Local Political Leadership and the Modernisation of Local Government

Political leadership has been a key element of central government's attempts to ‘modernise’ local government over the past decade, within a discourse that emphasised ‘strong’ and ‘visible’ leadership and the role of leaders and leadership in driving change within local authorities. In the context of such an approach, and also taking account of academic discourse, this article draws upon interviews with nearly thirty individuals in leadership positions in local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales to assess their experiences of leadership and their views of some aspects of the role and work of councils. It suggests that whilst there is broad convergence between the aspirations of government and the narratives that emerge from these leaders on some aspects of local political leadership, there are also differences, perhaps most notably over the relationship between changes to decision-making structures and the loci of political power.     

Bureaucratic socialism in reform mode: the changing politics of Cuba’s post-Fidel era

Standard wisdom explains Cuba’s current transformation as one of economic change but political immobility. However, Cuban politics have also undergone a major change since the handing over of power from Fidel to Raúl Castro – even if the rhetoric used has been one of continuity. This article traces this process by looking at four areas: the depersonalisation and re-institutionalisation of the political structures; the diversification of the public sphere, particularly through the use of digital media; the liberalisation of travel and migration, with its transformative impact on state–citizen relations; and the turn to a moderate foreign policy, as highlighted by the rapprochement with the USA, with its implications for legitimising the underpinnings of Cuban socialism. Although the shift has been well below the threshold of a transition to multiparty democracy, Cuba has evolved from the charismatic model of the past to what can be understood as bureaucratic socialism in reform mode.     

Can Vendors Buy Influence? The Relationship Between Campaign Contributions and Government Contracts

Over the past 30 years, research on government contracting has identified three major influences that help explain variation in contracting decisions—managerial, organizational, and political. This study looks to advance the political influence literature by introducing a factor that has received limited attention—vendor influence. This study specifically focuses on contract transactions at the U.S. federal government to determine if vendors influence the contract award. Traditionally, political influence is studied at the macro or meso levels. This study shifts the unit of analysis to the micro level which requires a change in measurement of political influence. The study uses vendor campaign contributions to capture political influence on this new level of focus.     

THE CHANGING STATE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT: RESTRUCTURING FOR THE 1990s

In the recent past, local government has largely been analysed as if its very existence were in danger from centrally inspired legislative reforms and financial controls. Such a starting point may make it more difficult to assess the changes which are taking place and which are likely to dominate in the 1990s. Three other possibilities are considered here. The first, is the notion of an 'enabling' authority; the second, the possibility of a shift towards post-Fordist local government; and the third, the possibility of more corporatist or neo-corporatist forms of politics at local level. It is suggested that the third is the most helpful approach for understanding the likely direction of change in the 1990s, and argued that changes within local government have to be understood in the context of wider restructuring of the UK state.     

More continuity than change? US strategy toward Cuba under Obama and Trump

This article examines the policies implemented by both the Obama and Trump Administrations toward Cuba to evaluate the claim that the ‘Thaw’ of relations between Washington and Havana represents a significant change in US foreign policy toward the island nation. Despite the appearance that the change in policy is a fundamental shift, I argue that the changes in US policy toward Cuba under both Obama and Trump represent changes in the means for pursuing the same historical objectives pursued by the Washington for the past few decades. In other words, the overall strategy and objective of US hegemony in Cuba is the same, with the only change being the means for achieving these ends. The central implication of this is that the ‘Thaw’ in relations between Cuba and the US represents a new, more ‘consensual’ means to instigating the same objective of provoking American-orchestrated political, economic, social and ideological changes in the island nation.     

Shifting linkages in ethnic mobilization: the case of RMDSZ and the Hungarians in Transylvania

The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) has been the most stable actor in the Romanian party system over the past two decades. However, in this article, we argue that beyond this apparent stability, the linkages between RMDSZ and its voters have undergone a gradual, yet significant shift. The ethnic block voting of Transylvanian Hungarians was closely connected to the concept of a self-standing and parallel “Minority Society,” and to the practices of institution building that the minority elites engaged in in the early 1990s. However, since its first participation in the Romanian government in 1996, RMDSZ has gradually departed from this strategy, a phenomenon that was also closely connected to a process of elite change within the organization. The present RMDSZ leadership puts less and less emphasis on policy programs that could reinforce the institutional system of the minority; consequently, it is unable (and unwilling) to organizationally integrate the community activists of the minority society who previously had played a key role in the process of (electoral) mobilization. At the rhetorical level, RMDSZ did not abandon the goal of building a parallel Hungarian minority society, but in its linkages to the Hungarian electorate, clientelistic exchanges have become predominant.     

In search of a democratic cultural “alternative”: Serbia's European heritage from Dositej Obradović to OTPOR

Developments in Serbia's democratic consolidation over the past six years have been both ongoing and progressive. Yet the establishment of a widely shared and collectively accepted political culture that has departed from the ethnocentric and euroskeptic narratives of the Milo?evi? era remains incomplete. Additionally, the failure by Serbian socio-political elites in appropriating alternative narratives of Serbian history and culture that demonstrate a tradition of shared values and identities with other European communities has stymied public acceptance of Serbia's European integration and public trust among its leaders. This paper argues that Serbian socio-political elites can appropriate narratives and symbols of Serbian collective identity that have been either sidelined or neglected by previously established ethnocentric narratives, and ascribe new systems of meaning and codes of behavior that qualify European liberal democratic values. I argue that a plentiful reservoir of democratic capital can be found in the histories of Serbian communities in Vojvodina over the past three centuries, and the urban cosmopolitanism of Belgrade from the late 1860s up to the present period.     

Perceptions and Misperceptions of Major Organizational Changes in Hospitals: Do Change Efforts Fail Because of Inconsistent Organizational Perceptions of Restructuring and Reengineering?

Abstract

Over the past decade, many hospitals have invested in major restructuring and/or reengineering efforts designed to enhance their competitiveness by improving product quality and/or reducing costs. For a variety of reasons, these significant changes have not been systematically evaluated. This research provides an objective look at the results of restructuring/reengineering hospitals and an examination of the influences on employee perceptions of reengineering's outcomes. This research demonstrates that employees, including upper management, had little or no objective knowledge of the outcomes of their change efforts. However, perceptions of all employees involved in a major change effort are critical if their full participation is to be sustained. The ultimate sustainability of many hospital strategic change efforts may rest largely on subjective assessments of its outcomes. The research reported here suggests that such perceptions vary significantly by organizational level and may not be stable over time. While the passage of time sees improvements in managers' perceptions of reengineering results, line personnel become increasingly skeptical and less positive. Further objective research is encouraged to more definitely distinguish the impact of employee perceptions on change efforts' outcomes and sustainability.     

Instrumentalisation de la coopération chinoise et transition politique au Sénégal: analyse de l’ère Wade

In countries like Senegal where democracy seems to be institutionalising itself, evaluation of the quality of this practice often happens at critical points of reference such as elections. The democratic changes between Presidents Diouf and Wade in 2000 and between the latter and President Macky Sall in 2012 are generally deemed to be indicators of the healthy condition of democracy in this country. The present article stipulates that the politicians involved in this alternation plan and prepare for it as much at the heart of their administrations as do the political parties, but often also outside election periods. This article demonstrates that the Wade regime, following that mindset, has instrumentalized its cooperation with China in attempt to consolidate its power.     

Political engagement and participation of Thai citizens: the rural–urban disparity

The nature of citizen participation and engagement in public life in Thailand has changed dramatically over the last decade. This article focuses on explaining the changing pictures of political engagement – political interest, knowledge, and efficacy – among rural and urban Thai citizens since the House of Representatives election in 2001. The major attempt made in this article also to explain how these changes affect patterns of political activism (i.e. in voting, political contacting, and protesting activities), particularly between the rural and urban Thai voters. Relying on three latest survey data taken from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the article suggests that the factors facilitating greater political participation are relatively different between rural and urban residents, and such differences cannot simply be explained as a result of a deeper engagement in the patron–client relationship of the rural than of the urban. Indeed, those differentiations depend on several factors and vary according to different kinds of political activity.     

Path Dependency and the Reform of English Local Government

This paper uses the concept of path dependency to examine the changes to the political management structures of English local government. We note how the possible experience of decreasing returns among some local authority actors combined with the powerful intervention of politicians within New Labour at the national level led to a significant break from past policy and the imposition of measures to establish a separate executive that was claimed as a radical step forward for local democracy. Using survey data from the Evaluating Local Governance research team ( http://www.elgnce.org.uk ), we explore the establishment of a separate political executive in all major local authorities and map out the style of decision-making that is emerging. We find that some established institutional patterns reasserted themselves in the process of implementation, but that increasing returns are not as great as some theorists of path dependency would suggest and they may be a force for system change as well as for stability.     

Ideological Rigidity and Flexibility of Secular and Religious Terror Groups: The Case of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Hamas

This article explores the ideological rigidity of secular and religious terror groups. Analyzing leaflets disseminated by two Palestinian groups during the First Intifada, it examines if and how each shifted its identity and goals in response to repression, political shifts, or resource changes. The results suggest that while similar catalysts led to ideological reformation among the secular and the religious group, the extent of ideological change within the religious group was more limited. The article argues for the need to disaggregate ideological analysis further in order to identify more subtle shifts, alterations, and omissions, in the positions held by religious terror groups, moving past the exploration of if such changes exist in ideological templates and instead focusing on the extent and type of alterations the different groups allow.     

CHANGE IN THE MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICES

This article identifies the main themes in recent changes in public sector management and shows the extent of the challenge to past organizational assumptions. While recognizing the objectives of the changes could bring benefits if realized, it argues that there are a series of issues that are unresolved. The language of consumerism, the development of government by contracts, the form of performance management and the use of quasi-markets are seen as creating problems. These are seen as deriving from an attempt to apply approaches drawn from the private sector to the public domain. It is argued that they need to be balanced by approaches that recognize the values of the public sector.     

The Influence of Resistance to Change on Public-Sector Reform Implementation: The Case of Italian Municipalities’ Internal Control System

The present research tries to contribute to the academic debate on public management reform adoption, focusing on the reasons for the discrepancies between actual and formal changes and using resistance to change as theoretical basis. The study hypothesizes that high levels of individual and organizational resistance to change may be associated to the formal implementation of public management reforms. The research results allow to confirm the hypothesis when large-size municipalities are considered, while when considering medium-size entities a definite evidence of a relation between resistance to change and the formal implementation of the reforms does not emerge.     

Designing for adaptation: Static and dynamic robustness in policy-making

Policy tools are chosen and deployed in the expectation that they will continue to work effectively over extended periods of time. This is a tall expectation to meet, given that the nature of policy problems and their contexts change constantly. To continue to operate effectively in the face of these changes and respond to policy feedback from policy actors and outputs, policy mixes must be robust. This robustness is of two types: static robustness in which policy means adapt while policy goals remain unchanged, and dynamic robustness in which both goals and tools change. The first equates robustness with resilience—that is, the ability to bounce back to a previous state and attain original goals in altered contexts caused by some change in internal or external conditions. The second, however, is more complex as it can involve changes in aspects of policy goals as well as means in order to allow policies to adapt more broadly by altering their form in response to changing circumstances. This second type of “dynamic robustness” focuses attention on the need for agility and upon the requisites for the creation of policy designs which allow for substantive changes in form as well as state. The article lays out these concepts and their interrelationships and the kinds of procedural and other tools involved in achieving either. It illustrates their features and differences using examples from different sectoral cases.     

From Emigrant to Immigrant Society

Abstract

As the host of complex factors that give rise to forced and voluntary migration change over time, the history of migration in any one country also changes. This paper is concerned with the processes of transition and change in migration patterns in the Republic of Ireland over the past fifteen years, as Ireland has moved from being a country of net emigration to one of net immigration. More specifically this paper considers the manner in which, as immigration acquires a negative label through reactive state policies enabled legislative provisions both migrant and local population groups focus on resource-based tensions. As a result, a complex set of barriers emerges to inhibit the formation (by migrants) of extensive social networks within Irish society and ultimately to restrict general social interaction and integration. This paper considers the manner in which, migrant interaction with the host society becomes more limited and of less relevance to the individual when social interaction takes place in the context of a heightened sense of difference and of barriers between local and migrant groups. As a consequence, the barriers and boundaries between the immigrant and the local population are further reinforced.     

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM – GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE

Failure to understand the political nature of administrative reform and to develop a political strategy to overcome resistance lies behind the failure of many reform attempts. The prerequisites of reform include political will, time, resources, an ongoing institution promoting change, and a strategy which concentrates on the implementation stage when resistance is strongest. Such a strategy must use the principal levers of change, including legislation, which directly affect administrative behaviour. In Australia in the 1970s administrative reform proceeded only slowly with the exception of changes in some States and the introduction of a new body of Federal administrative law. A better reform strategy in the past two years has resulted in extensive legislative change at the Federal level including greater ministerial control over certain senior appointments, open public competition for the top one per cent of civil service jobs, affirmative action and industrial democracy. There has thus been a further shift towards a unique Australian model of public administration.     

The Stop Climate Chaos Coalition: climate change as a development issue

After the Working Group on Climate Change and Development recognised the challenge that climate change poses to development, a number of environmental and aid, trade and development organisations formed a new politically active coalition, Stop Climate Chaos (SCC), to demand that stronger climate laws be adopted in the UK. The coalition now frames the issue of climate change as a ‘global climate justice’ one, emphasising the severity of the issue for people in poor countries, who will suffer the worst consequences, but have contributed least to it. The extent to which SCC member organisations address climate change as a global justice issue is explored through a content analysis of their websites, and a survey of participants in the SCC I-Count march, London, 3 November 2006. There is certainly evidence that environmental organisations are ‘facing South’, just as aid, trade and development organisations are ‘turning green’.     

International financial governance in hard times: tracing the transformations

This article reviews the tenets of the intellectual consensus on how to organize the international financial system that came to crystallize at the end of the 1990s and the contestation of such a consensus in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–09. Illustrating the path of ideational transformation from the early 1990s until the present time, the article builds on recent constructivist works in international political economy that take economic ideas held by agents as the principal unit of analysis. In doing so, it brings to the surface both the substantive changes that had taken place in the principles underlying the governance of the international financial system and the dynamics of ideational change. Specifically, the article suggests a shift away from a governance project based on the dispersion of supervisory authority and finds that new policy ideas of regulation and political centralization have all been conceived with negative reference to the past.     

East Africa's pastoralist emergency: is climate change the straw that breaks the camel's back?

The global warming trend of climate change is having severe adverse effects on the livelihoods of the Turkana pastoralists of northwestern Kenya. Care has to be taken in making assertions about the impact of climate change. The biggest effects may come not from lower average rainfall but from a widening of the standard deviation as weather extremes become more frequent. In a region already prone to drought, disease and conflict, climate change, access to modern weapons and new viral livestock diseases are now overwhelming pastoralists' coping capacity and deepening the region's roughly 30-year dependency on famine relief. This article examines the livelihood strategies of the Turkana and several poverty reduction programmes currently established, while addressing the reality that traditional pastoralism may no longer be a viable livelihood option, given the effects of climate change, disease and the ensuing conflict over diminishing resources. The findings conclude that the future for traditional Turkana pastoralists is dismal because they continue to depend on an environment that may no longer support them. Humanitarians are recommended to shift their focus to advocate and invest in alternative livelihood strategies that generate economic independence and help the Turkana adapt to their changing environment.