An examination of the structure of governance in California school districts before and after Proposition 13

This paper explores the structure of governance in California school districts. Two alternative models are considered, the decisive voter (benevolent dictator) model and a model that allows for rent-seeking behavior on the part of district decision makers. A formal test between these two models is proposed and implemented. The decisive voter model is found wanting as an explanation of school district decision making both before and after the passage of Proposition 13. There is, however, some evidence that the constraints imposed on some districts by Proposition 13 have forced decision makers to act in a manner more consistent with the preferences of their constituents.     

Free riders or easy riders?: An examination of the voluntary provision of public radio

This paper tests the widely accepted hypothesis that when a pure public good is voluntarily provided incentives to free ride increase with the number of individuals consuming the good. Specifically, I use unique data on the number of listeners and contributors to public radio to test two hypotheses. First I test whether the proportion of contributors falls as group size increases and second I test whether contributions per contributor falls as group size increases. I find that increases in group size result in significantly more free riding. However, I also find that group size has no effect on contributions per contributor.     

Urbanization and voter turnout in Korea: An update

In this paper we develop an econometric model to test whether alienation and/or mobilized voting explain urban-rural turnout in Korea. We find that a person's decision to vote is influenced by the act of mobilization and that it affects rural residents more strongly. But we do not find that the feeling of alienation affects a person's decision to vote. Thus, we find support for the mobilized voting hypothesis, but not for the alienation nonvoting hypothesis.     

Representative misconduct,voter perceptions and accountability: Evidence from the 2009 House of Commons expenses scandal

This paper examines electoral accountability after the 2009–10 UK expenses scandal. Existing research shows that Members of Parliament (MPs) implicated in the scandal fared only marginally worse in the election than non-implicated colleagues. This lack of electoral accountability for misconduct could have arisen either because voters did not know about their representative's wrongdoing or because they chose not to electorally sanction them. We combine panel survey data with new measures of MP implication in the expenses scandal to test where electoral accountability failed. We find that MP implication influenced voter perceptions of wrongdoing more than expected. In contrast, constituents were only marginally less likely to vote for MPs who were implicated in the scandal. Electoral accountability may therefore be constrained even when information about representative misconduct is easily available and clearly influences voter perceptions.     

The impacts of public interventions: An examination of the forestry sector

This article measures welfare and distributive effects of public market interventions in forestry. These interventions represent both the demand (Jones Act shipping restrictions and minimum wage restrictions) and supply (state forest practice acts, forest incentives payments, taxes and public land management) sides of the market. The authors evaluate how well these programs promote the three standard economic justifications for market intervention: market failure, distributive justice, and stabilization. Their results indicate that, with the single exception of Timber Mart South (a government-sponsored price-reporting service), all market interventions fail to accomplish their efficiency and distributive objectives. Furthermore, the authors find that targeted regulatory programs (such as State Forest Practice Acts) have small impacts when compared to effects of taxation and public ownership.     

Private and public choices in public education: An investigation of trustee effects

The paper applies the concepts of the horizon problem, agency costs, monitoring, and special interest incentives to trustee management of public schools and higher education. We examine whether South Carolina's 1984 Education Improvement Act, a major restructuring of educational organization and spending in South Carolina, is related to the ratio of pupils in private versus public schools. We employ 30 years of county level data in South Carolina, and we uncover several things. There is no statistically credible relation between public school expenditures per pupil and the private school/public school enrollment ratio. However, we do find that the directed changes in rules, organizational structure, and incentives mandated by the 1984 Educational Improvement Act are associated with a reduction in the relative number of children attending private school. We interpret this to mean that the features of the law requiring better accountability and the like were perceived by parents to make for better education while the increased money spent was only a transfer to teachers or some other groups; we find that organization matters more than money.     

Administrative Discretion and Active Representation: An Expansion of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy

Recent studies of the theory of representative bureaucracy have focused on active representation, whereby administrators in public organizations work to advance the interests of particular groups, achieving policy outcomes that directly address the needs of those groups. The concept of administrative discretion is central to these studies, as an administrator must have the discretion to produce results that reflect the values and beliefs of these groups. While the presence of discretion is often implied in these studies, few have examined it explicitly. Using data from the Farmer's Home Administration, we explore whether administrators who perceive themselves as having more discretion enact policy outcomes that are more representative of minority interests. The results strongly support the conclusion that administrators who perceive themselves as possessing significant discretion and who assume the role of minority representative in their agencies are more likely to enact policy outcomes that favor minority interests.     

Power,agency and structure: An examination of Steven Lukes

The dynamic between violence and politics in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement is analyzed, focusing on the relationship between racist terror and the state. The study explores how blacks in the rural South tried to defend themselves before civil rights, when white supremacists dominated local government and federal authorities ignored lynch murders. The article traces the development of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s nonviolent resistance strategy, and the long struggle to force the state to combat racist violence, one of the Civil Rights Movement's most significant achievements.     

Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler

Abstract

Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced völkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the ‘Jewish question’ as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of ‘the Jew’ (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although German-Jewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and ‘Germans’.     

Perceptional inequality and preferential judgements: An empirical examination of distributional axioms

There are two categories of income distribution evaluations: first, the more-or-less “value-free” perception of income inequality as a statistical dispersion; and second, the valuation of income distributions according to an explicit social welfare function which is meant to capture all of society's value judgements. These societal value judgements can be expressed in the form of preferences. Whereas the inequality perception of income distributions appeals to an observer's sober judgement, the revelation of preferences with respect to specific income distributions appeals to his or her sentiments. This paper is an empirical analysis which investigates the juxtaposition of preferences with respect to income distributions and corresponding perceptions of distributional inequality. We do this through a questionnaire in which attitudes towards various distributional axioms are tested. The source of our data is 1773 completed questionnaires collected from five German universities. Based on our data, we observe that individuals' preference orderings over the set of income distributionssubstantially deviate from their perceptions of distributional inequality. In fact, our test responses showed that even when some income distribution is judged to be more unequal than another, that distribution might be preferred, as it accords higher incomes to each individual. We hold that the preference for these greater incomes expresses a compensation for the increased degree of inequality. This explanation applies both to equiproportional and to equal fixed-sum increases in incomes, which implies a support of Paretian ethics.     

Stories and Interests in Finance: Agendas of Governance before and after the Financial Crisis

The financial crisis can be understood in many different terms. In this article, it is analyzed in terms of the unfolding of a series of elite narratives that shaped the agenda of regulation before the crisis, that were damaged by the crisis, and that were then reframed and recounted again in the wake of the crisis. The form of these stories differs in subtle ways by jurisdiction, and thus the fate of postcrisis regulatory practice likewise differs.     

Gentrification in tourist cities: Evidence from New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Tourism‐led redevelopment often provides city residents with increased opportunities for employment, leisure, and cultural enrichment, but it can also have dramatic and unpredictable effects on their lives. One of these effects involves the repercussions of redevelopment that transforms working‐class neighborhoods into middle‐ or upper‐class areas catering to tourists. We use the city of New Orleans as a case study to explore the connections between tourism and gentrification.

We first discuss the growth of tourism in New Orleans, paying particular attention to its geographic scope. We then consider the ways in which gentrification and tourism are connected in New Orleans and what their relationship adds to theories of tourism development and urban revitalization. The analysis concludes with an in‐depth look at one of the nation's oldest black neighborhoods, Tremé, where both tourism and the nonblack population have been increasing in recent years.     

The nature of managerial work in the public sector: An African perspective

It has been asserted too often that the development of non-western countries—those of Africa, in particular—is highly dependent upon their assimilation of western management techniques. Yet, the applicability of western management techniques to a non-western cultural milieu remains the subject of debate in the public administration and management literature. Much of the management development literature since the mid 70s has dealt with the replicability of Mintzberg's partition of the nature and contents of the manager's activities in diverse western work settings, in the US primarily. Few attempts have been undertaken to test Mintzberg's findings in non-western settings. In this article, the authors attempt to partially fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, the authors investigate the degrees to which the management roles identified in the US can be applied generically to the public sector in the African context. The findings indicate that perceptions of management roles at the macro level are highly consistent across cultural boundaries. Significant differences, derived primarily from the historic experience of colonial administration and the contingent micro level impact are also noted. The implications of these findings for the design and implementation of management training programmes in Africa are explored.