Letter to the Editor

Postcolonialism is now an extensive body of knowledge that draws on Edward Said's Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anti-colonial scholarship. While postcolonial scholars have significantly shaped humanistic disciplines such as history, comparative literature, and anthropology, their impact on political science has been limited. The resistance to postcolonialism is strongly associated with the perpetuation of Eurocentric perspectives on ex-colonial territories. Dominant theories of democracy and civil wars, for example, remain trapped in outdated Eurocentric theory that sheds scarcely any light on postcolonial realities. The case for a postcolonial approach to the study of politics is thus stronger than ever before. Such an approach calls for a sustained engagement with specific non-Western contexts as well as an openness to anthropological, historical, and area studies knowledge about them. Decolonizing knowledge within political science, in sum, ought to be seen as part of a wider project of decentering the discipline by undermining what is seen today as “mainstream.”     

Letter from the Editor

ABSTRACT

Aid dependence has been linked in the literature with worsening quality of governance. Using Kaufmann et al.'s six dimensions of governance (Voice and Accountability, Political Stability, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption), this article reinvestigates this relationship with new data and a more robust methodology. Under pooled Time Series Cross-Sectional (panel data) analysis, only the Rule of Law appears to have a negative relationship with aid, and at only the 0.10 significance level. To control for potential endogeneity and reverse causality, aid is lagged and subsequently instrumented. Potential omitted variables bias is controlled with a fixed effects model. Components of aid such as technical cooperation and average grant element are also explored. Findings suggest that aid can play a positive role when its components are considered and that the causal link between aid dependence and worsening quality of governance may be tenuous at best and sensitive to alternative specifications.     

Letter from the Editor

ABSTRACT

Organizational theory and research suggests that organizational performance may be affected by environmental circumstances. However, the available evidence on this important issue for public organizations relies primarily on “objective” archival measures of the environment drawn from secondary data sources. Perceptual measures gauging managerial “subjective” views on the nature of the task environment are also likely to be important determinants of organizational outcomes. In this paper, a comprehensive model of the impact of “objective” and “subjective” task environments on the performance of local government service departments is formalized and tested. The results suggest that both objective and subjective environmental munificence are positively related to performance, and that objective and subjective environmental dynamism are negatively related to service achievements. In addition, objective task complexity is negatively related to performance. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.