Riot and Reason: Crafting an Urban Policy Response

This article examines the federal policy response to urban problemsin the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riot. Although thefederal government failed to enact a long-term urban aid initiativein 1992, a number of locally based comprehensive urban initiativeswere under way in several cities across the country. The futureof national urban policy, however, will require a reconceptualizationof the problems of inner cities, and ultimately will dependon significant restructuring of fiscal federalism relationshipsamong and between the federal, state, and local governments.     

Seeing around Corners: Crafting the New Department of Homeland Security1

The development of the nation's homeland security agenda, including building the behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, will for decades to come provide a rich laboratory for scholars, public managers, consultants, and other observers and analysts. In this article, we begin to describe some of the history, key players and institutions, major policy instruments, and organizational challenges in the rapidly evolving arena of homeland security. This article carries with it two primary purposes: (1) to identify some of the key documents and federal-level initiatives since September 11, and (2) to suggest several areas that beg for additional attention from those who care about effective public policy and administration, whether the particular bent be toward scholarship or practice.     

Building consensus for affordable housing

Abstract

At one time the national goal of affordable housing was a widely held consensus that led to decent housing for millions of Americans. Today, proponents of affordable housing must negotiate with diverse and sometimes hostile parties to secure project approvals. Discussions are frequently adversarial, and stalemate is too often the result. The consensus has collapsed.

If progress toward affordable housing is to be made, proponents will have to recast the way they operate within this new environment. More than new financing plans or recommendations for regulatory relief are needed. Attention must also focus on the processes by which groups address divergent interests and come to agreement. “Principled negotiation,” a form of joint problem solving, when coupled with third‐party intervention, offers a promising and effective means of dealing with this hostile environment.     

Crafting and dismantling the egalitarian social contract: the changing state-society relations in globalizing Korea

Abstract

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, the Korean developmental state implemented a series of drastic egalitarian educational policies that were primarily geared toward social integration. While promoting social mobility and educational expansion, they provided the basis of the egalitarian social contract in Korea's educational policymaking for decades. Since the 1990s, however, the Korean state has implemented neoliberal education reforms that led to the rapid dismantling of the egalitarian framework for the country's educational policymaking. These neoliberal reforms were strongly supported by the affluent middle class that prefer elitist education and can afford expensive private education. The general direction of change in Korea's educational policymaking suggests both significant change and continuity in the character of the Korean state and its relations to society since the 1990s. The contemporary Korean state still maintains a highly strategic and activist orientation in adopting and implementing policies although its policies are increasingly neoliberal in content. In doing so, the Korean state is gradually abandoning its broad social base and mobilizational capacity, while increasingly connecting with the upper segments of the middle class.     

Crafting village democracy in China: The roles, networking, and strategies of provincial elites

There is no obvious and direct correlation between the provincial level of economic development and democratic level of village elections. There is a great disparity in the level of rural democratization and the implementation of village self-governance among and within provinces. The modernization model alone cannot explain why village elections work well in some provinces but not in others. This paper looks at the political elite’s ongoing efforts at provincial level to conduct village elections and implement village self-governance in rural China. These efforts include the strategies for crafting village democracy employed by provincial elites: elite cooperation, local legislature, political responsibility, political programming, and the art of balancing party leadership and village elections. He has published extensively on China’s village elections and local governance. He is author and coauthor of several books. His current research interests include the development of non-state, local governance, and political participation. The author gratefully acknowledges the anonymous reviewers, Professor He Baogang of Deakin University and Professor Zhong Yang of University of Tennessee for their suggestions on an earlier draft. My special thanks to Professor Joseph Fewsmith of Boston University, Professor Tan Qingshan of Cleveland State University, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, as well as to East Asian Institute of National University of Singapore for providing support for this research.     

Negotiation democracy versus consensus democracy: Parallel conclusions and recommendations

Abstract. In spite of a large number of disagreements concerning methodological and classificatory questions between Klaus Armingeon and myself, our substantive conclusions are very similar. Armingeon concludes that all three aspects of his negotiation democracy (consociationalism, corporatism, and counter-majoritarian institutions) result in superior government performance in selected areas – a finding that I interpret as supportive of my similar claims for the executives-parties dimension of consensus democracy (which consists of consociationalism plus corporatism) as well as for the federal-unitary dimension (which is the same as Armingeon's counter-majoritarian institutions). We are therefore also in broad agreement on the advice we can give to democratic constitutional engineers.     

Industrial and economic democracy in Sweden: from consensus to confrontation

Abstract. At the beginning of the 1970s, there was a wide-spread political consensus in Sweden that something had to be done in order to increase employee influence in companies and counteract the concentration of private capital. A series of laws on industrial democracy were passed by Parliament, virtually without opposition. The reforms were followed in 1975–1976 by a push towards economic democracy in the form of so-called wage earners' funds. The trade union movement was the leading actor behind these proposals. This broader issue was much more controversial and soon became the focus of sharp disagreement between the parties and the dominant interest organizations. The article analyses the development from consensus to confrontation in industrial and economic democracy in Sweden. Special attention is given to the Public Commission on Wage Earners' Funds, which sat between 1975–1981 without being able to produce any constructive or concrete results.     

Lijphart goes regional: Different patterns of consensus in Swiss democracies

This article addresses the relationships among the main political institutions of the two dozen cantonal democracies which constitute the Swiss federal state. By replicating Lijphart's analysis in the Swiss subnational context, the article seeks to explain the relationships of the political-institutional variables in the Swiss cantons. The main finding of the article is that in contrast to international comparisons, the cantons cannot be classified along the continuum of majoritarian and consensus democracies. However, the Swiss cantonal democracies practice clearly distinguishable forms of power sharing. Based on a factor analysis and a cluster analysis, it is possible to distinguish a two-dimensional pattern of cantonal democracies and five groups of cantons. Although there are a number of different procedures to achieve political stability through division of power in the cantons, the different characteristics of power sharing can, essentially – and with reference to Switzerland's central institutions – perfectly well be situated on a single axis; namely, on that between pronounced direct citizen involvement and broadly supported government coalitions.     

Rethinking corporatism and consensus: the dilemmas of German social-protection reform

This article explores the competing influences of institutional legacies and political negotiation in recent German social-protection reform. Long a paragon of consensus and gradual political change, the German political economy has adjusted poorly to the pressures of fiscal austerity and structural unemployment, creating pressures for an increasingly salient role for the federal government. The article provides a detailed analysis of recent German social-policy and labour-market reforms, arguing that existing literature is poorly equipped to account for this emerging policy-making paradigm. It also suggests that, while the German case illustrates the importance of institutional factors in shaping reform trajectories in advanced industrial democracies, careful attention must also be paid to élites' capacity for negotiating policy outcomes within these parameters.     

Governing a consensus democracy: The interplay of Pillarisation and administration

Apart from a static structure of institutional blocks erected for a certain purpose, pillarisation might also be viewed as a dynamic process accommodating not only different cultural groupings, but also varying regional, local and historical circumstances. Apart from being a sociological, political and cultural structure, pillarisation for a long time fulfilled important public administrative and executive functions within and for Dutch society. Apart from being a top‐down vehicle for separation and social control, pillarisation can also be seen as a polycentric or ‘bottom‐up’ institutional structure in which a variety of executive agencies, quangos, and other functional professional, local and regional institutions are being co‐ordinated, integrated, guided and controlled. By seeing ‘pillarisation’ as a dynamic form of network management, the question arises how ‘depillarisation’ affects the development system of intergovernmental governance in the Netherlands. More, rather than less historical knowledge of pillarisation is needed, not for understanding historical questions, but for grasping the complexities of contemporary institutional developments.     

The correlates of consensus democracy and the puzzle of Dutch politics

In much of the comparative literature, and in the work of Arend Lijphart in particular, the Netherlands often emerges as a ‘special case’ of accom‐modationist politics, a picture which is confirmed not only in terms of Lijphart's distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy, but is also the case when more policy‐based indicators are considered. This is somewhat puzzling, since, in comparative terms at least, the Dutch case is now no longer especially marked by the sorts of features which are generally believed to promote a more consensual style in politics. This puzzle is partly solved, however, by a more updated analysis of the comparative data, which reveals that the Netherlands no longer actually leads the field in terms of consensualism, but has since been surpassed by several other countries. In fact, the more recent evidence now suggests that neither the conditions nor the practice of consensual politics are much in evidence in the Netherlands.