Policy Entrepreneurs,Issue Experts,and Water Rights Policy Change in Colorado

Policy entrepreneurs can influence policy changes and decisions. These people invest their time, knowledge, and skills into promoting policies with which they agree. This paper investigates the influence that entrepreneurs had in the case of recreational water rights policy in Colorado to build a model of policy entrepreneurship. Almost 20 Colorado communities have constructed white‐water kayak courses to boost their local economies. In twelve of these communities, construction was followed by community pursuit of a new form of water right—the recreational in‐channel diversion. This case study is relevant to many areas of environmental policy and management where policies are transitioning from traditional consumptive uses of the resource to nonconsumptive uses. This policy change was not a given in Colorado communities, with recreational water rights requiring significant investments of community resources. These research findings conclude that policy entrepreneurs were influential to policy change, but the most important actors were expert entrepreneurs who hold expertise in water resource matters.     

以政策贯彻政策:政策执行、创新与调适

政策执行本身是复杂而多样的过程,多数政策执行的真实情况,是要经过各级政策主体研究出台地方政策或实施意见,通过"以致策贯彻政策"逐级传导,最终化作具体项目和行动,使政策得以执行和落实."以政策贯彻政策",作为政策执行和创新的重要环节,过去并没有引起足够重视.加强对这个问题的研究,对于理解政策执行的理论与实践都具有重要意义.     

The effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes: A data envelopment analysis

Data envelopment analysis is used to analyze the efficiency of candidate campaign spending. Analysis of the measured efficiency scores of the incumbents and challengers shows that there are significant systematic effects of both district and candidate characteristics. The incumbent's residuals from the efficiency score regressions indicate those candidates who do well because of the nature of their district and those who do well because of their own abilities. Incumbents are ranked according to their observed efficiency, their unobserved efficiency and their vote share. Correlations among the rankings are significant and of the expected signs. More efficient candidates receive higher vote shares.     

National Human Rights Institutions: Domestic implementation of international human rights law

Does adopting a National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) make states’ international commitments to not torture more constraining? Many researchers have explored international human rights treaties’ abilities to constrain leaders from violating human rights, some focusing exclusively on the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). Thus far, findings are not promising unless certain domestic conditions apply such as sufficient democratic space to air grievances or independent judiciaries. This article continues to explore domestic conditions by focusing on another liberal institution—National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs). Torture is usually a secretive practice, and NHRIs act as information providers to potential mobilizers and domestic legal systems assuring international legal commitments are not empty promises. Using statistical analysis on 153 countries over the years 1981–2007, I find that when a country has ratified the CAT, the presence of an NHRI substantively decreases the chances the state will be an egregious offender.     

The Chechen Exception: Rethinking Russia's Human Rights Policy

Orthodox interpretations of human rights policies and practices in post-Soviet Russia are often construed by external critics through a historicist lens of tsarist and Soviet-era authoritarianism. Contemporary Russia's adherence to emerging international human rights norms is commonly judged in sole reference to its human rights disaster in Chechnya. In this article, we contest the notion that human rights abuses in Chechnya fully illustrate Russia's stance on international human rights. We suggest that Chechnya is the exception in the post-Soviet era, and that Russia has increasingly brought its human rights standards in line with the West. We use a historical comparative context as well as Russia's discursive response to NATO's intervention in Kosovo and its UN Security Council voting record as empirical evidence for our argument. ¹     

Human Rights Reporting: Rights,Responsibilities, and Challenges

This essay critically examines the intersections between news media and human rights in the context of the existing human rights framework. A survey of the fundamental provisions of international human rights law and of the evolving case law of human rights organs relating to media freedom and responsibilities reveals that existing gaps and underspecified obligations render problematic the normative guidance offered by the framework in addressing the pertinent human rights issues. However, this is part of the story. The problems associated with normative guidance are compounded by media practitioners’ contending approaches on the role of the media as “promoters of human rights.” The interplay between these factors is then examined through the prism of the two communities’ converging commitment to “truth-seeking.” This commitment can provide entry points to a more constructive engagement between the news media and the human rights community.     

Squaring the circle: domestic welfare,migrants rights,and human rights

Domestic welfare reform and the management of international migration in Britain have been described by David Cameron as ‘two sides of the same coin’. Heightened conditions and sanctions for the benefit-dependent domestic population, both in and out of work, are being harnessed as a means of promoting labour market change and reducing demand for low-skilled migrants – often EU workers, whose own access to benefit is being curtailed. Arguments about the post-national expansion of rights and associated cosmopolitan debate implicitly measure migrants rights against a normative model of citizenship as the yardstick of full social inclusion, but with little attention to how far citizenship itself falls short of this promise. Taking Britain as a case study, this paper considers how the concept of civic stratification can further advance analysis of the link between domestic welfare, migration and human rights in a context of intensifying controls for both migrants and citizens.     

Civil Society Actors and EU Fundamental Rights Policy: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper examines how civil society actors in the EU utilize the political and legal opportunities provided by the EU’s fundamental rights policy to mobilize against discrimination, notably racism, and xenophobia. It emphasizes the multiple enabling roles that this policy provides to civil society associations engaged in judicial activism, political advocacy, and service delivery both at the EU and Member State levels, and assesses their effectiveness. It describes several factors that hinder the implementation of EU fundamental rights policy and reviews the strategies of civil society to overcome them. It highlights the reluctance of parts of public opinion to combat ethnic prejudice, considers reactions against what at a time of crisis is perceived as a costly project of social regulation, and examines civil society responses. The data sources consist of interviews with bureaucratic and civil society actors at EU level.     

Foreign Policy and Human Rights Advocacy: An Exercise in Measurement and Explanation

This article addresses three questions: How can we define and measure what constitutes a foreign policy in human rights? How is it possible to explain both the activism of a state and its ideological orientation in the international promotion of human rights? What is the empirical evidence found when we try to answer these questions in intermediate states? Research done on four cases (Argentina, Australia, Brazil and South Africa) suggests a correlation between domestic efforts in the promotion of human rights and international advocacy. It also shows that the greater the power of intermediate states, the greater their activism in human rights. Further, as development grows states show less support for economic, social and cultural rights. Last, the strategic relation with the USA shapes how states vote regarding human rights violators states.     

Policy makers,policy choices,and policy outcomes: The political economy of reform in developing countries

This article presents an analytic model for understanding the role of decision makers in bringing about significant policy and institutional changes and in understanding how processes of agenda setting, decision making, and implementation shape the content, timing, and sustainability of reform initiatives. Central to the model is the assertion that policy elites and the policy making process are important determinants of reform. The framework indicates that circumstances surrounding issue formation, the criteria that decision makers use to select among options, and the characteristics of specific policies are analytic categories that explain a considerable amount about reform outcomes. The model is based on cases developed by participants in twelve initiatives to bring about policy and institutional change in a variety of developing countries.     

Policy and Blame Attribution: Citizens’ Preferences,Policy Reputations,and Policy Surprises

Negativity bias suggests that the attribution of blame to governments, for alleged or actual policy failures, is disproportionately pertinent for their popularity. However, when citizens attribute blame for adverse consequences of a policy, does it make a difference which policy was it, and who was the political agent that adopted the policy? We posit that the level of blame citizens attribute to political agents for policy failures depends on three policy-oriented considerations: (1) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s established policy position; (2) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s concrete policy choice; and (3) the distance between the agent’s established policy position and her concrete policy choice. The inherent relationship between these three policy-oriented considerations renders their integration in one model a theoretical and methodological imperative. The model provides novel observable predictions regarding the conditions under which each of the three policy-oriented factors will produce either pronounced or subtle observable effects on blame attribution. We test the model’s predictions in two survey experiments, in Israel and in Germany. The results of both experiments are highly consistent with the model’s predictions. These finding offer an important contribution by specifying the ways in which individual-level preferences interact with politicians’ policy reputations and policy choices to shape blame attribution. Our model entails unintuitive revisions to several strands of the literature, and in the “Discussion” section we provide tentative support for the applicability of this model to other political judgments beyond blame attribution.

     

Liberty, Rights and Justice: A Conversation with Hillel Steiner

In this piece, Mario Ricciardi conducts an interview with Hillel Steiner centred around Steiner's prize winning book, An Essay on Rights. Steiner responds to questions on the development of his views, their practical implications and on key aspects of his theoretical standpoint.