Public support for coercive diplomacy: Exploring public opinion data from ten European countries

Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.     

The public policy program of the Kennedy School of Government: A student's view

In September of 1969, the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government, formerly the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, initiated a new program of professional graduate education for students expecting to enter public service. Twenty-one students were chosen to participate in the Public Policy Program's first experimental year. The author was one of those students, and in this article he attempts to explain the purposes of the Program, the features which distinguish it from other graduate educations with similar purposes, the form it took in its first year, and the direction in which it seems to be moving. At various stages of the article, also, the author has inserted student comments concerning the Program's first year and suggestions for its further evolution. The hope is that this format will offer a somewhat more intimate view of the Public Policy Program than could be gleaned from a reading of catalogs, news releases, or a hurried article by a faculty member.     

Comparative public adminstration: The United States view in international perspective

In the study of comparative public administration in the United States, there are currently four directions of development associated with bureaucratic and policy models, case and component approaches, the comparative study of organizations, and application. The characteristics of these developments are outlined in this article, recent publications surveyed and future trends discussed. The extent to which there is a peculiarly American or Western tradition in the comparative study of administration is considered and issue is taken with the argument presented by Dwivedi and Nef (1982) for greater autonomy.     

A public choice theory of the Great Contraction: Further evidence

We benefitted from comments by John Johnson and Lloyd Blenman. M. Bala Subrahmanyam, Steven Moore, and Thomas Lewis provided valuable research assistance. Any remaining errors are our own.     

俄罗斯的独联体外交:现状与前景

苏联解体后前苏联部分加盟共和国出于维系传统联系、共同解决分家事宜等考虑,成立了独立国家联合体。该组织并不具有国家的功能,甚至并未发展成为一个成熟的区域联合体,仅作为前苏联成员国咨询协调的平台。二十多年来,俄罗斯对独联体政策经历了从"甩包袱"到视为恢复大国地位的战略依托的演变。2011年普京提出与前苏联成员国共同构建"欧亚联盟"的战略构想,"欧亚经济联盟"已经于2015年1月1日正式启动。从目前来看俄罗斯与独联体国家的一体化进程仍将面临多重阻碍,其发展前景仍有待观察。     

Towards a positive theory of political rhetoric: Why do politicians lie?

This paper presents a model in which politicians can increase the probability of election by making exaggerated claims about the benefits of their own platform — referred to as positive campaigning — and by exaggerating the undesirable characteristics of their rival — i.e., negative campaigning. Such lies may be detected at some point in the future and thus result in a costly loss in reputation. Thus the politician must tradeoff immediate benefits against potential future costs. Of course this problem is similar to any commercial endeavor — a car maker, for example, is tempted to claim that his car is better and the competition's is worse than it is. But it is shown that the lack of transferable property rights to political office makes lying more likely in political markets. It is also shown that there is a natural tendency for politicians to engage in more negative campaigning.     

The global promotion of gender equality—A propaganda approach

This paper proposes a new way of measuring progress in international politics, an approach that focuses on the symbolic and ideological work of international organizations. Although such a strategy is not entirely new to the study of International Relations, it has not been a common, accessible way of assessing how well international organizations work to effect change. The more famous methods have been legalistic—investigations of how international organizations have created new international law in the issue-areas under investigation¹—and bureaucratic—studies of how international organizations create machinery to deal with the problems². But in a world where domestic and international discourse is more mediated than ever before by television, radio, the Internet, newspapers, and other means of mass communication, the argument here is that propaganda is a third arena that must be taken into account when exploring the work of international organizations. The international organization in question here is the United Nations, and the issue-area examined is gender equality, a topic that is also variously described as “women's rights,” “women's issues”, or the “women's movement”. The paper explains first why the topic of the UN and women's rights is important, I then examine the propaganda role of the UN in the struggle for gender equality, and the paper concludes with a critical analysis of the UN's propaganda work in relation to this issue.     

The theory of economic regulation and public choice and the determinants of public sector bargaining legislation

In this study we used the theory of economic regulation and public choice to derive a model to explain the pattern of public sector bargaining laws among the states. We find this type of legislation is influenced by the following demand factors: (1) the extent of public sector union membership, which represents the interest group hypothesis, has a positive influence on pro-union legislation; (2) the extent of employer opposition to unions, as measured by unfair labor practice charges against employers in representation elections, has a negative effect on bargaining laws; (3) two taste variables — the salaries of public employees and the percent of nonwhite employment in the state — have a positive influence on these laws. A result which will be surprising to many people is that the extent of private sector union membership has no significant influence on the passage of public sector bargaining legislation.Our empirical analysis indicates that supply factors are also important in explaining the pattern of public employee bargaining laws across the state. We find that states are more likely to enact pro-union legislation under the following conditions: (1) constituents appear to hold pro-labor views as represented by their Congressmen's voting record; (2) neighboring states have passed mandatory bargaining laws; and (3) when competition is greater among the political parties.     

公共选择理论视角下提高公民科学素质的对策

根据布坎南的公共选择理论,各种特殊利益之间的"缔约"在公众中进行集体选择中起着关键的作用,而并非公众所认为的"根据公共利益进行选择"的结果。无论是企业行为还是各种公共选择,其结果均来自各个利益主体的相互较量和博弈。提高公民科学素质工程无论对于国家实力提升、社会均衡发展还是公民个体都是一个无法回避的公共选择,然而在具体政策的制定与措施的实施方面,仍缺少相应的理论依据。基于公共选择理论,从政府支持、科普组织以及主体参与等三方面进行分析和探讨。     

A logistic growth theory of public expenditures: A study of five countries over 100 years

This paper offers a new theory and empirical testing of long-term trends of public expenditures for five countries. While Wagner’s Law would imply an exponential growth process of the ratio between public expenditures and national income (G/Y), the law should be rejected both on theoretical and empirical grounds, because it disregards the role of ever increasing distortionary taxation. However, under some conditions, the combination of Wagner’s Law and the Pigou’s conjecture that the excess burden of taxation constrains the growth of public expenditures can be captured by a non-linear first order differential equation. The equation is the Verhulst’s logistic, originally invented to model Malthusian predictions on population growth. The integration of a Verhulst equation generates an S-shaped curve. This analytical framework combines intuitions from a welfare economics and a public choice perspective, and potentially offers a new research strategy on the dynamics of government expenditures. We offer preliminary econometric estimates on long run trends (around 1870–1990) of G/Y in U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy. These estimates confirm a pattern of similar trajectories, in spite of different national parameters, and suggest that the logistic view of growth of government is consistent with observed data.