Business as usual

The tech stock crash of 2000 discredited the new economy as business model. This article introduces a journal special issue which takes up the challenge of putting new economy developments into this post-crash perspective and establishing long-run continuities, without discounting the importance of what happened. This article opens the debate by highlighting two themes in the articles that are collected together in the special issue: first, it discusses what was and is the new economy in the USA; second, it examines the relevance and resonance of the new economy in Europe.     

Al Qaeda Versus Big Brother: Anxiety About Government Monitoring and Support for Domestic Counterterrorism Policies

Explanatory models of attitudes toward U.S. domestic counterterrorism policy routinely incorporate individual concern over terrorism, but uniformly disregard concern about the government??s use of domestic surveillance. Indeed, one of the most prominent works of this kind explicitly argues that ordinary Americans will not perceive that government monitoring targets people like themselves and thus domestic surveillance programs will not generate anxiety. We question this assumption on theoretical and historical grounds. Our research uses a unique probability sample survey to demonstrate that significant portions of ordinary Americans feel anxious about domestic government monitoring. Moreover, the results show that anxiety about government monitoring negatively relates to attitudes toward domestic counterterrorism policies. Although never included in previous models, and even plainly dismissed as irrelevant, felt anxiety about government monitoring importantly predicts attitudes about domestic counterterrorism policies.     

Ten Years of EU's Fight against Terrorist Financing: A Critical Assessment

This article offers a critical assessment of the post-9/11 efforts of the European Union (EU) in the fight against terrorist finances. Using the EU's own goals from its action plans and counterterrorism strategies as the baseline criteria, it examines how successful the EU has been in implementing the relevant aspects of various United Nations Security Council counterterrorism resolutions, the special recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, and its own measures spanning across all of its three pre-Lisbon pillars. In particular, the article seeks to answer the following questions: (1) What and how much of its own counter-terrorism plans has the EU managed to achieve since 9/11? and (2) What lessons can be learned from the hitherto successes and failures for future EU efforts to counter terrorist financing? Special attention is paid to the thus far neglected role of the private sector in the fight against terrorist financing.     

Employment of individuals in the Social Security disability programs

The articles in this special issue present findings from research on the employment and work-related activities of individuals receiving benefits through the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs, and on the factors that hinder their efforts to work at levels that lead to exiting the disability rolls. This article introduces the other articles, highlights their important findings, and discusses the implications for ongoing efforts to increase the earnings and self-sufficiency of these beneficiaries, such as the Ticket to Work program and the Benefit Offset National Demonstration.     

Abstracts section

The theme of poverty eradication is now again at the top of the development policy agenda. In November 2000 the UK Department for International Development (DfID) published an important White Paper on International Development with the title Eliminating world poverty: a challenge for the 21st century. The World Bank World Development Report for 2000/2001 also takes poverty as its theme with the title Attacking poverty. It is interesting to note that the World Bank has bracketed the decade of the 1990s with the 1990 World Development Report simply entitled Poverty. After many conflicting theories of economic development, the basic problem of poverty in developing countries is now being addressed in a much more holistic way, as is exemplified in the following articles. It should be noted that two of these act as introductory articles to a special issue of a journal on this topic. The article by Lustig and Stern introduces the December 2000 issue of Finance and Development whose overall title is ‘How we can help the poor’ and the article by Baulch and Hoddinott introduces the August 2000 issue of the Journal of Development Studies entitled ‘Economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries’. These special issues contain articles on poverty in addition to the ones abstracted here. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Policy advisory systems: change dynamics and sources of variation

The special issue aims to enhance our understanding of the conditions under which policy advisory systems vary. The contributions comprise both continental European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands) and Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK). The introduction to the special issue briefly outlines existing scholarship on policy advisory systems and identifies different research gaps to the filling of which the special issue seeks to contribute. The introduction highlights that the articles in the special issue point to both political system and policy process variables to better systemize, theorize and explain the origins and change dynamics of policy advisory systems.     

Government Responses to Terrorism: Critical Views of Their Impacts on People and Public Administration

Following the tragic, massive terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, many antiterrorist laws, policies, and institutions have emerged to wage war on terrorism. These antiterrorist initiatives have major consequences for individuals, societies, and nations all over the world. Although controversies have proliferated with regard to the implications of counterterrorism for people's basic rights, the debate remains fragmented and often unfocused. This article examines the critical impact of new antiterrorist initiatives on the fundamental rights and responsibilities of citizens and others, with special reference to public administration.     

Tackling the Big Questions in Social Impact Bond Research through Comparative Approaches

Abstract

This special issue of theJournal of Comparative Policy Analysis brings together four cross-disciplinary articles representing the first concerted attempt to combine comparative approaches to extend theoretical and empirical understandings of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs). SIBs are investment-backed payment-by-results projects and have been subject to vigorous academic debate on their appropriateness and efficacy since the first SIB launched in 2010. This introduction to the special issue outlines the state of the academic literature on SIBs, identifying gaps and suggesting five big questions that do not yet have satisfactory answers: (1) What are the administrative or political problems to which SIBs respond? (2) Where and why do SIBs emerge in particular contexts? (3) What is the role of SIBs in the evidence-based policy movement? (4) Is delivering an intervention through a SIB more effective than other means and are associated costs justifiable? (5) Do SIBs catalyse wider organizational, system, or institutional changes? This introduction then summarizes the articles included in this special issue, discusses how they respond to these big questions, and suggests that further comparative research might best address remaining gaps in the literature.     

Resource allocation and voter calculus in?a?multicandidate election

This paper links campaign resources and voter calculus through a microeconomic optimization framework. I assume that candidate policy positions are fixed while personal valence scores and the salience of issue dimensions are malleable. Low valence candidates with many proximate competitors in the policy space will focus on building valence. High valence candidates who are relatively ??unclustered?? in the policy space will focus on manipulating issue salience. Resources devoted to diminishing others?? valence scores will increase as the number of viable candidates decreases. The model??s results are tested, where feasible, using data from the Democratic Party primary of 2004.     

Combatting terror in Europe: Euro-Israeli counterterrorism intelligence cooperation in the Club de Berne (1971–1972)

How do intelligence agencies cooperate to counter terrorism and to what extent can it be (ab)used for political purposes? This article focuses on the Club de Berne, an intelligence liaison forum that was founded in 1969 by nine Western European countries and which was also linked to the United States and Israel. This article explores the mechanisms of counterterrorism intelligence-sharing in the early 1970s and examines the motives for cooperation within this framework. On the basis of large-scale recently declassified intelligence records, the article uncovers new aspects in the history of European security cooperation with Israel and the United States, and hopes to lay the groundwork for broader theoretical reflections about counterterrorism intelligence cooperation.     

Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949: The Past,Present, and Future of Federal Housing and Urban Policy

Abstract

This article summarizes a special issue of Housing Policy Debate, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949. The act is best remembered for its declaration that every American deserves a “decent home and a suitable living environment.” The articles in this collection offer varying perspectives on how this act helped shape the postwar metropolis. The authors—urban planners, historians, and public officials—each consider a different part of the legacy.

The first three articles deal primarily with the act's creation and social and political ramifications, while the next three look at how Titles I, II, and III have influenced the past 50 years of housing and urban policy. The record of the Housing Act of 1949 is mixed, and so are its lessons. There remains an ongoing struggle to find the right mix of housing support to reach the goals first expressed in this landmark legislation.     

Introduction: Blogs, politics and power: a special issue of Public Choice

There is good reason to believe that blogs are changing politics, but we don’t know exactly how. Nor do we know whether the normative consequences of blogs for politics are likely to be good or bad. In this special issue, we and our co-authors undertake the first sustained effort to map the empirical and normative consequences of blogs for politics. We begin by setting out basic information about blogs, and some anecdotal evidence suggesting that they are indeed politically important. We go on to identify the key empirical and normative questions that blogs raise, and discuss the dearth of relevant data in the existing literature. We conclude by summarizing how the authors of the articles gathered in this special issue help fill this gap.     

Reflections of the nexus between justice and peacebuilding

This commentary reflects on eight articles recently published in this journal as part of a special issue on the nexus between transitional justice and statebuilding (Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016). It positions the special issue within an emerging ‘fourth phase’ literature on transitional justice that draws on critiques of liberal peacebuilding to urge an expansion of its boundaries to embrace socio-economic issues. It is argued that the type of analysis found in the special issue, characterized by in-depth, on-the-ground empirical analysis of complex domestic politics of material accumulation and ideological contestation, marks a significant and welcome advance in a literature which to this point has been largely de-contextualized, exhortatory and over-reliant on tired binaries of the ‘international and the local’ or the ‘liberal and legitimate’.     

Japan and identity change: why it matters in International Relations

Abstract

Two approaches to identity have been employed to explore issues in Japan's international relations. One views identity as constituted by domestic norms and culture, and as constitutive of interests, which in turn cause behaviour. Proponents view Japan's ‘pacifist’ and ‘antimilitarist’ identity as inherently stable and likely to change only as a result of material factors. In the other approach, ‘Japan’ emerges and changes through processes of differentiation vis-à-vis ‘Others’. Neither ‘domestic’ nor ‘material’ factors can exist outside of such identity constructions. We argue that the second, relational, approach is more theoretically sound, but begs three questions. First, how can different identity constructions in relation to numerous Others be synthesised and understood comprehensively? Second, how can continuity and change be handled in the same relational framework? Third, what is the point of analysing identity in relational terms? This article addresses the first two questions by introducing an analytical framework consisting of three mutually interacting layers of identity construction. Based on the articles in this special issue, we argue that identity entrepreneurs and emotions are particularly likely to contribute to change within this model. We address the third question by stressing common ground with the first approach: identity enables and constrains behaviour. In the case of Japan, changes in identity construction highlighted by the articles in this special issue forebode a political agenda centred on strengthening Japan militarily.     

The Rule of Law in the Fight against Terrorism

What is the role of legal limits on executive power, if any, when citizens demand more security from terrorism, and allowing executive officials legal flexibility of action appears necessary to achieve it? We develop a game‐theoretic model to show that when the executive faces increased electoral incentives to provide security and has legal flexibility to choose any policy it finds optimal, security from terrorism can actually decrease. In contrast, when the executive faces increased electoral incentives to provide security and there is an explicit legal limit on executive counterterrorism activities, security from terrorism increases. We also show that the executive achieves the objective of terrorism prevention more effectively when there are some limitations on its counterterrorism powers. The article provides a security rationale for legal limits on executive power and has implications for understanding how to design the institutional structure of liberal governments when the social objective is terrorism prevention.     

Assessing the Effects of Immigration and Diversity in Europe: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue on “Assessing the Effects of Immigration and Diversity in Europe” to the JEPOP readers. The article starts with a summary of the controversy generated by Putnam's 2007 article “E pluribus unum”. Next, it provides a brief account of the state of the art in the scholarship analysing the link between diversity, trust, social capital and social cohesion. The article continues with a discussion of a number of key problems that affect the existing scholarship, and highlights how the contributions to this special issue overcome some of these limitations. After this, the article considers the implications of this debate for the study of elections and public opinion. It concludes with a succinct overview of the contributions to the special issue and a discussion of how they help move forward the scholarship in this area.     

Capital Accumulation,Hegemony and Socio-ecological Struggles: Insights from the ENTITLE Project

This special issue presents findings and reflections of scholars who participated in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE). By mobilising conceptual frameworks from several strands of Marxist and post-structuralist theory—and empirically engaging with a range of historico-geographical processes—the articles in this issue contribute to debates in political ecology in two main ways. First, they critically analyse the political economy and ecology of contemporary capitalism, with an emphasis on accumulation strategies associated with the uneven expansion and crisis of neoliberalism. Specifically, they unpack and critically extend the frameworks of “accumulation by dispossession” and “nature's neoliberalisation” to engage with, among other cases, the political ecology of “austerity” in Southern Europe; historical and contemporary cases of “capital-driven disasters”; and political ecological dynamics taking place around relationships of “rent”. Second, the authors of this special issue analyse new and re-emerging forms of socio-ecological resistance and contestation, including both distributional struggles and movements against “commons' enclosures”. Moreover, they focus on how struggles can (and do) move from contesting capitalist forms of dispossession towards creating alternative “hegemonic” projects and blocs, by critiquing received “common sense” and constructing and performing alternative political ecological imaginaries informed by principles of solidarity and “commoning”. Taken together, the articles in this special issue present new ways of thinking and enacting political and ecological struggles outside established scholarly traditions and conventional disciplines.     

EU Counterterrorism and the Southern Mediterranean Countries after the Arab Spring: New Potential for Cooperation?

The European Union's (EU) relationship with North African countries has long been the subject of intense academic enquiry. For many years, the EU has performed a difficult balancing act between managing the security concerns of its member states, dealing with authoritarian regimes that have questionable human rights records, creating and maintaining good economic relations, and pursuing more normative objectives. Have security objectives overridden other concerns? While the EU has cooperated with regimes with questionable human rights records, counterterrorism cooperation between the EU and North African countries has not developed as much as previous academic studies believe. However, what are the prospects of this changing with more recent developments after the Arab Spring? This article examines in detail the reasons why the EU does not currently conduct significant counterterrorism cooperation with North African countries and discusses whether this situation is likely to change as a result of the events of the Arab Spring, which has swept through North Africa and the Middle East since 2010.     

Understanding varieties of populism in times of crises

Abstract

This introduction presents the conceptual and analytical framework which constitutes the background for the special issue entitled ‘Varieties of Populism in Europe in Times of Crises’. More specifically, this contribution investigates how different populist parties in the European Union have been affected by the recent economic crisis and the more long-lasting political and cultural crises. Analytically, the article disentangles the role of the Great Recession vis-à-vis other factors (such as political and party system factors, but also structural social changes or cultural opportunities) in the growing strength of populist parties in various European countries. It argues that although the economic crisis has without any doubt provided a specific ‘window of opportunity’ for the emergence of new political actors, which have capitalised on citizens’ discontent, long-lasting political factors – such as the increasing distrust toward political institutions and parties – and the more recent cultural crisis connected with migration issues have offered further fertile ground for the consolidation of populist parties in several European countries. Furthermore, as confirmed by the articles presented in the special issue, the various crises have offered differential opportunities for different types of populism – both inclusionary and exclusionary.     

Stewardship and health systems strengthening: An overview

The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the concept of stewardship to clarify the practical components of governance in the health sector. For the WHO, stewardship concentrated on how government actors take responsibility for the health system and the wellbeing of the population, fulfill health system functions, assure equity, and coordinate interaction with government and society. This article overviews the contents of this special issue, which offers examples of how health stewards in a variety of countries have addressed issues of health security, primary care expansion, family planning, and quality of care. The contributors' articles draw lessons for policy, programs, and management useful for practitioners and scholars. Our overview identifies several themes emerging from the articles: the foundational role of legal frameworks for effective stewardship, the importance of institutional arrangements as enablers, the influence of regional and global entities on national stewardship, the connection between credible decision‐making structures and stewardship, and pathways to sustainable financing and domestic resource mobilization. The discussion concludes with highlighting several gaps in knowledge and practice related to health stewardship.