The Articles of Confederation as the Background to the Federal Republic

The Articles of Confederation, usually neglected by those studyingthe American founding, formed an important part of the backgroundto the 1787 Constitution. The Articles functioned as the firstnational constitution of the United States and, as such, reflectedAmerican political theory as it emerged during the Revolution.Equally important, a textual analysis reveals the extent towhich the 1787 Constitution was a logical extension of the Articlesof Confederation. Most of the Articles were incorporated inthe U.S. Constitution, and several key changes found in thelater document were present in embryo in the Articles of Confederation.     

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Four years after its formal establishment, the European External Action Service (EEAS) remains in a state of complex and overlapping areas of competence. There are interlocking layers of political and administrative governance, where the service has to interact with, and answer to, different national and intergovernmental political masters as well as supranational actors, notably the European Commission and the European Parliament. The formal political decision-making power with regard to the EU’s common foreign and security policy lies with the Council, whilst substantial competences, notably in the field of the European Neighbourhood (ENP) and trade policies, as well as development and cooperation, remain under the control of the European Commission. The EEAS’s autonomy and institutional orientation are both much debated and empirically unexplored. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, this article undertakes a behavioural analysis of EEAS decision-making. Empirical findings suggest that there are competing institutional logics at work among different groups of staff which affect their respective administrative decisional behaviour. Supranational recruits tend to be more community-minded, whereas officials with an intergovernmental background have a propensity to be more member state oriented.     

Structural Adjustment and Political Adaptation: The Politics of Neoliberal Reform in Mexican Agriculture

Through a study of recent policy change in Mexico, this article shows that even a strong state, implementing a radical reform via purportedly neutral policy changes, inevitably must adapt to a context shaped by previous policy choices and outstanding political imperatives. In this case, the prior organization of commercial export growers in the fresh fruit and vegetable subsector, the strength of an independent peasant movement, and the state's long-term commitment to a rhetoric of development and social welfare significantly qualify the reform effort. In the export sector, Mexican production is largely shaped by the still powerful Confederation of Growers of Fruits and Vegetables. In regard to peasant agriculture, the government has had to make significant concessions to independent peasant organizations in an effort to regain political support. The neoliberal program has thus been qualified and to some extent reshaped by both immediate political considerations and the longer-term institutional and political structures of Mexican society. In this sense, economic forces remain "embedded" in prior social structures and political choices.     

The Council: An Institutional Chameleon?

Council reform is a topic that has become a key issue in the wider discussion about reshaping the institutions of the European Union. This article explores five different images of the Council: as a partner of the Commission; as a club of governments; as a venue for competition and bargaining between governments and other political actors; as an arena for networked governance; and as a consortium for developing "transgovernmental" collaboration. It is conventional to examine the Council as both executive and legislative in character. More interesting, perhaps, is its evolving practice as a forum for experimentation.     

Agenda responsiveness in the European Council: public priorities,policy problems and political attention

The existence of political responsiveness in multi-level systems like the EU remains an open question despite significant recent research on the topic. This article studies whether the European Council responds to the shifting policy priorities of European citizens. More specifically, it explores the synchronic and diachronic associations between what people consider to be the most important problems and the political attention devoted to these issues from 2003 to 2014. The economic crisis after 2008 appears to have made the ranking of public concerns and the European Council agenda more alike. However, a detailed examination of the shifts in prioritisation of single issues over time reveals little evidence for dynamic issue responsiveness. Recently the European Council has paid more attention to the issues that the public considered the most pressing problems but the convergence could possibly be driven by the intensity of the underlying policy problems.     

Administrative Justice: A Libertarian Cinderella in Search of an Egalitarian Prince

This article argues that the political significance of the Coalition government's proposed changes to administrative justice, including the abolition of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, is in danger of passing unnoticed, despite its potential significance for the Big Society agenda. It suggests that the retrieval of genuine perspective lies in paying closer attention both to the contemporary importance of administrative justice and to the political debates of the 1950s and 1960s, which set opposing views of administrative justice in broadly libertarian and egalitarian contexts respectively. It concludes that the recovery in particular of an egalitarian account of administrative justice is necessary to animate, and rebalance, the debate. Administrative justice might then be perceived as an essential part of a broader political vision and a significant aspect of social justice more ambitiously conceived.     

Public sector reform in a poor,aid‐dependent country,Tanzania

African public sectors went through many changes during the 1960s and 1970s in response to political, economic and social pressures. They expanded in size but remained, at least in design, hierarchical and centralized. Their formal relations to society did not undergo any significant changes either. Generally, the reforms now under way are significantly different from earlier ones. Most are inspired by the new public management (NPM) paradigm. They are also much more radical in their aims, among which are: to reduce the core functions of the state; redraw the boundaries between political and administrative responsibilities; emphasize efficiency; redefine relations between public and private sectors; strengthen accountability; reduce corruption; reorganize organizations and staff; change values and attitudes; and exploit new technologies. This article focuses on a paradox of reform in Tanzania: multiple changes are pursued in the public sector despite fragile domestic political support to the reform package as a whole and despite few service delivery improvements on the ground. It is argued that this is the result of substantial external influences, fragmented domestic policy making, weak links between policy making and implementation, and questionable assumptions about some of the key NPM‐inspired reform measures. Moreover, the analyses highlight a number of differences with some of the recent reform literature. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political Culture and the Pattern of Congressional Politics Under the Articles of Confederation

This article brings a broad tradition of sociocultural analysis,commonly identified with Louis Hartz, Bernard Bailyn, SeymourMartin Lipset, and Daniel J. Elazar, to bear in understandingthe pattern and character of congressional politics in the firstAmerican national government. This approach, centering on thestudy of political culture and the role of ideas in shapingthe performance of institutions, attempts to place values, orconflicts between alternative value systems, at the heart ofdiscussions of political development and change in RevolutionaryAmerica. I deploy both traditional historical argument and quantitativeevidence to demonstrate that the three political subculturesdescribed by Elazar—moralistic in New England, individualisticin the Middle Atlantic states, and traditionalistic in the South—providethe basis for an explanation of factional divisions which appearedin the Congress of the Articles of Confederation.     

Afraid of a ‘Kosovo Scenario’: A Disquieting Precedent for International Conflict Management

The UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999) represented an interim settlement that permitted conflict de-escalation while postponing the search for a lasting political solution. The final settlement should have been reached through negotiations between Belgrade and the Kosovo Albanians, and then endorsed by the UN Security Council, in accordance with the UN Resolution 1244 (1999). However, citing the ambiguity of the interim agreement and a deadlock in the negotiations, the United States and its allies recognized Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008, thereby allowing the Kosovo Albanians to defect from the peace process. Therefore, instead of an internationally endorsed negotiated outcome, there has been an attempt at a unilaterally enforced political settlement, in disregard for the authority of the UN Security Council, which had placed Kosovo under international administration. The subsequent involvement of the International Court of Justice has failed to resolve the contentious issues between Belgrade and Prishtina or bridge the international divide over Kosovo. Besides creating a troublesome legal precedent, the recognition of Kosovo represents a bad model for international conflict management. The issues of concern are the viability of future interim settlements, good faith negotiations and the legitimacy and guarantees provided by the international involvement, including the authority of the UN Security Council. Some parallels are drawn between Kosovo and other territorial disputes, particularly in the Caucasus, indicating how the Kosovo case could influence other conflicts.     

The Future of Northern Ireland: the Role of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement Institutions

Since the 2016 Brexit referendum a series of crises has gripped Northern Ireland's politics. This has had a destabilising effect across society, which has arguably been felt most acutely by political unionism. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (B/GFA) of 1998 created a series of institutions to deal with political conflict in Northern Ireland, manage cross-border cooperation and normalise relations between the UK and Ireland. However, many aspects of it have been sparingly and ineffectually deployed, most notably the second and third strands dealing with north/south and east/west relations respectively. In this article, the authors argue that regular use of the institutional arrangements created by the Agreement would help to deal with the challenges currently facing Northern Ireland and help address unionist anxieties over the Protocol. Use of the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), the British Irish Council (BIC) and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC) should be prioritised. The unresolved issues arising from Brexit require a recommitment to the intergovernmental logic at the heart of the 1998 Agreement, despite the obstacles.     

The End of Regional Middle Eastern Exceptionalism? The Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council after the Arab Uprisings

Up to the Arab uprisings, Middle Eastern exceptionalism served as an important paradigm for analyzing politics in the Arab world. With the numerous upheavals of the Arab uprisings, which caused fundamental political change in significant parts of the Arab world, this paradigm has been challenged for analyzing the domestic affairs of contemporary Middle Eastern politics. The present article aims at contributing to the debate by focusing on the regional dimension of Arab Middle Eastern exceptionalism. The Arab uprisings vitalized regional institutions, particularly the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Two main arguments are critically discussed. First, in sharp contrast to the revolutionary period of the 1950s, the conservative Gulf monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia, have been spearheading regional politics since the Arab uprisings. Second, in striking difference to the conservative character of the Gulf States’ domestic agenda, the means that the Arab League (and the Gulf Cooperation Council) has recently used are innovative—for instance, policies of softening the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states. However, despite the recent animation of regional institutions under the leadership of Saudi Arabia, it is unclear whether the recent trend of new regionalism will be sustained.     

Divide and Pacify

This paper explores the process of Europeanisation of party politics by examining the regulation of political parties by supranational European organisations. Despite the increased relevance of the regulation of the activity, behaviour, organisation and finances of political parties in European democracies, the supranational dimensions of this phenomenon have hitherto received relatively little systematic scholarly attention. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining approaches from the Europeanisation literature with legal theory and party scholarship. For the purpose of this paper, the rulings and regulations of the European Union, the various organs of the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights are analysed. The paper highlights the horizontal and vertical patterns of norm creation and diffusion and demonstrates that, despite a certain convergence of European standards, conceptions of democracy and corresponding regulatory paradigms have not become so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable from one another.     

The Triumph of Loyalty Over Competence: The Bush Administration and the Exhaustion of the Politicized Presidency

The most important administrative aspect of the George W. Bush presidency was not its formal management reform agenda, but its attempt to extend the politicized presidency. Efforts to assert tighter political control of the federal bureaucracy, revived during the Ronald Reagan administration, were pursued to an extreme under Bush. Loyalty triumphed over competence in selection, and political goals displaced rationality in decision making. However, the strategy of politicization undermined the Bush administration’s own policy goals as well as its broader agenda to restore the strength of the institutional presidency. This apparent failure of strategy signals the urgent necessity for a fundamental reconsideration of the politicized presidency.     

The Role of Think Tanks in the Swedish Political Landscape

The term ‘think tank’ represents a heterogeneous concept and is used to characterise a diverse group of organisations. This diversity also characterises the Swedish organisations and institutions that currently fall under the think tank umbrella. In the Swedish political context, most organisations known by the public and news media as think tanks are advocacy organisations with an unambiguous ideological and political profile. Further, during the last decade, we have seen a proliferation of independent, self-declared think tanks with more specific policy agendas, such as the environment and health care. However, according to the broader understanding used in global rankings, the Swedish think tank landscape includes a range of research institutions in different policy areas. Some receive funding from the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, corporations and private donors; others are government-funded, with Stockholm's International Peace Research Institute as a prominent example. The aim of this article is to map the Swedish think tank landscape and its borders and analyse the roles of different types of think tanks in consensual or confrontational policymaking. Strategic differences among these types are related to historical background and funding. While government-funded and some policy-sector think tanks typically represent a tradition of consensual policymaking, those funded by the Corporation of Swedish Enterprise and other business interests represent a post-corporatist development advocating neoliberal ideas and assuming a confrontational role in the expansion of private ownership and market solutions.     

Party leadership selection in France

Abstract. The methods of selection used by French political parties can be grouped into two categories: election by a party conference with some thousands of delegates for the right wing parties or election by a party committee after the party conference with some hundreds of representatives for the left wing parties. Nevertheless, the existence of a presidential election has completely changed the meaning of these methods of selecting party leaders. Political parties have been transformed into presidential machines carrying out two types of successive duties; as a springboard for a candidate at the presidential elections, then as a relay of the President of the Republic (the 'president's party'). In these two types of situation the selection of leaders is not completely the same. First, in order to gain access to the presidential election, certain politicians have quickly understood that it was necessary to create new political parties or to transform weak political groups in altering the normal rules of selection of the leaders or in overthrowing the existing leadership. Then the leader of the President's party is directly chosen by the President of the Republic himself. The formal methods of selection only serve to ratify the President's choice.     

Privatization in Kosovo: ‘Liberal Peace’ in Practice

This article examines internationally led privatization in Kosovo as an example of international statebuilding. It concentrates on the period from 1999 to 2008, when privatization was planned and implemented under formal international management. International statebuilding is typically sought justified with the idea of ‘liberal peace’, and this article shows how the tension between the political and economic tenets of the idea of liberal peace manifested itself in Kosovo's internationally led privatization.     

Assessing policy stability in Iraq: a fuzzy approach to?modeling preferences

The first Council of Representatives elected under the new Iraqi Constitution was unable to pass legislation required to achieve the political benchmarks set by the government. We argue that the exercise of a qualified veto by the three-member Presidency Council essentially required near unanimity among the nine parties of the governing coalition. Given the policy positions of these parties, unanimity was not possible. Our analysis makes use of a fuzzy veto players model. The placement of the government parties along a single dimension based on fuzzy preference measures derived from party text data reveals no common area of agreement.     

Learning in Denmark? The Case of Danish Parliamentary Control over European Union Policy

The Danish parliament is renowned for its influence over Danish European Union (EU) policy. Contrary to popular belief, this strength is now in question. The most central feature of the Danish EU decision‐making model is parliamentary control over the executive expressed in political mandates before Council meetings. In 1973, this was a perfectly reasonable way for the Danish parliament to influence EU policy. Today, the status of the Council has changed, severely challenging the ability of the Danish parliament to secure influence over EU policy. This article demonstrates that the Danish European Affairs Committee is aware of the changes in European decision‐making, and that the lack of adaptation, despite this knowledge, is due to structural and cultural barriers to learning in the Danish Folketing. This study reveals that our understanding of particular responses to the pressure of Europeanization is enhanced when the conditions for learning and ‘non‐learning’ are spelled out.     

Political Learning from Rare Events: Poisson Inference, Fiscal Constraints, and the Lifetime of Bureaus

David E. Lewis Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 e-mail: delewis{at}princeton.edu How do political actors learn about their environment when the"data" provided by political processes are characterized byrare events and highly discontinuous variation? In such learningenvironments, what can theory predict about how learning actorswill take costly actions that are difficult to reverse (e.g.,eliminating programs, approving a risky new product, revisinga security policy, firing or recalling an appointed or electedofficial)? We develop a formal model for this problem and applyit to the termination of bureaucratic agencies. The conventionalwisdom that "the older a bureau is, the less likely it is todie" (Downs 1967, Inside Bureaucracy) persists but has neverbeen properly tested. This paper offers a learning-based stochasticoptimization model of agency termination that offers two counterintuitivepredictions. First, politicians terminate agencies only afterlearning about them, so the hazard of agencies should be nonmonotonic,contradicting Downs's prediction. Second, if terminating agenciesis costly, agencies are least likely to be terminated when politiciansare fiscally constrained or when the deficit is high. We assessthe model by developing a battery of tests for the shape ofthe hazard function and estimate these and other duration modelsusing data on U.S. federal government agencies created between1946 and 1997. Results show that the hazard rate of agency terminationis strongly nonmonotonic and that agencies are less likely tobe terminated under high deficits and divided government. Forthe first 50 years of the agency duration distribution, themodal termination hazard occurs at five years after agenciesare enabled. Methodologically, our approach ties the functionalform of a hazard model tightly to theory and presents an applied"agenda" for testing the shape of an empirical hazard function.With extensions, our model and empirical framework are applicableto a range of political phenomena.     

The Solitary Center: the Core Executive in Central and Eastern Europe

This article discusses the coordinative capacity of Centers of Government (COGs) in several Central and Eastern Europe countries. In formal terms, COGs are at the heart of the executive process; but their contribution to coherence in executive policymaking has remained limited. This observation applies both to coordination within the executive, and between the executive and other key participants in the political process. In important respects, the "solitary centers" operate in isolation from their political and institutional environment. In part, this weakness of linkage reflects the particular features of the post-Communist political systems; in part, it can be explained by a lack of nodality, authority and policy expertise at the COG. There are good reasons to assume that, as policy systems mature, problems of linkage will decline in significance. But this outcome cannot be taken for granted. Instead, we might be witnessing the emergence of a "new administrative type" in some Central and Eastern European countries.