Combating Depopulation in the Northern Periphery: Local Leadership Strategies in two Norwegian Municipalities

This article concerns how the municipal organisation and its leaders respond to challenges posed by the post-industrial era, in the form of shrinking employment opportunities and population decline. By developing distinct policies of supporting cultural and new economic initiatives, they depart from traditional steering modes and engage in ‘networked governance’ to safeguard community viability. This extends the scope of what we normally expect of local government, as it implies practices and de facto decision making outside the public realm. With these strategies, municipal leaders show that they are eager to do something for the people in the municipality. Their relative success in the use of governance methods might be regarded as new ways of legitimising the politicians' and the municipalities' role. In this respect, creating policies that relate to the formation of community identity may be an important asset.     

A SCIENTIFIC STANDARD AND AN AGENCY’S LEGAL INDEPENDENCE: WHICH OF THESE REPUTATION PROTECTION MECHANISMS IS LESS SUSCEPTIBLE TO POLITICAL MOVES?

This article presents a model that introduces a scientific ‘gold’ standard as a reputation protection mechanism operating alongside an agency’s legal independence. It tries to gauge which of the two is less susceptible to political moves. The model suggests that the scientific ‘gold’ standard for agency decisions is less susceptible to political moves because of its important role as a legitimating device for both government ministers and regulators. Government ministers are able to address multiple audiences and even to respond to aggressive strategies by powerful interest groups by undermining one reputation protection mechanism (that is, an agency’s independence) without weakening the other (that is, the scientific barrier for granting full‐subsidy status to treatments that lack comparative therapeutic advantage). This implies that drug reimbursement mechanisms that provide a high quality of drug evaluation are designed to be effective.     

ONLY GOOD FENCES KEEP GOOD NEIGHBOURS! THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MINISTRY–AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS AT THE SCIENCE–POLICY NEXUS IN GERMAN FOOD SAFETY POLICY

This article makes a further contribution to opening the ‘black box’ of micropractices in ministry–agency relationships. We argue that the mechanisms that come into play in the course of institutionalizing agencification reforms – such as renegotiating mutual roles and rules in ministry–agency interactions – are only poorly covered in the existing literature. To adequately address the negotiated and contingent nature of de facto agency autonomy and political control, we develop an interpretive approach based on the concept of ‘boundary work’. The empirical focus is on ministry–agency interactions at the science–policy nexus in the contested policy field of food safety. By studying actors' stories about the institutionalization processes following the fundamental reorganization of the German food safety administration in the wake of the BSE crisis from a longitudinal perspective, we show how actors manage boundary conflicts via increasingly differentiated backstage coordination.     

LEADERSHIP STYLE,CRISIS RESPONSE AND BLAME MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF HURRICANE KATRINA

Crisis management research has largely ignored one of the most pressing challenges political leaders are confronted with in the wake of a large‐scale extreme event: how to cope with what is commonly called the blame game. In this article, we provide a heuristic to help understand political leader responses to blame in the aftermath of crises, emphasizing the crucial role of their leadership style on the political management of Inquiries. After integrating theoretical and empirical findings on crisis management and political leadership styles, we illustrate our heuristic by applying it to the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina in 2005. We conclude by offering suggestions for further research on the underdeveloped subject of the blame management challenges faced by political leaders in the wake of acute crisis episodes.     

Birth Registration and Protection for Children of Transnational Labor Migrants in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Policies on transnational labor migration do not consider workers' needs as parents or the rights and welfare of their children, including a child's right to an official identity through birth registration. A study of birth-registration decision making by migrant parents in Lombok, Indonesia underscored the need for targeted responses to uniquely challenging circumstances and priorities of migrant parents. Free birth registration through birthing and health centers and village-level leaders can overcome problems of decentralized implementation of national strategies and an exploitive registration brokerage industry, mitigating risks of de facto statelessness for children and a multigenerational pattern of undocumented and unsafe migration.     

Parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage: The relationship between institutional norms,reputation and accountability

While executive patronage brings important benefits in terms of governance and control, political influence over the selection of agency staff entails a democratic dilemma: how should the exercise of executive patronage be controlled? This article addresses this critical issue, examining Westminster's system of pre-appointment scrutiny by analysing an original database that encompasses every pre-appointment hearing held between 2007 and 2018. The article demonstrates that although the conduct of hearings accords with select committees’ longstanding commitment to cross-party working, members have not prioritized pre-appointment scrutiny relative to their other committee activities. By systematically disaggregating the factors which affect how select committees dispatch this account-holding responsibility, the article deepens previous analyses of pre-appointment scrutiny, and dovetails with scholarship examining the institutional determinants of select committee power. More broadly, it draws attention to the reputational dynamics of accountability, and how institutional norms can serve as vital reputational resources, enabling account-holders to demonstrate ‘responsible’ account-holding.     

Dependency today—finance,firms, mafias and the state: A review of Susan Strange's work from a developing country perspective

The movements of political protest, competitive elections and the installation of new regimes are widely regarded as the most significant political upheaval to shake Africa since political independence. The impression is often given that this transformation has also seen the sweeping away of the old guard of autocratic leaders. The image of renewed leadership does not however correspond with reality. Taking the leaders that were in office in 1990 at the beginning of the democratisation movement, the article traces their subsequent history. It finds that half still hold the highest office, having for the most part successfully transformed themselves into 'democratic' leaders. This remarkable success story is examined, for the purpose of this article, from a voluntarist perspective, that is, the tactics that the incumbents pursued so as to remain in office are the focus. Continuing in the tradition of Sandbrook, and Jackson and Rosberg's work on 'personal rule',1 it constitutes a primer on how to hang on to power against the odds.     

Curbing Corruption in India: An Impossible Dream?

This article analyses the serious problem of corruption in India by examining its causes and the various anti-corruption measures employed by the government from the formation in 1941 of the first anti-corruption agency, the Delhi Special Police Establishment, which was expanded to form the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in April 1963. India's ineffective anti-corruption strategy can be attributed to the lack of political will of its leaders and its unfavourable policy context, which has hindered the enforcement of the anti-corruption laws. The lack of political will in fighting corruption is manifested in the lowest per capita expenditure and least favourable staff-population ratio of the CBI when compared to those of its counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand. To enhance the CBI's effectiveness, it should be removed from the jurisdiction of the police and be established as an independent agency dedicated solely to curbing corruption. The Constitution of India should also be amended to empower the CBI to investigate corruption cases at the state level without obtaining the consent of the chief minister of the state. In view of the lack of political will, this article concludes that curbing corruption in India remains an impossible dream in the foreseeable future.     

Negotiating History for Reconciliation: A Comparative Evaluation of the Baltic Presidential Commissions

This article discusses the presidential historical commissions of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that were established in 1998 to research the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes and to overcome interpretive disputes that had begun to overshadow the new democracies' politics. Conceptually framed as a state tool of historical conflict resolution and reconciliation, the Baltic commissions' structure, operative work and results all reveal many of the pitfalls, but also the opportunities of such official bodies of historical truth-seeking. The article concludes that even though all three commissions had a clear reconciliatory aim, their operative processes and final output differed remarkably. Their contribution to actual reconciliation was also very limited.     

Changing perception of homeland for the Kazakh diaspora

There is a sizable Kazakh diaspora living in Turkey and Europe. Since their initial migration, these Kazakhs have been involved in actions aiming to preserve their group's cultural and ethnic boundaries. By studying these actions and related discourses, this article seeks to explain how these groups formulated and reformulated their identities and loyalties in their host states over generations. Many Kazakhs in Turkey and Europe originally came from Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) and considered this area their homeland. However, Kazakhstan's independence in 1991 led to an important change in their homeland orientation and, after 1991, the activities of an increasing number of Kazakh diaspora organizations shifted toward Kazakhstan as the homeland. Therefore, this article focuses mainly on two periods: the period before and the period after Kazakhstan's independence. The fieldwork was conducted in Turkey, Germany, France, and the Netherlands and includes interviews with leaders of Kazakh diaspora organizations and other members of the diaspora.     

A Question of Agency: Africa in international politics

Over recent years African states have become increasingly prominent actors in high-level international politics. This article makes the case for studying Africa's international relations from the point of view of agency. The article outlines contemporary contexts within which questions of African agency have come to the fore and argues a need to think conceptually about agency in international politics in a way that accommodates the range of different agencies at work. The article outlines three elements as foundations for the analysis of African agency: first, a conceptualisation of different dimensions of agency; second, a recognition of the importance of sovereignty in differentiating between state, or state-enabled agents, and others; and third, a temporally embedded approach to agency that historicises contemporary agency. Combined, these elements suggest that future work on African agency would be able to engage seriously with the continent's role in international politics in a way that presents Africa as actor not just acted upon, historical agent not just history's recipient.     

Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women,motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACT

This article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.     

Quasilegality: khat,cannabis and Africa’s drug laws

Abstract

This article explores the concept of ‘quasilegality’ in relation to two of Africa’s drug crops: khat and cannabis. It argues that the concept is useful in understanding the two substances and their ambiguous relation to the statute books: khat being of varied and ever-changing legal status yet often treated with suspicion even where legal, while cannabis is illegal everywhere in Africa yet often seems de facto legal. The article argues that such quasilegality is socially significant and productive, raising the value of such crops for farmers and traders, but also allowing states to police or not police these substances as their interests and instincts dictate. It also argues that there is no clear link between the law on the statute book and the actual harm potential of these substances. Finally, it suggests that the concept has much wider use beyond these case studies of drugs in Africa in a world where global consensus on drug policy is cracking, and where many other objects of trade and activities find themselves in the blurred territory of the quasilegal.     

Explaining collaboration in consensual and conflictual governance networks

The conditions under which policy beliefs and influential actors shape collaborative behaviour in governance networks are not well understood. This article applies exponential random graph models to network data from Finland and Sweden to investigate how beliefs, reputational power and the role of public authorities structure collaboration ties in the two countries’ climate change governance networks. Results show that only in Finland's conflictual climate policy domain do actors collaborate with those with similar beliefs and with reputational power, while only in Sweden's consensual climate policy domain do public authorities play central impartial coordinating roles. These results indicate that conflict is present in a governance network when beliefs and reputational power determine collaboration and that it is absent when public authorities occupy central roles. They also suggest that relative success in climate policy action is likely to occur when public authorities take on network manager roles.     

Recent state initiatives: The governor as policy leader; the governor as chief administrator

Innovative accomplishments of governors are a vehicle for analyzing state governors' performance as policy leaders and as chief executives. Analysis of survey data describing state innovations reveals governors fostering an almost even mix of programs (initiatives directly serving clienteles) and administrative innovations (changes in internal procedures), with innovations tending to be reported from agencies where the governor is involved in selection of the agency head. The implications are that governors interested in instituting and institutionalizing innovation can do so through their appointments and that the appointive power can be a vehicle for change as well as control. Program initiatives tended to concentrate in various functional policy areas, such as economic development or education. Management innovations, on the other hand, tended to be system wide in that they were reported in agencies that serve the entire state bureaucracy or they emanated from the governor's office.1     

Examining Connections between the Police and Prosecution in Sexual Assault Case Processing: Does the Use of Exceptional Clearance Facilitate a Downstream Orientation?

After several decades of research on how the criminal justice system handles reports of sexual assault, the attrition of cases at the police and prosecutor stages continues to draw the attention of policy makers, victim advocates, and academics. Such attrition has implications for thousands of victims and their alleged offenders each year. Current estimates show that significant rates of attrition persist and vary across jurisdictions. Recent work in two jurisdictions reveals a pattern of exceptional clearances being used to close sexual assault cases reported to the police and that prosecutors are weighing in at the arrest stage. Broadening this analysis we use incident data from a multitude of jurisdictions that report to the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) in combination with data from other law enforcement sources to investigate how legal and extra-legal incident factors as well as agency factors differentiate the decision to clear cases by exceptional means from clearance by arrest. We find that agency, legal, and extra-legal factors predict the use of exceptional clearance relative to arrest and discuss how these findings suggest a downstream orientation in case processing.     

Between spin doctor and information provider: Conceptualizing communication professionals in government ministries

Communication professionals are increasingly found within government ministries. Based on classic work on bureaucracy and recent literature on mediatization and personalization, this article develops two ideal types: the government information provider and government spin doctor. These ideals are constituted by six dimensions: recruitment criteria, values, loyalties, reputational concerns, interactions, and tasks. A study of nonpartisan communication professionals in Norwegian ministries is used to illustrate the empirical relevance of the ideal types. The analysis shows that for loyalties and reputational concerns, Norwegian communication professionals resemble the government information provider. Regarding interactions and tasks, they resemble the government spin doctor. For recruitment criteria and values, the picture is mixed. The empirical application thereby illustrates a fruitful aspect of the framework as certain configurations will bring forth inbuilt tension in communication professionals' role. The framework allows a fine-grained approach to extend ongoing debates of appropriate and inappropriate practices of communication professionals in ministries.     

Language and education laws in multi-ethnic de facto states: the cases of Abkhazia and Transnistria

Even after the conflicts of the early 1990s that brought them to their de facto independence, both Abkhazia and Transnistria remained strongly multi-ethnic. In both territories, no single ethnic group is an absolute majority and Russian is the language that is mostly spoken on the streets of Sukhumi and Tiraspol. Legislators of both entities felt the need to deal with multi-ethnicity and multilingualism, including in their constitutions, in laws related to education, or more directly with specific language laws (1992 law “On languages” in Transnistria; 2007 law “On the state language in Abkhazia”). The protection of linguistic rights that is formally part of the legislation of both territories finds limitations in practice. The language of education has proved to be particularly contentious, in particular for Moldovan/Romanian language schools in Transnistria and Georgian language schools in Abkhazia. Why are language laws in Abkhazia and Transnistria so different, in spite of the fact that they are both post-Soviet, multi-ethnic territories that became de facto independent in the early 1990s? The different approaches found in Abkhazia and Transnistria represent remarkable examples of language legislation as a tool for nation-building in ethnically heterogeneous territories.     

Double-Edged Swords: Expert-Stakeholders as (Slightly) Unreliable Instruments for Control and Autonomy of Executive Agencies

Establishing executive agencies at arms's length of parent departments has caused widespread concern regarding their autonomy. In the Netherlands, ministries have established different types of boards to monitor agencies. Also, agencies have established an independent review commission. The different boards and the review commission can be looked at as expert stakeholders. This article poses the question whether and how expert stakeholders contribute to either the ministries' control on agencies or the autonomy of agencies. The article is based on qualitative research on six of the largest executive agencies. The article concludes that expert stakeholders act as double-edged swords: they contribute to control on agencies but also to their autonomy. Expert stakeholders improve the monitoring capacity of ministries and thus contribute to control. Conversely, they also strengthen agencies, as they provide political multiplicity and boost reputational uniqueness. The question of which of these prevails is mainly influenced by time, capture, and policy crises.     

The Determinants of Medium Taxpayers’ Compliance Perspectives: Empirical Evidence from Siem Reap Province,Cambodia

Studies of tax compliance have focused primarily on individual taxpayers rather than representative enterprises. However, this paper examines several determinants of tax compliance perspectives among medium taxpayers. Using an ordered logit model, the associations of psychological and institutional factors with medium taxpayers’ compliance perspectives are analysed. The results indicate that tax law enforcement, penalties, tax awareness, trust in tax authority, and accounting agency are the main determinants increasing medium taxpayers’ high-compliance perspectives and reducing their medium-compliance perspectives. Tax law enforcement and accounting agency also remedy their low-compliance perspectives. These findings provide guidance for policymakers in enhancing tax compliance.