Cassazione) in Plenary Session, may have contributed to diminishing bribery in Italy, by increasing the area of liability for both civil servants and the public administration. The empirical analysis is based on a case study conducted in Sicily, in the province of Catania, using a unique data set. The main results of the article are: paying bureaucrats by means of an incentive wage regimes may not be effective in reducing corruption; an extension of the liability rule for the public administration and civil servants may discourage the phenomenon of bribery; and, the perfect specification of property rights helps to reduce corruption.     

Using Crowd-Sourced Data to Study Public Services: Lessons from Urban India

As cities throughout the developing world grow, they often expand more quickly than the infrastructure and service delivery networks that provide residents with basic necessities such as water and public safety. Why do some cities deliver more effective infrastructure and services in the face of rapid growth than others? Why do some households and communities secure better services than others? Answering these questions requires studying the large, politicized bureaucracies charged with providing urban services, especially the relationships between frontline workers, agency managers, and citizens in informal settlements. Researchers investigating public service delivery in cities of the Global South, however, have faced acute data scarcity when addressing these themes. The recent emergence of crowd-sourced data offers researchers new means of addressing such questions. In this paper, we draw on our own research on the politics of urban water delivery in India to highlight new types of analysis that are possible using crowd-sourced data and propose solutions to common pitfalls associated with analyzing it. These insights should be of use for researchers working on a broad range of topics in comparative politics where crowd-sourced data could provide leverage, such as protest politics, conflict processes, public opinion, and law and order.     

Battlefields of Ethnic Symbols. Public Space and Post-Soviet Identity Formation from a Minority Perspective

This article provides an analysis of interdependencies between post-Soviet Erinnerungspolitik in public space and the individual perception of urban reconfigurations by ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan. Applying a qualitative social-geographic approach the author examines determinants of the process of ethnic symbolisation of real and imagined places. Individual biography and the extent of Soviet socialisation are factors shaping the personal perception of symbolic landscapes. From the perspective of the individual, space reflects the power distribution within society and hence, impacts on individual identity formation. Depending on the dominance of internal as opposed to external identification, the (perceived) changing ethnicised landscape of cities potentially fuels ethnic tension.     

Underdevelopment,Urban Squatting,and The State Bureaucracy: A Case Study of Tanzania

This article investigates a part of the “story of the story” of the 1924 revolution, the first popular anticolonial uprising in Sudan to be framed by a nationalist ideology. Considering that the process that turns a past event into history is neither linear nor predictable, I draw on Trouillot's “catalogue of silences” to compare two sets of sources that correspond to two moments in the making of 1924 as history: first, the judicial records produced by the Sudan government during 1924, and second the Ewart Report, written in 1925, to “seal” the revolution. A comparison of these two sources reveals radical discrepancies in the narrative, as well as the silences imposed on and well-concealed fine-tunings of the various voices of the revolution. Of these two sets of sources, it is the Ewart Report that provides the most influential interpretation of the 1924 revolution.     

The Memory of Katyn in Polish Political Discourse: A Quantitative Study

This study uses quantitative methods to explore how the memory of Katyn is mobilised in political discourse. The scholarly literature on memory conflict tends to see international memory disputes as an expression of a state's interests as a whole; this study analyses when hostile rhetoric is mobilised and finds that in Poland Katyn is invoked as part of an opposition strategy that criticises the incumbent regime for undermining the national interest. Periods of accelerated debate about the significance of Katyn have occurred as political elites sought to achieve specific domestic rather than foreign political goals.     

E-Governance to Cut Corruption in Public Service Delivery: A Case Study of Fiji

Experience in a number of developed and developing countries has shown that E-Governance initiatives can promote greater transparency with the goal of cutting corruption. This article examines perceptions of public service delivery in Fiji to explore the potential of E-Governance to cut corruption and improve governance. Based on a survey of community perceptions and a review of selected literature it suggests that service-delivery oriented IT initiatives can contribute to an effective, multi-pronged strategy to cut corruption in the Fiji public sector.     

How to Make the Mix Matter: A Case Study of Post-Transformational Leadership in Hybrid Public Management

The purpose of this article is to explain how public managers can influence the mix of institutional logics in a process of organizational change. To do this, the concept of post-transformational leadership is related to institutional logics. The article is based on a case study of the Danish Crime Prevention Council. The study shows how post-transformative leaders are urged to move from strategies of collaboration to strategies of manipulation, hypocrisy, and the hijacking of institutional logics.     

Urban Land Management and its Discontents: A Case Study of the Swaziland Urban Development Project (SUDP)

Whilst much has been written about land contests in rural settings in sub-Saharan Africa, less attention has been paid to land disputes between traditional and formal authorities in urban areas. Using the Swaziland Urban Development Project as a case study, this article examines jurisdictional conflicts over land that occur between traditional leaders and formal structures such as Swaziland’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and city councils. The focus is on local residents, who are caught in the middle of the land contests and use various strategies to hold onto their land. Employing qualitative methodology and the conceptual lens of institutional multiplicity, the article concludes that rival jurisdictional claims negatively affect residents and impede development.     

Tensions Within the Public Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media

Drawing loosely on positioning theory, this article proposes two new claims about intellectuals and their public engagement. Firstly, we argue that the modern notion of the intellectual incorporates four core tensions or contradictions. Those four tensions centre round the following axes: hierarchy versus equality, generality versus expertise, passion versus distance, and the individual versus the collective. We show how these four tensions were present at the outset of the modern notion of the intellectual, and have regularly come to the surface in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Secondly, we contend that the same four tensions have taken on new forms, potentially affecting how intellectuals engage with the public. To develop this point, we focus on recent technological developments that enable novel intellectual interventions in the public sphere, in particular interactive online blogging and micro-blogging platforms.     

Political Entrepreneurs and Public Administration Reform: The Case of the Local Authorities' Unification Reform in Israel

This article examines a specific institutional change in Israel. In 2003 the Israeli Knesset implemented the local authority unification plan, an unprecedented reform in the structure of local authorities in Israel. This article is about a local government reorganization taking place in a unique political culture. This article tries to integrate the role of political entrepreneurs within an Institutionalist and “learning” perspectives to offer an explanation to a local government structure, thus politicians influence and are influenced by a wide range of institutional norms and practices in a complex process of design and determination of institutional change.     

How Resistance to Change Affects the Implementation of Accrual Accounting in Italian Public Universities: A Comparative Case Study

Following a highly disordered series of reforms, Italian universities will adopt accrual accounting by the end of 2016. This article studies the case of two universities where the new accounting system was introduced early (2013). The aim is to identify the main drivers of resistance to change and determine the types of organizational behavior that can counter this resistance. The results show a positive correlation between overcoming resistance to change and implementing specific organizational practices that may soften its effect. Surprisingly, the article found that resistance was stronger in the university where the situation was less complex.     

Maturation of Public Administration in a Multicultural Environment: Lessons from the Anglo-Saxon,Latin, and Scandinavian Political Traditions

Abstract

A comparative analysis is made of three different models of public administration: the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Scandinavian. The purpose of this comparison is to analyze how these ideal-types of public administration handle the issue of power. Our argument is that without understanding and facing the issue of the amount of power that bureaucrats and politicians possess in any society, public administration will continue to be handicapped to understand the dynamics of the real world and therefore grow as a discipline. This is so despite the universalist claims of the currently fashionable ideas of the New Public Management.     

Identity,Ideology, and Information: The Sources of Iraqi Public Support for the Islamic State

ABSTRACT

This article explores the amount and sources of support for the Islamic State among Iraqis. We argue that, in addition to shared identity and ideology, a neglected factor in debates about support for Islamist militancy is the messaging and information that individuals receive about a given group. We test these arguments using regression analysis on public opinion data collected in Iraq in April 2015. The analyses largely support our contentions, showing that exposure to news coverage of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant substantially reduces support for the group, even among alienated Sunnis or ideological Islamists.     

Space, Boundaries, and the Problem of Order: A View from Systems Theory

The idea our global polity is chiefly divided by territorially organized nation-states captures contemporary constellations of power and authority only insufficiently. Through a decoupling of power and the state, political spaces no longer match geographical spaces. Instead of simply acknowledging a challenge to the state, there is the need to rethink the changing meaning of space for political processes. The paper identifies three aspects, a reconceptualization of the spatial assumptions that IR needs to address: the production of space, the constitutive role of boundaries, and the problem of order. With this contribution, we argue that one avenue in understanding the production of space and the following questions of order is by converging systems theory and critical geopolitics. While the latter has already developed a conceptual apparatus to analyze the production of space, the former comes with an encompassing theoretical background, which takes "world society" as the starting point of analysis. In this respect, nation states are understood as a form of internal differentiation of a wider system, namely world society.     

Public Value in Moral Market: A Case Study of Human Organ Transplantation System

Although public value may be a new paradigm beyond traditional and new public management, some important theoretical questions are still unanswered. These questions could be clarified by the comparison to economic value in free market. Most public values have been ignored and threatened in free market, but they could be partially measured by some methodology. The issue of public value is emerging at the background of market society and so the moral market should be clarified. A human organ transplantation system has been analyzed to show how the public value could be created in a moral market.     

Public Service Motivation in Ghanaian Civil Service: A Case Study of Ejisu-Juabeng Municipality

Civil servants are perceived to possess altruistic motive known as Civil Service Motivation (PSM) which promotes public interest as confirmed in some developed countries. Using the Ejisu-Juabeng Municipality as a case study, this article assesses the existence of PSM in the Ghanaian public sector and finds that PSM exists in the public service but its existence does not ensure maximum output. The workers professed having motives such as sense of social justice, compassion, commitment to public interest, self-sacrifice, and sense of civic duty but indicated their unwillingness to commit their future to the public sector because of poor working conditions.