“Big Tigers,Big Data”: Learning Social Reactions to China's Anticorruption Campaign through Online Feedback

This article examines the effect of campaign‐style anticorruption efforts on political support using the case of China's most recent anticorruption drive, which stands out for its harsh crackdown on high‐ranking officials, known as “big tigers.” An exploratory text analysis of more than 370,000 online comments on the downfall of the first 100 big tigers, from 2012 to 2015, reveals that public support for the top national leader who initiated the anticorruption campaign significantly exceeded that afforded to anticorruption agencies and institutions. Further regression analyses show that support for the leaders with respect to intuitions increased with the tigers' party ranking. Findings suggest that while campaign‐style enforcement can reinforce the central authority and magnify support for individual leaders, it may also marginalize the role of legal institutions crucial to long‐term corruption control.     

State Capacity,Bureaucratic Politicization,and Corruption in the Brazilian State

Responding to recent articles in Governance highlighting the need for improved measurement of bureaucratic characteristics, this article describes efforts to map Brazil's federal agencies on three dimensions—capacity, autonomy, and partisan dominance—derived from data on more than 326,000 civil servants. The article provides a “proof of concept” about the utility of agency‐level measures of these variables, demonstrating how they relate to an output common to all agencies: corruption. The article provides a first step in the direction of building a comparative research program that offers objective evaluation of bureaucracies within nation‐states, with the intent of better disentangling their impact on governance outcomes.     

Big Data in Public Affairs

This article offers an overview of the conceptual, substantive, and practical issues surrounding “big data” to provide one perspective on how the field of public affairs can successfully cope with the big data revolution. Big data in public affairs refers to a combination of administrative data collected through traditional means and large‐scale data sets created by sensors, computer networks, or individuals as they use the Internet. In public affairs, new opportunities for real‐time insights into behavioral patterns are emerging but are bound by safeguards limiting government reach through the restriction of the collection and analysis of these data. To address both the opportunities and challenges of this emerging phenomenon, the authors first review the evolving canon of big data articles across related fields. Second, they derive a working definition of big data in public affairs. Third, they review the methodological and analytic challenges of using big data in public affairs scholarship and practice. The article concludes with implications for public affairs.     

Of Two Minds,But One Heart: A Good “Gut” Feeling Moderates the Effect of Ambivalence on Attitude Formation and Turnout

Popular psychological accounts argue that successful candidates address their appeals to citizens’ “hearts” rather than their “heads.” Yet research on campaigns shows that candidates win elections by getting voters to think about particular issues—especially issues that create ambivalence in the minds of opposition supporters. This article helps to reconcile these “heart‐centered” and “head‐centered” accounts of preference formation during campaigns. An original experiment and ANES data analyses (1980–2004) show that a “good gut feeling” toward a candidate helps citizens to overcome the paralyzing effect of ambivalence on attitude formation and turnout. And, since turnout is most tenuous among those with lower income, this is where the effect is most pronounced. Since Democratic candidates rely disproportionately on support from these lower‐income voters, it is particularly important that they inspire positive affect among latent supporters.     

Riding the Wave: World Trade and Factor‐Based Models of Democratization

Studies of “waves” of regime change, in which large numbers of countries experience similar political transitions at roughly similar periods of time, though once popular, have fallen from favor. Replacing the “third wave” arguments are several competing models relating domestic social structure—specifically, the distribution of income and factor ownership—to regime type. If any of these distributive models of regime type is correct, then global trade has an important explanatory role to play. Under factor‐based models, changes in the world trading system will have systematic effects on regime dynamics. Trade openness determines labor's factor income and ultimately its political power. As world trade expands and contracts, countries with similar labor endowments should experience similar regime pressures at the same time. We propose a novel empirical specification that addresses the endogeneity and data‐quality problems plaguing previous efforts to examine these arguments. We investigate the conditional impact of the global trading system on democratic transitions across 130 years and all of the states in the international system. Our findings cast doubt on the utility of factor‐based models of democratization, despite their importance in fueling renewed interest in the topic.     

The Big (Data) Bang: Policy,Prospects, and Challenges

Big data is increasingly the cornerstone on which policy making is based. However, with potential benefits and applications come challenges and dilemmas. In this set of symposium articles, authors examine the promise and problems of big data, exploring associated prospects, risks, parameters, and payoffs from a variety of perspectives. The articles address myriad challenges in the handling of big data sets, such as collection, validation, integrity, and security; ontological issues attending data analytics and conceptual transformations; the foundations of big data collection for social science research; the gap between the acquisition of data and its use to advance discovery and innovation; the costs and benefits of using big data in decision making and analysis; and, finally, related problems of privacy, security, and ethics. Issues such as these will continue to arise with increased use of big data as fundamental to policy making and governance in today's growing information society.     

Winning cures everything? Beliefs about voter fraud,voter confidence,and the 2016 election

Rhetoric about “rigged” elections has raised concerns about the solidity of public trust in the integrity of the voting system. Mitigating these concerns, research by Sinclair et al. (2019) on the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign documents a robust “winner's effect” on voter confidence despite intense partisan messaging aimed at influencing citizens' acceptance of the legitimacy of the election. This suggests that regularly fluctuating electoral outcomes in competitive democracies limit the impact of elite messages on trust in electoral institutions. A critical question is whether similar dynamics apply to dimensions of electoral trust that are more clearly partisan-branded and targeted, such as beliefs about the prevalence of illicit voting. This paper uses a panel study with waves conducted before and after Election Day 2016 to compare the effect of election on beliefs about the extent of illicit voting and voter confidence. Underlining both the promise and limitations of democratic competition as a counterweight to elite efforts to sow electoral distrust, there are significant “winner's effects” on both but substantially smaller impact on beliefs about illicit voting, a difference that is especially large among strong Republican partisans.     

Common‐interest housing in the communities of tomorrow

Abstract

This article offers a broad conceptual framework for understanding the rise of common‐interest housing developments (CIDs), including gated communities, townhouse and condominium projects, and other planned communities. The article begins by describing the CID as an institution and the essential characteristics and varieties of CIDs. Second, the rapid spread of CIDs is attributed to the incentives currently operating on real estate developers, municipal governments, and consumers. Third, this institution is placed in the context of definitions of public and private, and the categories of state, market, and civil society.

The article then presents the eight different “big‐picture” interpretations of this overall phenomenon that could inform the public policy framework within which CIDs are situated. They can be seen as an imperfectly realized version of the “rational choice” or “public choice” model, and reform efforts should be aimed at making choice mechanisms more effective.     

政治科学预测方法研究——以选举预测为例

预测是人类的基本认知活动。作为社会科学预测性研究的重要领域,选举预测是促进政治学理论和方法创新的动力。选举预测不仅限于民调,科学的选举预测可以划分为四类范式:意见聚合范式;模型范式;混合范式;大数据范式。每类范式包含若干种预测方法,不同预测方法在准确性、超前性、解释力、可重复性、中立性和预测成本等评判标准上各具优势,预测方法的选择是基于预测目标和应用场景的综合权衡。目前,选举预测领域呈现多元化、交叉互补、跨学科的发展趋势;其未来发展方向是“理论驱动”与“数据驱动”相结合、微观预测变量与宏观预测变量相结合、预测与解释相结合,以政治科学为基础,通过跨学科合作和前沿技术手段推进预测范式的创新,并在预测实践中不断更新升级。预测性研究与解释性研究可以构成“双螺旋”的共生互补关系,共同致力于增进人类对复杂政治活动的理解和研判,提升政治学研究的科学水平和政策应用价值。     

Personnel Reform in the States: A Look at Progress Fifteen Years after the Winter Commission

Trends in states’ civil service reforms since the Winter Commission’s report was published in 1993 are described and evaluated in the context of its recommendations. The authors argue that the commission’s reform agenda relies on a public service bargain that requires public employees, elected officials, and other stakeholders to respect, trust, and support each other’s efforts to serve the public interest. Its recommendations for modernizing state and local personnel systems are discussed and related to the “reinvention” and New Public Management initiatives of the past 20 years. Many of these ideas have been adopted by state governments, but there is no single reform model that has been followed across the states. Some states, such as Georgia and Florida, have engaged in radical reforms that include replacing traditional merit systems with at‐will employment models. The general pattern involves decentralization, deregulation, and limitation of employee protections. While many of the management‐oriented changes advocated by the Winter Commission are staples of states’ civil service reforms, its emphasis on a “trust and lead” strategy based on public service values, partnership, and leadership in the public interest has not received much attention. In general, objective evaluations of states’ reforms are needed to determine whether their purposes are being achieved.     

Incrementalism in Appropriations: Small Aggregation,Big Changes

U.S. federal budget dynamics, as a major attribute of the legislative and bureaucratic decision‐making processes, increasingly calls into question the scholarly focus on incrementalism. What constitutes a “small” change is largely unspecified in previous research that has also been unable to assess incrementalism across multiple levels of aggregation. Using a unique budgetary database, this article analyzes whether budgetary changes are in fact “small” at different levels of aggregation. Surprisingly, a low proportion of changes are small by any logical standard. During most years, more than one‐fifth of budgetary changes are greater than 50 percent, and nearly half are more than 10 percent. The level of aggregation is also important for assessing whether political variables influence incrementalism. A salient finding: change in party control reflects greater influence within micro‐level budget decisions, while divided government manifests more impact on aggregate‐level budget decisions.     

“Promoter” as an agency in decline of “market orientation” across small scale enterprises in Andhra Pradesh: Study on three selected districts

The study emphasizes the exploration of the influences that “promoter” of the small‐scale unit exerts in shaping the loss of market orientation in regional perspective. The small‐scale firm‐based “inefficiencies” have been measured with aid of the factors “promoter's entrepreneurial orientation,” “faulty resource based planning,” “inefficient managerial control,” and “improper capacity utilization.” The factors were shortlisted after extensive review of the existing literature, theoretical frameworks, and the conceptual notes with regard to the phenomenon of the market orientation decline or industrial sickness across the small‐scale units. The study across promoters of 300 sick industrial units observed the incidence of the sizable and quantifiable impact of the promoter in shaping the prospects for small‐scale unit‐based survival.     

Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent

In this article I want to outline an argument for a New Critical Theory with a cosmopolitan intent. Its main purpose is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning society and politics. This belief is the notion that “modern society” and “modern politics” are to be understood as society and politics organized around the nation‐state, equating society with the national imagination of society. There are two aspects to this body of beliefs: what I call the “national perspective” (or “national gaze”) of social actors, and the “methodological nationalism” of scientific observers. The distinction between these two perspectives is important because there is no logical co‐implication between them, only an interconnected genesis and history.     

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well‐known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data‐rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.     

Networks,Hierarchies, and Hybrids

Clusters of organizations making at least modest efforts to collaborate on implementing joint solutions to public sector problems are often called “networks.” By directing attention away from the hierarchical aspects of these clusters, and towards the voluntaristic and egalitarian aspects, this nomenclature can undermine and distort our understanding of the phenomenon. Such organizational clusters can be more fruitfully thought of as “implementation hybrids,” a type of collective production arrangement that has its own distinctive strengths and weaknesses, which this article delineates.     

Alexa,Alert Me When the Revolution Comes: Gender,Affect, and Labor in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence

The fantasy of automation is one of liberation from alienating tasks. Today, domestic artificial intelligence (AI) enacts this dream of frictionlessly offloading monotony. This article deploys theories of Marxist feminism, affective labor to interrogate domestic AI’s unprecedented promise of absorbing forms of labor we hardly acknowledged that we did. While these devices make the reproductive labor of the household legible as labor, we interrogate their quasi-emancipatory promise. We argue that devices such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home elide and reproduce the gendered and racialized dimensions of domestic labor, streamline this labor for capture by capital, and heighten the very affective dynamics they promise to ameliorate. Only critical political theories of work can illuminate the unfulfilled transformations and ongoing dominations of gender, race, and affect that saturate labor with domestic AI – expressed, we contend, by re-articulating the framework of the “social factory” to that of the “social server.”     

When do governments trade domestic reforms for external rewards? Explaining policy responses to the Millennium Challenge Corporation's eligibility standards

Journalistic reports and case study evidence suggest that governments have made policy and institutional reforms to achieve or maintain eligibility for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). However, the empirical scope of the “MCC Effect”—across countries, policy domains, and time—remains a subject of speculation and debate. There is also little rigorous evidence about the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards have influenced the reform efforts of developing country governments. To address this challenge, we construct an original data set that measures whether, when, and how governments in low‐income and lower‐middle‐income countries responded to the eligibility requirements for MCC assistance between 2004 and 2010. Our econometric analysis of the data set calls attention to an underappreciated factor that shapes the adoption and implementation of externally influenced reforms: the presence of a technocratic reform team with executive authority to introduce disruptive changes to the status quo.     

Innovation and public space: The developmental possibilities of regulation in the global south

Important product and process innovations are often developed in “public spaces” that promote collaboration and provide shelter from market competition. Given that most collaborative spaces are costly to establish, the possible implications are bleak for economically strapped developing countries. This paper highlights a less conspicuous – if not unknown – source of collaborative space: the regulatory process. Regulators can induce innovation by promoting collaboration across organizational, sectoral, and disciplinary boundaries in the interest of regulatory compliance. This paper documents the innovative consequences of efforts to regulate the use of lead‐based glazes in the Mexican ceramics industry and reconsiders several recent studies of upgrading in other countries that appear to have been driven, at least in part, by the regulatory process. Drawing on these cases, this paper makes four primary points: (i) that innovation in regulatory spaces is more common than previously acknowledged and is producing meaningful improvements in product quality and working conditions in developing economies; (ii) that promoting innovation in these regulatory spaces is an important developmental tool for countries that are “regulation‐takers” and have many low‐tech sectors; (iii) that this dynamic extends current conceptions of regulatory discretion, as well as development literature on state‐society synergies; and (iv) that establishing collaborative public spaces as a common conceptual framework is a critical step toward understanding the consequences of social regulation on upgrading.     

Political will and government anti‐corruption efforts: What does the evidence say?

“Political will” is oft‐cited as the major obstacle to government's anti‐corruption efforts. Notwithstanding, there is remarkably little systematic analysis of the concept, with some scholars describing it as the “slipperiest concept in the policy lexicon,” whereas others are calling for its empirical relevance. This paper tries to unpack the “black box” of political will by making it an empirically relevant concept drawing on evidence from two Asian countries; Singapore and Bangladesh. Four key indicators based on the works of earlier scholars are used including origin of the initiative; comprehension and extent of analysis; credible sanctions; and resource dedication and sustenance are used. The paper also uses Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, World Bank's World Governance Indicators (Control of Corruption and Government Effectiveness), and Political, Economic and Risk Consultancy's annual survey in Asia, as outcome measures. Based on the empirical evidence from the two countries, the paper shows that political will indeed has a positive influence on government's anti‐corruption efforts. Although political will may not be sufficient, it is a necessary condition to fight corruption, and that the difference between the positions of Singapore and Bangladesh on various global corruption league tables may be attributed to political will.